« December 23, 2007 - December 29, 2007 |
Main
| January 6, 2008 - January 12, 2008 »
December 30, 2007 - January 5, 2008 Archives
Closing Arguments
Robert Borosage has a solid roundup of the Democrats' closing arguments as they head into Iowa. For my part, I think there are reasonable cases to be made for both Edwards and Obama. It still seems to me that absent the presumption of inevitability, there's little reason to prefer Clinton but she's defused most of my initial hostility to her. I congratulate the people who feel a high degree of confidence about their preferred candidates' "theory of change" or "electability" but from where I sit it's very hard to say who's right about that stuff. Mostly, though, I'm super-pessimistic that any of the stuff any of them are promising to pass will actually pass no matter who gets elected.
Photo by Flickr user Catherine Trigg used under a Creative Commons license
Mass Pike
I'd previously praised the Federal Highway Administration's list of songs about highways but looking more closely it doesn't even include "Mass Pike" by the Get-Up Kids so maybe big government doesn't work after all.
Big Game
I don't like to think that I'm single-handedly responsible for the Pats' big win, but looking back the momentum does seem to have shifted about exactly when I posted about the game. Oh well. I suppose on some level I'm glad to have seen history made. The fact that the Patriots have looked eminently beatable in several of their games will only make the playoffs more interesting.
Who To Blame
This was an interesting poll result I found on Polling Report showing that, contrary to the fears of some, the public is basically aware that the reason "congress" isn't getting anything done is that Republicans are preventing anything from happening. It is, however, a pretty outdated poll. Anyone seen anything more recent on this?
Risky Business
Steve Clemons observes that "the fact that the leading Democrat contenders had nothing to say about the Annapolis Summit raises legitimate questions about whether they have the commitment and wherewithal to tackle the complexity of America's defining challenge in this era." I think that's true. At the same time, the political calculus that led the leading candidates to completely ignore the summit is pretty straightforward. And I wouldn't really want to have a nominee (or, for that matter, a president) who couldn't do basic politics. In other words, you actually want a certain level of craveness from your political leaders. But you don't want too much. You want the person who'll take risks at the right time not the one who never takes risks or the one who shoots from the hip all the time.
Food for Thought
A few good things elsewhere:
That's all.
Manipulations
Elizabeth Bumiller leads her retrospective on Benazir Bhutto with wise words: "Benazir Bhutto always understood Washington more than Washington understood her." This is the kind of thing I was driving at when I observed that "it's much easier for Pakistani actors to manipulate US policy than the reverse." We don't have American political leaders who speak fluent Urdu, went to Pakistani schools, and count a wide swathe of influential members of the Pakistani elite as among their personal friends.
We can and should take steps to improve the US governing class' understanding of foreign countries, but we shouldn't have any illusions about our ability to totally upend the imbalance in Pakistani elites' ability to understand the US versus our elites' ability to understand Pakistan. Our efforts to meddle can have a big impact (since the United States is a very large, rich, and powerful country) but they seem unlikely to have the intended impact.
Sounds Good to Me
Kate Kaplan's vision of the future sounds pretty cool to me. She might be interested in my exploration of the population density of Trantor.
Suing HRC
It seems the RIAA believes it's illegal to rip CDs onto your computer:
The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
Radley Balko points out that Hillary Clinton has said that she has Beatles songs on her iPod, songs that she couldn't have purchased through the iTunes store, and wonders if the RIAA will show the courage of its convictions and sue her.
The Bhutto Party
Pakistan People's Party's new chairman will be a nineteen year-old whose main qualification is that he's Benazir Bhutto's son. I was going to say something snarky about how that reflects on the PPP's credentials as tribunes of liberalism and reform, but of course the odds of us going Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton in the White House look pretty good so there's really no call for jokes. The Times, meanwhile, looks further afield and refers to "an abiding dynastic streak in South Asian politics — three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have dominated politics in India, and hereditary politics pervade Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well."
What's It All About?
As usual with calls for less partisanship and more moderation, the striking thing about this new initiative is its vacuousness. There are two kinds of thing a centrist movement might reasonably stand for. One would be a middle-ground approach to issues -- "Democrats think federal revenues should be at X percent of GDP, Republicans think it should be at Y percent, but we say it should be at (X+Y)/2 percent of GDP." Another would be to hold a mish-mash of left-wing positions on some issues, and right-wing positions on others "we should reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 through a 100 percent auction of tradable emissions permits and we should privatize Social Security." One might, of course, also have a combination of the two sorts of things.
So what do we hear?
Well, according to Stu Loesser, press secretary for Michael Bloomberg, "As mayor, he has seen far too often how hyperpartisanship in Washington has gotten in the way of making progress on a host of issues." Which issues? And what would constitute progress on them? Loesser doesn't say. Similarly, David Boren says that "Our hope is that the candidates will respond with their own specific ideas about how to pull the country together, not just aim at getting out their own polarized base." This, though, is just talk about political strategies. And if both countries put forward policies designed to appeal to the median voter, the result will be . . . polarization and election outcomes that hinge on the mobilization of one's base. Missing from Boren's account is any hint of what kinds of positions he thinks are being squeezed out in the current dynamic.
And there's the rub. There are only two political parties. Under the circumstances, polarization is all but inevitable. Third parties, meanwhile, never succeed in the United States but do often wind up having an impact on the course of events. But to have an impact, you have to have some kind of point of view that you're advancing. Big-time third party candidacies -- Strom Thurmond 1948, George Wallace 1968, Ross Perot 1992 -- aren't based on generic appeals to bringing the country together, they're based on policy agendas that neither major party reflects. You could imagine a third party campaign based on Ron Paul's brand of libertarian nationalism, but all Boren, Bloomberg, et. al. have are platitudes.
Your Year in Iraq Predictions
A year from now there will still be over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq.
If You've Got Nothing Nice to Say
I just hope The New York Times Book Review is as kind to my book when the time comes as they were to Jonah Goldberg (of course, realistically we're all just desperately hoping to be reviewed at all): "Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars." Yes, that's right, Liberal Fascism is a step away from the nastiness of the culture wars. The reviewer, David Oshinsky, does concede that Goldberg's main thesis is false but that didn't seem to bother him.
I actually would be somewhat interested to hear what Sherri Berman, author of The Primacy of Politics thinks about the Goldberg Thesis, since her book does posit common roots of fascism and social democracy (which she prefers to and distinguishes from progressive liberalism) in the revisionist Marxist movement of the pre-WWI era.
The Huckabee Void
On a Christmas Eve CNBC broadcast that I'm sure nobody watched, John Fund and I wound up agreeing that there was something remarkably vacuous to Mike Huckabee's economic populism. It doesn't even rise to the level of a lie the way George W. Bush's "different kind of Republican" schtick did in 2000 -- there's just nothing there. Earlier on the same show, John Harwood had interviewed Huckabee, went over Huckabee's dislike for outlandish CEO pay and the outsourcing of jobs, then asked Huckabee what he planned to do about it as president. Well, the answer turned out to be nothing.
At any rate, via Ambinder, the governor explains that he doesn't need policy proposals to be a worthwhile presidential candidate: "I can hire people, once I raise the money, who can come up with all kinds of proposals. That's fine. That's good. But the real question is: Am I going to be able to be a leader? You know there is a difference between a leader and a manager." But no. Leadership is, yes, an important part of the job of being president. But there's no such thing as generic "leadership" people need to know what sort of thing you want to do. That doesn't mean detailed legislative language on every aspect of your agenda, but you need to say something about what your top priorities are and what general direction you want to move in.
Tariq Ali on the Future
I'd never found Tariq Ali's thoughts on international relations particularly enlightening, though he's always had a great prose style. On the ins-and-outs of Pakistani politics, however, he's been consistent must-reading throughout the crisis. The latest:
Some of us had hoped that, with her death, the People's Party might start a new chapter. After all, one of its main leaders, Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Bar Association, played a heroic role in the popular movement against the dismissal of the chief justice. Mr Ahsan was arrested during the emergency and kept in solitary confinement. He is still under house arrest in Lahore. Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck.
The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later. Mr Zardari was loathed by many activists and held responsible for his wife's downfall. Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers except for its most reactionary segment: bandwagon careerists desperate to make a fortune.
It's hard to tell if that prediction of a split should be read as a genuine prediction or else just an expression of what he hopes will happen, since it's clear that Ali doesn't care for Nawaz Sharif and views himself as a PPP supporter of sorts.
Kristol's In
I've heard some complaints about it, but I actually think The New York Times's coverage of The New York Times's crazy decision to add Bill Kristol to their stable of op-ed columnists is pretty good:
Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions.
In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not “a first-rate newspaper of record,” adding, “The Times is irredeemable.”
I wonder what I need to say in order to get a column: Maybe the Times's editors should be detained without trial in Gitmo and tortured until they confess to deliberately running a second-rate newspaper in order to undermine American resolve. Does that work?
Quitting Time
Last year, after two failed attempts earlier in life, I decided to quit smoking as my New Year's resolution. I was a pretty heavy smoker, picked it up when I was sixteen, did about a pack a day through college, and then stepped it up to more like a pack and a half a day plus some more on top of that on heavy partying nights after I graduated. Thus far, I've been totally on the wagon, smoke free since around 4AM on 1 January 2007.
Continue reading "Quitting Time" »
Belief
I, for one, believe Daniel Pipes when he says he's not a child molester. It does seem to me that widespread belief that he's a child molester might hamper his career, but he says he's no child molester so I'll believe him when he says he doesn't molest children.
Wire and Reality
The new Atlantic has a really great article on The Wire by Mark Bowden that we're releasing early -- and for free -- online in light of the pending debut of season five. Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the stuff covered in the beginning of Bowden's article -- best show ever, etc. -- but he goes quite a bit deeper than other profiles, getting into the ways in which the show, despite its "realism" departs quite a bit from reality but doesn't suffer as drama as well as offering a real under-the-hood look at some of the Baltimore media issues that will be the subject of season five.
Bowden's got a background in the Charm City newspaper world just like Simon and it gives him a perspective you don't get elsewhere. Check it out.
More F.U.s
Jackson Diehl starts his latest column on a promising note: "For five years Washington-based officials and pundits have repeatedly made the mistake of predicting that the next six or 12 months in Iraq would be decisive." He then, however, just goes on to engage in the same fallacy: "Yet, for once, saying that the next six to 12 months will win or lose the war just might be right." And it becomes even less promising from there:
The number of American soldiers in Iraq started coming down last month. By July it will have dropped from the peak of 180,000 it reached briefly in November to 130,000, or 15 brigades, the force level before the surge. The Pentagon has until March to judge how Iraqis react to the initial withdrawals -- whether violence in volatile places such as Anbar province remains low or escalates again as U.S. troops depart. Then another decision will be made, on whether to reduce the force by five more brigades, to a total of about 100,000 troops, by the end of 2008.
This decision ought to be based entirely on whether Iraq's progress can continue with an American force 40 percent smaller than it was at the surge's peak. But external politics is already intruding: Gen. George Casey, the architect of the failed U.S. military strategy in Iraq pre-Petraeus, is already pushing for the full reduction, on the grounds that the Army needs to reduce its exposure in Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose strategic preoccupation has been arriving at a force level in Iraq that could win bipartisan acceptance in Washington, has said publicly that he'd like to hit the 100,000 target.
The idea that America's policy toward Iraq "ought to be based entirely" on conditions in Iraq, and that anything else constitutes the intrusion of "external politics" is really foolish. When considering US policy toward Iraq -- or toward Mexico or Afghanistan or Kenya or Pakistan or Russia or wherever else -- we have to try to do the right thing all things considered. To observe that were we willing to commit an unlimited quantity of resources to the country for an unlimited period of time we might be able to improve conditions in Iraq is silly. Suppose we dedicated infinite resources to security and economic development in nearby Haiti? Or Jamaica -- slightly further away, but conveniently inhabited by English-speakers? Our willingness to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Jamaica forever and ever ought to be based entirely on the crime and unemployment rate of Kingston, but unfortunately external politics is already starting to intrude.
But, of course, nobody would write something like that. But if General Casey thinks we need to expeditiously reduce our force levels in Iraq to 100,000 in order to rescue the Army from dangerous "overexposure" to Iraq, isn't that worth taking seriously on the merits? Diehl doesn't seem to want to grapple with it, but Casey and the joint chiefs seem to me to believe that because it's true. Now Diehl also says that if we reduce to that level, the security gains of the "surge" are likely to go away. I tend to agree with that as well. Which is what makes the surge so foolish -- why embark on an unsustainable course of action? Certainly it's what makes talk of the surge's success so foolish. The goal, after all, was to put Iraq on a sustainable path. But the surge force levels aren't sustainable. And the security gains are unlikely to be sustainable if we move our force levels to a sustainable level.
That's not "external politics" meddling with a solid plan, it's reality crashing down.
DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Sean Mulligan, U.S. Navy
Blame the Constitution
As Scott Lemieux says there is a real obstacle to "getting things done" legislatively in the United States, and it's not partisanship, it's the institutions of American government which are specifically designed to operate in a small-c conservative manner. Many people think this is a good thing. My view is that it's a bad thing. But either way, it's a fundamental aspect of our politics -- we operate in a system with many more veto points than exist in many other countries. If you worry that not enough "gets done" that's where you need to point the blame.
Helping Hands
BryklynLibrul demands speculation about the possible impact of a third party wanker ticket: "If this turns out to be serious, who does it help, the GOP or the Dems? Idle speculation at this point, but I'm curious to know what MY and others think."
The cop-out answer is that it depends on who the nominees are.
But taking a wide-angle view, the rise of a serious third party challenge typically signifies the collapse of the incumbent governing coalition. Certainly Perot in 1992, Wallace in 1968, and Roosevelt in 1912, Van Buren in 1848 fit that pattern, and Strom Thurmond in 1948 probably does as well. But that's not to say that the third party insurgent always helps the challenger party. The Humphrey-Nixon race in '68 ended up extremely close and it seems reasonable to assume that the bulk of the Wallace vote would have gone to Nixon (as it did in 1972) had he not been in the race. And it can get even more complicated, as Perot's presence in the 1992 race probably helped Bill Clinton win the election but there's good reason to think he could have won even without Perot, and in a one-on-one fight maybe could have secured a majority and thus had a stronger hand dealing with congress in 1993.
Now, of course, the weird thing about Bloombergism is that there's no sign that he's filling an open ideological niche. Pat Buchanan, by contrast, drew half a percentage point in 2000 at a time when his campaign didn't really have much of a rationale. By 2008, immigration is going to be a higher-salience issue, economic populism will have a larger constituency, and nationalist anti-war sentiment will have gone unrepresented in mainstream politics throughout years of failed war-fighting. You could imagine either Buchanan or, perhaps more likely Ron Paul, having a real impact. Otherwise, there's really nothing doing.
The Nature of the Threat
I know some people feel that the Celtics have had a soft schedule, but I feel like the extent to which they're dominating the league isn't well appreciated. But to get a taste, look at what Dave Berri noted a couple of days ago: "The Bulls in 1995-96 won 72 games and posted a differential of 13.0. This is the best mark in the league since 1973-74. The Celtics currently have a differential of 14.9. Yes, the current Celtics are posting a better mark than the team considered the best in NBA history. To give this result even more perspective, the Spurs differential this season is 6.9 (which is very good). Still the Spurs mark is only about half of what we see from Boston."
And of course that was before yesterday's 19 point win on the road against the Lakers. Right now, the Celtics average margin of victory -- around 14 -- is leaving everyone else in the dust. It's not just the best in the Association, they're putting up historically great numbers:
Of course that same table shows that not every team that starts out better than the '96 Bulls ends up with a better record than the '96 Bulls. But coming on the heels of the Patriots' perfect regular season and the Red Sox' World Series win, decent non-Boston people need to seriously contemplate the possibility of a record-breaking Celtics season. And, indeed, of all the Boston sports triumphs the Celtics are surely the most egregious: Kevin McHale trades away one of the best players in the league for peanuts. To his former team. Whose general manager is an ex-teammate and good friend. After having rejected numerous better offers. In any well-run fantasy league that would have gotten vetoed.
DC Schools
I'm with The New Republic in favoring efforts to make it easier to fire employees at the inept DC Public Schools central administrative office. I don't, howeve,r see why one would frame the issue this way:
Only three members of the 13-person board--one of them was Marion Barry--sided against Rhee. In short, the sclerotic establishment can no longer count on its old political patrons. And her victory was an important object lesson for other cities: Reformers can now battle the teachers' unions--and trounce them.
Back in the real world, this was a pretty mild reform limited to non-union employees. The public sector unions are bound to oppose it, of course, but the proposal was designed to minimize opposition, thus maximizing the odds of it passing and something useful actually getting done for DC kids. Framing every reform effort as a death blow to the unions seems like a good way to make sure reform efforts fail. Meanwhile, the reality is that the Washington Teachers Union is a relatively weak union. People know that DCPS is a low-performing system by big city standards, and people "know" that strong teachers unions are responsible for urban school systems being bad, so it just must be the case that DC's schools are bad because of a super-strong union.
Constitutional Amendments
Tim Russert apparently thinks it's hypocritical to believe it's sometimes a good idea to make them.
Rocking the Boat
This effort from Stuart Rothenberg really makes me hope John Edwards wins. The best part is when he explains that working class voters should fear Edwards because his populist rhetoric will case stock market declines:
Scare the stuffing out of Corporate America and watch the stock market tumble. That’s certain to make retirement funds – including those owned by labor unions and “working families” – happy, right?
Uh huh. Look. If you think Edwards' substantive policies are radically left-wing and bound to crush the national economy then, obviously, people have no good reason to vote for him -- working class or otherwise (for the record, the vast majority of stocks are owned by a small minority of very wealthy people). But Rothenberg doesn't so much as try to make the case. After all, it's a hard case to make. It's an especially hard case to make since Rothenberg wants to negatively contrast Edwards with the more mainstream talk coming from Clinton and Obama. But they all have similar policies. But to Rothernberg, the main thing is that we don't want anyone who'll say mean things to those poor little CEOs. We all feel super-sorry for them, sure.
UPDATE: I actually probably should have said this more seriously -- if Edwards wins in Iowa by running left and pissing people off, that'll be a good thing for the world. By contrast, while there's a lot I like about Barack Obama, if he wins Iowa it won't have been by running hard on the things I like best about him.
Speaking Ill
Via Robert Farley, a brilliant 1863 editorial by The New York Times on what they mistakenly believed to be the occassion of John C. Breckenridge's death. First sentence: "If it be true, as is now positively declared, that a loyal bullet has sent this traitor to eternity, every loyal heart will feel satisfaction and will not scruple to express it."
Local Taxes Down
One problem we have in the United States is that so much of public revenue and spending is in the hands of state and local governments who are set up to run strongly pro-cyclical fiscal policies. When times get tough, revenues go down. Thus, instead of increasing spending to help tide people over during the downturn, balanced budget rules force spending to go down which tends to deepen the downcycle. With the downturn in the housing market, we're seeing a somewhat different spin on this as the mortgage collapse leads to declining property tax revenues. It's not clear yet to what extent these housing issues are going to spill over into the jobs and income picture -- so far a well-timed uptick in exports seems to be keeping people employed -- but the tax side is one of several mechanisms by which it threatens to do so, undermining local budgets even in the absence of a recession.
Photo by Flickr user jffmrk used under a Creative Commons license
Happy Near Year!
I'm not, of course, actually at my computer blogging right now. Rather, I'm getting drunk at a party and this is a prescheduled post. What are you doing?
Register Poll
I think I'm going to outsource my NYE Des Moines Register poll blogging to my distinguished colleague Marc Ambinder who has some doubts about the partisan composition of the sample.
Who Rules Iran?
Borzou Daragahi writes in The Los Angeles Times that the Iranian clerical establishment is losing power and influence vis-a-vis other groups in the military, the bureaucracy, and the business world.
Eco Hat
I was reading in Dwell about the Oxley Woods development in England and the distinctive "eco-hat" package of solar and other technological contrivances that allow for a large gain in energy efficiency at low monetary costs. The article doesn't seem to be online, but this website has a decent explanation of the project. The whole subject of green architecture is one I find pretty fascinating. In this and other cases, it turns out that a lot of the work is being done not by technology as such (thought obviously technology matters) but by design -- simply doing the architecture with an eye to the energy use implications of the plan.
That kind of thing makes green architectural schemes well worth public investment. Given the appropriate financial incentives, firms can come up with different kinds of ways to meet the projects goals. But once the work's been done, the underlying design principles simply add to the general stock of human knowledge and become something that other firms can borrow or improve upon.
Al Jefferson's Inefficiency
When I was complaining about the sweetheart deal that Kevin McHale gave to the Celtics, some people were defending it in comments. At the center of any such defense is, necessarily, an overrating of Al Jefferson. Make no mistake, he's a pretty nice player. In particular, he's a very good rebounder. Even here, though, a simple look at 12.1 boards per game -- good for fourth in the league -- is a bit misleading. Look at him in terms of rebounds per 48 minutes or rebound rate and he drops down a bit.
But it's on the scoring front where Jefferson's status as a solid 20-10 guy looks most suspect. His usage rate is sky-high and he plays a lot of minutes per game. That bumps up his points per game despite the fact that, as you can see above, his shooting efficiency is kind of unimpressive for a center. One doesn't want to overstate the case here, he's obviously a nice prospect. But there's reason to think he's not really as nice as he seems -- surrounded by terrible players in Minnesota they're giving him tons of shots and he's scoring some, but other prospects on this list (Biedrens and Bynum come to mind especially) might well be putting up better numbers in Jefferson's situation.
No More "War on Terror"
The UK drops the label. There have actually been several moves over the years from within the US bureaucracy to do the same thing. The Republican Party, though, is clearly addicted to the "war" mentality. And when the Democrats were given an opportunity to disavow it, only John Edwards would. It seems to me that few if any policymakers on the Democratic side actually believe that this sort of conceptual framework is a helpful way to think about things, but knowing the right answer to questions is of limited value if political leaders aren't going to do anything about it.
The Possibly Not Coming Storm
Ross Douthat previews the next great conservative crack-up:
It's true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan's successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the "rally round Romney" effect. And it's true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely, and already, in the wake of just a single midterm-election debacle, it's obvious that the Norquistians and neocons and social conservatives aren't inevitable allies - that many tax-cutters and foreign-policy hawks, for instance, would happily screw over their Christian-Right allies to nominate Rudy Giuliani; or that many social conservatives don't give a tinker's dam what the Club for Growth thinks about Mike Huckabee's record. (So too with the neocon yearning for a McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would arguably represent a far more radical remaking of the GOP coalition than anything Chuck Hagel has to offer.) The "movement" institutions, from the think tanks to talk radio, have resisted these fissiparous tendencies, and if Mitt Romney wins the nomination they'll be able to claim a temporary victory. But if the GOP continues to suffer at the polls, in '08 and beyond, the (right-of) center can't be expected to hold, and the result will be a struggle for power that's likely to leave the conservative movement changed, considerably, from the way that Tomasky finds it today.
To which I say: Maybe!
Seriously, I sometimes do think that'll happen. Alternatively, maybe Romney gets the nomination and Romney gets beaten pretty badly. Then maybe conservatives say he was done in by (a) flip-flopping, (b) anti-Mormon bias, (c) bad political headwinds and decide nothing really needs to be done. Then, the congressional GOP just realizes that the conservative movement is really more comfortable in a quasi-opposition role, sets about using the filibuster and the timidity of the remaining southern Democratic senators to make the country ungovernable, does well in the 2010 midterms, and everything just kind of keeps on keeping on. It could happen. One's natural desire, as an observer of the political scene, is for something dramatic and interesting to happen. And sometimes something dramatic and interesting does happen. And it really might happen. The signs are there. But then again, it might not.
Romney and Institutional Power
Andrew Sullivan recommends David Brooks' thoughts on Mitt Romney: "The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn." That seems about right. In the progressive blogosphere, this idea circulates under the heading "iron law of institutions" which posits that institutional leaders care more about their own power within the institution than about the institution's power in the world.
It strikes me as a largely accurate characterization of the choice.
That said, to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.
The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.
Legitimacy
I can't say anything about the situation in Kenya beyond what I read in the papers but it does speak in some ways to the misguided embrace of "democracy" as the key indicator for political development. The idea of an effective democracy presupposes the idea of a broad consensus about the legitimate decision-making unit. Viewed in those terms, the noteworthy thing about Kenya isn't so much that there was a closely contested election marred by credible allegations of fraud followed by something of a popular uprising against the regime, but the fact that there's such substantial support for the incumbent anyway: "Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between the neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election [...] the no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands."
If Kikuyus feel that their main loyalty should be toward the Kikuyu then there mere fact that the Kikuyu may be outnumbered by the Luos isn't going to carry much weight. In the US, pretty much everyone thinks of themselves as owing primary allegiance to the United States. But it wasn't always thus. During the Civil War, at least some Southerners agreed to abide by the decisions of their respective state governments to secede without necessarily believing that secession was the best move on the merits. These days, the number of Americans who seriously contest the legitimacy of the United States of America as a decision-making unit is trivial, which is what makes things like Orson Scott Card's Empire so preposterous.
But that sense of agreement about the legitimate level of decision-making doesn't just happen inevitably because you live in the same borders with some other people. In Iraq, clearly, you don't have it just as Chechens seem disinclined to treat "Russia" as a legitimate unit and just as how the Irish in the early 20th century didn't view their right to elect members of parliament in Westminster as adequate compensation for the absence of national self-determination.
Enthusiasm Gap
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this observation from MSNBC's first read, but it sure is interesting: "Yesterday, we spent some time with the so-called second tier on the Dem side. The most striking thing: the crowd sizes. Biden and Richardson seem to get similar crowds as the GOP front-runners." Along the same lines, it seems to me that undecided progressives tend to be undecided because they see merit to more than one candidate (often including some affection for at least one out of the Biden/Dodd/Richardson tier) whereas undecided conservatives tend to be lamenting their poor options.
Again, I don't know exactly what the upshot of this dynamic is, but it seems like a noteworthy turn of events. Along the same lines, what you see on the Democratic side is basically people with similar ideas arguing about who's best situated to put those ideas into practice. On the Republican side, you have people arguing over their ideological bona fides. It's as if Democrats are trying to pick a leader who'll get things done, while conservatives just want to find a sacrificial lamb who doesn't call the orthodoxy into question.
Beyond Health Care
David Leonhardt makes an effort to get at the domestic policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that go beyond the health insurance mandates issue. According to Leonhardt, Clinton is a great fan of, er, Clintonian initiative that involve narrowly targeted efforts to alter incentives. Obama, by contrast, is more influenced by behavioral economics research that tends to suggest a blunter approach may work better. He illustrates the point with an example from retirement policy:
Her retirement tax credit, for example, would match the first $1,000 saved by couples making less than $60,000. For those making from $60,000 to $100,000, the match would be 50 cents on the dollar. To Mrs. Clinton, these policies are more efficient than old-style bureaucracy and less expensive than across-the-board tax cuts. [...] The problem with Mrs. Clinton savings plan, according to the Obama view, is that many people won’t save even when they are offered subsidies to do so. After all, many workers who are eligible for 401(k) matching funds don’t take advantage of them now.
So Mr. Obama would instead require companies to deduct money automatically from their employees’ paychecks and place it in a savings account the employee owned. Employees could opt out of the program. But if they did nothing, they would end up saving money. It’s an idea that comes directly from academic research showing that savings rates have jumped when individual companies have adopted such plans.
I'm definitely with Obama on this specific question. I'm not sure, though, that it really works out as a general account. Leonhardt, for example, tries to shoehorn the mandates issue into this frame but I don't think I'm convinced that's really what's going on there. My impression is that at the end of the day you'd actually have a similar group of people shaping economic policy in either person's administration.
Fouad al-Farhan
It seems the Saudi government has arrested their country's most popular blogger. This site -- Free Fouad -- has been set up to support him. In policy terms, it seems to me that the conversation tends to veer from the idea of supporting "our bastards" in countries like Saudi Arabia to the idea of trying to transform them into democracies. The latter would be nice, but doesn't really seem possible. That still leaves us, however, with the possibility of not being so deeply in bed with these kind of regimes.
Only in America
Tom Lantos, upon announcing his retirement from congress, offers up this bit of boilerplate: "It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress." Jonathan Zasloff correctly notes that this isn't true: Leon Blum and Brun Kreisky survived the Holocaust and served as Prime Ministers of France and Austria respectively: "This reminds me of Joe Lieberman's self-congratulatory acceptance speech at the 2000 Democratic Convention, where he also said that his story could happen 'only in America.' That's just wrong."
There's something very strange about this particular brand of American exceptionalism that takes genuine, positive things about the United States (many opportunities for Jewish people!) and then falsely transmogrifies them into unique attributes of the United States. It's a strange tick, because it's clearly not really meant to be taken literally. At a minimum, I'm sure Lantos is aware that "Jewish refugee becomes politician" is something that could happen in Israel. And yet convention dictates that if one wants to refer to one's personal story as illustrating some good thing about the United States one must insist that only in America do these good things happen. Would it really kill us to acknowledge that good things happen elsewhere.
The Wages of Naderism
That egomaniacal and absurd Ralph Nader is considering another run for president makes sense to me. But why John Nicols would write above this idea in such a favorable manner is beyond me. If you think that what the left needs to pursue is a Leninist strategy of deliberately bringing about Republican victories then, fine, cheer Nader on. But otherwise, any conceivable assemblage of people and organization would have a more constructive impact in the context of a primary campaign -- even a losing primary campaign can shift discussion in the direction of its leader's views.
Mickey Kaus is Making Sense
This seems quite true to me:
Do I detect a tacit media conspiracy to make the Iowa caucuses inconclusive, and even irrelevant? I'm for that! ... P.S.: It's like the moment in mafia stories when the cops just get tired of the mobsters they've been corruptly cooperating with for years and decide it's time to kill them. ... The Iowa caucuses--shot while trying to escape. ...
One sort of needs to abstract away from the contingencies of 2008 to grasp the evils of Iowa. As things happen, John Edwards is much stronger in Iowa than he is anywhere else and Edwards has had a very beneficial impact on this campaign (we'll all be indebted to him even if he loses in ways that I think haven't been widely appreciated) so that's all to the good. But in a broader sense, giving Iowa such outsized importance is harmful and bizarrely arbitrary -- the press created the caucuses and could easily enough destroy them in the future. Could and probably should. If in 2012 I don't need to read any more paens to how only people who live in all-white overwhelmingly rural states could as "real" Americans, I'll certainly be a happy customer.
Variations on a Theme
Since the point of an election campaign is for the candidate to say "vote for me and not the other guy" the tendency is for differences to become exaggerated, especially as the partisans of one or the other candidate start drawing lines in the sand. But I think my former editor Harold Meyerson nails the fundamental similarity between Barack Obama and John Edwards, arguing that the former is running more like an early twentieth century Progressive while Edwards is running more like a Populist, but "Obama is a rather populist progressive, a onetime community organizer who understands the power of organized popular protest. And Edwards is a progressive populist, heir to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, not William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long." Which isn't to say that are no differences in the Democratic field but rather, as Meyerson says, that it's a far cry from some of the hotly contested Democratic primaries of yore when large ideological choices were clearly on the table.
Train in Vain
I'm glad to see the Democratic debate turn once again to the subject of Iraq and national security issues where I think there may be more substantive differences between the candidates than you see on the domestic sphere. In an interview with The New York Times's Michael Gordon, for example, John Edwards underscores his opposition to a prolonged US "training" mission that would keep the US military engaged in Iraq's civil conflicts for an extended period of time. I think Edwards is completely correct on this (see, e.g. Brian Katulis' "Killing the Patient") but it's an issue that lots of Democrats in good standing are divided about and thus something it makes sense to have the candidates debating.
The Obama and Clinton campaigns seem to me to be deliberately trying to stay vague on forward-looking Iraq issues, the better to keep their options open for the campaign and for governing purposes. That makes sense, obviously, and there's a decent chance either of them would wind up doing the right thing in the end, but it's even better to see a candidate who's willing to actually stake out that position.
US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
The Bloc That Wasn't There
There's too much in this Barnett Rubin post on Pakistan to even try to summarize (always the sign of a good piece) so read it yourself. I'll just pull out one insight he offers about the way the United States (I think it's unfair to make this out to be an idiosyncratic failing of the Bush administration) sees the world:
The Bush administration has decided that in the "Muslim world" a battle is going on between pro-American "moderates" and anti-American "extremists." According to them, the "Muslim world" has a two-party system organized around how Muslims feel about America. In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf is a "pro-American moderate." Benazir Bhutto is a "pro-American moderate." Therefore it is only logical (and in U.S. interests!) for the U.S. to realign Pakistan politics so that the "moderates" work together against the "extremists.
To America, in short, the defining issue in Pakistani politics is . . . people's attitude toward America. But of course that's not how it looks in Pakistan, where "it is not just a random problem that the 'pro-American moderate' institution headed by General Musharraf executed Benazir's father and held her for years in solitary confinement." In short, Pakistani actors and institutions need to be understood in terms of their own interests and goals. Meanwhile, Pakistan's elections are going to be delayed until February, but the real issue would seem to be less the timing of the election than the extent to which the security services will try to rig them.
Elections aside, one thing Rubin emphasizes is the extent to which the military has tended to allow civilian rule just insofar as military retains control over everything it cares about.
Pinky and Me
Tim Noah offers up the ultimate Benazir Bhutto college remembrances parody column.
For my part, I met Prince Hamzah bin al-Hussein of Jordan when we were at Harvard and he was the Crown Prince. He didn't strike me as a particularly appealing person on any level. Nevertheless, all this Bhutto business did leave me looking forward to the day when I could reminisce about the King. It turns out, though, that he was removed from the position in 2004. Tragic stuff. I don't think anyone else I know from school is likely to become a dictator anywhere.
Rudy's Foreign Policy
It increasingly looks like the perils of a Rudy Giuliani administration are behind us, but nevertheless The American Conservative's cover story on Giuliani's foreign policy team by Michael Desch is pretty great nonetheless. The part about Steven Peter Rosen and hegemony is especially interesting. Desch quotes Rosen as saying "successful imperial governance must focus on maintaining and increasing, if possible, the initial advantage in the ability to generate military power." But he also has him going further, making an odd connection between hegemonism and his view of human nature, quoting a piece Rosen wrote years back rejecting Bush's call for a "humble" foreign policy:
Humility is always a virtue, but the dominant male atop any social hierarchy, human or otherwise, never managed to rule simply by being nice. Human evolutionary history has produced a species that both creates hierarchies and harbors the desire among subordinates to challenge its dominant member. Those challenges never disappear. The dominant member can never do everything that subordinates desire, and so it is blamed for what it does not do as much as for what it does.
Thus evolution shows that we have to rigorously ignore the views and interests of other countries. I guess. Maybe. Desch also persuasively argues that Charles Hill, often seen as a non-neocon member of the squad, has in fact moved over the years to a position very much in line with the rest of Team Rudy.
The Secret Anti-War McCain
Ramesh Ponnuru makes the case that the GOP would be in better shape had they gone with John McCain in 2000. That seems plausible to me. Then things get interesting when Andy McCarthy says:
Interesting question. McCain might have prosecuted the war in Iraq better, especially the aftermath of Saddam's ouster; but would he have invaded Iraq in the first place? I'd bet no. I realize he was very supportive of the Bush policy, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the policy he'd have made if he'd been president. He'd surely have ratcheted up the pressure on Saddam, but I think he'd have been more open to persuasion by the State Department, the Defense Department and the Europeans not to do pull the trigger. After all, the major personnel throughout a McCain administration would have been importantly different, and I doubt they would have been as inclined toward the view that Saddam had to be removed. I'm not trying to make a judgment about the comparative wisdom here — just hazarding a guess on what might have been.
That sounds totally wrong to me. My impression of McCain is that though he was a believer in restraint back in the 1980s, that by 2000 he was the neocon in the race. There was a reason, after all, why Bill Kristol and so forth were supporting him and it wasn't Kristol's commitment to campaign finance reform. Indeed, my recollection is that back during the period between 9/11 and when the Bush administration began its formal push for the Iraq AUMF that McCain was, along with Joe Lieberman one of the leading legislative proponents of regime change.
But McCarthy knows a lot more about the world of conservative national security thinkers than I do. If there's any evidence out there that McCain might not be the dyed-in-the-wool hawk he appears to be, I'd be interested to know it. It might make his seeming comeback in New Hampshire look less frightening.
More War for Rudy
Rudy Giuliani will apparently attempt to revive his flagging campaign with calls for more war. In particular, since the surge in Iraq has been so awesome, Rudy wants a surge in Afghanistan as well. Logistics? Rudy doesn't worry about 'em: "When asked from where the troops would come, Mr. Hill did not rule in or rule out reducing the size of the American presence in Iraq, but he also stressed that the troop level in Iraq should be based on the security needs there."
He's also calling on us to wage virtual war against al-Qaeda's websites, which he does concede to be "a tricky one, both from an international jurisdiction perspective (almost all of these sites are hosted on servers in foreign countries) and because there is some intelligence value to monitoring the sites."
Orexin A
It seems scientists have discovered that snorting a nasal spray including a hormone called Orexin A "reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests." One of the researcher describes the effects as "relatively benign," which seems a bit menacing to me.
Rising to the Occasion
I want to recommend the whole transcript of Michael Gordon's interview with John Edwards. Gordon asks him a bunch of tough, skeptical, well-informed questions. And Edwards answers them well. It's not just an interesting interview that casts Edwards in a good light, but really in a lot of ways shines a light on how political reporting could be made about a thousand times more useful to readers -- Gordon knows what he's talking about and eschews softballs, but at the same time he's respectful like he and his audience would actually like to hear John Edwards explain why he's changed his mind about Iraq over time rather than use the question to nail him to the wall.
The Horrors of Iowa
Here's a good piece by Jeff Greenfield that explains a bit about why the Iowa Caucuses are such a terrible way to pick a presidential nominee. Basically, there were never intended to be a good way to pick a presidential nominee:
George McGovern in 1972, and Jimmy Carter more successfully in 1976, made the Iowa caucuses a pre-New Hampshire test of political strength. And then they became in effect a "pre-primary primary," which bring to the state tens of millions of dollars and massive media overkill. In the process, the original purpose of the caucuses—to conduct party business and to talk over local concerns—became completely overwhelmed by the presidential frenzy for which they're so ill-suited. As Drake University professor Dennis Goldford notes, "The presidential preference just began as something piggybacking on an ordinary set of party functions, and it's been blown way out of proportion."
Ah, America.
Fascists in the American Legion?
American Legion communications director John Raughter denies Jonah Goldberg's allegations that his outfit was "founded as an essentially fascist organization."
Juno's Politics
[This post contains spoilers] I keep thinking about Ross's post on the politics of Juno and his contention that:
None of this means that movie is a brief for overturning Roe v. Wade; far from it. But like Knocked Up, it's decidedly a brief for not getting an abortion.
I really don't know. I mean, consider alternatives. There's no way to make a movie about a single woman and her unplanned pregnancy if you make the unplanned pregnancy end with an early abortion the way most such pregnancies end. But it can't be that the mere act of telling the story of a non-abortion constitutes a "brief" for getting not getting an abortion. And much of the plot of Juno is consistent with everything going awry after Mark and Venessa break up. If things had gone awry, you would have wound up with a very different film in terms of this alleged anti-abortion message -- you'd have something about how even leaving aside the inconvenience, etc., adoption is no panacea.
Instead, that all ends up happily and Juno even finds true love. But it's that -- the positive outcome rather than the portrayal of the decision itself -- that lends the film something of an anti-abortion quality. Like Knocked Up it's a film where a woman decides not to have an abortion under circumstances where an abortion seemed like a likely outcome, and then despite some difficulties it all winds up well in the end. But is this really a political message, or is it just Hollywood sentimentality? If it's the former, then it winds up being a pretty dumb message.
It would be a message that posits that the whole phenomenon of abortion in the United States is a kind of giant analytical error on the part of American women -- tons and tons of them are getting pregnant and having abortions because they think carrying the pregnancy to term would have very bad consequences for their lives, but actually they're mistaken. You might think your unplanned pregnancy would hurt your career as an on-air television personality, but really it will advance your career! You might think your parents will be mad and your friends will ostracize you, but really they'll all be supportive! Best of all, sticking with your unplanned pregnancy is solid ticket to love and marriage! But at the end of the day, it's really just silly to suppose that any huge proportion of abortions are mistakes like that.
The crux of the political problem for the anti-abortion movement is that pro-life activists think that a woman should be legally required to carry her pregnancy to term whether or not the consequences of doing so are likely to be negative. If making an effective "brief" for not having an abortion requires you to just posit that the non-abortion path will work out super-well, then you're simply not engaging the argument. Juno's family and friends are helpful and supportive and good for them and good for her. And Alison Scott's employers are enthusiastic about her pregnancy. But what about teenage girls whose parents aren't helpful and supportive? What about women whose careers really would be imperiled by a pregnancy? Those women are the real subjects of the abortion controversy and I don't think Juno or Knocked Up really has anything to say about them. Which doesn't harm them as light comedies, but does, I think, totally undermine efforts to construe them as having important political messages.
David Simon and the Audacity of Despair
Reihan Salam critiques The Wire: "David Simon thinks he’s constructed a critique of capitalism, but in fact he’s prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference."
I think that's right. What's more, based on what I've heard David Simon say about politics, while he and I are clearly "on the same side" in some sense, I don't really agree with him about very much in detail. Fundamentally, I think his vision of the bleak urban dystopia and its roots is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear. That said, I think the show succeeds not in spite of these lacunae in Simon's political vision, but almost because of them. Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic comedies, not big-time drama.
And I think everyone recognizes that on some level. But part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. While departing from both reality and realism in any number of ways, The Wire is resolutely committed to verisimilitude in a way that almost no other show is. The result is the creation of a world -- Simon's Baltimore -- that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.
In political terms it's a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky's, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of "normal" arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit. And at the end of the day, it's a television show not a treatise on urban policy. If some viewers are taking it too literally as a statement of truth, that's on them much more than it is on Simon.
The Mission Matters
What A.J. Rosmiller said about the significance of John Edwards' pledge to back away from the training mission in Iraq and how troubling it is that the Clinton and Obama campaigns haven't really engaged this debate. I would only add that Edwards actually has talked about this on a few occasions previous to his interview with Michael Gordon, it's just that there hasn't really been much press interest in pursuing it further.
Less Than Zero
I'm not quite sure I get why Jessica Valenti seems to think a "real doll" rental service is actually any creepier than the core real dolls product in the first place. It seems to me that the basic concept pretty much maxes out the creepometer and it doesn't really get worse under alternative permutations.
Wannabes for Obama
Via Chris Bowers, some indication that Joe Biden and Bill Richardson will urge their supporters to back Barack Obama in precincts where they're not viable. Why? One bit of speculation I've picked up is that it's Hillary Clinton's close relationship with Richard Holbrooke. The 2004 rumor mill had the competition for John Kerry's Secretary of State gig going to either Biden or Holbrooke, with the jostling getting ugly at points. But Holbrooke's thought to have Clinton locked down. So an Obama win would be Biden's best shot at moving into Foggy Bottom.
Alternatively, Biden may think that his combination of whiteness and experience is just what a Nominee Obama would be looking for in a Vice President, while if one squints at it right would could even see the argument that Richardson has the right combination of non-whiteness (there's some thought that Latinos won't be excited about a black candidate) and experience to be Obama's number two man.
UPDATE: Ambinder says there is no deal which makes speculation about why there's a deal a good deal less interesting.
Fiscal Discipline
Dana Goldstein notes some of the issues that feature in Hillary Clinton's stump speech but don't really come up when her rivals are talking. One such issue is the big domestic policy dog that didn't bark -- or at least hasn't thus far in 2008:
"Fiscal responsibility." All the candidates talk about rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. But only Clinton uses this particular language. This is a comfortable talking point for her, since her own husband balanced the budget. It's something she touts at every appearance.
But note that there's an actual policy issue here. All the candidates are promising new spending. And all the candidates are promising the partial cancellation of the Bush tax cuts. Obviously, if you cancel those tax cuts you have room for new spending. But you have less room if you're also also promising balanced budgets. Right near the beginning of the campaign there was some Edwards-Clinton back-and-forth on this subject, with Edwards saying that new revenues would be dedicated first and foremost to his heath care plan, "fiscal discipline" be damned, and Clinton basically taking the opposite line. Eventually, that whole discussion faded from view but it's a potentially crucial distinction.
Women and Caucusing
Hillary Clinton's speculation that the non-secret nature of voting-by-caucus was disproportionately bothersome to women seemed plausible to me, but Kate Sheppard points out that most 2004 caucus-goers were women so it's not clear that there's any empirical support for that view. Secret ballots are still preferable to what they do in Iowa, though, even if there isn't a distinct gender skew to the process.
Responsibility Knocks
To say a bit more on the question of Hillary Clinton and fiscal responsibility, "fiscal responsibility" is, of course, one of those phrases designed so as to be impossible to disagree with. Nobody's going to say "I favor an irresponsible fiscal policy" though some people do, in fact, favor such policies. The question is which policies are irresponsible. Late during Bill Clinton's administration, a combination of happenstance, politicking, and substantive belief produced a notion that to run a responsible fiscal policy requires a budget surplus. This worked pretty well as a tactical gambit vis-à-vis congressional Republicans' demands for new tax cuts since the basic congressional math took large new spending initiatives off the table anyway.
But as a general governing agenda, it's sharply limiting. Fiscal responsibility, as defined by The Washington Post, means something like "new spending must be financed by unpopular tax hikes unless it's spending on a war or the military or spending proposed by Republicans; also, budget deficits are an acute problem if a Democrat is president or if they're forecast to occur far in the future as a result of Social Security." That, obviously, is a political framework designed to make progressive governance impossible while simultaneously giving lip service to the desirability of spending money on important priorities like health care, education, clean energy, infrastructure, etc.
What's more, I don't think it's substantively clear that running modest budget deficits is a bad thing. Generally speaking we don't, in life, think that borrowing money is per se a bad idea -- it all depends on the terms of the loan and what it's buying you. Taking out a loan to pay for a college education is normally a good idea. Taking out a loan to buy a house is often a good idea, but as we've been seeing lately sometimes it's not. The federal government has the privilege of being able to borrow money on quite favorable terms which seems like something you want to take advantage of to some extent. A dept-to-GDP ratio that's trending sharply upwards, as we had in the Reagan years, is a problem, but a gentler decline than we had in the late-1990s would have been fine had it been sustained.
The Independents
John Judis and Ruy Teixeira take a look at the demographic and ideological characteristics of self-described independents and their potential role in the presidential election. It's clear that the post-partisan rhetoric from Barack Obama that's annoyed a lot of bloggers has tremendous appeal to this segment of the electorate. And though I, too, find it annoying I think you have to agree that if he really does manage to use this kind of rhetoric to mobilize an unprecedented number of independents to go caucus for the first time on behalf of a candidate who was right about Iraq from the beginning, backs ambitious new programs on climate change and media reform, big new regulations on health insurance companies and new subsidies to people who have trouble paying for insurance, etc., etc., etc. that that'll be a pretty impressive achievement.
It's always worth recalling that George W. Bush talked the talk about repudiating the harshness of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. That duped the brain-dead press and they, in turn, helped dupe a substantial element of the public. But the policy agenda from Bush was always very right-wing, just as Obama's platform is quite progressive.
She's a Woman!
I feel like Andrew Sullivan and I are supposed to argue more. Certainly, a Hillary Clinton versus John McCain matchup ought to give us the opportunity as HRC seems to set him off in weird ways. Andrew, for instance, finds this Jonah Goldberg post funny. I only see a kind of witless sexism. Watch Clinton's ad. It's not fantastic, but nothing about it "oozes chick cosmetic unguent infomercial" other than that the person speaking is a woman.
David Simon's View
Note that David Simon himself shows up in yesterday's thread about The Wire to disagree with me. It's an interesting discussion all around and I won't intervene further in it. But to answer Ogged's question here, I have no intention of leading an anti-Wire backlash -- assuming things don't go horribly awry in Season 5 it'll be the best television show anyone's ever made and its outlook, even if not one I totally agree with analytically, is integral to the drama.
Declaring Victory
Spencer Ackerman comments on the surge of overconfidence afflicting hawkish circles:
Over the past several months, surgenik euphoria has gotten out of control. War supporters all but declared victory as soon as 2007 ended. "We are now winning the war," writes new NYT columnist Bill Kristol in the current Weekly Standard. "We at the Weekly Standard thought the chances of success were better than 50-50 -- but that it remained a difficult proposition. Petraeus pulled it off." Leave aside for a moment the question of Kristol's cynicism and presume his sincerity. What this account neglects (as an understatement) is that every single time U.S. forces have shifted their tactics and pushed the insurgencies back -- the capture of Fallujah, the death of Zarqawi, the capture and the execution of Saddam Hussein, Operation Together Forward I, Operation Together Forward II, etc. -- the insurgency and al-Qaeda have watched, adjusted, adapted, and responded.
On thing that I think's important to keep in mind is that over the course of the summer of 2003 as the insurgency broke out in Iraq, public doubts about the war really began to grow. It looked like things maybe weren't going to well. This dude Howard Dean who nobody had heard of was picking up unprecedented levels of money and enthusiasm. And then Saddam Hussein was captured. And then Dean observed that capturing Saddam hadn't made America safer. And then all hell broke loose. Saddam's capture was deemed to have so thoroughly discredited the anti-war movement that people running in a Democratic primary decided it was time to savagely attack from the right. And not just Joe Lieberman. John Kerry this was "more proof that all the advisers in the world can't give Howard Dean the military and foreign-policy experience, leadership skills, or diplomatic temperament necessary to lead this country through dangerous times."
Again, the January 2005 elections were universally believed to have discredited war opponents. Then came a few other events that at least some people believed discredited war opponents.
The weird thing about the surge is that it's failure has been much more unambiguous. The theory behind the surge was clear. Some people said more troops would bring more security to Iraq. Critics of that idea noted that sending more troops would be logistically unsustainable. Surge theorists posited that a temporary increase in force levels would create a temporary increase in security that would open window of opportunity for political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security. So the surge was implemented. As of September, the surge had failed to generate the political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security. Surge supporters told skeptics we had to give it more time. Three months later, the surge has still failed to generate the political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security.
Now we're near the point of de-surging -- the window is closing rapidly and nobody thinks the opportunity will be seized. And yet surge fans are declaring victory. It's doesn't make sense. The surge's architects laid out admirably clear goals for it. Laid them out and unambiguously failed to meet them.
McCain's Moment
It's a bit odd, isn't it, that after all the drama of the Republican nominating race it now looks like John McCain will win? That, after all, is exactly what it seemed like would happen 18 months ago before any of the campaigning had happened. It's shades of John Kerry in 2004. I resolved four years ago to pay less attention to the details of the primary campaign next time around, and I think I succeeded to some extent, but I'm pretty sure I should have paid even less attention.
There's also a hack gap issue here. I spent, as did many liberals, much time mocking the eminently mock-worthy Mitt Romney. But in purely cynical terms, we should have all been mocking John McCain and acting really, really, really frighted of Romney. Such hair! How can we beat that? He'll put Massachusetts into play! Panic! That kind of thing.
Lou Dobbs: The Man in the Middle
Via Micah Sifry, the interactive version of this graphic is really more interesting than the static one represented above. Either way, though, you see the relationship between readers of different books, and you can see that the major political titles cluster into essentially non-communicating "liberal" and "conservative" clusters. In the middle, you see three books two of which are by Lou Dobbs.
That's about as good an illustration as you could like that insofar as there's some kind of excluded middle in our current political situation it's not the brand of Bloomberg-style "centrism" that the bemoaners of partisanship tend to favor. Instead, it's something akin to Dobbs-style populist nationalism. It's not a point of view I favor, but unlike Bloombergism it is a point of view that has a lot of support and only a little representation.
Snow Falling on Pundits
Given that the Iowa caucus is basically a media-generated phenomenon that wouldn't matter at all if not for the hype, it's a little strange that it's in Iowa in January. All one hears this week as a journalists are complaints from colleagues in Des Moines or Nashua about how cold it is. Under the circumstances, surely everyone could get behind something like a first-in-the-nation Hawaii Caucus. That sounds more fun for pundits and politicos alike.
Expectations
Is anything worse than the expectations game? No. Here's Jake Tapper on one bogus effort by Team Clinton to lower expectations for Iowa. And here's Marc Ambinder on another bogus effort by Team Clinton to lower expectations for Iowa. If she loses in Iowa, she's obviously got the money, infrastructure, and name recognition to keep campaigning -- as she should. But by the same token, if she loses in Iowa it's a real loss. She started out in Iowa with all the same advantages she has everywhere else, and if prolonged exposure to actual campaigning against actual alternatives causes Iowans to pick someone else, that's a real defeat.
Teeves
Watching television, it seems clear that the press is determined to spin
absolutely anything as a win for McCain and anything other than third place as a win for Obama. No surprise about press preferences, but still instructive to mainline it via 24 hour cable news.
The Unraveling
Ilan Goldberg points us to two stories illustrating the problems with coopting local armed groups in the absence of big-picture political progress. First, US forces attack Awakening Council (aka Concerned Local Citizens) members:
But Awakening Council members, often lightly armed and poorly trained, say Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not their only adversary in Diyala. Iraqi security forces remain distrustful of the former insurgents, and last week staged a raid with American forces against one of their headquarters in the town of Buhruz. The Iraqi police said the tribesmen killed a Shiite hostage during the raid and fired at the officers. United States helicopters returned fire and killed at least 10 council members.
Meanwhile, over here we see Awakening Council members trying to seize power from elected government officials in Anbar Province, threatening violence if their demands aren't met. Indeed, it's almost enough to make you think that Sheik Ahmed abu Risha isn't just selflessly interested in helping the US military battle against al-Qaeda but is making his own power play for his own reasons. Shocking stuff, but true.
DoD photo by Specialist Kieran Cuddihy, U.S. Army
Bad Arguments About Global Poverty
I agree with some of what Jared Diamond has to say here but simply because it's imperative for the rich world to adopt more ecologically sustainable practices and it's also imperative for us to do what we can to help ameliorate extreme poverty in the non-rich world is no reason to just throw any old argument into the mix. For example:
People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.
There's just no evidence of this. You don't see people growing up in Congo and launching terrorist attacks on Switzerland. Terrorists don't come indiscriminately from the poorest countries, and they don't seek to target the wealthiest countries. After all, terrorism's not a good way of making money it's an act of political violence and it's mainly perpetrated by people who think they have very serious political grievances. Israel's not richer than Norway, but it sure gets attacked by a lot more terrorists -- ideology and grievance are the key, and opposition to foreign occupiers is almost always the issue. Curbing global poverty is a good cause, but so is developing a more sensible foreign policy and we're not going to get that done unless we're clear on the actual sources of terrorist violence.
Voting Imminent
I hereby endorse Scott Lemieux's not-really-endorsement (as well I should, since it quotes me).
Preordained
Watching Chris Matthews, I just saw that Tim Russert has already booked John McCain as his featured interviewee for this Sunday.
