WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it. ...

Mona Charen gives us, "ACORN, Obama, and the Mortgage Mess."

Kenneth Blackwell presents the connection in, "An ACORN Falls from the Tree."

David Limbaugh calls on McCain to, "Pin the Tail on the Donkey."

Perhaps it is because of connections like this that Nancy Pelosi went partisan-ballistic on the floor of the House, criticizing Bush and the Republican advocacy of small government for the nation's present financial instability. When the detectives start closing in on who done it, the culprit creates a distraction.

Barack Obama has styled himself a centrist, but does his record support that claim? In this series, we examine Senator Obama's past, his voting record and the people who've served as his advisers and mentors over the years. We'll show how the facts of Obama's actions and associations reveal a far more left-leaning tilt to his background — and to his politics.

By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Substantively, this has been the worst week of John McCain’s campaign — and I mean since its beginning, in early 2007. With a perfect argument to make on his own behalf — that he saw the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and called them out in 2005 while others were still angling for their largesse, and that therefore he possesses the experience and demonstrated the kind of leadership and insight that are required for the presidency — he instead flailed about. Calling for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox? Right there, in that act, we got a glimpse of why senators so often make bad presidential candidates. From time immemorial, senators haughtily acts as though the dismissal of executive branch officials is a form of policymaking when it is almost always the opposite — an act of scapegoating.

Broadly, the principal official financial policy errors in the United States over the last 15 years or so (during which time there has been minimal inflation and unemployment, and nearly 30-million net new jobs created), have been:

• Nothing has been done in U.S. tax policy to discourage excessive debt accumulation by the American public, which has spent more than it has earned for years, most of it on non-durable goods, and much of it imported. This has created terrible financial and psychological vulnerability throughout the population.

• Nothing has been done to reduce the back-breaking importation of oil, which has grossly raised energy costs, fueled inflation, enriched unfriendly states such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, and financed their mischief, and burdened the United States with about half of its $800-billion annual current account deficit.

• Successive U.S. administrations of both parties have sat, inert as suet puddings, while China has piled up a $265-billion annual trade surplus with the United States.

• The deliberate reduction in the value of the U.S. dollar came too late to save manufacturing jobs and went on too long to improve the real buying power of American consumers. Meanwhile, Washington’s low-interest-rate policy was too deep and prolonged, and encouraged compulsive spending and expansion, and excessive borrowing and speculation, especially in housing.

Beyond that, the United States and other countries have fallen too far into the fool’s paradise of the service economy. The U.S. GDP of $13-trillion is about half composed of worthless and non-productive effort, which yet engages the efforts of a large number of very skilled people. A trillion dollars annually goes into legal expenses to feed the absurdly litigious society and state prosecutocracy. Another great fortune goes to insane insurance costs on medical lawsuits, and superfluous consulting fees -- which mainly substitute for what management should be doing, and provide a lightning rod to shelter inept management from shareholder wrath.

In the first step, the U.S. government should raise spending (and bailing out financial institutions will ensure that), increase the money supply, cut the discount rate, and reduce taxes, and not with Barack Obama’s shell game of “refundable tax credits,” which is only one step short of the late Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau’s famous “voluntary tax.”

The second step should unfold over the longer term, as the U.S. incentivizes savings, starts to seriously reduce energy imports, follows market forces in a redistribution of some effort from service to productive or research areas, and regains or exploits more of its sophisticated manufacturing potential.

The third step is creating the right combination of public-sector vigilance to prevent self-destructive financial excess, and private-sector fermentation, without regulators substituting themselves for commercially accomplished people.

Politically, he sees McCain as more likely to pursue a recovery agenda as opposed to a deepen-us-into-terrible-depression agenda. "Who would be the best for the task? Both candidates were pretty unconvincing last week. But I still believe that a tax-cutting ex-combat pilot is a better bet than a soak-the-rich ex-social worker."

Its collapse would be as close to an extinction-level event as the financial markets have seen since the Great Depression. A.I.G. does business with virtually every financial institution in the world. Most important, it is a central player in the unregulated, Brobdingnagian credit default swap market that is reported to be at least $60 trillion in size.

Nobody knows this market’s real size, or who owes what to whom, because there is no central clearinghouse or regulator for it. Credit default swaps are a type of credit insurance contract in which one party pays another party to protect it from the risk of default on a particular debt instrument. If that debt instrument (a bond, a bank loan, a mortgage) defaults, the insurer compensates the insured for his loss. The insurer (which could be a bank, an investment bank or a hedge fund) is required to post collateral to support its payment obligation, but in the insane credit environment that preceded the credit crisis, this collateral deposit was generally too small.

As a result, the credit default market is best described as an insurance market where many of the individual trades are undercapitalized. But even worse, many of the insurers are grossly undercapitalized. In one case in the New York courts, the Swiss banking giant UBS is suing a hedge fund that said it would insure nearly $1.5 billion in bonds but was unable to do so. No wonder — the hedge fund had only $200 million in assets.

If A.I.G. collapsed, its hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-related assets would be added to those being sold by other financial institutions. This would just depress values further. The counterparties around the world to A.I.G.’s credit default swaps may be unable to collect on their trades. As a large hedge-fund investor, A.I.G. would suddenly become a large redeemer from hedge funds, forcing fund managers to sell positions and probably driving down prices in the world’s financial markets. More failures, particularly of hedge funds, could follow.Regulators knew that if Lehman went down, the world wouldn’t end. But Wall Street isn’t remotely prepared for the inestimable damage the financial system would suffer if A.I.G. collapsed.