The article, penned by Gideon Rachman for the Financial Times, contends that history will come to assign far more importance to Lehman's financial collapse than it will to the literal one suffered by the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Rachman says that Lehman, and not 9/11, marked the end of the U.S. unipolar moment, both in terms of economics and geopolitics. The idea is basically that whereas Lehman marked the initial decline of U.S. global power against a clearly more robust Asia, it's hard to imagine that fundamentalist terrorists will eventually trump America in heft and prominence.

Anyway, today, when it's glaringly obvious that the most famous 9/11 location still feels like a national wound, it's hard to imagine that anything could prove more significant than the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Right now it seems offensive to weigh these tragedies against one another, but they do have one thing in common. Their anniversaries both seem to come earlier every year.

The top 10 DVDs of the year, courtesy of the Middletown THR.

A year of Western NY politics from Buffalo Pundit.

And the Buffalo News seems exasperated with all the (mostly bad) news.

The Times Union counted down, concluding the tanking economy was the year's top story.

Gawker has the worst moments of the financial collapse.

Gothamist has the year in food.

The Syracuse Post-Standard listed "reporting that made a difference."

City Room has highs and lows.

Gowanus Lounge has Brooklyn's top stories.

Newsday made a slideshow of front pages.

Transom recaps the year in culture.

When you buckle your seatbelts and when your air bag deploys—saving your life—you should thank Ralph Nader. The Clean Air Act, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act are at least partially due to Nader’s skill as an advocate in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

I mention the history because Nader did not build his reputation as a consumer and environmental advocate by pushing symbolism at the expense of results. He must know that his popularity is trending down.

Running as the Green Party’s Presidential candidate in 2000 he received 2.7 percent of the popular vote and was seen as the spoiler who threw the election to George W. Bush. Partially in reaction to that election, he only achieved ballot status in 34 states and received 0.3 percent of the vote in 2004.

This year, he first supported John Edwards for President and when Edwards dropped out decided that the populist cause required a new candidate—himself. The point about third parties in American politics is: while they may be useful for raising issues, they are useless for achieving power.

The structure of the American political process is specifically designed to favor majority rule. Unlike some parliamentary systems with proportional representation, a candidate must achieve a plurality in a specific state or district to win an election. Small parties get nothing. You could get 25 percent of the vote in every congressional district in the country and elect no representatives. In the Presidential election, the real vote is for electors to the Electoral College. The system is winner-take-all, and whoever gets the most votes in a state gets all of that state’s electoral votes. (At least in 48 states: In two states, Maine and Nebraska, electors are selected by pluralities in Congressional districts.) If a third-party candidate received enough votes to win a state’s electoral votes and the election were close enough that no one got the 270 electoral votes needed to achieve a majority, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. In the House, each state’s delegation gets one vote.

Currently, 26 of the delegations in the House are controlled by the Democrats, 21 by the Republicans and three are tied. If the House of Representatives were to decide this election, the Democrats would win.

The United States is a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. It is also a federation of still somewhat sovereign states. In U.S. politics, geography matters: Majorities matter too. There is little practical benefit to being a perpetual minority party. In American politics the whole game is about occupying and defining the political center. The goal is to build a tent big enough to attract a majority. Ronald Reagan knew that and built a center-right coalition. Bill Clinton knew that and built a Center-left coalition. If Ralph Nader wants to influence policy outcomes he needs to influence one of the two majority parties. Why doesn’t he do that directly? Why does he run for President?

If you run for office but can’t win, you are obviously doing it to raise issues and affect the agenda of those who win power. Symbolic candidacies and even strong third party candidacies can influence the political agenda. That’s what makes Ralphie run.

When Nader ran for President in 2000, he got a lot of free media attention. When he ran in 2004 he received some attention, but less than in 2000. In 2008, he is being noticed again, but some of the attention he is getting is probably not the type of attention he should be seeking. Instead of analyzing his issues, the media analyses his motivations.

In 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost the Presidency—in the Electoral College, or at least in the Supreme Court—many Democrats blamed Ralph Nader for the election of George W. Bush. It became clear that running a minor party race for President brought costs along with benefits. Many of Nader’s former supporters became skeptical of his motives and tactics and his national standing suffered.

Nader of course, will hear none of this. Here’s how his Web site presents his candidacy:

While it is possible to admire Nader’s persistence, and even some of his principles, the suspicion that lingers is that his campaign is more of a desperate attempt to stay in the public eye than a well thought-out strategy for influencing public policy. As 2004 demonstrated, however, even his supporters are unlikely to vote for him if the alternative is John McCain and a permanent military presence in Iraq.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a better way for Nader to gain our attention. Unfortunately, as this blog and other stories now in the media demonstrate—running for President still works for Ralph Nader. In fact, we’re paying attention to him right now.

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“If we had won Iowa and New Hampshire, as we had anticipated, projected, et cetera, you would not have been in a situation in which you are losing all of these small states—because we didn’t put any resources in those small states,” he said. “Obama, on the other hand, put resources in these small states.”

Compounding the damage of the bad defeats in Iowa, and then South Carolina, Mr. Nemazee explained, was the lack of the necessary foresight to invest the campaign’s resources in the states that Mrs. Clinton’s rival, Barack Obama, is now gobbling up as fuel for his ever more threatening momentum.

“You needed to have a Plan B, and Plan B was just doing what we are doing right now rather than having resources in the small states,” he said. “We basically ceded every one of these small red states that he has racked up victories in. And the reason that he has racked up victories at this level isn’t because he was so much more well received, or because his message was any better; it was because we didn’t put any resources in there. We weren’t campaigning there. We didn’t have anybody in Utah, in Idaho, in the Dakotas. In Alaska.”

On Feb. 12, the picture got even worse, as the voters of Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia all appeared set to hand lopsided wins to Mr. Obama. With a cold and bleak February calendar staring straight at them—other states set to vote this month are Wisconsin and Mr. Obama’s former home, Hawaii—some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are wondering how long she can keep losing without her support collapsing in the remaining contests.

Mrs. Clinton has made a show of addressing those concerns by replacing her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, with another loyalist, Maggie Williams. (Several donors interviewed for this story said, in retrospect, that they thought Ms. Doyle was in over her head.) But at this point, no change in personnel alters the campaign’s prescription for recovering its position: win Ohio and Texas on March 4, and Pennsylvania on April 22.

“If she doesn’t do well in these states,” said Mr. Nemazee, “it’s a completely different matter, and the momentum swings completely over to the other side.”

The Clinton campaign’s other scenario—Mrs. Clinton loses a majority of elected delegates but is protected by a buffer of party-appointed superdelegates to make up the difference—looks increasingly unlikely.

“The superdelegates are going to by and large mirror the popular vote,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, himself a superdelegate.

Mr. Schumer said he was “committed” to Mrs. Clinton no matter what. Asked if there wouldn’t be a revolt in the party if superdelegates undid the results of the state primaries and caucuses, he suggested that there was some wiggle room. “If the election is that close that 10 superdelegates going one way rather than the other way [decides it]? No. People will say it was a very close election.”

But, he said, “I don’t see a massive move of superdelegates different than how their states voted.”

The states may well end up voting for Mrs. Clinton in the end. But the realization that seems to have set in, somewhat jarringly, among her supporters is that there’s no safety net if they don’t.

“Everybody is taken aback—nobody expected it,” said John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate and prominent donor to Mrs. Clinton. (He was bestowed with the title of “Hillraiser” by the Clinton campaign, signifying that he had raised more than $100,000.) “Nobody expected Obama to be so strong. And at the end of the day, I think the Clintons will win out. But I have been saying that all along and it is getting harder to keep saying that.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Yashar Hedayat, a prominent fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in Los Angeles. “I have a lot of donors who are nervous, who are looking at the calendar like you are and saying, ‘How is this possible?’ But I feel very good about Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania.”

The bad news is that an Ohio-Texas-Pennsylvania strategy sets a very real deadline, past which it becomes just about impossible to argue that there’s still time to turn things around. It’s March 4 (and April 22) or bust.

The good news—the reason Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say they remain hopeful—is that she has proven she can bounce back from a loss.

Mr. Hedayat said that, as was ultimately the case in New Hampshire and California, Mrs. Clinton’s decades of building relationships with voters and activists and officials in those states “cannot be overcome by real or perceived momentum.”

Ellen Chesler, a major donor and friend of Mrs. Clinton in New York, made a similar case.

“There is obviously cause for concern,” she said. “But I think most people look at the calendar over the next month and realize that the states where she does well are yet to come and there is no reason to believe that she won’t continue to do well in those states—the pattern has been very well established.”

She added, “Anyone who really knows politics knows the difference between what has happened in these small caucuses versus when lots of people vote and vote directly.”

“We will do well again,” said Mr. Nemazee, “as we have every time we have had our backs to the wall.”

The scenario they envision is that Mrs. Clinton accumulates enough delegates in Ohio and Texas to compensate for any gap opened up by Mr. Obama in February, and that the race continues into Pennsylvania, where she has the backing of Governor Ed Rendell’s machine, and then into Puerto Rico on June 7, where she is expected to do well.

That protracted deadlock into the convention in August in Denver is not generally what the party wants—Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean took the extraordinary step of saying earlier this month that he’d like to see the candidates work something out between themselves before then, if necessary. Not that the Clinton camp is bothered by it.

“Dean can’t come in and say—to either Hillary or Obama—you’ve got to step aside before Pennsylvania has voted,” said Mr. Nemazee. “How is that possible f
or the chair of the party to say the people of Pennsylvania or Puerto Rico don’t deserve to have their votes counted, particularly since neither of the two will have prevailed by then?”

“The likely time to do intervention is the period after the primaries but before the convention if it’s necessary at all,” Mr. Schumer said.

But it’s not clear that all of Mrs. Clinton’s donors will have that much patience. Already, there seems to be no shortage of advice from them about how things ought to be run very differently.

“A lot of the donors and a lot of the people who know her are frustrated,” said one New York Hillraiser. “She has a tremendous asset in her supporters and surrogates. And she needs to do a better job and her campaign needs to do a better job of having a surrogate operation to get those votes out.”

The donor also criticized the way Mrs. Clinton had been forced to emphasize her experience for so long, and wasn’t permitted to reveal more of her personality.

“I would say to Mark and to others,” said the fund-raiser, referring to Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn, “‘Listen, there is not a single person in America today that doubts her résumé. No one doubts that she is the more experienced candidate of the two. But you’re not listening. You’re not paying attention. People don’t really give a crap now about experience. They want to see someone different.’”

It’s far from clear that all of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, or her advisers, have arrived yet at that conclusion.

Jeffrey Appel, a New York-based mortgage specialist and a Hillraiser, rejected the conclusion that voters—especially the better-educated, wealthier Democrats who have gone in large numbers for Mr. Obama so far—weren’t being persuaded by Mrs. Clinton.

“An interesting sort of spin has been put on this that Senator Obama seems to do better in areas among more highly educated, more intellectual groups,” Mr. Appel said. “And what is interesting about that is that it seems to be well known that Hillary has generated more large donors than Senator Obama has. I find it kind of strange that Hillary is the candidate of the less intellectual, yet she has the larger and more wealthy supporters.”

On the evening of Feb. 11, Mr. Penn—the architect of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign strategy from the very beginning—took a break from the rigors of the campaign to stump for himself at the Strand Bookstore in downtown Manhattan. Surrounded by white copies of his book Microtrends (already-purchased copies of which were not permitted on the premises), Mr. Penn stood at a lectern between a dark window and a small crowd of readers.

“I was determined to take an hour out and talk about the book,” Mr. Penn told the audience, some of whom ate yogurt as they listened by the stacks of art and auction catalogs on the bookstore’s second floor. “It’s not a political book.”

With that, Mr. Penn, who speaks softly and always looks a little nervous, began his presentation.

“The theory of the book is that the era of big trends is over,” he said.

He talked about how society had become “infinitely personalized” because of an increasingly evident “individualistic streak” that manifested itself in, among other things, the way “people don’t want to wear the same clothes.”

As Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor who is working on a Hillary Clinton book, took notes to his left, Mr. Penn emphasized his distaste for the microtrend he calls “impressionable elites”—supposed leaders of society who, as he sees it, show more interest in a candidate’s personality than policies.

Mr. Obama enjoys the support of this chattering class, Mr. Penn believes, while Mrs. Clinton speaks more to working-class people who really care about policy because policy really impacts their lives. Worse still, Mr. Penn sees the “impressionable elites” growing in number, so much so that he has considered turning “that trend into an entire book someday, because it is becoming more and more evident.”

At least one attendee was skeptical. “Obama strikes me as a macrotrend, not a microtrend,” said Kevin Costa, a 48-year-old government analyst and undecided Democrat, during the question-and-answer session.

“It’s not just in the political context,” Mr. Penn said, explaining that more and more people were being persuaded by media stories and making important decisions in their life based on “hearsay.”

Asked after the event what, if anything, had gone wrong with the Clinton campaign, Mr. Penn suggested that Mr. Obama had simply turned out to be a tougher candidate than originally expected.

“After he won Iowa, he was a different candidate with a larger constituency,” said Mr. Penn. “I think that very much changed the course of the race, but I think you have seen us come back time and time again in situations where the polls and the media were ready to call it, and the voters said otherwise.”

When the trial opens, the eager prosecutor lays out the case, an avalanche of seemingly damning—but, in actuality, entirely circumstantial—evidence. You stew at the defense table, aching for a chance to respond.

But before your moment arrives, the 12 jurors decide they’ve heard enough. With the trial still ongoing, they each cast early “guilty” verdicts. When you finally take the stand and prove—like a scene out of Matlock—that you’ve been wrongly accused, the jurors are all far away from the courtroom, back at their jobs or maybe just lounging around at home. You lose.

Welcome to the maddening world of early voting, a well-intentioned concept that has exploded in popularity while fundamentally undermining the fairness of elections. Its impact has never been more dramatic, and its consequences more far-reaching, than in this year’s Democratic presidential race.

It started in New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton abruptly ended her post-Iowa free­fall with a stunning two-point win over Barack Obama, a verdict that was—in part—a testament to the former first lady’s steely nerve and pluck.

But it was also a powerful illustration of the impact of early voting. As Nick Clemons, Mrs. Clinton’s chief organizer in the state, later explained, a key element of the Clinton New Hampshire strategy involved pushing likely Clinton voters to cast absentee ballots a month before the primary—“to get their votes,” as Mr. Clemons put it, “before Iowa even happened.”

In effect, the campaign ended before Christmas for some New Hampshire voters, while the rest cast their ballots only after watching each candidate handle the stresses and challenges of the chaotic five-day sprint between Iowa and New Hampshire.

Maybe this made no difference at all—perhaps the early Clinton voters were so committed that nothing would have changed their minds. Or maybe it cost Mr. Obama, whose message gained newfound credibility with his victory in Iowa. You could even argue that it hurt Mrs. Clinton—that the early voters for other candidates might have been so moved by her performance in the final days of the New Hampshire campaign that they would have shifted their allegiance to her.

The point is that early voting meant that two different electorates made up their minds after watching two very different campaigns. This is a violation of the democratic spirit, which demands that all voters have access to the same basic information before rendering their judgments.

And New Hampshire is hardly the only—or the worst—problem.

In California, the crown jewel of the Clinton campaign’s Super Tuesday successes, polls showed Mr. Obama erasing what had been a stubborn yearlong gap in the final days of the campaign. Exit polls—which, admittedly, have not been too reliable of late—actually put him five points ahead on primary day.

But Mrs. Clinton won in a rout, by nearly 400,000 votes. Why? It probably had something to do with the two million early votes—half of all ballots cast statewide—some nearly a month before the actual primary. Those early votes were cast when Mrs. Clinton was still sitting on the lopsided lead in the state—one she’d held from the very beginning of the campaign.

Only when the primary approached did California’s poll numbers begin to fluctuate, indicating that voters were becoming more engaged and less responsive to mere name recognition. But it was too late: Mrs. Clinton had already won the race with early votes.

The same thing happened in Florida, where Mrs. Clinton scored a commanding 17-point victory over Mr. Obama, something she and her campaign haven’t stopped trumpeting. That result comes with numerous asterisks—Florida’s “outlaw” primary meant that Mr. Obama never campaigned or spent money in the state—but chief among them is the discrepancy between early votes and primary day results. One-quarter of Florida’s ballots were cast in advance of the primary, overwhelmingly for Mrs. Clinton, while exit polls showed a tight Clinton-Obama race on primary day.

Similar patterns have played out in Tennessee, New Jersey and Arizona, where late Obama charges were—at least in part—turned back by early voting. And who knows? Maybe Mrs. Clinton herself was a victim of early ballots in Illinois and Utah, Obama states that also allow rampant early voting.

Increasing voter participation is a worthy aim, and there are some common-sense steps—like holding elections on Saturdays and expanding the number of polling stations—that ought to be considered.

But it surely isn’t a healthy thing for an election to be decided weeks before the campaign is over.

"We feel we really had a strong showing and we came back," Trippi said. Hillary Clinton "clearly did the robo-call thing last night because we were coming up on her—and they knocked us down."

Trippi said the Edwards campaign was "already ahead of this" on a lot of states. He cited Oklahoma and Missouri as states in which they expected to perform well. (So, Missouri really is a state!)

As for South Carolina: "We fought back, we got our share of the vote."

And! "Don't look at the numbers," he said. "We could go all the way..... We have the money to go on." He said that they'd raised a lot of money in the last 23 days—something like more than they had in the last quarter, but I couldn't really hear that part that well, nor do I tend to believe statements like that anyway, so no matter. And not to be ungrateful, but the rather paltry buffet table does not look much like the snack offerings of a rich campaign.

Aww. They're playing John Cougar! Ain't that America.

There are just a phenomenal number of reporters here—they've just gotta be excited at pulling Edwards detail on this triumphant night for the man that Hillary Clinton has called "a son of the south" at every opportunity this week.

Oh wow, now they are playing the Arcade Fire, a band popular with the urban young! Very preliminary results are coming in, over the T.V. waves, but not very much at all is going on here besides—wait, there is a man in a big spiky rooster hat and a patterned silk coat. I cannot identify a single reporter here! One woman is saying that service is "super-super-slow here"! That is okay because there are only dozens and dozens of people trying to dine, while the majority of people (the press) are eating from the free buffet, which I am about to plow into like a mack truck. More information to come on the status of the buffet and my eating of it as those events warrant.

Wait, I've just met two young white girls, one 18 and one 17, who are here in the front of the restaurant for a birthday party! The 18-year-old declined to vote in her very first primary. "I didn't know the hooplah about all this stuff," she said. But it was such a crazy election, how could she pass, I asked. "I was watching the thing on TV, who was it Edwards, Obama and Clinton, it was just between Clinton and Obama, they were just dissing each other, they weren't telling each other about anything," she said.

Note, however, that McCain's support in the state is less committed to him--they expressed a greater likelihood of changing their minds before the primary--than the supporters of any other top candidate.

Among Democrats, who aren't competing in the state because it sends no delegates this year, Hilllary Clinton maintains a significant lead of very committed support.

Here's the release:

Viewers of Mr. Dobb’s CNN show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, would not have been surprised by his populist-tinged tirades against the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Big Media, the National Council of La Raza, and the political leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

But he may have caught some members of the audience by surprise when he passionately argued against the celebration of Columbus Day.

“Columbus wasn’t even the one who got here first, it should be Norwegian Day,” said Mr. Dobbs.

In an act of even greater provocation, Mr. Dobbs – whose wife is Mexican-American – announced his support for increasing interracial marriage, “at a huge velocity,” so as to remedy the fact that Americans are “focusing too much on our differences.” (Paging Senator Bulworth!)

In actual news, he is “not interested in being a Presidential candidate,” he told Mr. Abrams. Electoral politics are, he said, “not in my nature.”

But then! “I am only a candidate of last resort.”