Week of September 29, 2008

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.” What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”

This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism--a k a"free enterprise"--seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead

October came early this year. In presidential politics, the penultimate month almost always brings surprises, or at least big news. In 1980, the Carter-Reagan debate that put the Gipper in the White House was not held until seven days before the Nov. 4 election. In 1992, Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh chose the last weekend of the race to indict Reagan-era Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, wounding George H.W. Bush, who was seeking re-election. In 2000, a Fox station in Maine broke the story of an old DUI of George W. Bush's, news that Bush's advisers believe hurt him in the popular vote against Al Gore. Four years ago, in 2004, a videotape of a very-much-alive Osama bin Laden stymied John Kerry's bid by sending worried voters back to the seemingly tougher Republican ticket (despite the fact that the very same Republican ticket had been unsuccessfully searching for the very same bin Laden for more than three years).

With the troubled markets and the ensuing debate over the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, October started in September. By suspending his campaign and threatening to postpone the foreign-policy debate in Oxford, Miss.—after a campaign in which he's taken hawkish stands on Russia, Iraq and just about everything else—John McCain quickly emerged as Mr. Hot, a candidate who makes no apologies for his often merry mischief-making. (See Palin, Sarah H., selection of for further evidence.) With his measured responses to the news of the season and his steady insistence on projecting a cerebral image, Barack Obama came off as Mr. Cool, at once impressively intellectual and yet aloof.

Somewhere in my attic there is a fading copy of a campus newspaper from 1967—my first year as a law professor at the University of Mississippi. The headline, as I recall, says"Negro to Address Ole Miss Class." In the space of my own adulthood, a world in which a guest lecture by a black man was a front-page news story has morphed into a world in which a person of color will be speaking on the Rebel campus tonight as a candidate for president of the United States.When my wife and I first arrived in Oxford, Miss., she to teach English and I to teach law, we entered a deeper South than the one we had known growing up in New Orleans and North Carolina. We were not quite prepared for the triumphal playing of"Dixie" and the unfurling of an enormous Confederate battle flag over the entire playing field, marking the opening of every home game. Bullet holes still scarred our faculty apartment building from shots fired when three people died a few years earlier in the turmoil over James Meredith's admission to the university. Until my wife, Anne, protested, the waiting room of the only obstetrician in town was still divided into designated"white" and" colored" sections.

The size and scale of the Bush administration's proposal are mind-boggling. During the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration spent about $250 billion (in today's dollars) on public-works projects, building about 8,000 parks, 40,000 public buildings, 72,000 schools and 80,000 bridges. The entire cost of all the New Deal programs (in today's dollars) was about $500 billion. The secretary of the Treasury now wants to spend perhaps twice that amount, simply to prevent a financial collapse.

Instead of 'Black History Lunch and Learn' almost 10000 copies were printed with 'Linch and Learn' in them.