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
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.
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.
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 It is, however, a pretty outdated poll.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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do I detect a tacitmediaconspiracy 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
American Legion communications director John Raughter denies Jonah Goldberg's allegations that his outfit was "founded as an essentially fascist organization."
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Watching Chris Matthews, I just saw that Tim Russert has already booked John McCain as his featured interviewee for this Sunday. Republican presidential candidate who won the Iowa Caucuses? Well, sorry, you're out of luck. It's already been decided that the "real" story out of Iowa is McCain....
Chris Matthews opines that John McCain will be "one of the winners tonight with about 18 points," 18 percent being, of course, a losing margin but Matthews wants to have his babies so who cares.
I think Kansas will beat Virginia Tech, but the real winner of the Orange Bowl will be John McCain as the merest thought of football reminds voters of his toughness.
I know he's the real winner, but isn't fourth place for John McCain kind of pathetic? Conversely, left-for-dead Fred Thompson turns out to still have some residual support. And why not? After all, the idea of Fred Thompson -- a totally normal, non-elderly orthodox conservative -- makes a ton of sense. If his staff can somehow resuscitate their candidate, I think there's clearly a market among the Republican faithful for what Thompson would be selling were he not too lazy to sell it.
It looks like he's likely to wind up in second. Certainly, I hope he hands on to it, both for the blow it'll do to Hillary Clinton's chances and also because he deserves to do well. It's very hard to see how his candidacy can stay viable without an Iowa win, but he's had a huge -- and entirely positive -- impact on the race.
I think the manner of Barack Obama's win is pretty impressive. I can't be the only one who was a bit inclined toward a cynical roll of the eyes at the idea of winning on the back of unprecedented turnout, mobilizing new voters, brining in young people, etc. That sounds like the kind of thing that people say they're going to do but never deliver on. But he did deliver. That's impressive.
Earlier today, an Obama supporter reminded me of this old Chicago Reader profile of Obama from back in the mid-1990s as proof of his progressive bona fides. It's certainly an article that makes you feel good about this guy being elected President of the United States. What's more, it's a reminder that tonight's victory for organizing and mobilization was spearheaded by a former community organizer; he's a guy who believes in the power of mobilizing new people and brining new people into the process. In Iowa, it's worked very well for him, and it's pretty thrilling to think about what could be accomplished with that kind of energy nationwide.
It's a good speech. What's more, Joe Trippi's desperate spin is actually sort of convincing:
"It's really a repudiation...of the Clinton campaign," Trippi just said on MSNBC, interpreting tonight's results.
"Clinton doesn't have a lot to talk about," Trippi continued, adding that the vote tonight showed that voters "don't want the status quo that the Clinton campaign represents."
Playing it straight, second place is second place and John Edwards is now the populist alternative to front-runner Barack Obama.
This sounds pretty bad to me, especially compared to Edwards' performance. The difference, I think, is that Edwards has a clear cause: his populism. That made for good speeches during the leadup to Iowa, and it makes a good speech in the wake of Iowa. It's a fighting creed. Barack Obama's message, in its different way, also is. But Hillary Clinton, sapped of her aura of inevitability, doesn't seem to have very much to say. Her candidacy is fundamentally about a kind of brokerage transaction; she herself is the logical convergence point for a group of people associated with her husband's administration and she's a competent steward of that network of supporters. But that's not a fighting message, it doesn't leave you with much to fall back on when times look grim.
You could see Madeleine Albright there in the background, but Albright's an eminence grise not someone you go to the mattresses with.
He was the thinking liberal's sentimental favorite in this race, but obviously going nowhere. He came very close to beating Tom Daschle in a race for Democratic Leader back in the day, and maybe he has a future in Senate leadership.
Electrifying. Exciting. It's easier, of course, to be excited and exciting when you're winning, but he's doing it. Hitting some populist themes strongly, but with a bit of subtelty and grace; emphasizing the idea of organizing and mobilization as more than just election tactics, but as integral to changing the world. The Obama who gets panned in Paul Krugman columns and sundry blog posts -- the one who just wants to make nice with Republicans and doesn't care about progressive values -- doesn't seem to be on the podium tonight.
Certainly, in principle Obama more than anyone else epitomizes the new progressive coalition and wields the coalition behind him with tremendous oratorical skill. The questions always been whether he can really deliver on that promise. Before today, I think relatively few people thought he would be able to pull off this unprecedented surge of young people and first-time caucus-goers -- but he did. Charles Barkley says it's a "great start".
It's one of those days where you wake up and check the papers just to make sure you remembered everything right from the day before. I'm not sure the scale of Mike Huckabee's victory over Mitt Romney properly sank in yesterday. He didn't just sneak by the establishment's boy; he really thumped him. His path to the nomination still looks bleak, since it's hard to imagine anyone prevailing against the sort of headwinds and lack of institutional support he's facing. But then again, what happened yesterday once looked very unlikely. More realistically, even if Huckabee does ultimately do the plausible thing and lose, the fact that he did so well in Iowa has to make you believe that he can turn in a strong performance in primaries held in his native South.
That's not enough to put him over the top, but it would still leave him as a force in the race. Thus far, I don't think we've really seen any of Huckabee's rivals react to his candidacy by trying on any real level to coopt his message. But given the power of that message to reach the Republican base despite a lack of funding and despite the opposition of most of the Republican media machine, it seems like the smart thing to do is to try to steal something from the guy.
Eric Kleefeld crunches the numbers a bit and suggests that John Edwards was the winner of the second choice sweepstakes, which would be in line with pre-caucus polling indicating that he was the most-frequently-named second choice.
Jane Harman's letter warning the Bush administration not to destroy evidence has now been declassified. Good for her for writing it, though obviously one wishes some more effective means of halting this business had been devised.
A reader: "Also, if there's one we can learn from tonight, it's that Democrats and Republicans both want populists with goofy ears." Indeed, only a Big Ears Unity Ticket can bring the country together.
To return to John McCain's 100 years' war remarks, it's worth considering what this says about him as a potential commander in chief:
George W. Bush, I think most people can agree, has a tendency toward the cavalier and irresponsible. Liberal critics such as myself also tend to view his strategy in Iraq as aimed at a perpetual occupation of that country. Nevertheless, not even George W. Bush is nearly so cavalier and irresponsible as to make the kind of remarks McCain is saying here. Bush, it seems, has advisors who know something about the diplomatic situation. Bush has even spoken personally with heads of state and other officials throughout the Arab world. Bush, in short, recklessless and immature though he may be still knows that it plays very very very poorly in the Arab world for American leaders to run around talking about 100 year occupations of Iraq.
Chris Bowers notes that self-identified Democrats were 76 percent of caucus-goers last night, barely changed from 79 percent in 2004. The dramatic increase in turnout, in short, did involve many new independents coming to the polls, but it was mostly achieved by mobilizing new self-identified Democrats.
Much of HIllary Clinton's game plan for a comeback makes sense, and it's worth recalling that the Iowa --> New Hampshire --> victory chain that John Kerry put together in 2004 was anomalous. Point six, though, I don't get:
6. Run against the idea of John McCain as the Republican nominee; in other words, who's better to face McCain: Clinton or Obama?
Um . . . Obama as best I can tell. There are no sure things in this world, but the main things that come to mind about John McCain's electoral strengths are his appeal to independents vaguely disgruntled with politics-as-usual and his appeal to the press, both things that Obama seems much better suited to counter. He's a formidable opponent either way, but this certainly isn't a consideration that cuts clearly in Clinton's favor.
Meanwhile, in non-campaign news, Spencer Ackerman notes that Iraqi Kurds are now pretty clearly threatening violence unless a referendum on the status of Kirkuk is held by May:
The war has quieted down as an issue here at home, in part because Iraq's quieted down and in part because the primaries have been so loud. But I think we can expect to see it back in the headlines soon enough. The surge has left a ton of festering issues unsettled and they're sure to start bubbling over soon enough.
I'm not sure if it's possible to sell short on Intrade, but if it is I think you'd have to consider Rudy Giuliani pretty seriously overvalued at these prices. He never seemed like a likely nominee to me for the obvious reasons, and his strategy of skipping all the early primary states was clearly a mistake. I suppose you could see Giuliani winning if Huckabee, McCain, and Romney all manage to stay in the field for a while, each drawing substantial support and letting Giuliani eke out a series of plurality wins but that sounds far-fetched to me.
Apple's Mighty Mouse. I've been a laptop user for so long that the whole idea of mouse use is somewhat unfamiliar. But thanks to Bluetooth, you can now get a wireless mouse that's simple to carry around in your bag and use when appropriate. What's more, after years of resisting the whole two button mouse concept, Apple's gone and developed the most elegant implementation of it out there. Unfortunately, they seem disinclined to brag about this since that might entail admitting that they were wrong on the utility of the second button, so you actually need to go into the system preferences and change one of the default settings to enable the right button functionality.
Also recommended: Third party RAM. Someone pointed out to me a little while back ago that RAM's not nearly as expensive as I thought -- Apple's just wildly overcharging people for it. And they're not even wildly overcharging for some kind of double super-secret proprietary RAM -- you can buy stuff that plugs right into your computer all over the internet with ease. It's just a pure price discrimination scheme: don't be a victim, but also don't be running your computer without enough RAM.
With oil hitting $100 a barrel, I think it's increasingly clear that totally irrespective of global warming the quest for alternatives to to the gasoline economy is going to be on in a big way. Absent some economic calamity in the developing world, demand -- and thus, prices -- seem destined to keep trending basically upwards. But while gasoline is hardly environmentally friendly, burning it's not the worst thing one can do for the planet either. The question is, will the replacement be a step forward or backwards? Andrew Dessler observes that "a shortage of oil or price spike is going to put a lot of pressure on politicians to take to relieve the pressure through policies that have disastrous consequences for the climate -- like liquefying coal."
I'm relatively optimistic, but it's a reminder that the rhetoric of "independence from foreign oil," though politically useful in some respects, in many ways fails to educate people on the crucial green issues at stake. Coal, unlike oil, is abundant right here in the USA. It's just toxic.
Photo by Flickr user dmuth used under a Creative Commons license
It's undoubtedly true that John McCain has some real strengths as a candidate, most notably the DC press corps' undying love for his wrinkly visage. That said, I'm not sure how much stock I would put into McCain's low unfavorables numbers. That's an advantage, to be sure. On the other hand, it's not a mystery where that advantage came from -- it's come from the fact that McCain's never been subjected to serious attacks from the left on the national stage. But it's not as if this pattern would continue were he to win the nomination.
Nor do I think it would be impossible to construct attacks against him. Matt Welch's book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, for example, contains plenty of the negative information about McCain and his record that's simply never been mentioned by his friends in the press. He'll continue to have that alliance, but in the context of an actual race it won't be possible to keep it all off the table. Meanwhile, McCain really lacks a lot of the characteristics you normally look for in a presidential contender. Like many losing candidates, he combines a lack of executive experience and the signature accomplishments that come with it with a long record of service in the Senate and the flip-flops and old votes that come with that. What's more, though he's obviously charming if you sit on a bus with him, the persona that regular people see isn't a charismatic one -- he's super-old and much more in a crazy old-man neighbor-guy kind of way than in an avuncular and reassuring way.
All things considered, if I were running a presidential campaign I'd rather not go up against a guy who'll be able to count on 75 percent of political reporters acting as de facto campaign volunteers, but it's not like he's some unstoppable force either. Unlike George W. Bush or, indeed, every successful national politician I can think of, McCain doesn't even pretend to care about the economic problems of struggling people.
The most notable recipient of Swift Boat largesse is John McCain, erstwhile front-runner and Stand Up Guy. When the Swift Boat ads were first unleashed, McCain was alone among his Republican colleagues to condemn them. A fellow Vietnam veteran, a good friend of Kerry's and a former target of smears about his own service, McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable," a "cheap stunt," and he urged Bush to condemn them. But in pursuit of the GOP nomination, McCain ditched the mantle of maverick for that of hack, and his once-floundering, possibly rejuvenated campaign has been aided along the way by $61,650 from Swift Boat donors and their associates. "There is such a thing as dirty money," said Senator Kerry in a statement, after The Nation informed him of McCain's FEC records. "I'm surprised that the John McCain I knew who was smeared in 2000 and thought so-called Swift Boating was wrong in 2004 would feel comfortable taking their money after seeing the way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves."
That's what we like to call solid reporting. But wait for the Straight Talk™ when called on it:
(McCain's office did not return calls for comment.)
So very straight. Meanwhile, it's worth recalling that the people behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth weren't actually a bunch of aggrieved veterans pissed off at John Kerry's anti-war activities. Rather, the main donors were extremely wealthy businessmen like developer Bob Perry, oilman T. Boone Pickens, and drugstore mogul and investor Harold Simmons whose multimillion dollar contributions were solid investments in acquiring political power on behalf of the corrupt Bush Republican machine that could, in turn, further enrich them.
One crucial thing Barack Obama did last night was get white people to vote for him. Lots and lots of white people. Iowa's not the kind of place where you can dominate the black vote, plus add on a sliver of white liberals and win a primary. To win -- even in a primary -- you need the support of white people.
And one thing holding Obama back among both black and white voters has been, I think, a fear that other people won't be willing to vote for a black guy. Winning a primary does a lot to dispel those worries. Winning a majority in a primary would do more, but given the presence of three strong contenders in Iowa that clearly wasn't on the table. The analogy, I think, is to JFK winning the West Virginia primary and showing that a Catholic from Boston could win in a state where there was no urban "ethnic" machine to serve as his base.
Photo by Flickr user Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons license
Check out Ezra Klein's latest post on John McCain's partnership with Joe Lieberman. One thing that strikes me is this. In MSM terms, one shows honesty and freethinking exclusively by showing disloyalty to one's political party. Thus, McCain and Lieberman are Bold Truth Tellers.
In the real world, guys like McCain and Lieberman seem to be to be unusually unprincipled -- totally unmoored from a whole range of political commitments. But what really drives them both is their shared and slightly daft worldviews on foreign policy. McCain is pro-life, Lieberman pro-choice, but they both seem to be personally indifferent to these questions and to most other questions. But war? Oh they love war. It's odd, under the circumstances, for the GOP's last best hope to be someone whose emotional core is so close to the very invasion of Iraq whose disastrous consequences have touched off so much coalitional unraveling.
A colleague alerts me to the fact that Chuck Norris is sixty-seven years old. -- way, way, way older than he looks. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that he and Mike Huckabee ought to abandon this whole politics thing and focus on doing lifestyle books. Between Huckabee's weight loss techniques and Norris' Dorian Gray-like ability to resist the inevitable realities of aging, it seems to me that they could make a lot of money in that line of work.
Andrew Olmsted whose blogging you, like me, may have followed at Obsidian Wings and elsewhere has died in Iraq. Deepest condolences to his friends and family. For commenters, please try to respect his wishes regarding not using this as fodder for political arguments.
Karen Tumulty reports on Hillary Clinton's plan to mount a comeback:
But all that may be about to change. "We've got to start holding him to the standard people hold her to," Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn told reporters aboard the campaign's chartered jet to New Hampshire. "I think there's a basic choice between experienced leadership for change and inexperienced leadership that talks about change."
Added another adviser: "You're going to see some very sharp media now." That suggests the next round of Clinton ads will go beyond the previous gentle references to Obama's lack of experience and begin to look at, for instance, inconsistency in his voting record. They are looking at issues like gun control, where he previously took a harder stand that may not play well with gun-loving voters in New Hampshire, and health care, where he previously expressed support for a government-run health care system. Clinton plans to exploit every whiff of inconsistency.
Those don't sound like incredibly devastating attacks to me, but we'll have to see. One thing to keep in mind is that just as Clinton had reasons to go relatively easy on Obama in Iowa, Obama had similar reasons to go relatively easy on Clinton. Both sides could easily launch much harsher attacks than they have thus far, which is one reason why I think Jon Chait's confidence in an Obama victory is a bit misplaced.
Meanwhile, earlier in the article Tumulty gets at what I thought about Clinton's speech last night: "with her husband the ex-President by her side, and an array of former Clinton Administration officials around her, Clinton was the center of a backward-looking tableau — a bridge to the 20th Century, as it were." Experience per se needn't be seen as in opposition to change, but a literal Clinton restoration does seem contrary to the idea of change. America has, meanwhile, elected plenty of presidents who were in some sense inexperienced (Obama has, lets recall, more experience as a legislator than does Clinton) and seen it work out fine; we've gotten burned by George W. Bush, of course, but that's because he's corrupt and intellectually lazy and I don't think Obama is either one of those.
My friend Jeffrey Theodore noted last night that when talking about energy in his victory speech last night, Barack Obama spoke of ending the tyranny of oil rather than the more conventional "tyranny of foreign oil." I thought maybe that was just an ad-lib or a slip, but it's a line he's used before.
It's a small thing, but it's a much better way of framing the issue than the conventional xenophobic line that's less economically and environmentally accurate.
Photo by Flickr user Skampy used under a Creative Commons license
Hillary Clinton's campaign seems determined to convince Barack Obama's detractors in the blogosphere that he is so a liberal after all:
Hillary's aides point to Obama's extremely progressive record as a community organizer, state senator and candidate for Congress, his alliances with "left-wing" intellectuals in Chicago's Hyde Park community, and his liberal voting record on criminal defendants' rights as subjects for examination.
Progressive record? Heaven forbid! I thought he didn't have experience.
The Tom Edsall article I got that from is well worth reading for his rundown of the GOP field as well.
Sam Graham-Felson's February 2007 Nation article on the Barack Obama youth brigades makes for interesting reading in retrospect. At the time, Graham-Felson was on the magazine's "youth" beat, from which perch many a young writer has forecast many a burgeoning progressive youth movement that never emerged. The interesting twist here is that SG-F eventually went to work for Barack Obama and Obama's youth team actually did wrack up huge margins among young voters and bring them to the polls in big numbers.
Hendrick Hertzberg takes a look at John McCain's pledge for American troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years and comes away unimpressed:
But what the context shows, I think, is that yanking that sound bite out of context isn’t really all that unfair. McCain's wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.
He'll see your fifty years and raise you fifty. But the cards are blank.
For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn't need to have a real purpose or be "worth it" in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as "it" takes and it doesn't matter if "it" is pointless or futile or even if "it" isn't anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale.
One Clinton donor and two prominent surrogates said they had been led to believe the campaign that by that if Clinton were to lose Iowa, she would have placed a close second to John Edwards, a candidate viewed as eminently beatable by the Clinton operation.
But such is the lot of major Clinton donors. And in truth, despite a healthy measure of kremlinology,the truth is that the campaign does not have a strategy to turn away the challenge Obama has posed.
In Iowa, one Clinton adviser, speaking before the caucuses, said that were Obama able to turn out independents and Democrats in the number projected by the Des Moines Register poll, "he deserves to be the nominee."
It seems to me that the leaks about plans to attack Barack Obama as too liberal don't make much sense as a strategy. But they do make sense as leaks that filter out in the absence of a strategy. I've long taken the view that Clinton's status as someone whose perceived as much more liberal than she really is is a fatal weakness in her candidacy "except, perhaps, for the faction of her advisers whose views are probably too right-wing to be associated with the Democratic presidential nominee, unless they can latch onto the one candidate both blessed and cursed with an undeserved reputation for liberalism."
In the absence of a clear comeback strategy, some of those folks are perhaps letting their liberal-hating id flow out a bit.
Michael Barone observes that "Every 16 years--in 1976, 1992 and now in 2008--American voters have seemed less interested in experience and credentials and more interested in a new face unconnected to the current political establishment" and then goes on to wonder "What can explain this 16-year itch?"
I'll endorse the Nyhan hypothesis: it's random chance. This is an extreme example, but a strikingly large quantity of political journalism seems focused on this kind of silly analytical error.
Ed Glaeser rightly bemoans the presidential campaign's lack of interest in big city issues. Ryan Avent says "voters must be the ones to demand more urban policy proposals from the the candidates" and wonders why they don't. I think it's more a question of the voters who care about these things not living in the right places. Neither Iowa nor New Hampshire nor South Carolina includes a substantially sized city. What's more, at the moment we're in a dynamic where general election campaigns don't seriously target California, New York, Illinois, or Texas but those states contain the bulk of our biggest metro areas.
Insofar as states like Florida and Virginia get targeted, you might see candidates trying to take on transportation and planning issues that have salience in those places, but realistically it's hard for big cities to figure on the agenda in a big way when New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and the Bay Area are all off the table in electoral college terms. On the other hand, presidents don't really write the laws -- congress does -- and the House Democratic caucus is full of leaders and chairpeople from in and around large metropolitan areas. Given a sympathetic president to sign things they write they could probably do a lot of good. On the other hand, the Senate is structured so as to largely disenfranchise urban America, so maybe we're doomed.
Photo by Flickr user BryanSereny used under a Creative Commons license
I think the Redskins can take Seattle today. DC's played much better than the Seahawks in recent weeks, and I think Seattle's NFC West schedule has been pretty weak. I'd feel more confident, though, if not for the whole home field advantage thing. That makes it a very close matchup. Still, no reason a 'skins fan shouldn't feel optimistic. As Thomas Boswell writes, "In all, Washington coped with seven games against teams that are in the playoffs and four others against 8-8 teams" wheres "played nine games against teams with a losing record."
(Along these lines, expect me to miss whichever of this evening's debates conflicts with the Redskins game)
Ben Smith has a Giulianiesque mailer being sent out by AFSCME, the public employees' union, on behalf of Hillary Clinton:
This is the kind of attack you really don't like to see from a progressive interest group. I understand that AFSCME chief Gerald McIntee has a longstanding good relationship with the Clinton family, but in the even that Barack Obama becomes the nominee AFSCME's going regret having participated in this kind of smear against the Democratic standard-bearer. It's one thing for a group to attack a candidate on the group's key issues -- that's what groups are there for -- but this is just off-topic fearmongering. Several members of the AFSCME board apparently agree and sent out this letter: "We were therefore shocked and appalled to learn that our union-through 'independent expenditures'–is squandering precious resources to wage a costly and deceptive campaign to oppose Barack Obama."
My understanding is that AFSCME is one of the more top-down unions out there, so it doesn't really matter if McIntee pisses off some board members.
Okay, flipping to the GOP debate. Some of the people in my living room think Mitt Romney's hair looks unusually bad. Others disagree. Sara likes his tie, but the rest of us hate it. Next up -- substantive commentary!
Admittedly, I haven't seen that much of this Republican debate. But from what I've seen, and from what I've seen in previous debates, it's striking to me how much of the focus is on the candidates pasts on whose record is the most purely conservative. Very little attention is being paid to the candidates' policies to what it is they want to do as president to improve Americans' lives. They gesture in the direction of policy ideas, but there's no real debate about them; nobody is running because he has a program to help people with their problems, or complaining that his rivals' program isn't good.
Holy crap! These health care questions are so substantive and well-informed ... it's bizarre. They even put an expert on who briefly-but-accurately explained the problem with the conservative fetish for individualized health care. Rudy Giuliani's response was, basically, to say "socialism" a lot. John McCain appears to be suggesting that we can't provide people with health insurance because when people get insurance from the government they're lazy and deliberately contract diabetes. McCain also seems to think that Canada is in Europe.
Romney, by contrast, talks about the plan he signed in Massachusetts and its virtues. Then he turns around and says "we don't need Hillarycare" even though Clinton's plan is, fundamentally, pretty similar to what Romney signed in Massachusetts. It's a little sad to see Romney refusing to characterize his own record accurately when, at the end of the day, the record reflects pretty well on him.
UPDATE: Now Romney's explicitly going in to the case for health care mandates. Good for him. He seems to have decided to be a bit less fake.
Mitt Romney asks John McCain "don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys." McCain deadpans back: "they are." That, I think, was the old John McCain who people liked. The context was McCain's call for reimportation of drugs from Canada.
This is followed by a commercial break and then when we come back the King of Straight Talk winds up doing some immigration pandering. "I've never supported amnesty," says the lead Republican sponsor of a Senate amnesty bill.
UPDATE: Ponnuru gets an email from a rival campaign noting a 2003 news account in which McCain explains that "Amnesty has to be an important part because there are people who have lived in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens. That has to be a component of it."
Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both agree that if they wind up running against Barack Obama their go-to line of attack will be against his lack of experience. Having just watched the experience issue fail for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, I'm left wondering if experience has ever worked well as an issue in presidential politics. Not for HW Bush in 1992. Not for Richard Nixon in 1960. I could be wrong, but what are the big counterexamples out there?
I didn't think Mitt Romney did as poorly as the post-game TV commentary suggested. He was on the defensive all night, since a lot of different candidates targeted, but under the circumstances I thought he did okay. Mark Levin at the Corner agrees with me.
Mike Huckabee is clearly the best politician out of this crew -- everyone but him and Ron Paul looked tired, and Huckabee is really the only one who's in touch with the mood of the country. His policy solutions are empty or crackpotty, but since his rivals don't deign to engage with him that doesn't come across during the debates. Meanwhile, his empty or crackpotty solutions are aimed at real problems real people have. The others often seem to be living on another planet.
Everyone seems to be rambling a bit in response to Charlie Gibson's question about Pakistan. It seems to me that the main thing to say about a hypothetical scenario where in radicals somehow seize control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons is that one of the first responsibilities of a President faced with a crisis in Pakistan would be to make sure that doesn't happen. Once it does happen, obviously all the options look bad.
John Edwards pivoted a bit to the broader issue of non-proliferation policy where he gave a fantastic answer about the need to combine short-term efforts with a long-term commitment to "rid the world of nuclear weapons" as part of a broad push to revitalize the non-proliferation framework.
On his second go-round Barack Obama gets to drive home the point that the Iraq War is one of the major reasons that our policy in the Pakistan-Afghanistan area has gotten so screwed up. This is the kind of strategic-level argument that any Democrat is going to need to make against a Republican who can't be specifically tied to the details of Bush's inept Iraq policy.
UPDATE: Given a second, clearer shot at the nuclear proliferation issue Edwards and Obama both offered great responses. Clinton's decision to put bureaucratic reorganization of the non-proliferation apparatus -- rather than substantive shifts in policy -- struck me as a bit odd, but perhaps in line with her broader argument about experience. She knows the nitty-gritty details of executive branch organization.
I thought this was the most enlightening exchange we've had yet on the mandates issue. Folks have convinced me over time that Obama's got this wrong on the merits ... his notion of a mandate-less big-picture reform sounds appealing, but it's fundamentally unworkable. Indeed, by the same token (and for the same reasons) you could never get it passed into law -- if you want guaranteed issue, you need a mandate.
Charlie Gibson directed a taunting "will you admit the surge worked?" question at Hillary Clinton and she gave the exact right response -- she admits nothing, the purpose of the surge was political reconciliation, reconciliation hasn't happened, the surge failed.
UPDATE: Good for Obama, too, complaining that "the bar of success has gotten so low" and pointing out that we're now where we were two years ago, which was a bad place to be.
Bill Richardson mentioned in response to a question about whether or not "relative youth" is a detriment in Presidential politics that JFK was his idol. Among Democrats of a certain age, this seems to be an incredibly common sentiment. Barack Obama's campaign often likes to invoke JFK. And in The Washington Monthly, Ted Widmer complains that Obama is no JFK.
But from where I sit JFK, um, wasn't a very good president. His signature accomplishment was . . . the Peace Corps? Basically, boomers seem to have taken the Kennedy/Johnson years, attributed all of the Vietnam stuff to Johnson even though Kennedy initiated the policy, then attributed all of the popular domestic stuff to JFK even though almost none of it passed while he was president, and then you get a lot of hand-waving. At some point, can't we act like grownups and let this drop. The Republican hagiography of Ronald Reagan is embarrassing but the JFK business is even more detached from reality.
I think voting for Bill Richardson would be a pretty bad idea, but much credit to him for noting that "land use policy" is something we need to improve to deal with global warming. This is the aspect of the issue that few people in politics seem to want to talk about. In a big-picture sense, all of the candidates have excellent positions on climate change issues so there's very little to debate here.
The usual pattern of these things, in my view, is that John Edwards has done the best, and Hillary Clinton has done what she needed to do to consolidate her position as front-runner. With fewer candidates in the field, I thought the debate became much more watchable and the same basic pattern held up -- Edwards is running as a strong progressive, has a strong message, and in this format has enormous charisma. Clinton doesn't wow you, but she takes care of business. Barack Obama is clearly not at his best in this format -- he delivers great setpiece speeches and is very appealing in a small group, but doesn't quite seem sure of his tone when seated around the table.
The difference, though, is that Hillary Clinton's not the front-runner anymore in the kind of way she used to be. She wanted to use tonight to cut her opponents down to size, but while she had good answers to questions she didn't have any devastating attacks. Edwards will have done himself a lot of good if a lot of New Hampshirites stayed in tonight and watched, but presumably the press will just move back to ignoring him. Obama, now, seems to me to be the guy who did what he needed to do delivering a competent performance and not letting his main rival draw any meaningful blood.
| 
Heads in the Sand
