No date has been set for the work stoppage. Employees are required by law to give the medical facility 10 days notice before walking off the job. Last month the workers, who are represented by Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota, held a two-day strike.

The primary dispute is over pension benefits. Regina Medical Center insists that it needs to cut back on retirement costs to remain competitive. The workers believe the proposed changes would amount to gutting their retirement savings.

“We are all for a boycott if that is what brings about a sense of community for people,” said Sean Hetherington of West Hollywood, Calif. Hetherington dreamed up the idea as a protest to the passage of California’s Prop 8. “You can take away from the economy and give back in other ways,” he told the Associated Press.

Hetherington’s website has serves as a portal for the event, connecting participants to volunteer organizations. For those that live in the 30 states where it is still legal to fire someone just for being gay or lesbian, the website offers other ways to get involved without risking employment.

In Minnesota, some of the opportunities to get involved include the following:

The Hub Bike Co-op will be hosting free classes in honor of the event. The University of Minnesota Human Rights Center is looking for volunteers to help run an event featuring the film A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Open Arms of Minnesota, a nonprofit that delivers meals to those with severe illnesses, including AIDS, has openings for drivers. Family and Children Service will be wrapping presents for those in need and Avenues for Homeless Youth need assistance cleaning and painting the shelter.

But by Bloomberg News’ account, the deal helped Wal-Mart avoid a potentially much bigger price tag of $2 billion which could have followed from an order Judge Robert King Jr. issued in the case last summer.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman addresses striking workers

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Since a two-day strike last month, there has been no progress in a contract dispute between Regina Medical Center and 230 workers represented by Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota. No talks have been held since the work stoppage and none are scheduled.

“They continue to tell members of the media they’re willing to meet, and yet they have not called us,” says Ryan Nagle, communications director for the labor union. “We’d be happy to meet anytime, anyplace.”

Next Wednesday union members will hold a vote on the current contract proposal from Regina Medical Center, which the Hastings facility has characterized as its final offer. If the proposal is voted down, the union will then vote on whether to authorize a five-day strike over unfair labor practices.

SEIU currently has a half-dozen grievances pending before the National Labor Relations Board for what Nagle characterizes as “run of the mill intimidation and threats leading up to the strike.” Among the allegations: employees were warned that they’d be permanently replaced if they walked off the job.

The chief issue in the contract dispute is over employee pensions. Currently Regina Medical Center pays the equivalent of 8 percent of an employee’s salary into a pension plan if the worker has at least five years of experience and 4 percent for more recent hires. The facility wants to change to a less-generous plan that would require employees to match the company’s contributions if they wish to have more than 2 percent of their salary put into a retirement account

Employees at Regina Medical Center walked off the job today, commencing a two-day strike to protest the hospital’s current contract proposal. The 230 employees, represented by Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota, include nurses’ aides, custodial workers and X-ray technicians.

The current three-year contract expired at the end of October, and there are no additional contract negotiations planned. Unlike most recent labor disputes, the chief stumbling block here isn’t health-care coverage, but rather employee retirement accounts.

“We are here to save our pensions,” said Jan Salo, (pictured at right) who has sterilized surgical tools at the facility for 20 years, at a rally this afternoon in front of the facility in Hastings. “Management wants to slash our pensions. We want to be able to retire with dignity and security, and we’re here to fight for it.”

Currently Regina Medical Center pays the equivalent of 8 percent of an employee’s salary into a pension plan if the worker has at least five years of experience and 4 percent for more recent hires. Under the medical center’s proposed change, the company would automatically contribute 2 percent into each employee’s retirement fund. If the worker then chooses to put part of his or her own salary into the plan, Regina would match that commitment up to an additional 6 percent of the individual’s wages for people who have worked there more than five years and 3 percent for newer employees.

To put this in concrete terms, if an employee currently makes $31,408 annually (a typical wage for a housekeeper), the company contributes $2,512.64 toward a retirement fund for anyone who has been working there for at least five years and half that amount for more recent hires. Under Regina’s proposed change the company would automatically contribute $628.16 to the worker’s pension plan each year. If the employee then chooses to put in additional money, the medical center would match it dollar-for-dollar up to an additional $1,884.48 for workers that have been there five years.

According to Judy Misencik, marketing director at the medical facility, the cutbacks are necessary to bring the company’s pension commitments into line with industry standards and help it weather a wretched economic climate. “Like many health-care organizations throughout the state, we’ve seen a downturn in our volume,” she says, noting that in order to cut costs, the hospital has also laid off employees and not filled vacant positions. “People who maybe have elective procedures that they’d like to have done are putting that off because of the economy.”

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Senate Assistant Majority Leader Tarryl Clark (pictured), along with a handful of labor leaders from other unions, showed up at the rally to show support for the workers. “You’re just trying to hold on to your basic pension,” Clark told the crowd. “The administration needs to come back to the table. They need to be looking at other alternatives.”

Linda Slattengren, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, said that her union fully supports the strike. “Regina hospital’s attack on the pensions of our brothers and sisters in SEIU is unethical and it’s highway robbery,” she said. “A pension is a promise — a promise by the employer to assure a safe senior life to dedicated workers.”

There was a negotiation session Nov. 17, but no further talks are scheduled. Regina has deemed the current proposal its final offer. “They told us that unless we were willing to accept exactly what they had on the table, there was no room for talk,” said Salo. “They didn’t want to negotiate with us at all.”

Misencik maintained that the two-day walkout hasn’t affected client services at the medical facility, which includes a hospital, nursing home and assisted living center. “We have our contingency plans in place,” she said, noting that the company is utilizing temporary workers and former employees to keep things running. “We actually had more people who showed up to help this morning than we needed, and we sent some people home.”

Lehman Brothers: A Wall Street icon goes bust.

After Monday’s dramatic tumble in the financial markets–led by dire announcements about Lehman Brothers (bound for bankruptcy court), Merrill Lynch (absorbed by Bank of America) and insurance giant AIG (desperately seeking bridge loans)–I got in touch with Doug Henwood for some help in sorting out these latest developments and what they augur for the US economy on Main Street.

In a 20-minute interview taped Tuesday afternoon, Henwood–the publisher of the invaluable Left Business Observer newsletter and perhaps our most plainspoken economics journalist–took the measure of “Gray Monday” and the arc of the US economy.

“So far, by historical standards, it’s not a very severe recession,” Henwood tells MnIndy. “The economy could, considering the blows it’s taken–the housing bust and the financial crises over the last year or two–it could be in a lot worse shape than it is. But I don’t think this is going to do it any good. My thinking is that we’re in the midst of a very long-term period of stagnation and economic trouble. I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of big collapse that a lot of people are expecting, certainly not like the 1930s, but even like the kind of deep recessions we saw in the 1970s or early 1980s. I think we’re going to see a very long period of a grinding and very unpleasant economy [where] the unemployment rate creeps higher and wages and income creep lower. It’s going to be very, very difficult to generate any prosperity out of this for a considerable period of time.” A complete transcript of the interview follows below the audio player.

Listen: Doug Henwood talks about Wall Street and Main Street after Monday’s financial bloodletting (19:28)

Minnesota Independent: After a day like yesterday, one of the things that’s most lacking is any sense of perspective. so i’d like to start by asking you a big-picture question: How is the US economic outlook different today from a week or a month ago?

Doug Henwood

Doug Henwood: Part of the reason we don’t have perspective in the heat of things is that we just don’t know, but my guess is that it’s marginally worse than it was. We’re in recession. I think that’s pretty incontrovertible, though it’s not officially declared yet.

So far, by historical standards, it’s not a very severe recession. Employment has contracted a little bit, but far less than in earlier recessions. The unemployment rate has crept higher, but also, again, less than in earlier recessions. The economy could, considering the blows it’s taken–the housing bust and the financial crises over the last year or two–it could be in a lot worse shape than it is. But I don’t think this is going to do it any good.

My thinking is that we’re in the midst of a very long-term period of stagnation and economic trouble. I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of big collapse that a lot of people are expecting, certainly not like the 1930s, but even like the kind of deep recessions we saw in the 1970s or early 1980s. I think we’re going to see a very long period of a grinding and very unpleasant economy [where] the unemployment rate creeps higher and wages and income creep lower. It’s going to be very, very difficult to generate any prosperity out of this for a considerable period of time.

MnIndy: Can you shed some light on the decision to let Lehman Brothers go bust but to pursue assistance for AIG?

Henwood: Who knows what these people are thinking? The other question is, why did Lehman Brothers go bust when they bailed out–well, they didn’t bail out, but they had the forced merger of Bear Stearns. The conspiracy theory version of events is that Goldman Sachs had it in for Lehman Brothers and was happy to see it go under–the Treasury secretary, [Henry] Paulson, and several other important people around all this were Goldman Sachs alums, and they were just happy to see it go down. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. People on Wall Street love conspiracy theories and gossip.

[There is] the possibility that they just wanted to teach Wall Street a lesson, that sometimes you can go bust. I think they got a little nervous after the Bear Stearns thing, the sense that Wall Street could get away with murder and get a get-out-of-jail-free pass. They didn’t want that to circulate too widely. So that may be why they let Lehman go down.

AIG is very, very, very big, the biggest insurance company in the country, and I think the consequences of it going under would be pretty dramatic. They may just be buying time for some sort of order rearrangement; who knows? But I think the fear is that to have Lehman go under, Merrill [Lynch] go into Bank of America in what could be something of a forced merger, and to lose AIG–all this in a couple of days would be just too much to handle. So they may just be buying some time [with AIG]. But I don’t think they really know what’s going on or what to do, either. They’re just improvising as they go along.

MnIndy: There’s been talk about what the Fed will do, later today and in the near term. What can the Fed do by way of containing this crisis that it hasn’t already done?

Henwood: It seems that just lowering interest rates is not enough. They’ve done a lot of that. Lowering interest rates works in more or less normal times. But credit markets are not normal markets in a lot of ways. And just lowering the price of it does not necessarily increase the demand for it. For example, if lenders get very, very scared and don’t want to lend money, they’re not going to lend. Or they’ll just buy government bonds with whatever cash they have, and avoid [doing] anything that looks even slightly risky.

So the problem is really, now, the availability of credit, not its price–not the interest rate. We’ve seen this in the mortgage market, where it’s very difficult for people to get mortgages unless they have really sterling credit histories. And I think we’re going to see this spreading beyond the mortgage market. The risk for the real economy in coming weeks and months is, what happens to commercial and industrial credit, the C&I lending that banks do–that is, lending to businesses just to finance day-to-day business operations, financing inventory, paying for supplies until the money comes in.

That kind of bread-and-butter business lending is what keeps the economy going. Without it, the economy would grind to a halt. I think there’s going to be less and less willingness on the part of banks to make those sorts of loans. We saw something like it in the early ’90s, when there was a credit crunch and a long period of economic stagnation, and I suspect we’re living through something like that again. It may go on longer and run deeper than in the early ’90s, though.

The Federal Reserve does a regular survey of lending officers at banks, asking whether they’re tightening or loosening standards, whether they’re making loans or not making loans. Those tend to have a long lead time, so the answers to those questions tend to predict what’s going to happen to the credit market six or twelve months out. Those surveys are showing that bankers are growing more and more unwilling to make loans to businesses, and certainly to consumers. That shutdown of lending is going to be a weight around the economy’s neck for what could be years to come.

MnIndy: There’s talk among the financial writers at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal today about a “contagion” of panic and, essentially, a run on major investment banks. Does yesterday represent a new threshold of anxiety for Wall Street, or no?

Henwood: Yeah, I think–Wall Street operates on a real herd mentality. A lot of what goes on in the world of finance is just one guy imitating the other. They operate like a crowd, and crowds do not operate rationally. During the housing bubble, for example, the crowd was very optimistic, and the crowd made loans to people who shouldn’t have gotten loans. People bought risky securities they shouldn’t have bought. Everyone thought it was okay.

Now we’re seeing the mirror image of that. It’s just going crazy in the other direction. There are rumors circulating about insolvencies all over the place. Everybody’s afraid of everyone else. Banks aren’t lending each other money. So even if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, if the banks don’t want to lend each other money, the interest rate is just a purely theoretical thing.

The only thing I think the Fed is going to do is keep pumping in money and making reassuring sounds, and hope that things just don’t get out of hand. There’s always a risk that things will get out of hand. In the past, all these bailouts have managed to contain the problem and keep it from spinning out of control. But this time it’s not working as well as in the past. We’re seeing one thing after another. We’ve had so many false endings to this financial crisis that began more than a year ago. It’s kind of like a bad horror movie.

MnIndy: Is there a shock factor among investors stemming from the refusal to bail out Lehman Brothers, or did Wall Street understand that this line would be drawn at some point?

Henwood: I think they probably suspected it, but they were probably also shocked when it actually happened. They had gotten so used to getting bailed out that I think there’s shock when it doesn’t happen.

It’s interesting who doesn’t get bailed out. Bear Stearns didn’t really get bailed out. They got liquidated and rolled into JP Morgan. Bear Stearns was not a very popular company among a lot of people on Wall Street. They refused to participate in the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, that hedge fund that went bust back in 1998. There’s some sense that maybe Wall Street and the Federal Reserve wanted to get revenge on Bear Stearns. If we go back to the early ’90s, the same thing happened to Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond home of Michael Milken. A lot of people didn’t like them. They weren’t very popular on Wall Street or in corporate America, and so they were allowed to go under as well.

Lehman was not that unpopular, so I was a little surprised that it was not bailed out. It’s a venerable old name, although it’s undergone many changes over the years, but there is a bit of a shock they were allowed to go under so dramatically. On the other hand, the Fed and the Treasury tried very hard to find a buyer to take Lehman Brothers, but no one wanted it. There are still some valuable parts of the business they’ll be selling off in the coming months, but no one really wanted to get into it. There was too much concern over what toxic waste was hidden in its balance sheet.

MnIndy: You and I talked about the economy six or eight months ago, and I’ve always remembered something you said in that interview: that one of the critical points over time was whether this was a recessionary, cyclical downturn, or the harbinger of all sorts of structural economic problems coming home to roost. How does the economy look to you in that regard now?

Henwood: I think it’s revealing some serious structural problems. It’s not behaving like a normal business cycle. If we go back into the expansion period–officially, the expansion ran from late 2001 onward–the economy stayed in expansion until, I think, the end of last year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of these things, hasn’t declared a recession yet, but I think they probably will. Those six years or so were the weakest expansion we’ve had since the end of WWII. Employment was very weak, GDP growth was very weak, wages went nowhere. It was just not a good time for most people. The contrast to the late ’90s, for example, is pretty stark. Then, the employment growth was strong, the unemployment rate got under 4 percent. There were wages increases absolutely across the income distribution, at every level, high to low. Black, white, Hispanic, men, women–everyone saw very nice income gains in the last few years of the 1990s.

The opposite was true this time. It was really just the very, very top of the income distribution that did well in this expansion. I’m not talking about the upper middle class; it was really just the top 1 percent. The further you go up the ladder–to the top tenth of 1 percent, or top hundredth of 1 percent–the further you go up, the better they did.

It was a very unusual situation. Certainly we’ve seen the rich getting richer for the last 25 or 30 years. But in the last five or six, we’re just off the charts in that regard. That suggested to me that something was wrong already–that the expansion just was not a normal one. The only thing that kept things going at all was the housing bubble. People felt richer, they spent more money because of it, they borrowed money against the value of their housing to sustain their consumption levels even though the labor market was kind of stinky.

Once that housing stimulus was taken away, the underlying fundamental weakness of the economy became very visible. We can make a list of what’s wrong with it: Income polarization is part of it. People don’t have the incomes to sustain a mass-consumption economy, so they’ve been borrowing a lot. That’s been going on for a long time, but it was especially egregious after the end of the late ’90s expansion.

The very sharp weakening of our manufacturing sector over the last 10 years [is another factor]. We have a narrower and narrower economy that’s based on retail and financial services, bars and restaurants, and housing. That’s not really a secure foundation for a productive economy over the longer term. We need to do something about that. That’s the real fundamental problem. It’s possible that retooling the economy to deal with climate change, better forms of energy and transportation, could generate a boom. But our political system and the consciousness of our capitalist class are not there yet.

MnIndy: There’s a lot of heated political rhetoric now about the extent to which the Bush regime and Republican economic policies are responsible for the woes we’re experiencing now. What do you think about that? Is this a Bush legacy?

Henwood: I think that’s a half-truth. Certainly the Republicans have done some worse things. The Clinton economic policy was not so great either, though. Bob Rubin was in the forefront of financial deregulation. The Clinton administration was very aggressive in financial deregulation. One thing they did do differently, however, was that in Clinton’s first term, he raised taxes on very rich people–the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. That balanced the budget, allowed interest rates to fall, and did help generate the boom of the 1990s.

That was really one thing you could point to that the Clinton administration did that was good. One thing they did that was bad was to encourage home ownership in a very irresponsible way by encouraging people to make low- or no-down payment house purchases. It really laid the groundwork for the housing bubble that got us into trouble more recently.

The Republicans and Democrats both have been very, very fond of financial deregulation. While the Democrats did a couple of good things and the Republicans did NO good things, I think both parties are very, very guilty of doing some bad things.

MnIndy: As you try to sort out the signs and portents regarding this particular financial crisis, and the health of the larger economy, what sorts of indicators do you watch most closely?

Henwood: One is the arcane one I was talking about earlier, which is what’s happening with commercial and industrial lending–whether banks are continuing to lend money to businesses for day-to-day activity. That’s a very important one, and one where financial troubles can get transmitted to the real economy. Sometimes the financial sector is just off on its own, dancing to its own tune, but that’s one way in which the financial sector has a very strong influence on the real sector.

Another thing is just to look at what’s happening with the job market. Every Thursday morning, the Labor Department releases figures on first-time claimants for unemployment insurance, when people lose their jobs. That’s been elevated recently, and if it rises more from here, it would be a sign that the job market is deteriorating.

The monthly jobs report that comes out on the first Friday of every month is in many ways the best economic indicator we have. It’s very timely; it comes out just a few days after the end of the month. And it’s a report on what matters to most people–what’s happening with employment, wages, hours, the mix of jobs, who’s getting them, who’s not getting them, what’s happening with unemployment.

Another thing to watch is what’s happening with retail spending. The government reports on that monthly, and there are private services that report weekly. You want to see if people are holding back. Certainly a lot of people are just broke and can’t spend money. But the people who aren’t broke, are they hoarding the money or spending it? What are they spending it on?

The pattern in retail sales lately has been people spending money mostly on essentials, and not spending money on impulse purchases or luxury goods. If that trend continues and gets worse, it would be a sign not only of distress, but also of anxiety that could become self-fulfilling if people stop spending and hoard their money. That would throw us into deeper recession than we’re in already.

But it’s also the case that Americans have been living way beyond our means. Over the last several decades, really, but it got very bad in the last 10 years. It used to be that people saved about 8 percent of their after-tax income. That’s gone down to 0. People who have money aren’t saving it; people who don’t have it are borrowing heavily. And that’s got to change. People have to save money and not borrow so much.

To do that, people are going to have to consume less. That’s going to mean a very wrenching change for the economy, but for the culture and the society at large. Overspending is practically part of the American way of life, and to cut back on that could lead to some very dramatic changes.

Joel Barkin, executive director at the Progressive States Network

Nathan Newman, a policy director at Progressive States Network, authored the report.

The New York-based political group Progressive States Network (PSN) has just released a report entitled, “The Anti-Immigration Movement That Failed,” which counters media hype around anti-immigration legislation, revealing that over the past few years, states have largely enacted various policies that embrace new immigrants.

While the anti-immigration movement may appear to hold sway at the federal government, the report makes the case that there’s still a heated debate going on at the state level, especially within swing states, said PSN executive director Joel Barkin, at a recent press conference. He calls the report, which examines nationwide policies on a state-by-state scale, “important and timely.” “It’s a significant fight and the pro-immigrant side is winning,” he said, adding, “It’s far from over.”

Report author Nathan Newman, a PSN policy director, attributes the inflated anti-immigrant message to political opportunists who tried to make it a “wedge” issue in electoral politics. But the data shows they’ve been so far unsuccessful. “The states that are the most experienced with the immigration issue, conservative or liberal, have the most positive approach.”

Newman advocates for “strong, integrative policies” that work to assimilate foreign-born people. That’s beneficial for everyone, he argued, pointing out that it can help raise labor standards for both immigrants and American-born workers. That includes things like higher wages for all employees. “Scapegoating immigrants is not going to solve the economic pressure working families experience.  The real problem is a far more pervasive one of employers violating the workplace rights of all workers, both native and immigrant,” the report states.

The vast majority of immigrants across the U.S. live in places that have adopted positive, “integrative” approaches that are welcoming to “New Americans.” A mere 11 percent of undocumented immigrants reside in states that have comprehensive punitive policies, or ones that are broadly unfriendly to immigrants. To the contrary, many states have started offering in-state tuition for undocumented people heading to public universities, health insurance for undocumented children and English language instruction.

Others have introduced programs that provide assistance to immigrants who want to obtain citizenship. More and more states are getting tough on employers that aren’t up to par when it comes to minimum wage, safety code and workers compensation.

(Minnesota, which has a mix of both punitive and integrative laws, is among several states that have passed “new crackdowns on companies misclassifying employees as ‘independent contractors’ in order to evade wage and tax laws.” Other states, like New York, have established something along the lines of a Bureau of Immigrant Workers’ Rights to go after companies that violate wage laws.)

Only in a handful of states that were already conservative-leaning were “significant anti-immigrant policies able to make headway in 2008… Everywhere else, states either stalled anti-immigrant bills or enacted positive policies to better integrate new immigrants,” the report reads.

“I simply refuse to believe there are no community organizers in Alaska.” That’s what Marjorie Childress wrote at the New Mexico Independent after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin maligned community organizers at the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Indeed, though their work may carry different job titles — “advocate” seems to be Alaskan for “organizer” — plenty of Alaskans do community organizing. In fact, Gov. Palin is currently hiring people to do the work of community organizers. At Workplace Alaska, Alaska’s Web site for recruiting state workers, there are two current job openings for this position:

Social Services Program Coordinator, in Anchorage or Juneau. From the job description: “The incumbent is expected to perform technical assistance, on-site community development … The duties of the position require frequent travel and strong community development skills … Your experience securing resources for youth-related programs and services, through grant writing, negotiating agreements and partnerships with a variety of organizations and agencies, and/or grassroots community mobilization.”

At ALEXsys, Alaska state government’s online job bank, there are two more community organizer-type positions advertised:

Village Advocate, Naknek, Alaska. Provide direct advocacy and crisis intervention services to adult and child victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, other crimes and related abuse. Provide systems advocacy to challenge and change institutional response and belief systems that allow violence to continue, including technical assistance and systems advocacy to village/tribal groups on community interventions in domestic violence and sexual assault.

Outreach Coordinator, Kotzebue, Alaska. Among the job duties: Disseminate information about suicide prevention, cultural strength and wellness through a variety of means. Coordinate and meet with local and regional organizations and bodies to keep them aware of outreach activities and to get their support and guidance.

On top of that, Alaska state government funds a dozen regional development organizations known as ARDORs, through a state agency that until last year was known as the Alaska Division of Community Advocacy. (Under the auspices of the Alaska Division of Community Advocacy, Sarah Palin served on the board of her ARDOR, the Mat-Su Resource Conservation and Development Council, while she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.)

What do these ARDORs, these emissaries of community advocacy, do? One example is the Bering Straits Development Council, which according to the latest ARDOR annual report helped recruit a VISTA volunteer to tackle, among other projects, “poverty alleviation.” The Bering Straits organization also worked with the University of Alaska to “provide rural citizens with cooperative technical and organizational assistance. The goal is to foster a cash-based economy by creating rural cooperatives.”

Shelton, who spent time at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s, said she’s not sure what to believe of what she’s read about Palin’s spat — while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska — with the town librarian. Shelton doesn’t report directly to Palin, has found the governor “very pleasant” the one or two times she’s met her, and said issues of censorship haven’t come up at the state library in her three years there.

4:15 a.m.
I’m developing a purely anecdotal theory about Republican drunkenness: that it’s related to ideology. The less ideological arrive back at the headquarters earlier in the evening, between midnight and 1 a.m. These are, in chronological order, the Romney and the Giuliani supporters. Both are East Coast, urban college grad, corporate types. They like to drink and reminisce about the Harvard-Yale game, but they also like to wake up early, shave and not smell like booze at committee meetings. The Giuliani people are secular and more openly lecherous. So they tend to drink a bit harder and stay out closer to 1 a.m. The Ron Paul people party past 1 a.m., but not much. And they shave but they don’t showboat.

The ones who stay out the latest and come back the drunkest, I notice, are the Huckabee folks, the party’s rural conservatives. They believe in Jesus, in the hard-bitten way of the true alcoholic. If they ever sober up, it’ll be by the grace of the Lord; and if they intend to stay on the sauce and continue living, then they’ll really need His loving kindness. If you intend to be drinking heavily until closing time — 4 a.m. in the Twin Cities during the RNC — you had better walk home with Jesus.

I can’t place true McCainites on the alcohol-ideology matrix. I think they were all asleep by 9:30 p.m.