When thinking about the prospects of some kind of bailout for US automakers, it’s important to understand that problems in the car industry are, at the moment, worldwide. Toyota, the biggest and most successful firm in the business, is looking at taking a huge hit. Under the circumstances, the outlook for Detroit’s embattled firms looks even worse. They’re not, in other words, one quick fix from viability — they’re the sick men of an industry that’s in big overall trouble. Simply put, much more capacity exists to make new cars than there is demand to buy new cars. Propping up failing manufacturers isn’t going to solve any broader economic problems. Helping the people or even the geographical areas affected by the liquidation of the weakest car firms would be a reasonable course of action.

But trying to help them by helping the firms themselves is going to be costlier and ultimately slower in terms of putting people in a sustainable situation.

Some “Democratic strategist” named Michael Feldman seems to think that John Kerry shouldn’t be Secretary of State because that would (combined with Joe Biden’s departure for the Vice Presidency) leave Russ Feingold to chair the Foreign Relations Committee. He says “of course that poses a whole series of problems.”

Andrea Mitchell sensibly asks “Why does it pose a series of problems?”

To which Feldman replies: “Well, because of Senator Feingold’s opposition to the war and I think that would immediately, his vocal opposition to the war, I think that would immediately then raise some issues for the caucus and for leader Reid.”

Now the truth is that Feingold, like most any Senator, has taken some positions over the years I don’t agree with (opposing NATO expansion in the mid-nineties, for example) but the idea that anyone could, with a straight face, argue that Feingold should be disqualified on account of having been correct about Iraq is a sad comment on the state of things. That said, the soon-to-be presence in the White House of a war opponent is changing things. Mitchell is a soundly establishmentarian figure and she immediately shoots back with “But the president[-elect] of the United States is opposed to the war.”

At any rate, though I’ve heard enough asinine things on television to believe that Feldman may well have said this because he meant it, I also think this may be more about Kerry than about Feingold. There’s a developing meme out there that Kerry is some kind of dangerous leftwing radical (his selection “would be … bound to provoke controversy with moderate Democrats” for some reason) and the Richard Holbrooke Fan Club hasn’t gone out of business yet in the press.

I think a post-election Gallup tracking poll is really what we don’t need. If this past election revealed anything, it’s that all too many people don’t grasp the concept of “random variation” in this kind of thing. But suffice it to say that if you do a poll of roughly Gallup’s size and take a three day rolling average, you wind up generating all sorts of neat-looking vaguely sinusoidal curves that people then dream up narratives to “explain.” The whole thing’s a waste of time, and ultimate does more to misinform people than to help them understand the world.

These are the kind of thoughts that your editor is supposed to stop you from writing. Leon Wieseltier:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown’s for fried green tomatoes.

I was waiting for the next sentence to be about watermelons, but he spared us that at least.