In Wednesday's column, Thomas Friedman quotes Stanford professor Larry Diamond:

There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a real democracy.

Why should this be? Remember just before the Iraq invasion when neo-cons were assuring us that Iraq's oil wealth would be an advantage in its transition to democracy?

Understanding why it wasn't -- and won't be in the future -- tells us something important about democracy: You can settle your differences by voting only after your society has established an overwhelming consensus on all the issues worth killing and dying for. One of those issues is the legitimacy of the property system: Who owns what? Why should I recognize that any particular bit of wealth is yours and not mine?

In an effort to understand what kind of bias was at work Wednesday night, I went back and read the transcripts of the last two debates ABC hosted: a Republican one followed by a Democratic one, both in Manchester on January 5. Here's the most striking thing: In the Republican debate, all the questions were substantive.

In order, the Republican candidates were asked about the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive attack, the principles they would stand on no matter what, health insurance, immigration, how to run against Obama, and gas prices. No character issues at all. Nobody asked Giuliani about providing police protection for his mistress or McCain about why evangelicals distrust him or Romney about going on a driving vacation with his dog on the roof. Nothing. Zero.

If your conservative friends and relatives won't read the books you recommend because they're "shrill" or "angry" or off-putting in some other way, try giving them Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is a Korean economics professor from the prestigious University of Cambridge.  He has written a very readable, understandable book explaining why everything you know about economics -- particularly the economics of developing countries -- is wrong. But he doesn't pound the table about it because, well, he doesn't have to -- the facts are sufficient.

Chang speaks both from scholarship and from deep experience: He was born in South Korea when it was one of the world's poorest countries, and he lived through its transition into a relatively advanced, wealthy nation. So he knows first-hand that Korea's story, told accurately, has a lot to do with trade -- but not free trade. He recalls, for example, import controls so severe that a tin of Spam smuggled from an American military base was something to daydream about.

This diary was sufficiently misunderstood and caused so much upset that I removed it. So as not to make the comments completely unintelligible, here's the point I was trying (not very successfully, apparently) to make: The pop cultural changes that led to the emergence of female action heroes in the 1990s (example: Buffy/Xena) will play out in such a way as to lead to a different kind of female politician in the 2010s. The new intelligibility of woman-as-hero in the culture will allow these women to take advantage of the JFK hero-20-years-later model, using some story of 1990s heroism the way Kerry or McCain have used their Vietnam stories. For men, such a story gives a middle-aged or even elderly candidate an aura of youthfulness, and it will do the same for women. The youthful-hero-turned-middle-aged-leader female candidates will project an aura of the archetypal Daughter, which will let them slip past the male resistance to power-seeking from candidates who relate through the Wife or Mother archetypes.

Back in 2000, the media presented us with two very clear images of the presidential candidates. George W. Bush was a regular guy who'd be fun to hang around with. Al Gore, on the other hand, was a pretentious bore -- preachy, self-important, and generally not somebody you'd want to spend any time with.

Looking back, those images seem pretty ridiculous. Which raises the question: Is it happening again this year? Are lazy journalists fitting the facts into simplistic narratives that lack any foundation in reality?

Yeah, pretty much. I'm hardly a bosom buddy of Obama, Clinton, or McCain. But I took advantage of living in New Hampshire to watch them fairly closely, and I see some definite gaps between reality and the media narratives that have formed around each of them.

In the readable, 273-page Conscience of a Liberal, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman retells the political/economic history of the United States from the Gilded Age until today. He does it to make a point: The amount of economic inequality in America is largely a political decision, not a result of impersonal economic forces. America became a middle-class society fairly quickly in response to the New Deal, and inequality has grown back to Gilded Age proportions because of the conservative economic policies that have been dominant since Ronald Reagan.

It's easy to imagine two ways to make this argument: In a 900-page tome dense with economic jargon and mathematics, or in a breezy polemic that sounds plausible but has no connection to rigorous thought. Krugman does neither.

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it. – Eugene Debs

In my last pre-primary post – when I re-affirmed that I was voting for John Edwards -- I wrote: "I would like to live in an America in which Kucinich is a viable candidate." I knew I would hear about that, and I did. A Kucinich supporter reminded me of all the issues where Kucinich and I agree: single-payer health care, impeachment, leaving Iraq, no torture, civil liberties. "Kucinich is viable if you vote for him," his email said. "Don’t let the media tell you who is viable. They have their own agenda."

Now that New Hampshire is quiet again, I can think more calmly and clearly: Was he right?

It's decision time in New Hampshire. The phone never stops ringing. Each day's mail brings six glossy brochures. Sunday I saw four political commercials airing back-to-back.

For months I've been keeping track of the candidates through the BirdDog Calendar of PriotiesNH. Sunday they listed 28 separate candidate appearances: three here in Nashua, another three in the neighboring towns of Milford and Hollis, and seven just up the road in Manchester. Today: 41. I went to none. It's just too much.

But it's been quite a ride. This year I saw Clinton, Richardson, Obama, Edwards twice, and Edwards' wife once. And I got to sit down one-on-one with Mike Gravel, which was a hoot even if he has no chance to win.

Ultimately all these primaries are about electing delegates to the party conventions. Where do they come from? How do you get to be one?

I'm not sure how those questions get answered in the big campaigns where everything runs smoothly. But on December 1 Elliott Jacobson, the manager of the Mike Gravel campaign, sent an email asking if I wanted to be a Gravel delegate in New Hampshire. Each candidate needed to have a slate of delegates registered with the party by December 5, and the Gravel people were scrambling to get theirs together. I didn't notice the deadline until December 3, so I quickly had to go to the NH Democratic Party web site, download their delegate registration form, and race it to the post office (you can't email it) to get it in on time.

I feel obligated to point out that it was unethical for me to do this.

This week's cautionary tale begins with Pope Benedict's New Year message, which is already available at the Vatican web site. Now, recent popes have a well-deserved reputation for being conservative on social issues. But it's less well known that they've been quite liberal on economic, environmental, and military issues. (In 2005 I wrote this article analyzing the radical economic viewpoint of John Paul II. Short version: God created the Earth for everybody, not just the people who own everything.)

So it was something of a shock -- a pleasant shock for anti-environmentalists and an unpleasant shock for the rest of us -- to find this headline in London's newspaper The Daily Mail: The Pope condemns climate-change prophets of doom.

The last time I saw John McCain, he had just won the 2000 New Hampshire primary. My wife and I, to our own surprise and largely out of apathy with the Gore-Bradley race, had voted for him. As the returns started coming in and the magnitude of his upset of George W. Bush was becoming clear, I heard a CNN reporter sign off from the hotel where the victory party was starting. "That's just a few miles from here," I said. "We could go."

Nobody stopped us at the door and we shoe-horned ourselves into the crowd of people standing in the ballroom. Eventually McCain came out to make a victory announcement. I don't remember a word he said, just the buzz of hope and excitement in the room. Only a week or two before, the nomination of George II had been inevitable. And now it wasn't. Anything could happen.

That was a long time ago. But Saturday morning John McCain was back in Nashua.

I just finished Robert Draper's Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W. Bush. The book has been out for several weeks and has already been reviewed here and here. Draper has been interviewed here and here and here, and the book has been diaried before -- so I'm not pretending to have breaking news. But why let that stop me?

Draper's accumulation of detail gives Bush a new 3-dimensionality that lets you form your own impressions about his character. That's the point of reading it. My conclusions don't always match Draper's, so yours probably won't match either his or mine.  But here's the main stuff I gleaned:

I went to Fred Thompson's rally in front of City Hall in Nashua, NH Sunday afternoon. Maybe rally is the wrong word. I'm not sure what I saw. He stood on a platform and talked to maybe 100-150 people, but he didn't make any attempt to "rally" us. I'm not sure what he was doing.

Early on, he told us he wasn't going to give us a lot of applause lines, that he had come to talk to us "seriously about serious things." And for about an hour we were a serious, somber crowd. (There might have been more of us if it hadn't just rained.) And maybe we were skeptical. It was hard to tell. Look at the expressions in this picture:

My wife Deb and I were two of the 200-250 people waiting for John and Elizabeth Edwards at City Hall Plaza in Manchester Sunday morning.

There we are, surrounded by the combination of seriousness and wackiness that I've come to expect in New Hampshire politics. PrioritiesNH (a group that wants our defense budget redistributed into programs that help people) has a few people handing out cookies whose icing is a pie chart of the federal discretionary budget, while some others drive past in the topsy-turvy bus, which you just have to see. People are wearing a variety of t-shirts to advertise their organizations: Health Care Voters, the ONE Campaign, and seven members of the letter carrier's union. Oh, and I'm carrying my Yearly Kos tote bag.

In view of the recent problems in the housing market and with the mortgage companies, you might be wondering why we have these periodic panics. If the economy is growing over the long term, why can't it grow consistently over the short term? Why do we have bubbles? Why recessions? Why can't things be nice and stable?

I'd like to explain the business cycle -- the cycle of booms and busts -- with a simple example. Let's imagine a town that has ten restaurants. The town has grown a little lately and people have been going out to eat more often, so all the restaurants are doing well. On Friday and Saturday nights, you have to wait a long time to get a table. The restaurant business is so good that a rational observer who looked at the trends would conclude that the town can actually support 12 restaurants.

What happens? It depends on the economic system.

Lately a lot of folks on this site, including Kos, have been saying with great certainty that Bush won't do certain things. (Canceling the 2008 elections was Kos' example.) We're often urged to take off our tinfoil hats.

I'd love to. Personally, I feel paranoid when I worry about the more outrageous stuff. But all the same, I do worry. My sense that "an American president would never do that" has already been violated so many times that I no longer have good defenses against paranoia.

So I'd appreciate it if those of you who do have such defenses would help me out. If you believe there are definite limits on what Bush will or won't do, where do you think those limits are? And what is your basis for having confidence in those limits?

Help me out here. Most of the time when I post a diary, it's because I think I understand something and I want the rest of you to understand it too. But today I'm posting because I don't understand what the Republicans are doing, and I'm hoping maybe you do.

In high school I used to play a lot of chess. And I remember very clearly the euphoric feeling I got whenever an opponent who usually beat me seemed to be cheerfully blundering into a trap. I learned (the hard way) to be suspicious of that feeling. Because it often meant that my opponent saw something I didn't.

So: Republicans. Iraq. 2008 elections. They're marching off a cliff, aren't they? Are they really that dumb? Or do they see something I don't?

Of all the candidates coming through New Hampshire, Barack Obama has been the one I wanted to see most. I saw John Edwards three times in 2004. Hillary I think I know pretty well. Everybody else on the Democratic side is a long-shot, and everybody on the Republican side is still trailing None Of The Above. The interesting question is Obama. He can draw crowds. He can raise money. He can give a good speech.

But is he the real thing? I had tried to see for myself three times. Twice  I waited too long to get a ticket to a limited-seating event. Once I got snowed out. Today in Manchester I finally succeeded.