11.09.09
Imperfect Information Undermines “Free-market” Economies
It’s no secret that a variety of interested parties exert influence over both economic policies and the general understanding (and reporting) of the effects of changes, just as they do in energy, health care, education, the financial sector, and/or anything else that the Congress or various federal agencies have a role in shaping. Misinformation can lead a seemingly honest, open debate far afield from reality, inhibiting the efficiency of the process while at the same time warping the outcome.
If you don’t understand fiduciary relationships, and you still think most corporate actions reflect the same sort of priorities that pertain when a truly small business is owned by a single person, or a couple, you’re missing a key factor. Shareholders, for instance, seldom have any significant influence on the pay (or bonuses) of officers engaged in potentially risky decisions at major corporations – auto manufacturers, for instance, or the financial institutions that crumbled on Wall Street as the financial crisis became obvious to virtually everybody at home and abroad near the end of the Bush administration, when we ended up dumping billions of dollars into banks without any obvious benefit (it certainly didn’t stimulate consumer lending, as both Bush and early Obama administration initiatives were intended to do.)
In fact, if you look closely, the problem of banks that are “too big to fail” is getting worse, not better, due to consolidation. But that’s not what they tell Congress or the media; the bankers speak instead of “economies of scale” to justify even further growth. Banks are tied to the model that’s ruled economic policy for decades: debt-fueled consumer spending.
Those who talk about concerns over finite resources, such as clean water, are scoffed at, and the countering rhetoric lumps them in with “climate alarmists” and “tree huggers” in such a way that genuine free market forces are not even close to determining the value of any natural resource that cannot be mined – with the curious exception that there are some cities who have privatized their formerly municipally controlled water systems, which does begin to result in a certain market value being placed on that particular resource. Of course, once a profit motive starts driving the price up, citizens in the U.S. and abroad often agitate to re-socialize their water supplies, in an era when “socializing” is used by some to imply everything that went wrong with every non-U.S. form of government.
Similarly there’s an obvious bias in the talk about income tax cuts – it generally originates from those who are well to do, and stirs the emotions of those who have much less, but more importantly if one looks closely at the data, there’s been a strong correlation in the past between those with wealth and those whose tax rates truly go down under most of the recent approaches. Would tax cuts stimulate the economy? Assuredly so – but in what way? 
A tax cut on income doesn’t have the same effect as, say, a tax cut (or tax credit/investment credit) for spending consistent with our national priorities, such as alternative energy sources, or research and education, etc. Such selective, targeted changes spur spending in specific areas — a very straightforward function of supply and demand, and the result is tangible — money flows to those areas, stimulating job growth and additional investment without any necessary growth of the government (growth which makes most of us justifiably cautious in the wake of the Bush administration’s under-reported increases.)
The reason that governments trying socialism, such as the USSR, to manage resources and markets for the good of the people have consistently floundered and failed is that they don’t — and can’t — have good enough centralized information to succeed making the rapid decisions necessary to control what is arguably the most intricate challenge of any “man-made” system, the decentralized activity of a vibrant, balanced economy. Markets are efficient at managing that information; but we’ve seen a dramatic example of why they cannot be expected to function for the good of the consumers when government fails to regulate those with the profit motives.
Consumers, too, need access to better information than they typically get under the current system, no matter if you’re considering tax-cuts, politics, the price of peanut butter, new home-buyer credits, or anything else. When misinformation is tolerated (or encouraged) it undermines the effectiveness of capitalism. Free markets rely on timely, accurate information – we need to consider new incentives for the reporting of “news” and information systems we base our choices on, or capitalism is absolutely doomed to implode.
10.29.09
CNN & Money.com aren’t qualified to assess “Cash for Clunkers”
You’d expect an author at this CNNMoney.com to understand the role of money in business. You’d expect an editor to send this back to re-write. Here was the basis of Peter Valdes-Dapena’s misguided assessment:
“…majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com”
So? This isn’t news, and it misses the point of the Cash for Clunkers initiative.
Valdes-Dapena and/or his editor may think selling cars sooner rather than later is a valid reason to criticize the program, but as any businessman can tell you: success in business is about cash flow. Any retail operation needs to keep their stock turning over. At a time when the inventory was sitting idle on the lots this program provided a much needed infusion, enabling dealers to pay staff, utilities, creditors, and suppliers.
Did the Cash for Clunkers program solve the economic crisis? Of course not. The goal was to turn over inventory in one segment of the industry – to keep dealerships from failing in huge numbers just before the manufacturers started to recover, thereby saving some jobs and hopefully averting a situation that would spread and further exacerbate the economic downturn.
The article may fool a person with no entrepreneurial experience, but it reflects either a shallow grasp of money and business or a thinly-veiled attack on the government’s attempt to avert a breakdown in the delivery mechanism of an industry it was actively seeking to save – without proposing any alternative that might have been even marginally effective.
The public may think “Cash for Clunkers” was as simple as just selling cars, the author evidently wants to; the reality is much subtler. Edmunds didn’t surprise anybody (except maybe CNNMoney.com staff) with the news that one of the primary effects was to accelerate the decisions and purchases – that was the point.
10.27.09
Recent tax cuts increased the 2009 deficit
Bruce Bartlett was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and conservative supply sider. He did a little simple math and uncovered that the cause of the deficit increase is revenue-related.
The increase cannot be blamed on spending – the Obama administration’s spending has been more conservative than was forecast – $28 billion less than was predicted. This math strongly suggests that more tax cuts, as some in the GOP are advocating, would actually further increase the deficit; tax cuts were unambiguously a major factor in the problematic revenue decline that underlies the deficit growth.
Mr. Bartlett, in a column dated October 24th, was responding to the theory that tax cuts were the best way to solve the deficit, as was advanced by Mort Zuckerman recently in a New York Daily News opinion piece.
Here’s an excerpt:
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2009 estimate for fiscal year 2009, outlays were projected to be $3,543 billion and revenues were projected to be $2,357 billion, leaving a deficit of $1,186 billion. Keep in mind that these estimates were made before Obama took office, based on existing law and policy, and did not take into account any actions that Obama might implement.
Therefore, unless one thinks that McCain would have somehow or other raised taxes and cut spending (with a Democratic Congress), rather than enacting a stimulus of his own, then a deficit of $1.2 trillion was baked in the cake the day Obama took office. Any suggestion that McCain would have brought in a lower deficit is simply fanciful.
Now let’s fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to CBO, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion.
To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected, but spending was $28 billion [less] and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending.
It turns out you have to go back to 1950 to find a year when federal revenues were lower as a share of GDP. So Bartlett, who is happy to say there is some basis for criticism of the Obama administration’s anti-recession tactics, points out that excessive spending isn’t the problem.
In fact, with much of the revenue that was not collected due to the tax cuts sitting more-or-less idle in savings accounts, and certainly not trickling down to stimulate job growth, or bank lending, etc., Bruce Bartlett concludes that:
The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts.
Bartlett’s article is a must-read for anybody involved in the U.S. economy – which should include every voter and pundit, not just those elected to Congress.
10.22.09
Income Redistribution and the IRS
The non-partisan Center on Budget and Priority Policy, a research group forcused on federal and state fiscal policies, looked at IRS data and stated in September that:
“Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.”
In fact, with the exception of a slight reversal that correlates with the Bill Clinton presidency, the chart of this IRS data, reproduced below, reveals an obvious trend in favor of the wealthy.
Class Warfare?
In point of fact, Piketty and Saez relied on several different income concepts and each naturally results in slightly different estimates of the share of income going to each group, so the Center on Budget and Priority Policy conclusion that the share of the nation’s income flowing to the top earning households increased from 16.9% in 2002 to 23.5% in 2007 could have “quibble room.” Yet the fact remains that change represents a larger share than at any point since 1928.
I strongly urge you to read the entire article, and abandon any sense that the wealthy in America are either paying a disproportionate share of their income(s) or losing some mythical class warfare when people talk about income redistribution or raising taxes.
Taxation without representation
It’s lately become fashionable in certain circles to cite the American Revolution as an anti-tax movement. Nothing could be more misleading, and I suspect many of those who rely on the tea bag as a new rallying symbol neither drink tea nor are conversant with either the series of
tax changes, such as the molasses tax (6p/gallon,) which contributed to the uprising against taxation without representation or with the impact of the choice to drink tea over coffee.
Surely many of those who opine that they, “don’t want our government to do anything at all,” and argue in favor of states’ rights, etc., do, in fact, prefer having national immigration laws (and agents to enforce them,) a standing army to provide for the common defense, and even publicly built and maintained highways over the free-market alternative as practiced in present-day Somalia. Yet there’s more to their position than simply a media-distorted, sound-bite-fed outcry being exploited for ratings and ad revenues.
The collective American psyche places great stock in the notion of fair play. Some take it so far that they want the U.S. to be the world arbiter of justice, and accordingly encourage the notion that it’s somehow an American responsibility to prevent piracy on the high seas (the ultimate free-market exercise) or to remove regimes from power in other countries if they don’t believe that leader assumed power fairly.
State budgets are under assault
The American Dream is under assault. There is no free lunch. Taxation to accomplish the legitimate goals of federal and state government initiatives must be fairly distributed. Defining the necessary changes to tax codes is a daunting prospect even if it’s separated pragmatically from debating the role of government to expedite resolving budget crises. But considering higher taxes on the wealthy hardly constitutes class warfare, let alone an unfair burden.
09.15.09
Misinformation 101: Spin Influences Debates
Polling can reliably reveal whatever the person who constructs/conducts the poll was investigating – if we’re given the raw data and a good description of the sampling procedure. But in practice, the data is usually glossed over in favor of a sound-bite summary tending to support the interests of the person and/or network doing the reporting on it, and the description of the sample is only included by the most rigorous of editors.
Without knowing how the sample of people was selected (and randomized) you simply can’t know anything more than what’s reported about a poll.
You can’t know, for instance, if its findings are useful in any logical sense, because you don’t know who the sample represents.
It’s all in the design
I can ask 13, 17, or 21 people a question, and come back with convincing-looking numbers that don’t look “too round.” But if I select who most of those people are it will darn sure tell you what I want you to think I learned.
An example of shaping a poll
Imagine I go to a GOP Town Hall meeting, and survey 15 people wearing shirts or carrying signs that say either “Nobama,” or, “Joe Wilson was right!” I’ll ask them one simple question:
Are you a) “for” Obama’s government takeover of our health care system that he’s pushing through the congress under the name of “reform” or b) “against reform” that will make changes that undermine the free market system that has given us the best health care in the world and cost the tax payers even more money?
OK, I’ve plausibly got 15 “b) against reform” responses now in my hypothetical example. I’ll ask 6 additional people, more or less randomly selected, that same question. Let’s say for the sake of argument that most of them magically favor reform (not a given the way the question’s phrased, is it?) But for the example say I got 4 out of 6 favorable replies.
Now I’ll summarize the poll for you based on that (fake) survey:
“In a [hypothetical] survey conducted Wednesday, only 19% of those responding favor the proposed reforms to health care, while nearly 81% said they were ‘against change.’ That’s more than 4 out of 5 in our survey who are hoping their representatives in Congress will stop the President’s take-over of business.”
If you believe what anybody in the media tells you without understanding both the sample and the data, all you know is what the reporter’s boss wants you to believe. If you choose to believe on that basis – which you just might if it agrees with your political leanings – rather than examining the poll itself, then you’re gullible indeed. The good news is: the politicians on your side and the ratings-hungry networks (who are on the side of earning a living from ad revenues) both love you. They’ll go out of their way to validate your “wisdom and insight” into the issue.
If the poll isn’t conducted on a random sample, but merely open to those who respond…? Well, my friends, that will tell you a bit about the people who responded, of course, but one must be wary of extrapolating to draw any useful conclusions about a larger population. We call it spin. But knowing that they’re gaming us doesn’t stop the echoes.
Media complicity
In fact, it won’t surprise me to find this utterly fake survey example quoted elsewhere within days, if not hours. Can’t you see it, at DIGG maybe, or on another blog, or even on Fox? Something like:
A post on Wednesday at a liberal-leaning blog about politics and economics described a survey which concluded that, quote, “only 19% of those responding favor the proposed reforms to health care, while nearly 81% said they were ‘against change.’” In other words, that’s more than 4 out of 5 who want their representatives in Congress to stop the President’s assault on insurance providers and let capitalism work.
There you go: lifted out of context, but the quote is nearly character-for-character what I reported in the fake “summary” above. Now we’re set up for the media echoes to persist even though the numbers are clearly unreal. Now they’re not reporting on the survey, they’re reporting on the reporting, which is just an irresponsible excuse to keep repeating the misleading numbers. Next thing you know, nobody knows how many people were at that rally on the mall in DC, but everybody believes the numbers support their hopes.
Misinformation distorts any debate. I could easily have made the example go the opposite way, of course, but I don’t want somebody to echo a story that falsely represents support for reform. In fact, some well-constructed surveys do reveal that over 90% favor “at least some reform.” But then, who wouldn’t favor “at least some” unless they were making money from the insurance industry? It’s like asking who wants lower taxes without considering how you’d pay for those government services you realize you benefit from.
Are you leading an “unexamined” life?
You know that commercial media outlets rely on advertising revenues. So, do you follow the money? Better still, my favorite (somewhat cynical) question: Why do you trust who you always have to report on things you care about? And yet, those are the sources most people trust to describe the town hall “meetings” as well as the “expert” arguments for and against reforming the health care insurance system.
08.04.09
Let’s talk about euthanasia and abortion?
Abortion is a time-tested “wedge” issue, in the finest tradition of Karl Rove’s masterful divisive politics, and it’s arguably being used that way again right now in the health-care insurance reform debate.
Most of us have good enough insurance, and we all get to make the choice to keep our current system. This isn’t about the majority, this is about the 1 in 6 Americans who aren’t covered. 1 in 6 – that’s not quite 50 million Americans.
Now, nobody’s proposed socialized medicine – if they had the doctors wouldn’t be mostly in favor of reform. But it’s a tested sound bite that shaves off a few votes. Did you know they need more billing clerks at Duke Medical Center than they have nurses? Does that get through to the opponents of reform at all? No, apparently they’re happier with it spun by lobbyists and CEOs than sticking with reality.
So, too, with abortion. It’s being dragged into the debate for the express purpose of derailing the whole package – undermining an honest debate about our values, and shaving off a few votes here and there. It’s classic Rove/GOP/special interest “divide and conquer” in the face of Obama’s attempts to make real improvements.
They hope we’ll ignore that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy filings is medical expenses. Never mind that the number of uninsured Americans grows by over 10,000 people each and every day. No, no, don’t fret about your neighbors who aren’t as well off as you, that’s not your problem – just keeping listening to the $pecial interests as they spend millions of dollars per day, raised by bureaucrats at companies who decide your premiums and what they’ll cover or not cover, all to influence congress and public opinion. The bureaucrats who control our access to health care right now live rich, lavish lifestyles with no incentive to change the system, let alone to cover those who need it most.
More than half of personal bankruptcy filings are triggered by medical costs. Really.
Do you think this is about somebody else? Do you think everybody you know is really covered? Do you mind that most of the raises in the last three decades for low and middle-income earners have gone right into the pockets of health insurance profiteers, because premiums have been rising at triple the rate of inflation?
Lots of money – special interest money – is being thrown at this debate, and it’s up to us to keep the truth out there, because when people hear things like abortion, socialized medicine, or alleged euthanasia for senior citizens, many have a visceral reaction and stop thinking, let alone listening.
Are you still thinking?
05.25.09
Texans won’t be seceding from the union
Oh I know, there’s a lot of talk about states’ rights, and they’ve got a governor making noises to insure he’s getting lots of PR, but at the end of the day? Texans don’t want to secede, they’re proud to be Americans – in fact, many Texans look on themselves as iconic of Americans.
Will they threaten? Absolutely they will. Collectively these are very shrewd, savvy folks when it comes to negotiating, so if Governor Rick Perry has made anti-D.C. rhetoric the theme of the month by deliberately raising secession at a tea-bag event they will talk the talk – but they’re too smart to walk out. Do you realize how much federal money flows into Texas each year? Do you think they want to give up the U.S. military bases, or NASA? Do you think most Texans want to deal with the drugs and violence spilling across the border from Mexico without federal dollars and agents to bolster that fight?
I’m not certain Governor Perry is manipulating the Texas voters or the national media for personal political gain, but consider this: Do you think the governor and his advisers don’t realize the benefit of federal funding for the wall at the border has for local construction jobs, for instance? Would the good folks of Dallas surrender the slogan of their NFL Cowboys as “America’s Team”?
Of course not.
Nor do they want to work out the price of buying back the federally owned land or start paying for the maintenance of interstate highways – and believe me, the highways matter a lot more in Texas than they do in your smaller states. But they will loyally back their governor, and they are an independent lot, so anybody doing a survey is bound to find a fair amount of pro-secession sentiment expressed -well, maybe less so over Memorial Day weekend, or the 4th of July, but few people watching veterans on parade, or fireworks while the national anthem plays, really want to secede.
And there’s no day of the year your survey in Texas would show greater support there for extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich than in some other state after his spending priorities shorted armor for troops on the ground in Iraq. So actually, just how much pro-seccesion sentiment you found would probably have a whole lot to do with exactly how you framed the question.
So what’s Perry up to?
I hope he’s just trying to attract national press coverage, in the tried and true manner of politicians almost everywhere. Perhaps he senses the chaos in the GOP leadership as a vacuum, and wants to position himself for a Presidential bid (although in the wake of G. W. Bush that hasn’t been a smooth path for GOP governors.) The alternative, though, if this isn’t about boosting his “federal cred” by raising the issue of federalism as he suggested last week, is dark indeed for those of us old enough to recall what the rallying cry of “states’ rights” has meant in politics in this country.
The reality is that “states’ rights” hasn’t been about the federal government, or taxes, it’s been a call to white bigots. By raising it, and then backing away and saying it’s just a discussion about a legal principle, has Perry sent his signal to those who hear it another way? Some of us recall George
Wallace flanked by Alabama State Troopers, exerting states’ rights to exclude black children from “white” schools. There’s been a lot of progress in the country since that era, and most Texans aren’t bigots, but that doesn’t change what that phrase has signalled for most of the time since the civil war.
States’ Rights has consistently been the politically correct way of saying we’ve got to keep minorities from attaining power, wealth, or influence. I’m not saying there’s no bigotry left in Texas, or that President Barack Obama’s campaign and election stopped nay-sayers on all sides of the racism issue dead in their tracks. In Texas, though, there’s precious little tolerance for slippery politically correct double-speak .
You might argue that Reagan got away with a covert shout-out to white racists in a speech in Mississippi in 1980, but this isn’t the same electorate, or the same mood, that dominated the country then – and Perry may be shooting his political career in the foot. He’s arguably signaled the most extreme members of the GOP at a tea-party despite quickly back-walking from the rhetoric for the national press. Would his leadership further distance the Republicans from the values of moderate Americans?
The state that’s famous for knowing when a politician is, “all hat - no cattle,” is surely gathering around the grills and picnic tables this summer wondering just where their Governor’s going with this.
04.19.09
Connecting the dots: From Tea Parties to taxes
Let’s skip the loaded debate over who benefited from Bush-era tax cuts, and move right on to the guts of the current question: 
are taxes unfair, and is a tea-bag an apt modern rallying symbol?
People having trouble making ends meet have reason to wish bank and credit-card fees were less onerous, and they naturally resent the inevitable burden of any tax they think is unfair. Yet nobody in the U.S.A. wants our local, state, or federal agencies to outright shut down the way they have in Somalia. We value the services the government provides even though we hope Obama can cut costs and reverse the run-away growth of the U.S. federal government that has characterized the beginning of this century.
Fair, easily understood taxes are a reasonable means to pay for public education, defense, bridges & roads, and so on – so long as they aren’t roads and bridges to nowhere that benefit some special interest that donates to a congressional campaign to win favors. Nobody doubts we need on-going investments to keep this country a great place to live, work, and raise families – yet amid the on-going economic meltdown there’s a natural anger when we hear about bailout money going to folks who earn more in a single bonus than most Americans earn in a lifetime.
So when we argue about tax cuts, let’s make sure we’re clear on just whose taxes are being cut. We’ve been giving tax breaks to oil companies, and now Exxon’s atop the Fortune 500 – it doesn’t take an accounting degree to know that’s not fair to people trying to pay for health care, college tuition, and the home they live in. Congress has been looking out for the already-rich at the expense of the rest of us by creating byzantine, opaque loopholes in exchange for campaign donations and junkets, and that has simply got to stop. People aren’t upset about taxes, they’re upset about not being sure if everybody’s paying their fair share.
In the late 1700s, in an era when nobody dared drink unboiled water, merchants and bureaucrats conspired to tax the tea sent to America – the tea that made getting enough fluid more palatable – at exorbitant rates. In a gesture not unlike cutting off their noses to spite their own faces a boycott was enforced – and a message sent – by vandalizing private property, thus insuring that the captains had no merchandise to sell and no collected taxes (or profits) to take back to England. Naturally coffee filled in the gap in the colonies for some time. (The U.S. didn’t immediately become a coffee nation, though. That change is usually tied to the tea embargo during the War of 1812.)
In modern terms, tea is considerably more central to the daily living of people in Europe and Asia. The fact that every student of U.S. history learns about the “Boston Tea Party” apparently made it seem a catchy sound-bite as behind the scenes operatives sought to foment a movement timed to use as a media event on April 15th,
but the effect of the media coverage seems to have given us more sense of Alice’s Mad Hatter than colonial rebels battling distant rich despots. The President’s shining success at the Summit of the Americas further diminished the amount of attention the story got in various media.
Curiously, in hindsight the naive echoing of the slang-term “tea-bagging” by conservative pundits probably drove more web traffic to Google and the UrbanDictionary than the actual events. It certainly detracted from impact of the hype leading up to the not-so-grassroots parties.
I’m betting the folks with Google Ad Sense terms tied to those searches, and “astro-turfing“ are enjoying a brief bonanza of exposure.
10.02.08
Much ado about…Gwen Ifill? Soft bigotry of low expectations for Gov. Palin
Seriously? The extremists with an audience are out in full force today ranting that Gwen Ifill, the moderator of the much-anticipated October 2 Vice Presidential Debate, isn’t without bias. Michelle Malkin, for example, is outraged that Ifill has a book in the works about Senator Barack Obama. Mind you, it hasn’t been released yet, so Malkin could be just a shill trying to help Ifill’s publicity in advance, but I think the motive is likely more insidious.
Ms. Malkin could be lowering expectations of Governor Palin’s performance – even setting up an excuse in advance. Something along the lines of: “Nobody could expect the Governor to do well with a liberal ostensibly moderating the debate…” I realize Malkin’s an avowed opponent of multiculturalism, but to set up the “soft bigotry of low expectation” on the eve of the debate seems more than a little disingenuous.
I admit that despite being a fiscal conservative I find the Governor’s reported biblical literalism out of step with my preferred post-Darwinian point of view. I realize, too, that any number of proud social conservatives have expressed reservations over Palin’s readiness and/or suitability for the position of Vice President. But it behooves us to grant Governor Palin her time in the limelight, to approach the evening with as open a mind as is possible as we focus on the issues important to the voters – the economic bailout being considered by congress, deregulation, Iraq, taxes, and health care to name a few obvious issues more important than the fact a professional journalist from a non-commercial network is also an author. It’s not time to distract us by creating false controversy about the moderator.
Yes, it’s false controversy, though the echo chamber that surrounds right-wing pundits was in full fettle today. Ultimately even the Fox network (surely at least as “in the tank” for the Republican ticket as Ms. Ifill is accused of being for the Democrats) had to concede that Senator McCain has the utmost respect for Gwen Ifill, and is more than satisfied that she’ll serve ably and professionally as a moderator.
In fact, we arguably learn more about a candidate from a slightly adversarial interviewer (or moderator) than we would from somebody lobbing easy questions. Governor Palin is something of an unknown on the national political scene in the U.S., and the campaign has not to this point made her very available for interviews or press conferences. This is her chance to shine – and I, for one, expect her to do a creditable job in the spotlight. This is not her first debate, and anyone ready to be Vice President surely has to be ready, willing, and able to handle questions from a PBS moderator in a controlled situation.
Much ado about nothing
Will Ms. Ifill present more rigor than Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric? Probably so. The late Tim Russert might have been rugged in this sort of context, but Gwen Ifill? Why are the right-leaning pundits so concerned? Why are they making this about people, not issues? And even if she is up against a more experienced, worldly debater in Senator Joe Biden, she’s been prepping for weeks; it’s show time!
She’s not being asked to talk to Jon Stewart, after all.
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