Vanishing Primates
Apparently almost one third of primate species are at serious risk of extinction.
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October 28, 2007 - November 3, 2007 Archives
October 28, 2007
Calorie Count
If you'd just told me in the abstract about a proposal to force chain restaurants "to prominently display calorie information" I would have been skeptical, but the vigor with which the affected businesses are fighting back makes me think this may well be a good idea after all since most of the non-Subway firms involved appear to think that keeping this information secret is vital to their business models.
After all, this won't prevent anyone from buying a Big Mac or some KFC — the only reason for thinking it would be bad for business is that these businesses believe that consumers wouldn't want to eat their products if they were better-informed about them. That, in and of itself, seems like a compelling reason to think the information should be provided. It's worth endlessly repeating that policies aimed at improving America's diet and exercise habits are likely to do more for public health than are reforms to the health care finance system.
Photo by Flickr user drewzhrodague used under a Creative Commons license
A Trap
David Ignatius: "Military action would be irrational for both sides. But that doesn't mean it won't happen. I wish the Bush administration could see that with each step it takes closer to conflict, it is walking toward a well-planned trap." The thing is that the planning behind this trap isn't really all that impressive and it's pretty obvious what's going on. The scary thing is that even though the trap's not particularly clever, it's very plausible that we'll stumble into it anyway.
Where to Find Qualified Women
Surely you've heard dozens of times of the progressive — or even non-ideological — organization whose leadership professes to wish to have more women in high-level roles, but just can't seem to find qualified candidates for openings when they arise. Something to keep in mind next time you hear something like that would be GFR's take on how Hillary Clinton's campaign staff came to have so many women in senior positions:
After all, it’s not like there was some huge population of female strategists out there the various campaigns were competing for and Clinton just happened to snap them all up. Clinton created, on her own, a cadre of female strategists to serve her political needs, by spotting talent in the women around her and promoting them up the political food chain. No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their former female scheduler.
It also might be worth noting in this regard that I think almost everyone would agree that Clinton's had the best-run campaign — free of mistakes, and seemingly drawing blood on those occasions when they've felt the need to attack.
Iran Proxies
I'm not sure Wesley Clark's defense of Hillary Clinton's support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment was convincing, but it was the sort of thing that might convince. Clark is, after all, a great proxy to have doing outreach to more dovish voters for you — an Iraq War opponent, a committed multilateralist, and someone with deep ties to the blogosphere. Madeleine Albright not so much. When people worry that an HRC administration might be too hawkish, Albright is part of what we're worrying about, she a member of the hawkish "strategic class" circle that Clinton was aligning herself with when she voted to authorize war with Iraq.
Malawi vs. the Stone Age
I'm happy to believe that the standard of living in Malawi is deplorable (have I plugged the ONE Campaign recently?) but Gregory Clark's argument that living standards are actually worse than they were for stone age hunter-gatherers seems a bit hard to believe. This comes to me via Brad DeLong who seems to agree. Either way, I keep meaning to read Clark's book and it certainly does seem interesting.
Punishment for the Innocent
David Greenberg's rundown of Rudy Giuliani's frightening authoritarianism reminds me of one episode from my youth that I'd forgotten: "In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council's permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving -- even if the suspects were later acquitted." Greenberg describes this as "Cheney-esque" but while the Bush administration has certainly been happy to act with a cavalier indifference to the guilt or innocence of the people they're surveilling, detaining without counsel, torturing, etc. I think even they have never claimed the right to punish people who've been certified as innocent.
Who's Afraid of the Arab-American Institute?
Just about everyone, according to Steve Clemons who was there over the weekend:
But unlike the clamor of candidates to speak at the annual AIPAC conference or to appear at various national security forums in Israel, this important Michigan-based conference of the great and the good among Arab Americans was given a frosty shoulder by leading candidates of both parties, and I think that is outrageous. [...]
First of all, I want to applaud the fact that Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson took the time to be at this important assembly of Arab Americans.
Let me clap with just one hand the fact that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama sent videotaped greetings and had "surrogates" represent them in exchanges with the large audience. [...]
None of the Republicans other than Paul had a serious presence there. Mitt Romney had someone put out some brochures -- but neither he, nor Rudy Giuliani, nor Fred Thomspon, nor John McCain sent anyone to meet with national leaders of the premier Arab American leadership conference in the nation.
It's a bit of a sad state of affairs. Obviously, politicians shouldn't feel any particular compulsion to agree with the Arab-American Institute's policy views if they think they're wrong on the merits, but it hardly seems like too much to ask for a little engagement with this bloc of people.
Confidence Level Sinking
Guess who "has re-emerged as a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq" accord to McClatchey's Nancy Youssef? That's right: Ahmed Chalabi! Let the good times roll.
October 29, 2007
The Universal Bogeyman
Michael Hirsh on the new blame Iran for everything strategy coming out of the White House:
Today the administration is casting Iran as America's biggest bogeyman on every front. National missile defense? Once Kim Jong Il of North Korea was identified as the target of this expensive project. No longer. In a speech Tuesday at National Defense University, Bush declared that "the need for missile defense in Europe … is urgent" because "Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles." Mideast peace? Never mind that the Palestinians are mixed up in a civil war of their own making and blaming the Israelis. Much of it is really the fault of "Iranian aggression," as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared on Wednesday. "To see Iranian actual penetration now of these more radical elements of the Palestinian terrorist groups is really quite troubling," she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. U.S. generals are now routinely trotted out to blame Iranian interference and arms shipments for the continuing Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, though Tehran plays at best a minor role there.
Recall something similar from before the Iraq War, not only a particular tendency to inflate the Iraqi nuclear front and the Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, there was this habit of dramatically overstating Iraq's significance in the broader world. Not only was Saddam's support of Palestinian rejectionist a bad thing about his regime, but somehow ending this support was the key to peace. And now again we see that if the administration's "get tough" strategy toward Iran's nuclear program isn't working and getting tougher is unlikely to work, so now we're told that getting tough will solve all kinds of problems all around the world.
The Mystery Email
I'm no expert in these matters, but this looks an awful lot like General Petraeus' spokesman emailed Glenn Greenwald and is now trying to weasel out of responsibility for having done so. And of course if Colonel Boylan is telling the truth, then MNF-Iraq's computer systems certainly seem to be having some security problems that they ought to address.
More Good News From Somalia
Somalia's Prime Minister is resigning in the context of the "worst fighting in weeks between Islamist rebels and allied Ethiopian-Somali government troops."
Shock and Awe
So when I sat down to watch the Redskins-Patriots game yesterday afternoon, I was under no illusions that the ultimate outcome of the game would be anything other than a Skins defeat, but wow, what domination. I had read, of course, about how good the Pats were and seen the highlight reels, but this was the first game of theirs of watched this season and it was a thing to behold — I find myself seized by a vague, nameless horror so mystical and well-nigh ineffable that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. Good luck, Colts....
The Madness of Iraq
As an America, I hope Turkey doesn't launch military strikes in Iraq, as doing so could have very bad consequences for our policies there and for the well-being of American soldiers and civilians living there. As a citizen of the world, I worry that Turkish incursions will just make the situation in a generally troubled part of the world even worse. And even in terms of advice to the Turks, I would caution that the thrill of retaliatory military action will fade and won't solve anything in terms of Turkey's problems vis-à-vis its own Kurdish population and the Kurdish people living near the border with Turkey. That said, I think Kevin Drum's observation that "Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is sounding eerily similar to the way George Bush sounded in March of 2003" is far too kind to Bush.
When Erdogan says something like "The moment an operation is needed, we will take that step. We don't need to ask anyone's permission" he's talking about a bona fide response to actual PKK terrorist attacks that really have happened. Human history's seen more than its fair share of ill-conceived overreactions to provocations (consider Israel's summer 2006 attacks on Lebanon) but the invasion of Iraq was considerably nuttier than that an enormous overreaction to hypothetical attacks and a nuclear weapons program that didn't exist.
Conservatism = Torture
When in doubt about what to blog about, read the Corner:
"McCain Not Sure About Mukasey" [Rich Lowry]
From ABC News. The senator sure knows how to court conservatives, as Jennifer Rubin notes here.
I wonder if there'll come a time when the editor of National Review circa 2038 wonders when it was, exactly, that the decision was made to make robust enthusiasm about torture a defining value of the American conservative movement.
Consider the Source
We've mostly been getting this in unsigned editorials from The Washington Post but here Sebastian Mallaby puts a name to it:
Likewise on sanctions, Clinton is the only one to insist that sanctions are less a prelude to war than a means of forestalling it. They are more likely to work, moreover, if the military option is looming in the background, which is why bellicose comments from Bush or his vice president don't prove that war is the preordained strategy. The idea that the threat of war can prevent actual war is the most basic lesson of nuclear doctrine, but it appears to escape the Bush haters.
"Bush haters" is a cheap rhetorical move by which to pre-emptively discredit the notion that one, perhaps, ought not to trust that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will handle murky and complicated situations with skill and moral rectitude. But why shouldn't one be, in this sense, a "Bush hater" — one who is inclined to expect the worst rather than the best from Bush and Cheney? I'll say that I don't find Mallaby's line of reasoning to be categorically absurd. It's in the nature of the office of the presidency that one is entrusting a great deal of discretionary authority to its holder and that one is thereby assuming that he or she will be capable of acting in the broad national interest. But this is obviously a defeasible assumption. And what, if not the actual Bush-Cheney record, would defeat it? I wish I could share Mallaby's certitude that bellicose rhetoric is all part of a clever and well-designed plan to avoid war, but I have no idea where he gets it from.
Malawi Living Standards Update
Yesterday, I found myself baffled by Gregory Clark's argument that people in contemporary Malawi are worse-off than were stone age hunter-gatherers. I picked up his book in the afternoon, and now I understand the claim better. In particular, if you compare median individuals, then the fact that the contemporary Malian elite is far better-off than are stone age elites vanishes into the background.
The more interesting move is that dead people don't have "standards of living." Clark sees Malawi, like much of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa and the entire world before 1800, as trapped in a Malthusian trap. Improved technologies lead initially to an increase in living standards, but eventually the gains are dissipated into an increase in the number of living people rather than an improved average. Under the circumstances, improvements in health care or public health techniques have a perverse impact. By increasing the ability of marginal cases to survive, they reduce the minimum material conditions required to live. Over the long run, that simply means that average living standards fall back down to the new, lower subsistence level.
Needless to say, this raises some difficult moral questions and makes me want to revisit my Parfit.
Medical Tourism
The Daily Telegraph reports that 50,000 of the UK's citizens will travel abroad seeking medical treatment. Andrew declares victory: "Tony Blair poured millions into Britain's socialized healthcare system, pumping unprecedented resources into a healthcare system that Michael Moore admires and the American left loves. This is the result."
But as Ezra Klein points out we can find articles about 50,000 Americans going to just one hospital in Thailand over the course of 2005. And the UK's still spending under half of what we spend here in the US.
Victory's Just a Beauchamp Away
Katherine Jean-Lopez passes on an email from Michael Yon:
I intend to support the boycott being launched by Bob Owens. Boycotts against the media have proven effective: I launched one myself last year against a magazine that misused one of my photos and misrepresented me. That magazine collapsed.
The New Republic needs to be the latest example that the good old days of no-accountability are ending. They attacked American soldiers during a time of war, and they attacked those soldiers without justification. I happen to be in Baghdad with some of the soldiers they attacked. These soldiers have enough challenges with urban combat that they should not have to watch their backs for concern of irresponsible publications stabbing them.
That's not a very subtle stab in the back allegation now is it? Meanwhile, I don't know if it's more or less odd that in this instance the alleged backstabber is actually serving in the military as we speak.
Banana Republicanism Still on the March
Whatever happened the to FEMA official who organized the Potemkin press conference and tried to trick journalists into thinking they were watching a real one? Well, he's been fired of course. But with a catch: his next job will be as head of public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
UPDATE: Apparently, the DNI may be getting cold feet.
ElBaradei: Naive and Irresponsible
Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBarradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, tries to calm things down a bit:
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.
Obviously, the man needs to read more Washington Post editorials. A steady diet of Mallaby, Hiatt, and Krauthammer can cure him of his pesky expertise on arms control issues.
Tragically Banal
I was hoping Dave Berri's Eastern Conference forecast would contain some crazy counterintuitive predictions we could hold him to, but Boston #1, Chicago #2, followed by Detroit and Cleveland closely matched for third and fourth best teams seems pretty sensible. I'm glad, however, to see yet another person predicting that the Wizards will miss the playoffs. I was getting frustrated with this one and done business, but now that everyone's saying it's a non-playoff team, making the playoffs and losing in six will feel somewhat satisfying again.
Rudy's Relative Unpopularity
It occurs to me that a lot of the semi-baffled discussion of how Rudy Giuliani's been able to maintain his lead in national GOP primary polls has a tendency to implicitly overstate Rudy's actual level of support. His lead is real, and since the McCain Collapse has been consistently pretty large, but in absolute terms he's not a very popular choice for Republicans — only able to gain support from more than a third of Republicans for a brief and transient moment. Even though Giuliani's strong showing has surprised a lot of people, I don't think anyone would have been especially shocked two or seven years ago by the contention that 25 percent or so of Republicans aren't especially committed to the abortion issue. Rudy's lead is perfectly consistent with only a tiny number of actual "values voters" actually deciding that perpetual war is more important to them than banning abortion of persecuting gays and lesbians.
Meanwhile, the same considerations highlight the continued underlying weakness of Giuliani's candidacy. The graph seems to suggest that there's a reasonably firm ceiling on Giuliani's potential level of support. Ordinarily, what you'd expect to see happen is for various other contenders to drop out of the race as the primary season continues eventually leading to the emergence of an Anti-Rudy who picks up something like the combined McCain-Romney-Thompson-Huckabee vote in the current national polls (Ron Paul's clearly running a protest campaign and can be expected to stay in 'till the end) and wins the race. There's a question as to whether quirks of the process this year and the compressed schedule can prevent that from happening, but the basic reality is still that Giuliani's lead has more to do with the large number of flawed rivals in the field than with any overwhelming strength on his part.
Malawi Correction
This post erroneously used the term "Malians" to refer to residents of Malawi when, in fact, the proper use of that term is to refer to Mali's citizens. Apologies for the error. Citizens of Malawi should be called "Malawians."
Bush and Imperialism
I would strongly recommend John Judis' American Prospect article on Iraq as Bush's neoimperialist war. It's an important point, not so much because we need an abusive term to throw at the policy, but because it's important to place the failures of Bush's policies in a broader historical context of failure. The specific questions the United States faces are new, but the broader debate about the viability of a foreign policy centered on assymetrical sovereignty and the coercive domination of smaller countries isn't. It hasn't worked in the past, it's not working today, and most signs are that technological progress is making it harder and harder to act in this way even though America's military might is unrivaled.
John developed these things at greater length in his book, The Folly of Empire which also gets into the ways in which Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eventually came to learn from the pitfalls of the imperialist ventures they'd once supported and started grasping toward something resembling contemporary liberal internationalism, an approach to world affairs centered on international law and legitimacy with major powers working through stable, rule-governed institutions.
More Judis
Apropos the post below, John Judis has a solid piece on the threat of a Rudy Administration that concludes with this great observation:
The centerpiece of Giuliani's claim, however, is the suggestion that his approach to fighting crime provides a model for conducting foreign policy. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: "I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world's bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior."
This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the NYPD went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the "neighborhoods" Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other "neighborhoods," such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.
Right. Trying to treat the entire world as if it were the sovereign territory of the United States is going to produce catastrophic results. The observation that the world needs forces to try to help bring order to some "bad neighborhoods" has a lot of truth to it, but insofar as that order is brought it's going to need to be done by institutions and through mechanisms — first and foremost, the UN but also regional groups in their own back yards where appropriate — that are capable of doing so in a reasonably legitimate manner. Just having the President dictate to the rest of the world, however, isn't going to fly.
Don't Fear The Meter
Mayor Fenty's plan to replace the crazy zone fare system in DC with a normal meter one seems to be meeting with some resistance from cab drivers. The oddest thing about it, though, is the specific nature of the objection:
Wegen Tadesse said the 900 members of the Ethiopian Ethio-American United Cab Owner Association plan to strike. "It's not just about the meters now," he said. "There are no guarantees for any of our jobs. The big companies are going to take over the business."
What he's referring to is DC's unusual system of independent-proprietor taxicabs. Most cities face sharp limits on the number of cabs allowed to roam the streets. Consequently, the licenses become very valuable, which is to say very expensive, and cab driving thus becomes a capital intensive business in which firms own multiple cabs (with the license rather than the cab itself being the valuable commodity here) and employ drivers to drive them. In DC, by contrast, it's much cheaper and easier to get a cab up and running so they're mostly owner-operated. Tadesse and many other cab drivers feel that letting the mayor impose the meter will somehow undue this system. But it's not clear exactly why they think that, so it's hard to know what kind of policies could assuage those fears while simultaneously letting us enjoy the bounty of the meter.
October 30, 2007
The Difference
I'd considered writing one of these "meta" posts about the Obama campaign, where it's going, etc., etc. offering my random advice, etc., etc. but then I realized I hate that stuff. Instead, here's an observation: It seems that most people don't perceive a meaningful difference between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy. It also seems that one important exception to that is a chorus of "centrist" hawks frequently derided in the blogosphere as Very Serious People.
We've got Sebastian Mallaby slamming "Bush haters" for not wanting a war with Iran and praising Clinton as the "foreign policy grownup." You've got Michael O'Hanlon. You've got the Post editorial board slamming Obama on Iran. Things like that. These plugged-in hawkish elites don't find Clinton threatening, and do find Obama threatening. Conversely, Obama's foreign policy team is largely drawn from the ranks of people who were marginalized by the hawks back during the 2002-2004 period. The Obama campaign hasn't done a great job of explaining exactly what the cash value of this difference is, and personally I think it's hard to know for sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's something and given the amount of time the progressive blogosphere spends slamming the O'Hanlons and Hiatt's of the world I'm surprised that people seem inclined to put such little weight on it. So, yes, like Josh I wish Obama would articulate this more prominently but for whatever it's worth it seems to me that the difference is there and important whether or not Obama's campaign articulates it clearly.
On the Other Hand
Though as I said below, I do think Obama's getting short shrift in the blogosphere on key foreign policy issues, the fact does remain that he's wrong on the merits in his Social Security-related attacks on Hillary Clinton. There's no particular reason she (or anyone else) should be offering specific proposals at the moment to close Social Security's hypothetic future fiscal gap. It would make some sense for candidate to talk more explicitly about their views of the current budget deficit (which isn't especially large) or maybe to describe their outlook on budget deficits in general (which is a controversial subject among left-of-center economists) but we didn't need George W. Bush's trumped up Social Security "crisis" and we don't need one from Barack Obama either.
View From a Divided Palestine
I'll be going to the New America Foundation's event "The View from a Divided Palestine" with Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian Legislative Council, Rita Hauser from the International Peace Academy and the International Crisis Group, and Daniel Levy from New America and elsewhere. Steve Clemons is promising that the event will be record and posted here.
For background, after years of pursuing a mix of disengagement and sporadic counterproductive interventions, Condoleezza Rice decided to call for a peace conference that'll be happening in Annapolis in November. It's a little unclear why exactly she's done this, since in many respects the US government doesn't seem to have done anything to clear the ground for success and the consequences of failure could be dire. But call it she did, so people of good will may as well try to seize the opportunity to accomplish something constructive — or, at a minimum, stave off some kind of disaster where poor planning leads to failure which leads to years of renewed bitterness and violence.
The Trouble With Terminator 2
I agree with Jonah Goldberg and his readers about the very important subject of Terminator 2, especially the correspondent who observes:
I loved it initially, but the sad truth is that, while T2 was awesome when it came out, 90% of that awesomeness was the new digital effects. Now that those techniques are commonplace, the movie has to fall back on its characters and story, which were weak, annoying, and confused.
It's worth, however, being clear that there's a very specific problem here: The sequel's tragic mishandling of the time travel paradox. The first film has this dead right — the machines' efforts to go back in time and change the past by assassinating Sarah Connor are not only doomed to fail, but indeed bring about the result they were intended to prevent, namely the conception of John Connor. This is a time-honored literary trope going back, in its way, to Oedipus Rex and is certainly the correct way to handle time travel plots.
Terminator 2 casts all this to the wind with some vague talk about how the future is not yet written. And because T2 operates within the bad "you can change the future" paradigm, T3 winds up making little-to-know sense from the very beginning.
Blogospheric Classics
I sometimes forget that the aggregate audience for blog commentary is enormously larger than it was a few years ago, so it's quite possible that there are people reading this blog right now who have never heard of Daniel Davies' spring 2004 classic The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101, nominated today by Jim Henley for the august title of Best Blog Post Ever.
At any rate, give it a read. It's about Iraq — the pre-war debate specifically — but it's also about Iran. For that matter, it's also about forward-looking Iraq policy. Specifically, I know a lot of progressives who are still disinclined to fully endorse complete withdrawal from Iraq who ought to give some consideration to the principle that good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. Then they might ask themselves why it is that George W. Bush and the large team of professional political operatives he employs believe that sustaining the American military presence in Iraq requires the mission to be draped in a lot of lies about fighting them over there so we don't need to fight them over here, etc., etc.
A Meter Theory
Brad Plumer glosses several theories as to what possible causal mechanism might lead from meters to the end of the independent taxi driver. This one seems most plausible to me:
It's a good question. I've got two guesses. One is that, right now, it's very hard for big cab companies to enter the D.C. taxi market in the absence of meters, since there's no easy way for a large company to monitor its drivers under the zone system and see how much they're making. That has partly helped independent cab drivers flourish. Scrap the zone system, and suddenly the big boys will start moving in.
I can imagine someone thinking this, but it doesn't make a ton of sense. There aren't some huge economies of scale in the taxi business that big companies could plausibly take advantage of to drive small proprietors out of business. The plausible story by which the owner-operated cab dies is that a restrictive licensing regime is put into place which transforms the taxi trade from a labor-intensive business into a capital-intensive one. And, indeed, such a transformation is plausible, since it's happened in America's other big cities. But it's important to understand that the most plausible constituency for such a move is current taxi drivers looking to restrict competition, so DC's cabbies really have it within their power to prevent this.
At any rate, in my reporting on these sentiments it's clear that differences of opinion exist among cabbies, and that anti-meter fervor seems much stronger among Ethiopian drivers than among others. Indeed, two different West African drivers have treated me to furious diatribes about the evils of the zone and their fervent longing for meters.
Beyond Petroleum
Michael Klare, whose work I find consistently puzzling, has a piece out in The Nation called "Beyond the Age of Petroleum" warning in dire terms of "a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency." Like Joseph Romm arguing with James Kunstler, I don't really get this. Hybrid cars are already available on the market, are much more fuel efficient than conventional autos, and with the "hybrid premium" standing at a few thousand dollars and falling, it seems obvious that if drastically higher fuel prices emerge, middle class suburbanites are going to respond with slightly altered consumption habits (more expensive cars, fewer plasma TVs and granite countertops) rather than radical lifestyle alterations:
Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.
And suppose oil hit $280 a barrel and gasoline rose to $8 dollars a gallon in 2025. You would replace your hybrid with a plug-in hybrid, and those trips less than 30 miles that have made suburbia what it is today would actually cut your fuel bill by a factor of more than 10 -- even if all the electricity were from zero-carbon sources like wind power -- to far below what you are paying today. The extra cost of the vehicle would be paid for in fuel savings in well under five years.
Obviously, this would result in some economic hardship for many families, but it's hardly an "epochal shift." Indeed, even current gasoline prices are actually quite low as a share of household income by historical standards so even if plug-in technology doesn't materialize (which is hard to believe) we're not on the precipice of such never-before-seen apocalypse.
Ignorance is Strength
Via Brian Beutler, yet another Washington Post column on the "war is peace" theme, this time from Richard Cohen:
But the true realism is that Iran is a menace -- potentially a great one -- and that its Revolutionary Guard is engaged in the dirty business of killing Americans and others. The fact that the Bush administration says so does not make it otherwise.
Uh huh. Meanwhile, Cohen offers us yet another example of an annoying rhetorical trope, namely the fact that the Iraq War has turned out to be such a disaster is deemed to discredit anti-war voices, because opposition to an escalation of hostilities with Iran can now be written off via cheap psychoanalysis as war fatigue or anti-Bush sentiment. Basically, if Bush were popular, it would be irrational to oppose him since he's so awesome, but now that Bush is unpopular, it's irrational to allow warranted dislike of Bush to cast aspersions on his policy agenda.
Zakaria v. N-Pod
It's Norman Podhoretz versus someone who knows what he's talking about (i.e., Fareed Zakaria) on a New Hour debate on Iran policy.
That's via Justin Logan.
Village Idiots
Ezra Klein dredges up the famous Sally Quin article expressing her Establishmentarian loathing of Bill Clinton even as the country was clearly signaling that they were more interesting in the President's impact on the economy, their health care, etc. than in his sex life.
The remarkable thing about the article, though, is what it isn't. As in, at the end of the day it's not an incredibly revealing piece of journalism that accidentally explains what really drives these people. I just read it through twice and it remains . . . incredibly opaque. She expends thirteen graphs explicating Point 2 THE LYING OFFENDS THEM but Bush lying doesn't offend them at all. And, again, she says people were upset because "they feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president" but this is circular — its cogency depends on the view that Bill Clinton cheating on his wife was morally worse than Ronald Reagan sponsoring deadly acts of terrorism in Central America, it doesn't explain the view.
Nor does Quinn's column so much as broach obvious questions like why is JFK revered if Presidential infidelity so damn awful? Or how come nobody cares about all these divorced politicians? Like the press corps' view that George W. Bush, dim-witted recovering alcoholic and religious fanatic, was someone they'd "like to have a beer with" it just makes no sense on any level.
NBA Predictions!
Season starts tonight; I'm going to make a bold prediction that San Antonio will beat Portland. Also I figure, given the evenness of the year and all, that San Antonio won't win the championship. Instead, I'll take Dallas for best record in the West, followed by Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Utah, Denver, Lakers, and New Orleans in roughly that order. In the East I have Boston (beyond the obvious, I think Rajon Rondo is better than people think) followed by Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Washington, Orlando, and Miami. Obviously, a Bulls-Lakers deal for Kobe could change that, though the current asking price of Gordon, Deng, Thomas, and Noah seems clearly too high.
Resilience
What Ross and Daniel Larison say about Robert Kagan's observations on the alleged "resilience" of autocracy in Venezuela and Russia. That leaves the case of China, where both important elements of the neoconservative right (à la Kagan) and of the labor-liberal left (à la several of my old editors at The American Prospect) would like us to believe that the links between globalization, the market economy, political liberalization, and human freedom have all been broken.
The trouble here is that I've rarely if ever heard from a Chinese person or a person who lives in China anything other than that China is, in fact, freer than it was twenty years ago. Is that in large part a reflection of how bad things used to be? Sure. Does that make China a liberal democracy? Of course not. But are things moving in a positive direction? Yes.
The unfortunate reality for those like Kagan who'd like to believe that an incredibly aggressive, violent, coercion-oriented US foreign policy is the height of moral probity is that living conditions around the world are, in general, improving for the better without us. There are major exceptions in Sub-Saharan Africa and North Korea but there's nothing about a glance at those places — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — that have benefitted from American "democracy promotion" policy that would make any sane person think we need to Kaganize our approach to Russia or China.
"Silver Lining"
I agree with Brad DeLong, this is a good song:
A lot of Rilo Kiley fans I know seem to have been disappointed by the new album, Under the Black Light in general. Not me, I think it's pretty great and though it arguably lacks some of the pop triumphs of earlier albums, they do a better job of integrating their diverse stylistic interests into a consistent quality level.
The Decline and Fall of the Gayborhood
It's noted in The New York Times which takes the cancellation of the Halloween parade in the Castro as its peg. Andrew "The End of Gay Culture" Sullivan, naturally, is psyched. And of course I, too, am glad to see gay and lesbian Americans taking their rightful place as equal citizens.
On the other hand, I do think it's worth wondering what the consequences of all this will be for our urban ecology. When I see Atrios going on about "the Village," my instinct is still to read that as my hometown, Greenwich Village, New York, NY (pictured above) which I suppose I didn't realize was a "gay" neighborhood when I was little anymore than I realized that there might be a gay angle to the annual Village Halloween Parade. These neighborhoods, scattered in major cities across the country, have a unique and congenial character and though their disappearance would obviously be a small price to pay for equality, I think it should be recognized as a price. I'm not quite sure I have the chops to right the straight person's appreciation of the vanishing gay neighborhood, but I think one should be written, so I'll nominate Garance Franke-Ruta who grew up in the same area.
Photo by Flickr user Tiseb used under a Creative Commons license
Money Well Spent?
The clearest sign you could ask for that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to win in 2008 is this graphic which appeared in yesterday's New York Times showing all segments of the health care industry now favoring Democrats with their campaign contributions even though Democrats are all promising tough new regulations that would seem to ill-serve the industry's interests.
The question of course arises of what these firms are buying for their trouble. It's something I'd like to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both address. I don't think there's any sense in asking them (or anyone else) to disavow accepting contributions from this sector of the economy (it's giant, after all, and "health professionals" and hospital administrators can be donating out of a complicated mix of interests) but as long as we're in the phase of the political process where these people are supposed to be "pandering" to the Dread Base, I'd like to see us, the voting public, wring a bit more out of them in terms of rhetorical bridge-burning.
Agent Zero
Gilbert Arenas gets his big profile in The Washington Post magazine. In my experience, a lot of us Wizards fans are experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance over the whole Gilbert phenomenon. When I first moved to town and the Wizards were, as they are today, a middling franchise capable of making the playoffs in a weak Eastern Conference, nobody in DC seemed aware of that fact. It's not really been a basketball town historically, the Wizards/Bullets had been terrible for a long time, and everyone wanted to talk about the Redskins or the new baseball team.
But for DC's NBA fans there was this treat — a charismatic underrated combo guard with at times questionable decision-making and commitment to defense, but an unquestionable nose for scoring and various delightful quirks. Now over the past twelve months or so, Gilbert seems to have leapt from underrated to overrated — he's on the cover of NBA Live, I saw his jersey prominently featured in the NBA Store in New York, etc. — and I'm not sure he realizes that he owes his fans in DC something more. In particular, a winning basketball team. In double particular, the Wizards defense was so bad last season that it seems to me that something as simple as a little leadership by example from the team's star player could do a lot to boost the defense from "awful" to "below average" and win a ton of games. But I'm not at all optimistic that it'll happen.
In It To Win It
Kevin Drum says he's leaning toward Hillary. I lean the other way, but I agree with the idea that Obama's "Kumbaya campaigning schtick leaves me cold. Worse than that, in fact: it leaves me terrified that he just doesn't know what he's up against with the modern Republican Party and won't have the instinct to go for the jugular when the inevitable Swift Boating commences." I agree. In the early days of Barack Obama's campaign I thought he had this exactly right; that the thing to do was to mildly annoy Chris Bowers by lying like hell about a professed desire to unite the country while recognizing that politics is a blood sport played for high stakes against unrelenting foes in which the only thing that matters is getting the number of votes you need to win.
Now I have my doubts.
In particular, if Rudy Giuliani is the Republican nominee, I want to see a Democrat who will, enthusiastically, smear him through his association with Alan Placa and sundry other corrupt figures and whose staff will feel intensely comfortable asking supporters to cut $2,300 checks to a third party pro-life challenger. Someone who's in it to win it, and isn't trying to prove anything other than his (or her) ability to win the election. Hillary Clinton is that person and I'm not so sure Barack Obama is.
At the end of the day, though, I'm happy to play the youthful idealist here, and note Clinton seems to have so much less in the way of upside — not just or even especially as a candidate — than do Obama or Edwards. I could imagine either of them successfully taking advantage of the disastrous failure of the Bush presidency to rebrand liberalism as the mainstream ideology of our time. Clinton, by contrast, will bring back competent centrist technocracy and basic morality to the White House. That'd be good, but I think the country's at a place where we can do better right now than a simple reversion to what we had before Bush and I, at least, would like to hold out for more.
The Kobe Factor
I suppose it's worth saying something about the rumors flying that Kobe Bryant might get traded to Washington, since I heard someone repeating them excitedly at the corner store. In fact, though, the only observation I have is about the cosmic injustice of conference imbalance. Last year's Lakers went 42-40, whereas the Wizards went 41-41. So the teams did about the same. Except, of course, that if you swapped the entire Lakers roster for the entire Wizards roster, the Wizards would get much better and the Lakers would get much worse. The two teams, after all, compiled their similar records playing against very dissimilar competition.
Tortured Answers
As ludicrous as it might seem that Michael Mukasey's official view on waterboarding is that he can't say whether or not it's torture until he's been confirmed first, it's even more ludicrous that Benjamin Wittes thinks this makes sense:
It may be obvious to senators--and to me, for that matter--that waterboarding crosses a legal line. But it would be very wrong for a nominee to call foul on a series of opinions which he cannot read, on which a major covert action program depends, which individuals serving their country have used to assure themselves that they operate within the law, and which happen to represent the position of the department Mukasey aspires to lead.
So basically, waterboarding is torture, and it's obviously torture, but it would be "very wrong" for a would-be Attorney-General of the United States to say so. And what if that means confirming yet another Attorney-General who will condone this act of torture? Well:
The Democrats have a big club to wield over Mukasey's head to make sure they don't get snookered: Without a strong working relationship with them, he won't be able to get anything done.
Now you're sitting here and saying to yourself, but wasn't this just as true of Mukasey's steadfastly pro-torture predecessors? But Wittes, using the same powers of counterintuition that allow him to divine the notion that overturning Roe v. Wade would be wrong "as a jurisprudential matter" but good "for the cause of abortion rights" turns this into an argument for the "see no evil" approach:
The lack of such a relationship gravely impaired both of his predecessors, albeit for different reasons. And, with only a year to serve in office, Mukasey's clock will tick loudly from the start. He will prove nothing but a caretaker unless he can act as a bridge between the ruling party on Capitol Hill and an administration that has burned its other bridges to Congress yet desperately needs constructive legislation in a variety of areas related to the war on terrorism.
When in doubt, count on the Bush administration's good faith! Thank the Lord we have Brookings scholars around to offer us independent research and analysis.
October 31, 2007
Debate Quasi-Blogging
I wasn't really watching after the first half hour or so, but it seemed to me that Edwards was doing a better job than Obama of landing blows on Clinton and that something about the dynamic of so many different candidates slamming HRC was weird. Weird in a way that helps her or weird in a way that hurts her I couldn't quite say. Insofar as people fear that Obama may not have the requisite instinct for the jugular, I don't think he was allaying that fear. On the other hand, if he wins Iowa does that prove he's a winner and suddenly put him neck-in-neck in the national race?
The Limits of "Diplomacy"
I've had this nagging disquiet with the Democrats' diplomacy-talk on Iran, and now Josh Marshall formulates it well:
But another point -- diplomacy is a tactic, not a strategy. Our whole strategy is wrong in the region. Leaving more time for the diplomatic phase of the policy just delays getting to where the policy is taking us: full-scale war with Iran.
Right. The question isn't "do we use diplomacy?" the question is what are we trying to do — are we talking about a good faith effort to deal with the Iranian nuclear program in the context of a larger effort to put our polices in the region on the right track, or is the diplomacy part of a larger effort to portray events in the Middle East as a zero sum conflict between the US and Iran.
Wednesday Year-Old NBA Predictions Blogging
Some people would use my oft-troubled record as a political prognosticator to derogate the validity of my NBA predictions, but check out last year's picks. They were full of accurate predictions, including that Dallas would win the Southwest but San Antonio would take the championship, though I obviously underestimated Toronto, Golden State, and Detroit.
We've Got The Facts and What Good Will It Do Us?
Ezra Klein describes "the central reality of health care politics," namely "most Americans are basically happy with what they have, but worried about keeping it. Policies that guarantee their futures are quite popular. Policies that radically change their presents are not."
Few if any journalists are any better plugged in to Democratic conventional wisdom about the politics and policy of health care than Ezra is, so this nicely encapsulates my mystification about what, exactly, it is everyone's doing. The underlying presumption here seems to be that if you devise a policy that does not, in fact, change anyone's current insurance then you'll be in good job. But if there's a policy that health insurance companies and others think it's worth spending a lot of money to defeat, they'll just say it will change your insurance for the worse and the fact that it's not true isn't going to be especially helpful in beating that argument back. Meanwhile, it puts the Democrats in the slightly bizarre situation of simultaneously arguing that we urgently need to pass a fundamental overhaul of the health care system, but don't worry, the changes won't affect insurance for the vast majority of you.
It seems to me that if it's really true that most people are happy with their health insurance and don't want to see the boat rocked (and since even liberals seem to concede that this is the case) that the prospects for fundamental health care reform are just very very bad and it would be better to settle for a more modest health care agenda and spend political capital on other things. After all, it's not as if the task at hand on the climate change front is so trivial and easy that there's nothing else to do but pass a health care reform that the public isn't demanding.
Alternatively, maybe the plan is to take the already somewhat odd mandate schemes that are currently on the table, then take out their best provisions — the public private competition, the stiff community rating rules, etc. — and wind up with what amounts to a package of subsidies to health insurance companies. Then you defuse interest-group opposition, making public opinion largely irrelevant, and giving your campaign contributors their money's worth.
O Captain, My Captain
Joseph Galloway notes the severe shortage of Captains and Majors facing the Army. As Eric Martin says, we're seeing a noteworthy gap between the number of people interesting in advocating a neoimperial military posture and the number of people interested in carrying out such a policy. Maybe the right-wing bloggers want to start a recruiting drive?
Phanton Menaces
Mark Goldberg catches Fred Thompson in two separate, yet nearly simultaneous, instances of revealing himself to be a moron in ways that don't count as "gaffes" because they were done by a Republican and because they concern important points of diplomacy and international law. First, Fred Thompson said "the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that international human rights law requires all nations to adopt strict gun control laws" but it, um, doesn't say any such thing. Then he went on to say that the UN doesn't recognize the existence of a right to self-defense which, again, it does.
Thompson's ignorance on these subjects is, of course, disturbing. Equally disturbing is that he's clearly going out of his way to work this business into his campaign appearances. It's odd campaign rhetoric that lets you know what interests contenders really think they need to pander to, and apparently Thompson and his staff feel that the black helicopter constituency is a powerful force inside the GOP. And, of course, insofar as they seem like they stand some chance of prevailing upon the Senate to block the Law of the Sea Treaty, that just further confirms it.
Waterboarding: The Video
Kaj Larsen gets waterboarded on video by former SERE instructors for the edification of the American public. Via Garance Franke-Ruta.
Welcoming Their Hate
The essential fact of the current primary season is that Hillary Clinton has this apparent trump card when her rivals try to attack her from the left: Republicans really, really, really hate her. The debate opened with an invitation for Barack Obama to slam Clinton, he attacked, and then she rebutted: "Well, I don't think the Republicans got the message that I'm voting and sounding like them. If you watched their debate last week, I seemed to be the topic of great conversation and consternation, and that's for a reason, because I have stood against George Bush and his failed policies." Later in the debate she explained "I think that, you know, the Republicans and their constant obsession with me demonstrates clearly that they obviously think that I am communicating effectively about what I will do as president."
Barack Obama countered with what I think is the first effort I've seen to seize this bull by the horns:
Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is because that's a fight they're very comfortable having. It is the fight that we've been through since the '90s. And part of the job of the next president is to break the gridlock and to get Democrats and independents and Republicans to start working together to solve these big problems, like health care or climate change or energy.
There's something to that argument, but there are obviously limits to its cogency. Like Sally Quinn's loathing of Bill Clinton, there's just an irreducible core of irrationality to anti-Hillary sentiment. Part of it, obviously, is misogyny and the rest is just that same core that she shares with her husband and that prevents either of them from being perceived as the savvy (in both political and policy terms) moderates that they are. Obviously, that "Clinton Rules" treatment has been a problem for her at various points and doubtless will be again, but in the present context it's a big asset for her. John Edwards, though perhaps overstating a bit, is basically right to say that a return to Clintonism wouldn't constitution a fundamental change in American political economy and Obama's right to point out that Clinton seems to disagree with Bush's foreign policy more in terms of tactics than strategy. But as long as the entire conservative movement is deeply invested in the idea that she's a hard-core Communist, it's very hard to persuade people that these things are true.
Everything Sucks, I Blame Mexicans
Given that the basic conclusion is that the public is really unhappy with Bush, the Republicans, and the status quo there's something pretty depressing about this Democracy Corps (PDF) strategy memo based on some polls and focus groups. In particular, what's depressing about it is the extent to which independents and other median voter types seem inclined to basically see nefarious foreigners as the root of all our problems. Here participants are asked to name the top two problems facing the country:
Democratic voters, like Democratic politicians, see Iraq and health care as the big issues. But to independents the entrance of too many immigrants into the country is overwhelmingly the top priority. And, indeed, independents see pretty much everything as more important than Iraq. Meanwhile, the text of the memo makes it clear that voters' concerns about illegal immigration, as voiced in focus groups, tend to be founded on the inaccurate perception that illegals are hogging up tons of public services and tend to be focused in rural areas where few immigrants live. Nevertheless, Stan Greenberg and James Carville don't have any particularly creative advice to offer:
But Democrats can get this right – genuinely attacking Bush for losing control of immigration, specifically, failing to manage the borders and no longer enforcing laws at the workplace. Democrats favor greater control and enforcement at the borders and restored penalties on employers for employing illegal workers. They would deny most government benefits, which is current law in almost all cases. Recognizing we can’t expel 12 million workers, Democrats accept some kind of legal status for the those who are working, pay taxes and are law-abiding – putting our values at the heart of the reforms that will further open up our society.
That may be good electoral strategy. Obviously, Republicans will counter by shifting to an even more restrictionist stance. And since the more anti-immigration party will be arguing that illegal immigrants' use of public services is a big problem and the less anti-immigration party will also be arguing that illegal immigrants' use of public services is a big problem, then moderately informed voters are, naturally, going to become even more deeply entrenched in their erroneous conviction that this is a big problem .
Urgency
I'd been dimly curious as to what explained the paranoid attitude that seems to prevail in Israeli circles with regard to Iran, and yesterday's New America event crystallized one possible explanation. Basically, from Mustafa Barghouti's perspective, the Israeli side side has basically lost interest in achieving a final-status agreement. They basically see themselves as having nothing to lose from the status quo continuing more-or-less indefinitely, though obviously if some kind of Palestinian quisling leadership emerges that's willing to accept less than what was offered at Camp David were to emerge, they would listen to those guys. But basically the Israeli's feel no urgency about this.
Rita Hauser essentially agreed, as did Daniel Levy and MJ Rosenberg. Not really being knowledgeable about Israeli politics, this seemed remarkable to me, because the logic of the situation seems to me to be that Israel should regard the demographic tipping point issue as a question of great urgency. Ariel Sharon himself seemed to recognize this just a few years ago, and though the "unilateral disengagement" strategy he devised to deal with it was fatally flawed, it at least constituted recognition of the issue, namely that we're close to the point when Palestinians are going to start acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over all the land from the Jordan Sea and demanding rights — equal access to roads, equal access to education, equal share of water rations, voting rights, etc. — rather than a separate state and that's going to be the end of the idea of a sovereign Jewish democracy.
Meanwhile, there is on the table right now the very promising "Arab Initiative" for full recognition of Israel in exchange for full withdrawal to the armistice lines. Israel isn't merely rejecting this offer, but the Israeli government is refusing to deal with it until they can get an unrealistic guarantee of 100 percent assurance of perfect security from rejectionist attacks. Obviously, security from attacks is a reasonable thing to want, but since refusing to negotiate doesn't provide perfect security and does risk throwing the entire Zionist project away by letting the window of Palestinian interest in a two-state solution close, this seems like an odd attitude to have.
One way to understand the somewhat hysterical view of the Iranian situation that seems to prevail in Israeli government circles is as a mirror image of the weird complacency about the Palestinian situation — perhaps it's a kind of displacement of anxiety about the Palestinians onto an Iranian problem that appears more amenable to emotionally satisfying Gordian airstrikes.
Time Heals All Wounds
Via Julian Sanchez, a great Brian Doherty column making the point that historical memory can play tricks on people and Iraq may someday come to be viewed as a success. After all, internecine violence in Iraq won't continue forever and since most ethnically mixed neighborhoods have already been cleansed, it's at least plausible that the worst is behind us. If we keep over 130,000 troops there for another eighteen months, and then tens of thousands of troops for years after that, the situation could well become peaceful and the whole sorry enterprise could be branded a success.
Doherty writes that "especially if the Democrats go, as seems likely, with their most widely hated candidate, Hillary Clinton, they shouldn’t count on disgust with Bush’s Iraq policy to shoo them in." I don't think that's the right Hillary-related thing to say. Rather, if the Democrats nominate an unapologetic war-supporter, and then she wins, and the war in some sense winds down during her term, then this makes it very likely that the Official Story of Iraq will be that the war, despite some problems, was ultimately successful. Conversely, if the Democrats nominate a candidate who disavows the war, and that candidate wins, the Official Story will deem the war a failure. History is written by the victors even a democracy — a Clinton presidency will boost the "liberal hawk" narrative about the war, an Obama or Edwards presidency will boost the dove narrative, and a Republican presidency will boost the Bushist narrative.
In Search of Christian Democracy
Michael Gerson observes that "there are, in fact, two belief systems contending for the soul of the Republican Party," namely "libertarianism and Roman Catholic social thought -- a teaching that has influenced many non-Catholics, including me." I think this is sort of right, but it's an importantly qualified "sort of." It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.
But what neither Bush nor Huckabee nor anyone else seems to have offered is a policy agenda that cashes the rhetorical checks they're spreading around. If the libertarian tradition in the GOP mostly consists of a free-market agenda that's friendly to the interests of rich people and big companies, the Bushian deviations from the free-market line have overwhelmingly been aimed at advancing lobbyist-friendly policies. Similarly, Mike Huckabee talks a good game about inequality, but his distinctive policy proposal is a massively regressive (and phenomenally stupid) National Retail Sales Tax. There's just no there there. In practice to find Republicans likely to support programs that help poor people, you need to look to the generically "moderate" (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans representing culturally liberal coastal areas — Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, etc. — and Christian Democratic talk remains just that: talk.
Photo by Flickr user Zoonabar used under a Creative Commons license
Third-Hand Rumor-Mongering
Ron Rosenbaum spread s gossip:
So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that “everyone knows” The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. “Everyone knows” meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. “Sitting on it” because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me (not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say “don’t write about this”.
He refers, of course, to the case of M. Kaus and the goats. More seriously, I guess I'm not in the DC mainstream media political reporting world, because I haven't heard anything about this. Maybe Ambinder knows something.
Why Mukasey Can't Answer
I think Brian Beutler makes a good point: Mukasey can't say that waterboarding is torture because the job of Attorney-General in the Bush administration essentially requires one to sign off on torture. Conceding during nomination hearings that to do so would be a crime would doom any future criminal defense that Mukasey may need to mount.
Vouchers
For all of the extensive huffing and puffing on the subject of school vouchers over at McMegan's place, I'm still left totally baffled as to what it is she's actually proposing, and doubly baffled by her steadfast refusal to say what she's proposing:
Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I'm too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they'll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details. But until you do, it's a waste of time.
First off, as Ezra says, the United States already "allows" poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way that it allows rich and middle class parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems. They're "allowed" to send their kids to a private school that's willing to educate them, and they're "allowed" to move elsewhere. Obviously, in practice poor families have less practical capacity to do this. But by the same token, poor families have less practical capacity to live on streets with well-appointed sidewalks, to choose cruelty-free meat, tto get health care, to benefit from competently organized disaster relief, to live in neighborhoods with low murder rates, and all kinds of other things. These are all real problems but since they're problems of practical capacity rather than permission (about the fair value of the right, rather than the existence of the right) institutional design is about all that matters.
One needs to go back to what we know about educating poor children. One thing we know is that it's very difficult. The schools that do a good job of educating poor kids tend to expend more resources than do schools that do a good job of educating middle class kids. We also know that there are many schools that produce good overall results but that nonetheless produce bad results with their poor children. We know that some urban public school systems do better than others. We know that the charter school movement has produced some successful models, but also that market demand can keep a healthy number of non-successful charter schools operating because parents do a less-than-perfect job of making school placement decisions on the basis of evidence about educational outcomes.
If we're concerned not about the "right" of exit (which already exists) but the practical ability to get a better education, then you need policies that increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children. Just handing a voucher to every family in DC that can manage to place a kid in a private school would be a nice subsidy to the parents at Sidwell and St. Albans and would presumably get some poor kids into better situations, but would still, in practice, leave most DC families right where they are today — with the "right" to send their kids elsewhere, but no practical ability to do so.
Maybe that'd be a change for the better. In DC, which is about the worst-case scenario for an urban school system, I'd find that claim plausible. Elsewhere, it might do more harm than good. But in neither case would it address the issue in a comprehensive way. Which, I think, is one of the main attractions of the voucher concept — it lets people get indignant about the sorry state of public education by basically assuming the problem away, thus avoiding the need to deal with the real issues.
Photo by Flickr user Sfllaw used under a Creative Commons license
Making Sense
Chuck Hagel calls for direct talks with Iran.
With Friends Like These...
Oh, look, it's Joe Lieberman:
Lieberman an unseen force in Democrats' clash
Connecticut maverick backs Clinton, criticizes Edwards on Iran policy
Ah, mavericks. Lieberman's too much of a stopped clock (like Bill Kristol, he's all-war, all-the-time) to say that you should always do the reverse of what he recommends, but suffice it to say that if you're the person in a controversy with the Lieberman-approved Iran policy, you're not the person with the best Iran policy. Indeed, it's worth recalling that Lieberman and resolution cosponsor Jon Kyl have been trying to gin up conflict with Iran for a long time. Here's some February 2006 reporting from yours truly:
At the front of the room was an American flag, a podium, a projection screen, and R. James Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence who went more-than-a-little around the bend sometime after leaving the Clinton administration. He was one of the very first prominent commentators to finger Saddam Hussein as the likely culprit for the 9-11 attacks, doing so just after the strikes when no empirical evidence could possibly support the contention, and maintaining his view steadfastly even as evidence continued to be non-existent.
Needless to say, such loyalty to his own imagination has done nothing to diminish his standing in the neoconservative world or his access to mass audiences on cable television. On that January day at the Capitol, he was speaking on behalf of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a think tank he founded in the summer of 2004 with various neocon B-listers under the nominal auspices of Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman. The occasion was the release of a six-page policy paper on Iran, which to no one's surprise reached the conclusion that “the United States' policy objective must be regime change in Iran.”
Which isn't to say that Hillary Clinton is part of a plot to start a war with Iran. It does, however, seem worth noting that opposing a "rush to war" (which is what she said) isn't at all the same as opposing going to war.
Goal Posts
Ross charges:
And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal. Back in September, when Petraeus was testifying and the fur was flying, Matt was making roughly the same point that he and Julian and Brian Doherty are making now, except that he was saying things like "maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced." Now it's less than two months later, the violence has continued to diminish, and Matt's response is: "After all, internecine violence in Iraq won't continue forever and since most ethnically mixed neighborhoods have already been cleansed, it's at least plausible that the worst is behind us." And he's right - it is at least plausible. But given that only six weeks ago he was throwing out "4 or 5 more years" as a timeline for when Iraq might start to settle down, I think it's also "at least plausible" that when we look back on the last year of American military operations in Iraq, we'll judge them to have played a major role in putting the worst behind us earlier than most people anticipated.
Well, okay, maybe I'm shifting the goal posts. Or maybe there's no inconsistency between the idea that "the worst" violence and ethnic cleansing are now behind us, but that it'll take "4 or 5 more years" are continued violence and ethnic cleansing for Iraq to really settle down. After all, my recollection is that most people regarded the level of violence prevailing in Iraq in late 2003 to be unacceptable and had high hopes that Saddam Hussein's capture would reduce it. Instead, things were worse in 2004 than they were in 2003. Then in 2005, things were worse than they were in 2004. And then in 2006 things were even worse than they'd been in 2005. Now 2007 looks set to be not-quite-as-bad on average as 2006 was. Maybe the downward trend will continue.
On the other hand, maybe things will get worse. Maybe Turkey will invade Kurdistan. Maybe you'll see an uptick in ethnic cleansing elsewhere. Either way, though, for the purposes of this debate the relevant goalposts aren't the timing of declines in violence but the causal mechanism by which they occur. If violence is declining because local areas have already been ethnically cleansed, then the reduction, while preferable to their being more violence, hardly shows that the US military deployment is accomplishing anything worthwhile.
Strategery
I guess another way of making the point below is that it remains unclear to me what purpose the current deployment in Iraq is supposed to serve. One purpose it seems to be serving is the general sense that if our soldiers just stay in Iraq, risking their lives carrying out arduous day-to-day tactical missions unrelated to any broader strategic objectives that conditions in Iraq might improve anyway, thus allowing the continued presence of a large American deployment to provide a patina of "victory" to the results. At any rate, via Ilan Goldenberg I see that the GAO is confused (PDF) to:
U.S. efforts lack strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles, and performance measures. The U.S. strategy for victory in Iraq partially identifies the agencies responsible for implementing key aspects of the strategy and does not fully address how the United States would integrate its goals with those of the Iraqis and the international community. U.S. efforts to develop Iraqi ministry capability lack an overall strategy, no lead agency provides overall direction, and U.S. priorities have been subject to numerous changes. The weaknesses in U.S. strategic planning are compounded by the Iraqi government’s lack of integrated strategic planning in its critical energy sector.
It's hardly unheard of to see soldiers used, in essence, as props. It happens at sporting events frequently, and George W. Bush has developed a bad habit of using soldiers as backdrops for partisan political speeches. But to actually send over 100,000 into a combat zone while lacking "strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles, and performance measures" seems utterly unconscionable to me.
November 1, 2007
Fear Itself
Blue Dogs actually seem like the most scared people in all of Washington, D.C. as a result of this article. They are afraid of Republican attacks. They are afraid of conservative pundits. They are afraid of their constituents. They are afraid of motions to recommit that are meaningless in terms of actual policy. And they are protected by Emanuel and Hoyer, who seem petrified of all the same things. They seem to all operate in a perpetual state of fear, despite their surface machismo. And yes, it does seem like fear, rather than simply conservative beliefs in this case, because otherwise why would they be in favor of a meaningless procedural motion that has nothing to do with policy? The widespread fear in the tough guy wing of the Democratic Party is one of the great ironies of modern American politics.
There's much truth to this, but I wouldn't entirely discount the idea that many elected Democrats actually have fairly conservative views on a few issues and prefer to be seen as "afraid" by liberals than as simply on the other side.
The Variety of Price Control Experiences
Daniel Gross sees "Soviet-style price controls" returning to Russia. Tyler Cowen disagrees seeing stylistically different and less pernicious price controls now coming into vogue. To back Tyler up, I'll note that in Nizhny Novgorod circa 1998 at least a lot of food was being retailed in very informal shops and stands where one would expect enforcement of price control regimes to be very lax. It's quite possible that given the improved economic conditions of the past ten years, these distribution mechanisms have fallen into disuse in favor of a supermarkets, but surely things can flip back if necessary.
Dreamworld
So despite the lousy housing news, the economy grew at a robust 3.9 percent last quarter. Except Rex Nutting says it didn't: "The economy didn't really grow 3.9%, and inflation really wasn't 0.8%. The numbers aren't as good as they look."
Most Expensive Cities
The Mercer "cost of living index" shows the fifty most expensive cities in the world. US urban areas turn out to be pretty cheap — New York is number 15, Los Angeles is number 42, and there are no other American cities on the list. On the other hand, both NYC and LA got substantially cheaper over the previous twelve months, which I believe is an exchange rate phenomenon. Either way, a great nation such as ours ought to contain more super-expensive cities than does Japan, not fewer.
Gender Anxiety and Imperialism
I've tried in the past to draw attention to the substantial continuities between the "neoconservative" foreign policy of George W. Bush and the classical imperialism of the late-19th and early twentieth centuries. "D" at Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes some linkages in terms of the rhetoric of gender anxiety as a motivating factor in foreign policy adventurism. And I think there's something to do. This sort of consideration doesn't drive strategic thinking, but it does help create a mentality wherein the destructiveness of war counts as a benefit rather than a cost of a war policy (see also "suck on this"). That skewed approach to accounting obviously sends the whole debate off-kilter in very bad ways.
Michael Goldfarb
I had sort of thought that the original configuration of The Weekly Standard's "worldwide standard" blog was the worst imaginable magazine blog. Eventually, though, they had a personnel change and Michael Goldfarb took over and the thing actually became considerably worse — lacking that amusing train wreck quality it had previously sustained. Still, he does sometimes have his moments.
Here, for example, he's huffing and puffing that The Los Angeles Times won't correct some alleged errors that range from the trivial ("In the same column, Rutten wrote that Beauchamp had 'described the ridicule of a disfigured Iraqi woman . . .' In fact, the woman has never been described as Iraqi.") to the in-fact-perfectly-accurate ("Rutten also said that Beauchamp 'described . . . attempts to run over stray dogs with Bradley fighting vehicles . . .' In fact, Beauchamp actually described three incidents in which military personnel had killed stray dogs.") meanwhile, he seems to have no intention whatsoever of correcting his straightforwardly false August 6 item "Beauchamp Recants".
There, Goldfarb wrote that Beauchamp had "signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only 'a smidgen of truth,' in the words of our source." This never happened.
Meanwhile, we've been noting the shortage of captains and majors afflicting the military and wondering when age-appropriate advocates of an aggressive military posture like Goldfarb are going to step up to the plate to fill some of these absences. Well, he seems to have decided today that he should do his part to cope with growing personnel shortfalls in the State Department's mission in Iraq by . . . calling professional foreign service officers "diplowimps" because, I suppose, they've failed to demonstrate the sort of awe-inspiring courage required to write a blog from 17th Street. Maybe instead of being such wimps, the striped pants boys ought to join Goldfarb in trying to gin up a new war from the front-line cubicles here in Washington.
Health Care Scores
It's true, of course, that when the crazy kids downstairs at National Journal put together a bipartisan group to evaluate the presidential candidate's health care plans that the results showed the Democrats' plans to be good, whereas the Republicans' plans are bad. More telling, though, is actually the specific nature of where the different plans did well. This is especially true because in some respects the categories appear to have been gerrymandered to make the total scores less embarrassing for the GOP.
For example, these "economic impact" categories seem to have been defined in a very GOP-friendly way, with the three similar-sounding metrics here each having as much weight in the total rankings as does the entire subject of the uninsured and no consideration given to the idea that health care reform could have some positive economic benefits like freeing up labor market possibilities for people with pre-existing conditions. Either way, this is how they decided to do it, and you see that while the Democrats do a better job than the Republicans of delivering value — the central category — they're not as good at being stingy, which the rankers then double-count in the GOP's favor.
As you might expect from plans that are bad at delivering value, but good at delivering stinginess, when you get to the question of quality the Republicans start doing poorly. Do you think a plan should "enable consumers to make more-informed choices about health care?" Then you'll like Hillary Clinton (7) and Barack Obama (7) and might do okay with John Edwards (6) or John McCain (6) but you're screwed with Giuliani (4) or Mitt Romney (4). Clinton gets an 8 on giving medical professionals the best tools to improve care, while Obama and Edwards both pull 7s, McCain gets a 5, and Rudy and Romney each get pathetic 3s. In terms of giving providers incentives to compete on the basis of quality and price, McCain pulls even with all three Democrats, and Rudy and Romney once again fall behind.
So basically if you're looking for a cheap plan that doesn't actually improve health care quality the Republicans are looking good. If, in exchange for some high-value spending, you're eager to see the quality of care improved, the Democrats look better.
Similarly, in terms of consumer impact one question is about whether the plans would help people weather "increases in patient costs" the answer is that all three Democrats do better than all three Republicans. And again, would coverage be "available and affordable for the sickest people" — I think that'd be good, since sick people are the ones who need health care, and Democrats agree, scoring eight, nine, and eight on this measure. But if you don't care about sick people, but do care a lot about stinginess, then once again it's Republicans to the rescue since they do better on "would encourage patients to seek value for money."
On the question of employer impact all the Democrats beat all the Republicans in terms of would they encourage employers who currently offer health insurance to continue to make a financial contribution to their employees' health. But the Republicans do better on "would not cause financial hardship for employers." As ever, it's good to be the CEO when Republicans are in charge.
Last on the uninsured we once again see the Republicans doing terrible. They've got health care reform plans that don't help people who currently lack insurance, that aren't very good at ensuring health care for sick people, and that don't improve health care quality. The only think keeping them in the game is that their plans are cheaper. But the cheapness derives exclusively from the fact that they don't deliver the goods not through some brilliant cost-savings or efficiencies. That the plans differ in these systematic ways probably gives you a better idea of who to vote for than would any amount of peering into the details of the plans.
All of these proposals are vague in some key respects, and nothing that's proposed on the campaign trail is going to be enacted as is by congress. But these plans show something about the values and priorities of the different parties. Republicans, basically, are looking to make sure that the federal budget contains as much headroom as possible for tax cuts for high-income and high-wealth individuals while minimizing financial burdens on large employers. Democrats, by contrast, are looking to improve the quality and accessibility of American health care.
Photo by Flickr user Saveena used under a Creative Commons license
The Annals of Web Design
This from the Politico web team is really absurd. The idea that there can be "bad news" for Democrats but "worse news" for GOP betrays a basic failure to understand the nature of electoral politics, namely that it's a zero-sum competition for power in which only one candidate can win any given race and only one party can hold a majority in any legislative body. If new polls show public dissatisfaction with Democrats but greater dissatisfaction with Republicans, that's good news for Democrats. The only way something could be bad news for both parties would be if you believe that the country is on the verge of an unprecedented wave that's going to sweep a third party into power.
Meanwhile, silly headlines are one thing, but they decided to compound the sin here by highlighting the bad news for dems article even though the publication acknowledges that the news is, in fact, "worse" for Republicans.
My Tim Russert Problem: And Ours
Paul Waldman's brilliant piece on the evils of Tim Russert as debate moderate (and, of course, as Meet the Press host) unfortunately only scratches the surface of our problem, which is not so much Russert as it is Russertism. This, in turn, is built into the deeper structure of these things. The trouble is that someone discovered one day that Meet the Press or a primary debate could be very important even if almost nobody watched. The reason is that a clip might get picked up by shows that people do watch.
Under this new dynamic, the role of the moderate is not to play host to an interesting informative discussion but rather to maximize the odds that some particular 10 second snippet of an hour-long broadcast will be worthy of rebroadcast. Hence, the focus on inane questions designed less to draw out an illuminating remark than to trip someone up. The trouble, though, is that the more a broadcast is structured like this the fewer people will watch. Russertism has succeeded in creating a kind of political broadcast that even hard-core political junkies find difficult to watch. Indeed, the only way to make it tolerable is to step back and go meta, scanning the broadcast for signs of those telltale clips.
But the fewer people watch, the more the debate becomes about clip-generation rather than debate. And that only makes the debate more unwatchable! And down and down we go.
UPDATE: To be clear, it's not even necessarily that I think a "wonkier" broadcast would attract higher ratings than the current sort of debates. Rather, I think that if they tried to produce an hour-long debate broadcast whose goal was to maximize viewership of the hour-long broadcast, rather than producing two-hour broadcasts whose goal is to maximize the odds of generating a signature "moment," that the broadcasts would get higher viewership. It shouldn't be that hard to produce a presidential debate that virtually every political junkie watches. Right now what they're doing doesn't even attract that audience.
"Heroes"
John Edwards' campaign is releasing this new ad today:
In a conference call with reporters, Edwards campaign senior staff were clearly trying to convince people that he's still in the game. Their basic point is that it remains a fairly close three-way race in Iowa, and this'll be the first Edwards ad after millions of dollars in spending from the rival campaigns. The ad, plus Edwards' strong performance in the most recent debate, are supposed to put him back on top in the caucuses.
The Karen Hughes Era
With Karen Hughes stepping down, some questions get asked about why she's so ineffective:
Q So in your mind, she has succeeded in her goal of outreach to the Arab world, based on those numbers that I just cited?
MS. PERINO: Look, I'm not going to comment or respond to a poll that you just read out. I don't know about those numbers, I don't know the questions that were asked; I think it's inappropriate. What I can tell you is that she has done amazing work. Let me give another example. She started a women's outreach effort with the Middle Eastern countries and started a breast cancer initiative. And just last week Mrs. Bush went and highlighted that initiative and went to four different countries in the Middle East, had a very successful trip in explaining that women have tools at their disposal when they find out that they have breast cancer, early detection and treatment. That is precisely what the President was hoping Karen Hughes would achieve, and she has.
Q So in your view, the U.S. image in the Arab world has improved under Karen Hughes?
MS. PERINO: We are making progress. I know that we have a long way to go.
And indeed we do have a long way to go.
Respect Whose Authority?
Two good posts (one, two) from Ryan Avent on rail funding and planning issues. I would add that making everything more difficult here is that the lines of political authority in the Northeast of the United States were drawn a very long time ago — often literally hundreds of years ago — and don't match up especially well with the way patterns of residence and commerce actually exist. Manhattan is governed by institutions located in Albany that also run far-off Buffalo but have no authority in Hoboken right across the river.
Neither the government in Richmond nor the government in Annapolis takes the problems of the DC metro area to be its primary concern, because most residents of Virginia don't live in the area and neither do most residents of Maryland. But it doesn't have to be this way. The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria MSA contains over five million people, making it bigger than most states. And if it were a state, that state would probably engage in more more sensible regional transportation planning. But it's not so we don't get it.
They Made a Civil War and Called it Victory
Ilan Goldenberg asks what's the president' strategy for Iraq:
Iraq still does not have a functional central government. Half of the cabinet has quit and the national government has essentially given up on reconciliation. Moreover, the Iraqi government opposes the Administration’s “bottom up” approach in Anbar and has been actively working to undermine it. It is also not clear how the approach in Anbar, where American forces and Sunni tribes agreed to fight foreign extremist elements, translates to the rest of the country. It does not explain how warring Shi’a factions who are fighting a civil war in the South might reconcile or how to overcome the conflict between Kurds and Arabs over Kirkuk. In effect, while the central government is willing to work with the United States and the Sunni tribes are willing to work with the United States, there is no indication that they are willing to work with each other. If these questions are not addressed, the situation in Iraq may deteriorate further and in the long run we may find that the arming, organizing, and training of various Sunni and Shi’a groups will only exacerbate the civil war.
Seems like a problem. Of course, insofar as you create a situation where you have three different factions who all dislike and distrust each other more than they dislike and distrust the United States, then you've laid the groundwork for a situation in which a long-term American military presence will be tolerated, if not exactly welcomed. This is one of the paradoxes of our current policy in Iraq. Insofar as the establishment of permanent military facilities in Iraq is one of the goals of the policy, national reconciliation is probably a bad thing since a unified Iraq would be more likely to tell us to get lost.
Crawl to War
This Gail Collins column is a mixed bad, and readers will know that I disagree with her about Social Security, but I think she nails this point:
“Well, first of all, I am against a rush to war,” she said. That would have been disturbing even if she had not attacked the idea of “rushing to war” twice more in the next 60 seconds. Being against a rush to another war in the Middle East seems to be setting the bar a tad low. How does she feel about a measured march to war? A leisurely stroll?
Right. The Bush administration itself doesn't appear to be pursuing a "rush to war" with Iran. Given the very long period of time — over a year — during which the saber-rattling has played out, there's really no question of a "rush" at this point. But the strategy still embeds a logic of confrontation and, yes, war. The key point here in many ways is less the Kyl-Lieberman vote as such than the way Kyl-Lieberman fits into a broader package — hawkish on Iraq, attacked Obama from the right on Iran, seemed to rule out normalization of relations with Iran even in exchange for verifiable disarmament in a Foreign Affairs article — of hawkish Iran-related measures even in the midst of a primary campaign.
A Serious Post About My Navel
This blog isn't a hobby enterprise anymore and hasn't been for some time, so it occurs to me that perhaps I should ask you, the reading public, what you think in terms of the balance of content. Does it make sense to invest more time at the margin to doing serious posts on the issues that are harder to put together, or is it better to dedicate energy to assembling lots of quick links to interesting commentary and articles around the internet?
Obviously, I continue to do both, but I wonder if people feel it would be better to alter the mix in one direction or another.
Sanders on Lieberman-Warner
Bernie Sanders has a smart rejoinder to the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, a welcome bipartisan effort to tackle a serious problem that, unfortunately, doesn't tackle the problem:
Today, however, we have a qualitatively different situation. I wish it wasn't so, but it is. The issue is not what I want versus what Senator Lieberman or Senator Warner or Senator Inhofe may want -- and the need to work out an agreement that we can all accept. That's not the dynamic we face today. The issue today is one of physics and chemistry and what the best scientists in the world believe is happening to our planet because of greenhouse gas emissions. The issue is what we can do, as a nation, along with the international community, to reverse global warming and to save this planet from a catastrophic and irreversible damage which could impact billions of people.
The tragic element here is that had Al Gore taken office in January 2001 we might have found ourselves in a situation where we were debating something along these lines in 2002 or 2003 when something like Lieberman-Warner could have been an adequate first step. But as time goes by the fact that there's both more carbon in the air, and a warmer planet, and a higher baseline level of emissions all make it less-and-less viable to start gently.
The NCLB Exception
Responding to my contention that there turned out to be no there there to Bush's "compassionate conservatism," Ross adduces a few examples:
Bush did have a pseudo-Christian Democratic policy agenda: It consisted of the faith-based initiatives, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drugs bill, and immigration reform. The first was small potatoes, but the rest weren't small at all.
My rejoinder to this, as Ross anticipates, is that the prescription drug bill and the immigration reform proposal are really both just business conservatism dressed up as "compassion." Ross says that's "what you'd expect from an administration where both Gerson and Dick Cheney had the President's ear," but it's also what I'd expect from an administration that just likes lying.
It really does all come down to NCLB, a policy that obviously has some low-partisan rationales in terms of dividing the Democratic coalition, but that also represents some meaningful dissent from the right's typical voucher-mania in a reality-based way. In particular, NCLB is founded on recognition that absent some really unimaginable injection of new money the majority of kids — especially disadvantaged ones — are going to be in public schools, and also on the reality that plenty of "good" schools in the suburbs still manage to do a bad job of educating poor children. The proposition that NCLB actually helps achieve its goals on those measure is, needless to say, controversial in left-of-center circles (my view on this is more Robert Gordon than Richard Rothstein) but the whole idea of a policy debate over how to make public schools work better is a refreshing alternative to the usual contemporary dynamic where you have Republicans trying to destroy some public service.
After War
Tyler Cowen directs my attention to Chris Coynes' new book After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. The prognosis isn't good:
What do the data indicate regarding the effectiveness of reconstruction as a means of achieving liberal democracy? In short, the historical record indicates that efforts to export liberal democracy at gunpoint are more likely to fail than succeed. Of the twenty-five reconstruction efforts, where five years have passed since the end of occupation, seven have achieved the stated benchmark, resulting in a 28 percent success rate. The rate of success stays the same for those cases where ten years have passed. For those efforts where at least fifteen years have passed, nine out of twenty-three have achieved the benchmark for success, resulting in a 39 percent success rate. Finally, of the twenty-two reconstruction efforts where twenty years have passed since the exit of occupiers eight have reached the benchmark, resulting in a 36 percent success rate.
It's worth saying, of course, that you're unlikely to ever find the United States actually invading other countries in order to turn them into democracies. Rather, it so happens to be the case that pretty much all of the good candidates for "enemy" status are dubiously democratic regimes, so that rhetorical invocation of democratic values becomes an attractive strategy. The poor record, in practice, of armed democratization is just a further reason to think that such rhetoric should be basically ignored. Sometimes situations may arise where using military force to topple a foreign government is the right thing to do (Germany during World War II and Afghanistan after 9/11 come to mind) and then I think we have an obligation to do our best to bequeath a decent new regime to the place we've conquered. But the prospects for success aren't nearly good enough to make this the reason for launching a war.
Blaming America First
I'm all for attacking Rudy Giuliani's approach to foreign policy, but I'm not sure I'm ready to join David Klinghoffer in the view that the problem with Giuliani is his failure to recognize that abortion and gay marriage are what's going to let the terrorists destroy America:
In the run-up to this tragedy, was he out banging the drum for a tough anti-Babylonian stance, sponsoring a “Babylo-Fascist Awareness Week” a-la-David Horowitz? No. On the contrary, he was accused of treason by the war party among his fellow Jews. He warned that, in the context of Israel’s corrupt moral culture, it was useless to resist Babylon. [...]
If you are not a believer, it should still be possible to appreciate the accumulated wisdom of three thousand years as found in the pages of Scripture; men who faced outside enemies far more dangerous than Islamic terror, concluded that the real peril came from within.
I appreciate the effort to put a sense of perspective around the Islamoscaryboogiefascist menace, but this particular branch of the blame America first crowd doesn't really make very much sense. I mean, surely there are more Godless countries out there than the United States; how come the Lord wasn't inflicting his wrath on idolatrous Denmark?
Diploweenies Redux
Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard blog steps up the rhetoric against "diploweenies" who don't want to be conscripted for service in Iraq, adding a casual slander to the schoolyard-level insults:
Why would a professional diplomat care to engage the most urgent diplomatic challenge of the 21st century when he could instead be inflating the ego of some third world potentate while being feted as some kind of royalty? Besides, since Iraq lacks a functional government that's hostile to American interests, "going native" isn't even an option.
Thank God for the past seven years our policies have been driven by the manly-men of the Standard and not the treasonous goons at Foggy Bottom! Ignoring the advice of America's foreign service professionals has, thus far, reaped massive benefits in terms of unprecedented international isolation. But it gets crazier as Barnett endorses a Duncan Hunter plan to really stick it to the diploweenies by pulling wounded soldiers out of their hospital beds to redeploy them to Iraq, but this time to conduct diplomatic missions they're not trained for. That'll show 'em!
Meanwhile, previously-hyped-in-this-space congressional candidate Dan Grant (Texas-10) is a former diploweenie himself who served in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq before coming home to run for congress and is now airing his first ad:
I think I'd rather listen to him than to the Standard.
November 2, 2007
Do We Need an Air Force?
Robert Farley says no. A debate ensues. My sympathies lie with Farley. Obviously, our military needs air power capabilities, but creating a specific bureaucratic entity given exclusive purview over air power was an idea grounded in a 1940s-vintage overestimation of strategic air power's capabilities, and its continued existence creates an artificial constituency for continuing such overestimations.
Waste-Heat Recovery
Recycling waste-heat to generate even more power without any additional carbon emissions certainly sounds like an appealing technology. And of course the genius of a carbon tax or a well-designed cap-and-trade system would be precisely that it helps technologies like this to emerge without requiring political pundits (e.g., me) or congressional staffers to accurately guess which technologies are the most promising low-carbon alternatives.
Going, Going, Gone
I should have already left the house by the time this blog post appears on your computer, heading off to the DC DMV, new Social Security card in hand, to get my DC driver's license. Hopefully this won't take too long....
Brains in a VAT
Kevin Drum says a Value Added Tax would be a good way to pay for a universal health care plan. I'll add my voice to that suggestion. A universal health care program would be a highly progressive measure, so progressivity would continue to exist even given a somewhat regressive finance structure. What's more, Kevin's right that "pay or play" finance scheme make for terrible interest-group politics since the costs wind up falling heavily on certain classes of small businesses who, unfortunately, but understandably and with some justice, then wind up furiously opposing them.
All-in-all, I think this is an area where progressive politicians are going to need to figure out a way to get over their taxophobia. The sort of things liberals want to see happen require money, and that's a real political problem. Trying to get around the need to raise this money through taxes — using various kinds of regulatory mandates and "fees" — may work pretty well when you're only talking about a small amount of money, but when big bucks come into play it's probably worth coming up with something straightforward, efficient, and comprehensible and just having the fight.
Strategic Drift
Read CAP's Podesta, Korb, and Katulis on "strategic drift" in Iraq. It's a great memo, encompassing both the policy issues, the failures of certain segments of the "expert" community, the irresponsibility of Bush and the GOP, and — yes — the fecklessness of Democratic Party politicians.
I'll focus on this last part a bit because it's relevant to the major themes of my book. They write that Democrats "now risk drifting themselves into offering only a vague and muddled vision. Progressives must provide a clear alternative to counter the Bush policy of strategic drift—one that takes back control of America’s security interests." This sort of thing has frequently been a problem in the post-9/11 world, and it's a depressing cycle. It starts with the fact that there's no major interest group on the left concerned with matters of war and peace — no equivalent to the AFL-CIO or Change to Win or the Sierra Club or the NAACP or NARAL seeking to use progressive politicians as a vehicle to advance a specific policy agenda, able to provide resources (including things as simple as policy analysis) to allies, and capable of sometimes pushing people to take inconvenient risks. Consequently, you tend to wind up with a political strategy of pure opportunism and positions being staked out purely with a view to short-term political expediency.
The trouble in policy terms is that this tends to lead to bad policy positions like backing the war in 2002, the mau-mauing of Howard Dean when Saddam was captured in 2003, the incompetence argument in 2004, the short-lived effort to get to Bush's right on Iran in late 2005 and early 2006, the enthusiasm for "soft partition" and "training" in 2007. The trouble in political terms is that this kind of bobbing and weaving doesn't provide a foundation for anything. People can't hone political arguments in favor of a progressive national security agenda if there isn't actually a coherent agenda to defend. People can't fully reap advantage of disastrous conservative errors if they didn't clearly oppose making the errors at the time. People can't respond persuasively to dynamic events and new issues if they're constantly re-inventing the wheel.
For a while, though, Democrats were getting their shit together on the narrow subject of Iraq. But as the CAP crew argues, having been legislatively defeat by the Republicans, they now seem to be losing focus in ways that are bad for the country and unlikely to serve their interests in the long run.
Getting Cute
President Bush starts flirting with open advocacy of torture:
When Mr. Bush was asked whether he considered waterboarding illegal, he said he would not discuss specific methods used in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. “It doesn’t make any sense to tell the enemy whether we use those techniques or not,” he said.
“And the techniques we use by highly trained professionals are within the law,” the president said. “That’s what’s important for America to know.”
What doesn't make sense here is the answer. Expressing an opinion on the legality of waterboarding isn't the same as saying whether or not waterboarding is used. And besides which, everybody knows waterboarding is used. But to illustrate the difference, our best understand is that Bush thinks it would be legal for him to order Sean Hannity detained indefinitely and incommunicado without charge, whereupon he'd be subject to torture, and evidence acquired through torturing Hannity could perhaps be used as a justification for wiretapping Rush Limbaugh's phones, but he clearly seems to have decided that he doesn't want to actually do those things.
More Like It
Barack Obama opens up a clear policy difference with Hillary Clinton, a strategy toward the greater Middle East centered around an effort to forge a "grand bargain" with Iran. This doesn't necessarily sound incredibly different from Clinton's strategy of saying that the United States "should be prepared to offer Iran a carefully calibrated package of incentives," but it's pretty different. The difference, in particular, is that as Flynt Leverett has argued in a non-campaign context the "grand bargain" approach might work, whereas Clinton's approach won't work.
Zbigniew Brzezinski and other people in the Obama circle have long been advocates of this more sensible approach to Iran, but until now the subject has been considered to "hot" politically to touch. But now Obama's going there and it's a very good thing he is. This is what we should be debating in this country — strategy, not tactics. A diplomatic approach that doesn't work followed by war is really not much better than a "rush to war", what's needed is a strategy that avoids war and advances the interests of the United States. And now Obama's putting one on the table.
Adventures in Bureacracy
My effort to trade in my New York driver's license for a DC one at the old downtown DMV location two years ago was such a horrific experience that I became demoralized and gave up. But this morning at the District's new Southwest Service Center was a surprisingly painless experience — polite, efficient service in clean, welcoming conditions.
It's a reminder of a point I saw in a David Sirota column that I can't locate anymore, namely that the quality of these kind of services is kind of a big deal politically. When people who spend a lot of time thinking about politics and policy think of "government" we think of Social Security, the Department of Defense, Medicare, the giant agencies that account for the bulk of the federal budget. But when most people think of "government" they think of the agencies they're most likely to interact with personally — the Post Office, the DMV, the IRS form — and these things leave an impression. The argument "would you want your health care brought to you by the people who run the DMV" is a powerful argument to a citizen whose local DMV sucks (compare to: health care by the people who put a man on the Moon, invented the atom bomb and GPS, pilot nuclear submarines beneath arctic ice, etc). And yet the quality of these things varies enormously. The Southwest Service Center is fine, but a little inconvenient for most people. The Post Office closest to my house when I was growing up was terrible (maybe it's fine now) but the Post Office in Harvard Square was fantastic and the Post Office in Castine, Maine is actually kind of stunning, while the T Street Station in DC looks horrible but is actually well-run.
Given that it's fairly easy to look at examples of highly-functioning government "retail" offices and then look at what it would take (in terms of management strategies and resources) to bring other offices up to that standard, it makes a lot of sense for politicians interested in building support for further public investments in health care, education, child care, etc. to pay attention to this stuff. And it also makes sense to make the point that conservative politicians dedicated to the proposition that government can't work have a strong incentive to make sure that government doesn't work.
Photo by Flickr user Joelogon used under a Creative Commons license
Gotta Have a Post on Kobe Bryant
Kobe not only demanding a trade, but also apparently demanding that Luol Deng not be part of any deal with Chicago is bordering on the lunatic. There's no way Kobe can manipulate the situation to guarantee that he lines up on a championship team. But the current Bulls frontcourt includes Ben Wallace, Tyrus Thomas, Joakim Noah, Luol Deng, and Andres Nocioni plus some other backup types. That's more guys than the team needs to win games if they can upgrade from Ben Gordon to Kobe Bryant at the two.
Indeed, in a lot of ways a Gordon & Deng for Kobe (plus somehow the salaries need to match) trade would result in the ideal situation for him because the resulting team, while definitely in contention, would also be a squad where it made perfect sense for Kobe to take a ridiculously high proportion of the shots.
The Return of Peretz-Blogging
One request in the navel-gazing post was for more Marty Peretz-bashing. Your wish is my demand! Like the other day Matt Duss was smacking Peretz around for his outrageous smear campaign against Archbishop Desmond Tutu prompting, naturally, James "Lil' Marty" Kirchick to leap to the defense of dark master, but as Duss notes in a followup he's not making any sense either.
The thing about the archbiship, though, is that unlike, say, Jimmy Carter it's genuinely the case that he's never done anything to massively improve Israel's strategic position. Carter, by contrast, though definitely pissing off some Israeli politicians and their self-proclaimed friends in the United States did, by brokering a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, wind up doing perhaps the biggest favor to Israel that any American president has done since Harry Truman's decision to recognize the Jewish state back in the 1940s. Naturally, the prospect of him trying to offer advice on the business of peacemaking to Secretary Rice has incensed Peretz who seems to consistently place hatred of Arabs and love of war ahead of even his much-professed love of Israel.
But as a bonus, Peretz yet again puts the words "Jewish lobby" into the mouths of those who would criticize the pernicious activities of the Israel lobby in the United States. It's much easier to pretend that your political opponents are all motivated by a racist hatred of Jewish people if you refuse to engage with what they're actually saying and instead just attribute some different words to them! Nice work if you can get it, but somewhat despicable from an ethical point of view.
The Annals of Pedantry
To make a long story short, Max Boot is kind of ridiculous but the longer version of the story to be found by following the link is pretty funny.
Team Obama
I don't really want to just quote an excerpt this long, but James Traub really nails the difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in terms of their supporters in the world of foreign policy:
The United States has had only one foreign policy and one national-security strategy since the transforming events of 9/11 — and this set of doctrines has been shaped by the very distinctive worldview of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the men and women around them. The great project of the foreign-policy world in the last few years has been to think through a “post-post-9/11 strategy,” in the words of the Princeton Project on National Security, a study that brought together many of the foreign-policy thinkers of both parties. Such a strategy, the experts concluded, must, like “a Swiss Army knife,” offer different tools for different situations, rather than only the sharp edge of a blade; must pay close attention to “how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions”; must recognize that other nations may legitimately care more about their neighbors or their access to resources than about terrorism; and must be “grounded in hope, not fear.” A post-post-9/11 strategy must harness the forces of globalization while honestly addressing the growing “perception of unfairness” around the world; must actively promote, not just democracy, but “a world of liberty under law”; and must renew multilateral instruments like the United Nations.
In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. “There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living,” as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. “The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama.” Hillary Clinton’s inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband’s second term in office — the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington’s foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you’re bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” Ex-Clintonites in Obama’s inner circle also include the president’s former lawyer, Greg Craig, and Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary.
The first of the Clinton people to notice this rising political star was Anthony Lake, national-security adviser in Bill Clinton’s first term. Lake says that he was introduced to Obama in 2002 when the latter had just begun considering a run for a Senate seat. Impressed, he began contributing ideas. When Obama came to Washington as a senator and joined the Foreign Relations Committee, Lake continued to work with him on occasion. Like others, Lake was impressed not so much by Obama’s policy prescriptions as by his temperament and intellectual habits. “He has,” Lake says, “the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity.” This awareness of complexity felt like a kind of politics itself and a repudiation of the Bush administration’s categorical thinking.
Obama spoke out against the impending war in Iraq in the fall of 2002; and those members of the Democratic establishment who, like Lake, also opposed the war came to view him as a kindred spirit. Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration who, along with Lake, heads up Obama’s foreign-policy team, says, “You were considered naïve, wrong, weak, stupid to oppose that war.” Hillary Clinton (and John Edwards) voted for the war. Obama’s opposition to it showed Rice “a willingness not to be bound by conventional wisdom and the well-trod path.”
This is all quite right. And it's important to recall that this hawk/dove split and the elite/rank-and-file split have some causal interaction. Back in 2002, the Democratic establishment found itself trapped in this vicious cycle. Most rank-and-file members of congress were ready to oppose the war. But the leadership in the House and the Senate was backing it. And the campaign committees were advising challengers and vulnerable members to back it. And the conventional wisdom said that anyone who wanted to be elected president had to back it. And so were most of the media celebrities focusing on foreign policy — Holbrooke and Albright and Pollack and O'Hanlon. In part, political leaders backed the war because these "experts" were backing it, and in part the celebrity experts were backing it because the politicians they were courting were backing it.
But it all blew up in everyone's face. The war was, substantively, a disaster. And it became hard to take advantage of the disaster because so many leading Democrats had backed it.
And in foreign policy terms, though Clinton certainly counts some war opponents and some younger rank-and-file people, she and her campaign fundamentally represent continuity with that seem set of political and policy elites who were running the show in 2002 and 2003. Obama represents a break from that; a turn toward people who think a different way, who probably aren't as famous but just might know what they're talking about, and perhaps even more important than that to people whose thinking isn't hobbled by an unwillingness to break with past positions.
"Why Obama Matters"
Not to be outdone by the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic's put Andrew Sullivan's new Barack Obama cover story up for free online. Andrew focuses on something that I think had largely dropped out of view as the campaign proceeds, the meaning of Obama's relative youth and freshness:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
I think that's very true. In the course of highlight this difference between Obama and the others I think Andrew does wind up underplaying the systematic factors separating all the Republicans from all of the Democrats, but it is an important point. I would also add that while I think Andrew's approach to politician-evaluating is a bit more personality-driven than is wise, his approach is by far the most common one among swing voter types and the fact that independent-minded conservatives can find Obama compelling in a way they don't feel compelled by Clinton reflects a real virtue of his candidacy.
What I've Seen With Your Eyes
I went the other day to see the "final cut" of Blade Runner on the giant screen at the Uptown Theater the other day, and if you're a fan of the movie you should find a theater way it's playing. I'm too young, of course, to have seen it in theaters in 1982 but it occurs to me that that wouldn't have been the proper, voiceover-free version anyway and that since it wasn't especially popular on first release there are probably lots of people who've seen it on DVD or TV but never on a large screen. It makes a big difference to such a visually poetic film.
Meanwhile, it's just so rich and textured, so you notice new things each time. My observations for this go-round, fittingly enough, have to do with the way the movie portrays the climate. I remembered, of course, that the story is set in Los Angeles and that it's raining constantly, but the striking thing to me on this reviewing is that the LA setting appears to play no other role in the plot. The striking cityscape doesn't even bare any real resemblance to LA. Meanwhile, not only is it pouring but nobody mentions this as if torrential downpours are a common phenomenon. Just a couple of years ago, I would have overlooked all of this (the LA setting just flashes briefly across the screen at the very beginning and the rain, in part, is just a kind of noir cliché) but in the contemporary context it obviously has a certain resonance and melds with the subtle suggestions (the book is very heavy-handed and clear on this point) that there have been massive die-offs in the animal population.
UPDATE: Brian Beutler whines IRL that I failed to mention that he was present for this afternoon cinematic excursion. This, in turn, raises the question of whether it's really wise to admit to having been at the movies in the afternoon, but my official position is that since I'm blogging about it right now I was actually working.
Giuliani's Character
Paul Krugman notes that Rudy Giuliani's running around the country saying things about health care policy that aren't true, and wonders "Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?" It's a good question.
Meanwhile, Joe Conason and Ezra Klein note that he's also a huge hypocrite — the health insurance Giuliani claims was so superior to government-provided health care was . . . provided by the government.
The Right Enemies
I should note that not only does Barack Obama have the right allies on foreign policy questions, but he has the right enemies as well. Here, PPI's Will Marshall stands up for Hillary Clinton on Iran and says that people who criticize her "risk rekindling ancient public doubts about their party’s willingness to confront tough national security challenges." And of course, it's precisely Marshall's poor judgment on the substance of national security policy issues combined with a knee-jerk "left is never right" view of the politics of national security issues that led him to become such a forceful advocate of invading Iraq years ago.
Meanwhile, Ilan Goldenberg also notes Marshall launching a wrongheaded critique of Obama's understanding of al-Qaeda and complains:
Just check out his bio. There is absolutely nothing in his background that has anything to do with foreign policy. He really doesn't know all that much about this stuff.
But forget Marshall's bio, check out the general PPI staff bios page and you'll see that unless I'm missing something Marshall runs a think tank that doesn't employ any foreign policy or national security specialists at all. One might conclude that this means his ideas should be understood primarily as "centrist" political posturing rather than reflecting some deep effort to understand the issues.
CORRECTION: It's not on their website, but I'm told that PPI has in fact hired a guy named Jim Arkedis with a background in naval intelligence and a degree from SAIS. They used to have Steve Nider whose work was pretty tightly focused on military transformation issues.
Parsing
From a technical point of view, this John Edwards ad is pretty awesome:
Substantively, though, I'm not in love with this particular critique of Clinton precisely because it's not a substantive critique. All politicians try to "have it both ways" to some extent, and anyone would be acting like this if they were a front runner. Her position on Social Security is the correct position, and there's no sense in helping Tim Russert portray it as cowardly. But more to the point, Edwards leads off with some revealing Iraq clips.
The correct point to make about Clinton on Iraq, though, isn't that her positions require too much parsing, the point to make is that her vision of an enduring American training mission in Iraq is a bad idea on the merits. She says we should keep troops in Iraq to train Iraqi security forces. In fact, we shouldn't do that. Absent political chance in Iraq, the training mission makes things worse. We're arming and equipping the parties to a civil war, pouring gasoline on the fires of violence. If a pony happens to emerge, it might make sense to re-evaluate the anti-training view, but given the current situation we shouldn't be doing this training mission. Clinton's position on this issue is wrong and that's the problem with it.
Meanwhile, like GFR and Ezra I'm not really sure that Clinton did play the gender card. Anyone who's ever ridden the, um, "Wellesley College Senate Bus" can tell you that "In so many ways, this all-women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics" is standard-issue Wellesley talking points and not some nefarious piece of political messaging. I think it is true, though, that Clinton is counting, politically, on the fact that people probably subconsciously assume that a woman is less hawkish than an analysis of her policy positions would suggest.
UPDATE: Edwards campaign sources want to emphasize that Edwards did make a policy argument during the debate (though focused more on the idea of "combat missions" than the training farce) but that the MSM isn't interested in policy arguments.
Second Degree Greatness
Dan Drezner links to his top five best blog posts ever. None of them are written by me, but two of them contain links to less distinguished posts that I wrote. So you see you can't hold me responsible for the low quality of the content here; the goal is provoke other people to write great blog posts.
More Calculus Please
I've long been sympathetic to the argument, advanced over the years in various forms by members of the Greeberg Quinlan Rosner team, that the "marriage gap" is an under-recognized feature of American politics and that one of liberalism's most promising growth areas is simply in finding better ways to engage and mobilize unmarried women who are a large and quite progressive bloc of the population with low voter turnout rates. You can see the latest form of the argument in this report and, as I say, I find it convincing.
I do, however, keep being disappointed by the relative lack of statistical sophistication you see here. After all, unmarried people are demographically quite different from married people in a number of ways including age, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation — all characteristics that are plausibly big driver's of voting behavior. They do a decent job of showing that the "marriage gap" holds up even when you look at the major sub-samples of the population (it's not, in short, just driven by the different marriage rates of blacks, whites, and Latinos) but this is still a pretty crude way of looking at the interplay of factors. What would really be nice would be some regression analysis that could help us try to estimate the impact of marriage independent of other demographic factors.
Relatedly, it's always worth saying that proposals to "target" this or that slice of the electorate sometimes seem to me to involve underestimating the heterogeneity of the group. It's true, for example, that one would expect a 25 year-old unmarried white woman who graduated from Wellesley, took an entry-level job at a DC think tank, and is now enrolled at Georgetown Law School and a 25 year-old unmarried African-American mother of two who dropped out of high school to both be loyal Democrats but it's not at all clear that there's a common "single woman" or even "single 25 year-old woman" characteristic that's driving this common voting behavior, even though they're both common archetypes in major American cities. A Republican strategist looking to make inroads with these voters, for example, would probably adopt different strategies depending on which woman they were trying to court.
November 3, 2007
Fear of Immigration
EJ Dionne runs down the atmosphere of fear and dread in Democratic circles that being painted as soft on illegal immigration will wreck the party's fortunes. My sense is that a lot of folks in town are furrowing their brows trying to think of a way to thread the policy needle here. What I wonder is whether these concerned couldn't be effectively blunted with cheap political rhetoric and a minor dose of dishonesty. How hard is it, really, to just say something like "the Bush Republicans have had eight years to get the borders under control and things just get worse and worse; from Katrina to Iraq to no-bid contracts back to immigration these guys can't do anything right."
That doesn't really mean anything, sure, but insofar as the goal is just to muddy the waters and prevent public outrage from overwhelming everything else it seems viable to me. In general, it shouldn't be easy for the GOP to ride in on a wave of outrage at their own party's inability to enforce immigration law. Sure, Bush actually broke with his party over this, but professional ad men exist to confuse people about this kind of nuance.
The Crazy Years
Via David Boaz, a 1999 San Francisco Chronicle article that reminds us of how completely insane our political culture was back then:
Nina Burleigh, former White House correspondent for Time, confessed that she enjoyed having Clinton check out her naked legs after they played a game of hearts aboard Air Force One en route to Jasper, Ark. "If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room at the Jasper Holiday Inn, I would have been happy to go there and see what happened," Burleigh wrote in Mirabella. Elaborating for the Washington Post, she said, "I'd be happy to give him (oral sex) just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."
Apparently this really happened and Mirabella was a real magazine. And of course Mike Huckabee decided to let a convicted rapist run free because his imprisonment was somehow part of the Vast Clinton Conspiracy only for him to murder someone. Of course the year and a half after 9/11 was pretty crazy, too, but at least that craziness was based on a real national trauma.
Benkler Interview
Kottke has an intersting interview up with Yochai Benkler, author of the excellent book The Wealth of Networks about how peer-production, open networks, and free culture can and should revolutionize our politics and society. I worry, though, that Benkler is too optimistic about the political process. Or, rather, that his optimism may be shading into a problematic complacency. Political change is hard to do, and making it happen requires concrete plans for organizing and activism that the relevant segments of the geek community don't seem to me to be very good at engaging in.
Inequality in Context
Via Brad Plumer, Jubin Zelveh reportson the development of new methods to measure inequality based on historical data.
His table is reproduced here and you can see that, as Jonathan Cohn could have told you, Denmark is awesome. I'm a bit surprised to see China in the late-nineteenth century and the Kingdom of Naples in the early nineteenth century come out as relatively egalitarian. My understanding had been that primarily agricultural societies are almost always super unequal since wealth (i.e. land) tends to be more unequally distributed than income, but iin societies like that a very large share of income goes to landowners as such. But perhaps not. He also says we have a ways to go in terms of upward redistribution of wealth:
It turns out that the typical modern nation has extracted about 33% of the available inequality (for the U.S. it's about 41%, for China it's 47%) while the researchers' sample of past societies squeezed out almost all of the available inequality.
Something to look forward to?
Small World
Scott Lemieux makes an argument I offered during a bloggingheads segment with Ross, namely given the extremely low quality of Commentary's current output are we really so sure that John Podhoretz was a nepotism hire? As Scott writes, "Given that the actual content of the journal seems to be sixth-rate defenses of failed imperialist schemes and feeble Republican hackery" why shouldn't J-Pod be able to do the job as well or better than anyone else.
In a somewhat more serious vein, one should note the "small world" problem here. The vast majority of intellectuals are on the left. But precisely in order to counteract this leftward domination of the traditional intelligentsia and traditional intelllectual institutions, the conservative movement has over the years dedicated a considerable amount of energy to building a large network of counterestablishment institutions and publications of various sorts. What's more, because this counterestablishment is the product of a specific political critique of the intelligentsia and its impact on American politics, the tendency is for counterestablishment institutions to be much more explicitly political than what you see in traditional intellectual institutions.
The result is that the demand for certain forms of conservative intellectual output appears at times to threaten to outstrip supply. The relatively small number of outlets for liberal political commentary can draw on a vast cadre of liberals scattered throughout the arts and academia. On the right, though, there's more output but less input. As a result, you have Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for the Journal of International Security Affairs (published by JINSA), Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for The Weekly Standard, Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for National Review, Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for The Wall Street Journal, Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for The New York Sun, Claudia Rosett writing about how the UN is evil for Commentary and so on and so forth.
Under the circumstances, almost any hire is going to wind up being "nepotistic" on some level. You're dealing with a very, very, very small world that sometimes appears large because of the large number of institutions involved. But the actual number of people is small, and there tend to be large overlaps in personnel and funding sources. Overlaps, nepotism, and incestuous circles are hardly unknown on the left since that's a pretty small world on its own terms, but it's even more the case on the right in a way that makes these distinctions a bit meaningless.
Um... Off to the Mall...
Well, I'm going to leave the house now and go to Target, but "Musharraf Declares Emergency Rule" seems like a big story. If you're not at the mall, go read a real newspaper. Or maybe you want to check out Joshua Hammer talking about "After Musharraf".
Mukasey
I think the pragmatic argument that Mukasey in office is preferable to the realistic alternative
options makes some sense. Still, avote to confirm him at this point would seem to set a bad precedent. At a minimum couldn't people inclined to take the Schumer line on this just abstain from voting and let the Republicans put him in?
Gender Card
As long as we're all worried about Hillary Clinton and the 'gender card' we do realize that about 75 percent of the 2004 race between John "I've killed people" Kerry and George "no you're a windsurfing frenchman" Bush was a series of efforts to play the gender card, right?
It's actually stunning how much of thr erstwhile foreign policy debate is primarily an argument about the size of the debaters' dicks.
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Heads in the Sand
