Here's Hillary Clinton's argument about the inadequacy of merely talking about change:
But here, Barack Obama argues that effective rhetoric and inspiration are, in fact, crucial to producing change:
Ultimately, the idea of running on a record of change or talking about how you've been producing change for thirty-five years (which sounds like an overestimate -- how much change was she really bringing about at the age of 25?) seems destined to wind up having you offer a lot of paradoxical-sounding phrases. Just because polls show people want change doesn't mean you ought to just start inserting "change" constantly into your talk even if it winds up making you say funny-sounding things. Clinton's brand is experience and competence and those are good brands.
As I side note, I think her team is possibly reading the lines of causation wrong -- voters in Iowa knew that "change" was Obama's message, and so people who showed up to vote for Obama also told pollsters they were primarily interested in change. Clinton voters, by contrast, are trained to talk about "experience." This kind of thing is, I think, a major failing of conventional polling methods which tends to fairly naively assume that respondents' reported candidate preferences are built out of their reported character trait and issue preferences. It's likely, however, to be the other way around -- people who like Candidate X come to embrace key parts of Candidate X's argument.
This is totally awesome. Don't listen to the haters. I realized maybe fifteen minutes into the movie that a sort of had to pee and there were over two hours left and I didn't mind at all because the movie's so utterly great. Daniel Day-Lewis is great. He goes over the top, then picks the top up and puts it on a higher shelf somewhere. Or something. The use of the dissonant score is stunning. The other performances are good. Even the bizarre ending, in context, works for me. Best film of 2007, hands down, if it counts as a 2007 film.
In the Republican debate I watched, John McCain repeatedly savaged Mitt Romney. McCain almost never questioned the merits of any of Romney's policy positions, but rather repeatedly slagged on Romney's character suggesting, accurately, that Romney is a liar who's changed his positions repeatedly on a whole variety of issues in a manner that suggests he's basically a bad person. But of course whatever happens is good for John McCain so the way Mark Halperin reports it is that "To his advantage, he stayed above the fray."
As Lemieux says the striking thing here is that just sentences later Halperin acknowledges that this is BS and McCain "seemed to relish his engagement with Romney over immigration, slipping in a sharp jab over his rival’s fortune, and got in another zinger by twisting Romney’s message of change into a glib attack on the governor’s flipflopping history."
The Powers of Straight Talk are, indeed, great.
To me the very strange thing about this is that while McCain's attacks on Romney were mostly accurate, the overall approach was ludicrously unfair. McCain, like Mitt Romney, drifted pretty far left for a Republican during the 2002-2003 period and McCain, like Mitt Romney, started furiously backpedaling during 2006-2007 in a desperate bid to become President of the United States. The idea of the one attacking the other as a flip-flopper is ludicrous and the fact that McCain did it while wearing a vicious snarl that he'd then transform into a disingenuous grin after unleashing a zinger didn't strike me as especially endearing. Then again, I guess you just can't make it as a real big-time pundit until you fall spell to the Lure of the Straight Talk and see that when McCain changes his views or spouts nonsense or whatever that that's just all part of the Higher Straight Talk.
I noted yesterday that Mike Huckabee seemed to me to be the only Republican in touch with the mood of the country. I should have added Ron Paul to that list. Paul, to his credit, talks about the existence of problems in the economy and sells himself as a person who would implement policies to alleviate ordinary people's economic situation.
When I first heard anecdotal evidence and then saw some Iowa entrance poll data that indicated that some folks are backing Paul on economic grounds, I was a bit mystified. But as with Huckabee, it goes back to the vacuousness and weirdness of the mainstream campaigns. Paul gets up there onstage and suggests that fiat money is the cause of high oil prices because we're devaluing our currency. This is flat-out wrong and suggests a strange ignorance on the part of a monetary policy obsessive (to make a long story short, there's a reason we distinguish between "real" and "nominal" prices and the "real" ones are the real ones that matter; meanwhile, international oil transactions are conducted in dollars anyway). But for that matter, he also thinks the gold standard would reign in health care inflation.
It's all hollow and absurd, even more so than Huckabee's populist case for a 30 percent national retail sales tax that he'll pretend is only a 23 percent tax. But the point is that both Paul and Huckabee try to connect to people feeling economic pain while Rudy McRomney seem to be living on a weird planet where none of these problems exist. Certainly, they don't deign to try to expose Paul and Huckabee as selling snake oil and propose something more constructive; they're just ignoring it.
The character of RoboCop itself was inspired by Judge Dredd[4] as well as the Marvel Comics superhero Iron Man (one of these comic books can be seen during the convenience store robbery). Iron Man was conceived by Stan Lee as the alter ego of Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist working as a military contractor. During the original run of the comic, Iron Man was mostly occupied battling communism. In this light, RoboCop is seen as a subversive take on this classic Marvel character. Although both Neumeier and Verhoeven have declared themselves staunchly on the political left, Neumeier recalls on the audio commentary to Starship Troopers that many of his leftist friends wrongly perceived RoboCop as a fascist movie. However, on the 20th Anniversary DVD, producer Jon Davison referred to the film's message as "fascism for liberals" - a politically liberal film done in the most violent way possible.
It's strange that Davison, as a liberal, is unaware that "fascism for liberals" is redundant. After all, liberalism just is fascism. How could a movie be fascism for fascists? The whole thing's puzzling.
In last night's debate, Bill Richardson brought attention to a much-overlooked issue by saying that an effective campaign against catastrophic climate change will entail us building more light rail systems. Mark Steyn and Mark Hemingway responded to this not with criticism, but with asinine sniggering. I didn't think that was particularly noteworthy, since ninety-five percent of conservative commentators don't know anything about any policy questions, but Matt Zeitlin took note then Steyn took note of him and responded with . . . more sniggering.
But of course that's how it goes.
Bill Richardson did a lot of mock-worthy stuff yesterday, including the moment when he suggested that none of the costs of a cap-and-trade system would be passed on to consumers. But at the end of the day, we have four Democrats with serious plans to forestall a major environmental crisis. On the Republican side, we have Mike Huckabee who thinks global warming is a serious problem but doesn't have any particular ideas about dealing with it. We have Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani who basically seem to be in denial. And then most bizarrely we have John McCain who acknowledges the problem, acknowledges its severity, acknowledges that the only solution is curbs on carbon emissions and then . . . won't endorse the sort of curbs that his own analysis suggests is necessary.
Nice article by ex-colleague Nick Confessore, noting that if you judge by issue positions Michael Bloomberg just seems like a standard-issue Democrat. Quite so. He could, of course, adopt some new, more right-wing views to make himself more centrist, but doing that strategically would only further demonstrate the vacuity of the enterprise.
Am I feeling bitter? You bet. Not because Hillary Clinton seems more likely than not to lose — I can live with that pretty easily — but because of how she's likely to lose. Because the press doesn't like her. Because any time a woman raises her voice half a decibel she instantly becomes shrill. Because we insist on an idiotic nominating system that gives a bunch of Iowa corn farmers 20x the influence of any Democratic voter in any urban area in the country. Because the fever swamp, in the end, is getting the last laugh.
As Troy Aikman just said to Joe Buck about an unrelated issue, "I agree with that to a point." But consider the alternative -- had Hillary Clinton won because she'd been able to coerce the support of a large number of elected officials, union leaders, donors, and other elites on the basis of the idea that she was inevitable and retribution would be dealt out to those who failed to support her and because we insist on an idiotic nominating system that gives wildly disproportionate influence to lily-white Iowa that would have sucked, too. We have a screwed-up political process in this country, and political outcomes naturally reflect that fact.
I agree that Clinton gets a bad rap from many in the press, but at the end of the day there are limits to my sympathy for the ill-treatment she and her husband have received over the years. Or, rather, there aren't limits to the sympathy, but there are limits to what the sympathy can buy you. Resentment at the inanity of the media isn't a good reason to make one particular person President. If she loses, Hillary Clinton will still be a multimillionaire US Senator, so there are people out there who I'll feel sorrier for. Meanwhile, it's not as if Clinton had some visionary plan to fix these problems; it's Obama with the ambitious media reform program, and Clinton who's benefitting from Murdoch-hosted fundraisers.
On top of all that: Getting good press is part of being an effective candidate and part of being an effective president. Will Obama continue to get this kind of worshipful coverage in the general election campaign? Probably not, especially if he has to run against Saint John of Arizona. But will he get better coverage than Clinton or Edwards would? Almost certainly. And I don't think it makes sense to let resentment be the governing consideration here.
Speaking of undeserved good press coverage, Eli Manning played a good game, beat Tampa Day and suddenly I'm hearing guys on television speculating that we may look back at this game as "the day Eli Manning grew up" or some such nonsense. Sure, we may do that if, over the rest of his career he suddenly starts playing like his brother. But there's no reason to expect that whatsoever. Manning's not so bad that he's never put a good game together.
But take a below-average NFL quarterback, surround him with some other talented offensive players, and he's going to play well some of the time. That's just the basic math of it. Meanwhile, 24 points is only slightly above league average -- it's not as if we witnessed some dominating offensive performance.
In the latest in a bizarrely long line of efforts to convince us that Hillary Clinton never supported the Iraq War, we've now got her saying "After 9/11, I would never have taken us to war in Iraq. I would have stayed focused on Afghanistan because the real threat was coming from there." Now it's entirely possible that, in a purely counterfactual sense, had some freakish sequence of events put her in the White House in September of 2001 that Hillary Clinton would have stayed focused on Afghanistan rather than drawing attention to Iraq. But in the real world she was a United States Senator, the President of the United States asked for the authority to invade Iraq, and she voted to give it to him.
Clinton has on-again, off-again tried to argue (now she's on again) that that didn't mean she favored actually invading. But it would seem to seriously undermine the argument that she's a doer with tons of valuable experience to argue that she didn't know what was going on. In the real world, it's hardly creditable to think that she was that naive.
I missed the vast majority of Fox News' "No Ron Paul Allowed" debate to watch the season premiere of The Wire (yes, yes, I know I could have watched it earlier on demand, but it's easier to coordinate with a group of people by just sticking to the air date) but Josh Marshall thought Romney did a good job. Mark Levin liked Romney too. And apparently a Frank Luntz focus group handed it to Romney. Anyone else out there see it?
In the brief segment I saw, the candidates were mostly beating around the issue of who has the right kind of experience to lead. McCain and Romney, in particular, were having a kind of classic debate of presidential politics wherein the senator argues that you need specific experience with foreign affairs questions that you don't get at the state level, while the governor argues that you need the kind of administrative experience that you don't get in the Senate. My sense is that, historically, that kind of argument has usually gone in favor of the governors but clearly plenty of senators win nominations as well.
In a broader sense, I had trouble discerning a distinctive argument being made by McCain. The argument I often hear made on McCain's behalf is either that Romney is too weak a general election candidate, or else that orthodox conservatives need to unite around semi-orthodox McCain rather than risk a win by heterodox Huckabee or Giuliani. But McCain himself doesn't seem to be pushing the electability argument. Nor does he seem to be pushing the David Brooks argument that, yes, he's less orthodox than Romney but that's a good thing. But if those aren't his arguments, then what is his argument? That circles back to leadership and experience, but I don't think those issues clearly cut in the favor of a very old man who can't really touch Romney's experience as a manager.
Lurking near the end of Tom Edsall's excellent piece on the Clinton campaign's efforts to retool we get this WTF moment: "In private, some of Clinton's supporters are deeply disdainful of Obama. 'He is the candidate of the "identity left",' said one, dismissively." These sound like some talking points straight outta 1988 to me.
Glad to see some attention being paid to the evils of Mark Penn. His downfall would, if it comes to pass, truly be one of the best consequences of a Hillary Clinton non-nomination. In my mind, Clinton's decision to hire Penn did and does a lot to undermine her efforts to project herself as the more committed progressive than Barack Obama in this race.
Hillary watches Grey’s Anatomy, Barack Obama likes The Wire (for the record, that’s the right answer), and John Edwards says his viewing guilty pleasure is "Fred Thompson on Law & Order."
Of course it does give one pause. The press, myself included, loves The Wire but it's not something the mass public has ever embraced. Is America ready for a Wire-watching President?
The trouble with having Bill Kristol as a New York Times columnist is not just that he's prone to saying substantive things about the issues that I disagree with. He's also the kind of guy who when he goes out on a weird limb and says Mike Huckabee would have a good chance of winning in a general election, you immediately start wondering why he's saying that.
"Because he believes it" doesn't tend to rank very high on the list. That's his rep, and based on his record it seems like a deserved rep. But when you read your morning paper and find yourself wondering why, exactly, its authors are trying to mislead you, then your morning paper is suddenly not so useful.
But if we entertain the premise that Kristol does think Huckabee would make a good general election candidate, then what he's doing is conflating the fact that Huckabee is the most appealing natural politician in the Republican field with the idea that the actually existing Huckabee would do well. Someone like Huckabee -- someone with something comparable to his ability to connect with people -- could be a very successful figure in American politics. Someone like Huckabee could be Bill Clinton. But Huckabee is Huckabee, not a Huckabee-like substitute; a niche product, a white evangelical identity politics candidate.
Carrie Brownstein takes note of U2 rise to dominance in the campaign music scene:
When Barack Obama took the stage in DeMoines to deliver his impassioned Iowa caucus victory speech, U2's song "City of Blinding Lights" preceded him. On the same night, John Edwards' address to his supporters was also paired with a U2 song, "In The Name of Love?" Since when has U2 become the band to sum up American sentiment? Or is it just that they are one of the biggest band in the world and summing up the zeitgeist is part of their job? I guess with Led Zeppelin's "Lemon Song" not exactly getting the right message across and Rush a little tricky to dance to, U2 is the only monolithic band to embody that perfect blend of informed yet cool.
I'll say this, when I went to check out a Barack Obama rally in Washington Square Park by far the worst element was this painfully lame indie rock act they got to keep the crowd warm as people filtered in. In short, you could do worse than U2 (Celine Dione, for example). Still, in light of this country's rich heritage of African-American music, it's a bit sad to see Obama feeling the need to whiten things up like this.
I think Barack Obama just won the Michael O'Hanlon primary. Everyone's favorite expert on everything explains that the problem with Obama is that he "seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war." Oh dear! We learn that, after all, he "had used chemical weapons against his own defenseless people.":
Sanctions limited his funds for military programs, but the sanctions were eroding fast in the years before the invasion. Saddam's links to al Qaeda were overdramatized, but Saddam's own record of atrocities against his own people, Iranians and Kuwaitis, as well as his support for anti-Israeli terrorists, were heinous enough.
Yet Mr. Obama consistently accuses those who supported the war of political motivations -- and unsavory ones at that. On Dec. 27, for example, Mr. Obama said in Des Moines, Iowa, "You can't fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and then offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America."
Now I think you've got to draw a distinction. Given the large number of people who supported the war in some form or another, a viable politician obviously can't have help for each and every person who did so. But a politician who has contempt for the opinion leaders like O'Hanlon who helped sell the country on the war seems like exactly the sort of person you want in the White House.
From the standpoint of foreign policy doctrine, this has been a frustrating primary to watch. The candidates have debated the main issues of domestic policy at a high level of detail, despite (or perhaps because of) everyone agreeing that they share the same basic approach. On national security issues, it's always been far less obvious how big or small the disgareements really are. And yet, few broad issues have really been mooted and everyone's quite vague. Instead of hearing thing straightforwardly, we're left in the position of trying to assess the contenders' likely conduct by judging the shadows. But this shadow definitely points in Obama's favor.
Season Five, Episode one got off to a strong start. At the same time, contemplating the enormity of the narrative task now facing the show's creators, it seems hard to believe that they're going to be able to reel this whole thing in in a dozen episodes. Not that I expect The Wire to do anything as trite as "wrap up" all the threads into a tidy package, but surely something needs to happen. But with Michael and Dukie from season four still in the mix, then the political plot thread, the new newspaper thread, the cops, the co-op, Omar, and hints that Avon Barksdale and at least some elements of the Greek's crew coming back into view, it all just seems like . . . a lot of ground to cover.
Ari Berman takes a good long luck at the different groups of foreign policy advisors around Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If you read the piece, you may find yourself frustrated that it doesn't come to a more clear-cut conclusion. My experience trying to explore this same issue, though, is that it's simply very difficult to reach a clear-cut conclusion as there's a good deal of overlap. That said, insofar as there are indications of daylight between Clinton and Obama, the daylight certainly seems to be in Obama's favor:
Today, advisers like Tony Lake point to a number of "significant differences" between Obama and Clinton. On Iraq, Obama not only opposed the war but has said he would withdraw all combat troops within sixteen months of taking office. On Iran, Obama rejected the Kyl-Lieberman resolution (though he missed the vote while campaigning) and has proposed a broader engagement strategy to lure Iran into the community of nations. On nuclear weapons, he has not only promised to reduce US nuclear stockpiles, as has Clinton, but advocates a world free of nuclear weapons. On Cuba, Obama went to Miami and said the ban on family travel and remittances to the island nation should be lifted, a policy Clinton opposes.
At any rate, you really ought to read the whole piece because there are a lot of nuances here. What's more, assembling a "foreign policy team" for campaign purposes isn't really the same as assembling an actual foreign policy team to govern with, so it's a bit uncertain how much any of this matters.
One thing that I wish Democratic candidates would or could emphasize is that a more liberal immigration regime isn’t just compatible with better security, it may actually facilitate it. If you allow economic immigrants ready access to the country, then they have no reason not to come in through the front door, at which point they can get fingerprinted, get their visas and identification cards, be placed in the government’s databases, checked against terrorist profiles, etc. This way, we know who is coming into the country, and we know that anyone not using the front door is probably not a legitimate economic immigrant.
I'm convinced. I'm not, however, convinced that people's concern about immigration is really driven primarily by national security worries as opposed to cultural anxieties.
When I was talking to Jon Chait about John McCain I realized that I was a little unclear on the current status of McCain's climate change thinking. Brian Beutler lays out his evolution:
Jon rightly points to his position on climate change--indeed, in 2003, when McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced the Climate Stewardship Act, they were way ahead of the curve, and if the bill had passed then, it might well have been a sufficient regulatory solution to the problem. But the problem has grown worse and the measures needed to combat it more expansive, and as such, when the Democrats took over in 2007, they began discussing a whole host of new legislation, the weakest of which--sponsored by Lieberman and John Warner--has a lot of momentum behind it. But it doesn't have the support of McCain himself, who basically thinks the bill is too far reaching, except in that it doesn't contain a provision to back a dump truck full of money up to the front door of the nuclear energy industry. Today, his campaign says almost nothing about global warming at all. So I suppose he should get some plaudits for opening the climate change conversation up to other Republicans (like Olympia Snowe and John Warner and others). But he's not leading on the issue anymore, and it's pretty clear where he'd govern from as president.
I don't think it's a very good idea to lard up a climate change bill with subsidies to the nuclear industry (noting that any sensible system of carbon curbs would constitute a large de facto subsidy to nuclear power anyway, I'd like to see explicit subsidies limited to truly clean renewables). I wouldn't, however, be heartbroken to see an otherwise good climate bill wind up larded up with such subsidies on route to passage or as a means of building a broader political coalition. But to actually turn around and oppose a climate change bill due to insufficient lard seems totally unconscionable like old fashioned straight talk to me.
Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee — an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.
What's fascinating about this is the literally superficial level of the analysis. It's true that Edwards and Huckabee have a somewhat similar political style -- they both fit firmly in the southern populist tradition. Barack Obama has a very different style, coming out of the progressive reformer tradition. That said, in any deeper sense, Edwards is clearly much much much more similar to Obama than he is to Huckabee. Huckabee says "We don't need universal health care mandated by federal edict or funded through ever-higher taxes."
John Edwards and Barack Obama both have health care plans that involve lots of new spending and federal edicts. John Edwards would reduce carbon emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050 through an auction of tradable emissions permits. Barack Obama would do the same. Mike Huckabee's energy plan doesn't mention global warming. John Edwards supports reproductive freedom and gay rights. So does Barack Obama. But Mike Huckabee doesn't. Barack Obama wants to repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. So does John Edwards. Mike Huckabee wants to implement a regressive and unworkable national retail sales tax.
I won't further belabor the point, because it's obvious. But this stuff matters! The difference between a world of uncontrollable global warming, a rag-tag health care system, a regressive tax code, forced pregnancy, and a Federal Marriage Amendment is very different from a world with a clean energy economy, a strong safety net for the sick, a progressive tax code, and a government that respects privacy. The stylistic differences between Edwards and Obama aren't unimportant, but the substantive similarities between the two (and, indeed, between both of them and Hillary Clinton) are much more important than the superficial similarities between Edwards and Huckabee.
Photo courtesy of John Edwards 2008 used under a Creative Commons license
Okay, I think I've figured out what game Bill Kristol's playing by talking up Mike Huckabee. The theory, I think, is that the current GOP contest features a Romney versus McCain matchup and a Romney versus Huckabee matchup. If it ever becomes a McCain-Huckabee head-to-head, then McCain wins. Hence, talking up Huckabee helps McCain, the candidate Kristol wants to help.
But, seriously New York Times, this is the problem with taking Kristol on as a columnist. You need to read his work with a decoder ring to try to figure out what's happening.
As best I can tell, the Clinton campaign's attacks on Barack Obama's record on abortion rights and their attacks on his counterattcks are, as Dana Goldstein reports, basically false.
In a larger sense, though, efforts to even raise this issue ring a bit hollow to me. After all, what's the beef here supposed to be? What is it that's supposed to make me, as a pro-choice voter, worry about the prospect of an Obama administration? To the best of my knowledge, Obama, like Clinton, would appoint pro-choice judges, repeal the global gag rule, sign a Freedom of Choice Act, veto abortion restrictions that don't adequately safeguard a mother's health, etc., etc. If that's not true -- if Obama has some meaningful policy disagreement with Clinton -- then that'd be a great issue to raise. But if there isn't, then there isn't.
I suppose that in pure campaigning terms, Kevin Drum's right and Hillary Clinton's complaints about Barack Obama and John Edwards raising "false hopes" was a gaffe. But I think it's an interesting theme, and sort of wish she would explore it in a more rigorous and thorough way.
The trouble is that as is, she's raising essentially the same hopes as her competitors -- hopes of fundamental change in health care and energy policy. It often does seem to me that all three Democrats are overpromising here, and I think it would be interesting to hear Clinton try to specifically make the argument that her rivals are promising too much and that doing so is dangerous. The trouble is that while I'm open to the idea that either Obama or Edwards is engaged in a certain amount of magical thinking about their ability to implement their agenda, she then just turns around and does the same thing. It's true that high aspirations and inspiring rhetoric won't produce fundamental policy shifts. It's also true that getting really outraged won't produce fundamental policy shifts. But neither will Clinton's years of experience -- you can see it in her own list of legislative accomplishments as Senator and First Lady, there's just nothing in there of remotely the sort of scale that she's now promising.
So if it's true that Edwards and Obama are raising false hopes, then show is she. Ultimately, I think whether or not those hopes prove false will mostly turn not on who the president is, but on what the outcome of the congressional elections are. Still, it would be interesting to see veteran centrist Hillary Clinton run as veteran centrist Hillary Clinton and make the case on the merits for the kind of legislative approach that she and Bill adopted for the bulk of their time in the White House. Instead, though, she's campaigning on an agenda that's every bit as ambitious as her rivals' and then asking us to believe that her experience being married to someone who governed successfully as a cautious centrist makes her uniquely capable of producing dramatic change. It doesn't really make sense.
I think it bears mentioning that it's always worth trying to not overread the trends. A month ago, it looked like Hillary Clinton would probably win the nomination. At the same time, it was clear back then that Obama wasn't prohibitively far behind in Iowa or anything. And it was clear that winning Iowa would give him a big edge in winning in New Hampshire. And it was also clear that if Obama swept Iowa and New Hampshire, the powerful culinary workers union was unlikely to back Clinton. And it was also clear that if Obama won in two lily-white states, that the odds favored African-Americans flocking to his banner in South Carolina. And it was clear that all that would create a lot of momentum working against Clinton moving into the big states.
We knew all that, but because it looked like Obama probably wouldn't win Iowa, that pro-Obama cascade looked unlikely. Then Obama did win Iowa, making the cascade look likely. And I think it is the most probable outcome. But just as Obama once looked like he would lose in Iowa and then won, just because Clinton looks down now hardly makes it impossible for her to recover. In particular, I think there's an important sense in which Edwards is doing more to split the regular/warrior/beer track vote than he is to split an anti-Clinton vote, which is one reason that I haven't felt too torn up about my divided affections for both Edwards and Obama. But if Edwards doesn't build up any profile in the February 5 states, I think a head-to-head matchup is much trickier for Obama. The risk for Clinton is that her network of supporters might melt down before then, or else that Edwards' message might start to break through in a wider array of states and make it difficult for Clinton to consolidate a coalition of working class whites and Latinos.
Meanwhile, if there's such a thing as an anti-Obama constituency inside the party, it seems to me that Edwards would probably have an easier time beating Obama in a two-person race than would Clinton since in a lot of ways he's much better-situated to lead a working class counterinsurgency against Obama's fancy-pants fan club.
Brian Katulis' rejoinder to Michael O'Hanlon -- "O’Hanlon Mourns That Obama Was Right On Iraq" -- is pretty amusing reading. The charge that O'Hanlon is "angling for influence," though probably accurate, seems a bit unfair since I think Katulis is angling for influence, too. The difference is that Katulis having influence over an Obama administration would be a good thing, while O'Hanlon having influence over a Clinton administration would be a bad thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if this inane "Clinton crying" pseudo-story winds up redounding to her benefit; it's a stark reminder of how much sexist BS there is out there which, in turn, gets people back to thinking about how the first woman president in American history would be a pretty damn transformative event all on its own terms.
It's interesting to see Hillary Clinton evidently attempting to make the sort of criticism of JFK that I blogged on Saturday. It's a natural argument for her to make; that Barack Obama is, just as his fans say, like JFK and that's a bad thing. But based on my experience of trying to argue that being "like Kennedy" isn't necessarily what you want in a president, this is unlikely to persuade tons of people.
[I don't really think the analogy holds up though in either direction -- the legislative circumstances surrounding the Civil Rights Act were really quite unlike anything you'd ever see today. What's more, she really does seem to me to be slighting the crucial role of social movements in setting the conditions for things to happen.]
Here's some interesting graphics. First, the Iowa counties Mike Huckabee won in blue, those Mitt Romney won in red:
Next up, the proportion of Catholics in each county:
That's circumstantial evidence that Catholics don't like the Huckster. Philip Klinker, who put those images together, ran the numbers more rigorously and came to a firmer conclusion -- Catholics don't like the guy.
At the end of the day, that's big trouble. One thinks, traditionally, of white Catholics as the core bloc of culturally traditionalist voters with some leanings in the direction of economic populism. Any nationally successful coalition founded on the sort of Christian Democratic approach that Huckabee gestures at in his more appealing moments would need to have Catholic voters at its heart, not pushed out to the margins.
With all of DC's biggest political addicts all up in New Hampshire, the only thing anyone in town really cares about is Joe Gibbs resigning as head coach of the Redskins. Seems to me like it's for the best.
Tyler Cowen relinked today to guest poster Fabio Rojas' thoughts on Barack Obama from back in May 2004. It reminded me that I'd been meaning to do a rambling post on my early impressions of the now-favorite for the Democratic nomination.
Way back in the day when I was a Writing Fellow at The American Prospect my fellow fellow was from Illinois and she'd been known to mention from time to time that there was this great up-and-coming State Senator named Barack Obama running for US Senator and that it was too bad the party establishment was trying to hand the nomination to some mediocrity named Blair Hull. This kind of fit into a notion that I'd frequently tossed around with my friend Dave. Dave and I agreed that rhetorical skill was an underrated trait in achieving political success, that a disproportionate number of skilled orators in the United States seem to be Southern or African-American, and that, therefore, the general Democratic aversion to nominating black candidates to run for office in majority white constituencies was likely depriving the country of some potentially very successful politicians.
Then, I didn't think a ton about it but at this 2004 blogger breakfast event at the Democratic National Convention, I met Obama when he and I found ourselves jostling to get some breakfast meat at the buffet (this is how I know he's not secretly a Muslim) he introduced himself, asked if I was a blogger, I said I was, and he in a pretty honest-and-appealing conceded that his understanding of what a blogger was was a bit hazy but people told him it was important. Then he gave a little talk about something and it didn't strike me as particularly memorable.
Later, either that day or soon after, I was in the Fleet Center's corridors soon before Obama delivered the speech that really launched his national profile, not with any definite views as to when I was going to head into the main part of the arena to start listening to speeches. I ran into Bradley Tusk who I worked for one summer when he was Chuck Schumer's Communications Director and who turned out at the time to be working for Governor Blagojevich in Illinois. He said this Obama guy was a great speaker and I should really check it out, I made some kind of breakfast-related joke, and then in we went. The Fleet Center was much more crowded than it had been at comparable times on other nights so we wound up with really terrible seats. Then came Obama and, of course, he blew everyone away.
What's the point of recounting this? I have no idea, but the sequence of events has always made me favorable disposed toward the guy for reasons that really have nothing to do with his suitability to be a president or a presidential candidate. On the other hand, I had various opportunities to proclaim the guy the future of American politics and come away looking prescient, but kept not really doing so, a pattern in keeping with my generally poor powers of prognostication.
My debut print article for the Atlantic is in our Jan/Feb issue, which should be coming available just about now in print form. Or, you can read it online here. The subject is the wave of foreclosures washing over the country -- where are things worst and why, plus what kind of negative consequences exist of living in foreclosureland even if you've been making your payments on time.
Ana Marie Cox tries to get John McCain to expand a bit on his vision for an indefinite occupation of Iraq:
His campaign insists that the reason he becomes so hyperbolic is to hammer home the point that our time in Iraq will stop being a controversy once the killing stops. Sure, he's right about that -- and that's why he mentions Japan, Germany and Kuwait when rebuffing criticism. (Though it's also a weirdly obvious conclusion: Other than the killings, America, how did you like the play?) What frustrated me yesterday was his refusal to engage on what it would take to make the transition from an occupying force in a country torn by civil war to something less intrusive... and also to address the mixed feelings that Iraqis greet the prospect of perpetual American presence.
I think this shows a real inability to grasp the basic dynamics of the situation. I can't speak to the details of the immediate postwar period in Germany and Japan, but it's clear that following the formal surrender of the Axis militaries the occupation forces were able to very quickly establish orderly and peaceful conditions. Within just a couple of years the dawn of the Cold War shifted the main purpose of US military personnel in Germany and Japan away from occupation work and toward defense of those countries from the Soviet threat. Meanwhile, there was never any serious doubt about the legitimacy of "Germany" or "Japan" as nation-states.
Four and a half years after the occupation of Iraq began, there's just nothing about Iraq 2008 that resembles Germany or Japan in 1950. To do what McCain does and simply assume that the natural evolution of the situation is into the sort of stability and uncontroversial presence of US troops that we see in those other countries is fatuous.
Am I totally crazy, or has the Bush administration's "surge" policy in Iraq produced a surge in the use of the term "surge" in America? I feel like every time a candidate's polling number start improving these days, we say he's "surging." Was that always the word in vogue? It's common, of course, for war to impact the language -- "shell shocked," etc. -- but I'd always hoped "shock and awe" would be Iraq War Deux's distinctive contribution to the American lexicon.
Reading Bill Clinton's slams on Barack Obama you have to wonder if the ex-president and other close associates might be so clouded by bitterness if Hillary Clinton loses that they'll try to sabotage Obama's general election campaign. As Hillary's husband, you expect Bill to vigorously support her campaign. But as a former president and high-profile Democratic Party leader, you also expect Bill to not actually get down and dirty attacking other Democrats as unfit for office.
After all, if Obama does become the nominee and John McCain or Mitt Romney starts attacking him as insufficiently experienced to do the job, one surrogate you'd definitely want to have out there in Obama's camp would be former President Bill Clinton.
My roommate Kriston Capps is having some difficulty explaining to his parents why the Fair Tax is not, in fact, fair. I think the talking point you want to hit here has to do with the effects of excluding savings and investment from taxation. Under the fair tax, Paris Hilton's maid winds up paying a bigger proportion of her income in taxes than does Paris Hilton. People who can afford giant mansions aren't going to pay 30 percent on that, people who can afford full-tuition for their kids at fancy private universities aren't going to pay 30 percent on that, people aren't going to pay 30 percent on their European vacations, they're not paying 30 percent on what they pay their maid or their gardner.
But ordinary people are going to see the price of everything they buy at the grocery store go up.
Related to the foreclosures issue (and, of course, The Wire) it seems that Baltimore is suing Wells Fargo Bank "contending that its lending practices discriminated against black borrowers and led to a wave of foreclosures that has reduced city tax revenues and increased its costs." It's possible, of course, that this is a good idea but one needs to be very careful in this territory. The last thing a struggling city like Baltimore needs to do is create a situation where banks just figure they'd rather not lend anything to anyone in the city for fear of lawsuits if things don't work out.
It's by no means a policy book, but one thing that comes through loud and clear in Sudhir Venkatesh's Off The Books is that inability to secure formal, legal credit from proper banks is a big obstacle for inner-city underground entrepreneurs who'd like to take their successes above-board. Meanwhile, however bad the terms a real bank may offer a person in a sketchy neighborhood, you're way better off with the bank than with the loan shark or the checks cashed guy or the payday loan emporium.
Chilling words: "Chevy Chase is trying to make a comeback." My hope is for all the "notable alumni of the Dalton School" who are more notable than I to slip into obscurity. What's Claire Danes done lately?
The Washington Post's Thomas Boswell pronounces himself a "Gibsologist" comparable to a Kremlinologist. Explains he's been studying the man for over 25 years. Fails to predict his resignation. Column runs on the very day the resignation happens.
Dahlia Lithwick, reacting to Steinem says "The real contrast between Obama and Clinton lies not in this who’s-carrying-a-greater-burden sweepstakes. It’s that he figured out how to transcend labels and she tried to do so by turning herself into an android."
That, I think, is closer to the mark. But here's where being black is less of a handicap than being a woman. American society is awash in certain negative stereotypes of African-Americans, especially African-American men. But it's possible for any individual African-American to "transcend" those stereotypes by simply not living up to them. So Barack Obama can't afford to show the kind of populist outrage John Edwards expresses lest he be deemed a threatening radical, but if he avoids falling into pitfalls of stereotype he winds up getting praised in a somewhat condescending, but still helpful to his political career, manner as "one of the good ones."
A woman faces a very different problem. A woman who's seen as possessing the stereotypical characteristics of femininity won't do well in presidential politics. But a woman who's seen as lacking those characteristics will be penalized as well. The female politician can't be too femme or too butch, and she can't be androgynous either. That's why, as Kerry Howley sagely observed in The New York Times, frequently the only way for a woman politician to break through is by more-or-less riding the coattails of a male husband or father. Once some critical mass of women acquire political power, it becomes possible to start creating new models of political behavior. But right now, our model of executive leadership is heavily male-coded, but insufficiently feminine women are disparaged so widespread sexist assumptions create an inescapable trap.
Brian Katulis writes on a subject near to my heart: how progressives can win on national security. His thought, meanwhile, largely mirrors my own. It's important to make a broad-based, principles-driven argument that the failures of the Bush years represent an ideological failure that discredits not specific people but their ideas.
I do, however, have one point of disagreement related to Katulis' disparagement of calls for bipartisanship. I think one has to be careful here. The party coalitions are arranged primarily around issues of domestic policy and identity, so there often isn't especially sharp partisan differentiation on these subjects. Most elected officials just don't care at all about the substance of foreign policy issues. Meanwhile, many moderate Republican politicians have really been no worse than your "liberal hawk" types. I'm not one to go over-the-top in valorizing Chuck Hagel et. al., but he's been at least as good as, say, Ben Nelson on a number of key issues.
This goes two way. On the one hand, Dick Lugar really is someone it should be possible for a new administration to work with on a number of topics. Conversely, there are plenty of Democrats who are sort of no good. So bipartisanship can work out well or it can work out poorly. I think, for example, that this "bipartisan agenda" statement from the Stanley Foundation on "revitalizing international cooperation" is pretty good. Their book of "bipartisan" essays, on the other hand, is a very mixed bag. The "bipartisan center" composed of Michael O'Hanlon and Frederick Kagan is one we could do without. But Francis Fukuyama is the author of an important critique of neoconservative foreign policy and when he teams up with Michael McFaul the results are good.
Basically, during 2002-2003 we saw pernicious factions take control of both political parties. But other factions exist inside both parties. Building alliances with the more sensible moderate Republicans, paleocons, libertarians, etc. is, I think, essential to beating back the tide of horrors.
It's worth saying that I find Patrick Ruffini's Hillary Comeback scenario pretty plausible. The Iowa and New Hampshire primaries were really, really, really close together. After tonight, even if she loses, things slow down a bit and give her ample opportunity to mount her comeback.
However, a few caveats.
The widespread assumption seems to be that the path to victory for HRC involves tearing Obama down. That seems a bit doubtful to me. She has a lot of institutional support, endorsements, etc. that were acquired back in the "inevitable" era. Those people will presumably keep standing with her even if it looks like she'll probably lose. What they won't want to do is keep standing with her as she smears the front-runner. Lots of Clinton's supporters were backing her for essentially careerist and opportunistic reasons, and they're not going to want to be associated with harsh negative campaigning against Obama if it looks probable that Obama will win anyhow.
What she needs to do with her opportunity is do what she didn't do in the nine months before Iowa: Establish an affirmative rationale for her candidacy. She's had the advantage for most of the campaign of playing front-runner, parrying attacks, and basically being the default option. That advantage has now become a disadvantage, however, because it means she never really established a core sense of what was supposed to be exciting about a Hillary Clinton administration. She still has time to do that, though, and since most Democrats, unlike most reporters, basically like and respect her, I think people would be very open to her argument. I've just never heard what the argument is (and, no, it's not "experience" ask Bill Richardson and every other "I'm qualified" candidate how that worked out).
James Kirchick has a long article delving deeper into the archives of Ron Paul's newsletters and finds a lot of racist and neoconfederate stuff, plus some serious homophobia. Some of this has been seen before, and Chris Hayes' article on the gap between the Ron Paul / Von Mises Institute school of libertarianism and the urbane cosmopolitans of Cato prefigured the general thrust of the thing, but Kirchick has a lot of the goods.
On the other hand, I think Ron Paul's responses as given to Dave Weigel and now issued in a press release are reasonably reasonable. If you're a pro-life, anti-war, anti-immigration, libertarian I don't really see anything here that would make you suddenly embrace John McCain as a preferable presidential candidate. Meanwhile, it shouldn't really be surprising to see a link between a libertarian politician and white supremacists. The main constituency for Barry Goldwater's message was white supremacists, after all.
Mike Huckabee comes out in favor of removing Palestinians from Palestine and establishing a Palestinian state somewhere else. Maybe Egypt or Saudi Arabia. A play to pick up some of Giuliani's supporters? The sentiments are outrageous on their own terms, and also a stark reminder that Israel's real friends in the United States shouldn't be blind to the dangers posed by the irrealism and extremism of the Christian Zionists.
Brave New Films is doing a collaboration with the Young Turks radio show tonight, and I'll be on around 7:40 PM eastern time. Webcast is here. I'll also be on ABC News Now around 9:30 PM eastern time which you can see here.
The polls and what we can tell of turnout all point toward an Obama win. But thanks to the nature of the "expectations game" I don't expect winning to do him much further good. Note once again that the main impact of the primary system is not so much to empower the voters of New Hampshire as it is to empower the political press. Bill Clinton was dubbed the "comeback kid" based on a number two finish in New Hampshire, and the press could easily spin a Clinton loss by as much as 4-6 percentage points as a comeback moral victory that sets the stage for a Clinton rebound.
Don't expect that to happen since the press doesn't like Clinton that much, and Team Clinton wasn't complaining about this dynamic in 1992 when it worked in their favor.
That said, the press will be bored of Obamamania before February 5, and I bet the reporters tasked to cover Clinton wake up tomorrow morning realizing that it's no good for their careers if the Democratic primary ends this week, so the fight will continue.
Watch the early returns out of Manchester -- it has a big working class contingent. If Clinton-Obama is close there, Obama wins. If Obama's winning there, the state's a blowout for him. And if Clinton's winning big in Manchester, it'll be close statewide. On the Republican side, Romney needs to do well along the I-93 Corridor where voters have more Massachusetts ties.
Clinton and Obama are tight. I need to go to ABC's studios pretty soon to film this appearance and may not be able to liveblog the moment when we get to know the outcome.
Obviously, polls predicting a big Obama win in NH were wrong. It's going to be close, and it's quite possibly going to be for Clinton. 25 I thought:
I wouldn't be surprised if this inane "Clinton crying" pseudo-story winds up redounding to her benefit; it's a stark reminder of how much sexist BS there is out there which, in turn, gets people back to thinking about how the first woman president in American history would be a pretty damn transformative event all on its own terms.
It seems to me that Hillary Clinton's return to dominance among women bears that out. I don't think pissing off Chris Matthews is a good enough reason to pull the lever for Clinton, but I can certainly understand the impulse.
My friend Emily Thorson has trained in the twisted logic of managing an Iowa caucus and has this to say about Clinton's New Hampshire rebound:
The TV coverage I've been watching has implied that New Hampshire is a crazy comeback surprise and Iowa is somehow the "real" result. I think they're wrong. Iowa is the anomaly, because of the bizarre public forum that is the Iowa caucus. You know why Hillary does worse in a caucus? Because women who are leaning Hillary go to the caucus with their husbands, and he says "Let's go for Obama" or "Let's go for Edwards" and she says "Well, all right then" because she doesn't want to spend the next hour sitting alone in the Hillary group. I've sat through a caucus. This is how it works.
I heard most of Mitt Romney's speech earlier tonight and he sounded a lot like the reasonably appealing moderate technocrat I voted for in 2002. Certainly, much more like that guy than like the "three-legged stool" New Model Wingnut he's been running as. Meanwhile, John Judis notes that despite Romney's more moderate record, he actually succeeded in convincing New Hampshire voters that he was more conservative and "bested McCain only among voters who considered themselves 'very conservative' and were 'enthusiastic' about the Bush administration. In New Hampshire, these voters were a decided minority."
If Rommey had run on his record, in short, he might have won. On the other hand, we saw in 2000 what happens in a GOP primary where moderate Republicans and independents go for John McCain -- he loses to the conservative. But with Mike Huckabee in the field, it's going to be hard for Romney to consolidate social conservatives against McCain. Of course, it also remains to be seen if Rudy Giuliani can rally his forces to any extent.
As we've seen from the exit polls, she pulled ahead based on strong support from women.
UPDATE: I should say we're seeing some talk of a "Wilder effect" possibly doing Obama in. I don't buy that. If you look at the breakdown of the results, you'd need to believe that white women, but not white men, are inclined to lie to pollsters about that. More likely we're looking at a combination of gender backlash, plus the fact that Obama was so widely perceived as likely to win led independents to vote for John McCain in the GOP primary.
It's worth saying that if a month ago, Team Obama had said their plan was to win out of the two first states and go from there, I think people would have considered that a prudently optimistic plan for victory. The temptation to massively overreact to the last thing that happened is something I warned about during the Iowa-NH interregnum, and the same is true today. In an election where most Democrats think there's more than one candidate in the field who could make a good nominee, I think we should expect to see a lot of volatility.
Barack Obama's new refrain "yes we can" just so happens to be an English translation of the "si se puede" chant one might associate with a crucial union in Nevada.
Crack investigative reporter Spencer Ackerman observes that Howard Wolfson looks like Chris Elliot. I would also note that the sweater he's wearing is absurd. The man's a professional, he should wear a suit when he goes on television.
It's interesting how much more interested the press seems to be in the Democratic race than in the GOP one. When after Iowa there was tons of attention showered on Barack Obama and nothing on Huckabee, I figured that was just part of the vast pro-McCain conspiracy. But after the media got the McCain victory it was hoping for, there's still more talk about the Democratic result.
The thing of it is that the Republican race is really much more interesting. It's a bigger field of semi-viable contenders and it's very unpredictable. What's more, there appears to be much more separating the Republican nominees from each other in terms of policy and approach -- Mike Huckabee is really, really different from Rudy Giuliani. My feeling has kind of been that I, personally, tend to focus on the Democratic field perhaps a bit more than it deserves because I'm a liberal and I've got a mostly liberal audience, but actually it seems that everyone is playing it my way and I'm not really sure why.
Commenter Brian makes an observation "No one is talking about how the polls actually nailed Obama's number. Obama didn't lose this election. He stayed steady and Hillary surged ahead." That seems to be true. Here's a chart comparing the actual results to the most recent Pollster.com current standard estimate polling average.
Just as Brian says, the difference between the Obama poll level and the Obama vote total level seems to just be your basic statistical variance. The pollsters underestimated Clinton's level of support. People who were undecided as of the last round of polling seem to have gone overwhelmingly in her direction.
[also note the relevance of this to Wilder/Bradley effect speculations]
French President Nicholas Sarkozy got divorced early in his term, is dating a supermodel and his son's writing songs for radical French rappers. Not only does American politics seem remarkably focused on relatively unimportant personal trivia, but our politicians don't even have interesting trivia.
The striking thing about the Sam Nunn statement coming out of the silly unity confab is the bizarre mismatch between its action-items and its diagnosis. Here what they think is wrong with the country:
Approval for the United States around the world has dropped to historically low levels, with only one out of four people approving of our country's actions, even in nations that are our longtime allies.
We have eroded America's credibility and capacity to lead on urgent global and foreign policy issues, including terrrorism, nuclear profileration, climate change, and regional instabilities.
Our budget and trade deficits are out of control. We are squandering our children's future. The ominous transfer of our national wealth has made our economy vulnerable, and our economic strength and competitiveness are both declining. Middle-income Americans are struggling to keep their homes and jobs and educate their children.
We are not as secure as we should be. Our military is stretched thin and our nation remains vulnerabvle to catrostrophic terrorism."
We are being held economically hostage because we have no energy policy worthy of the name.
Our educational system is failing to prepare our children to succeed in a globalized and technological world
Nearly 50 miillion Americans remain without health insurance, and the cost of medical care continues to spiral.
The failures of bridges in Minnesota, and levees in New Orleans are harsh metaphors for the reckless neglect of our infrastructure.
So, okay, 50 million Americans lack health insurance. Do they demand a combination of subsidies and regulations to ensure that nobody goes without insurance? No. Instead, their takeaways:
Clear descriptions of how they would establish a government of national unity
specific strategies for reducing polarization and reaching bipartisan consensus
plans to go beyond tokenism to appoint a truly bipartisan cabinet with critical posts held by the most qualified people available regardless of political affiliation
proposals for bipartisan executive and legislative policy groups in critical areas such as national security.
But the one thing has nothing to do with the other. To really tackle climate change, for example, what you need is not "a truly bipartisan cabinet" but rather elected officials who put the national interest over the interests of oil and gas companies. Most of the problem actors here are Republicans, but some are Democrats like Mary Landrieux. Back when he was a right-wing Democratic Senator, David Boren worked slavishly to advance the interests of polluting energy firms. Now he wants us to have more bipartisanship? It's absurd.
On all of these issues, the problem isn't that people disagree about how to accomplish these things. The problem is that many politicians don't want to do this stuff.
Mitt Romney's boat of having won "two silvers and a gold" based on second place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, plus a victory in the Wyoming quasi-caucus sounded ridiculous last night. That said, he's actually leading in the delegate count. I saw some sentiment on TV last night that Michigan is must win for Romney, but I don't really see it that way. Second place finishes are survivable for Romney as long as different people are beating him in different places and as long as he keeps picking up delegates. The GOP side has more winner-take-all primaries than does the Democratic side and, clearly, you can't lose all of those. But basically while Romney's not in good shape, he's in at least okay shape.
So, are you saying that Romney's boat is seaworthy? Able to stay afloat despite being battered by waves of support for his opponents? Or is Romney's boat taking on water faster than he can bail? Maybe he needs to dig deeper into his pocket for another wad of cash to plug the latest leak. Will the Romney boat's hard tack to starboard ever succeed in finding enough wind to fill his sails?
I think it's more like Romney is an early explorer in the Pacific whose ship is seaworthy but he's out of fresh provisions and has no idea how far he is from land. You can keep living on salt pork and hardtack for a long time before scurvy puts the crew out of commission. But it's not going to be very pleasant. A continuation of the status quo puts you on track for slow, painful death. But if you do find land, you stock up on new provisions and everything's fine (unless you get speared to death like Magellan).
Marc Ambinder reports on the odd situation inside Hillaryland. The campaign, prepared for a loss, was on the verge of an internal shake-up that, in the nature of things, various people wanted to see happen completely independently of the actual results in Iowa and New Hampshire. But in the wake of an unexpected win, not much shaking will actually happen which leaves some would-be shakers-uppers disappointed.
I don't blame Tom Schaller for this but methinks maybe an editor at The Baltimore Sun should have been a bit more cautious:
Whether or not Mrs. Clinton can come back to win the nomination, fellow Sen. Barack Obama's victories in Iowa and, last night, in New Hampshire utterly demolished any notion of her inevitability. He is now the clear front-runner, a development that has shaken up not only the Democratic primary but the Republican one as well. His continued success would also make an independent run by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg much less likely.
The Obama campaign's strategy for victory certainly isn't very interesting but by the same token, it's utterly plausible. It's worth recalling that four weeks ago, Obama was down badly everywhere except Iowa. The events of the past seven days are clearly a net plus for his campaign.
Scott Lemieux reminds us of the orthodox Republicans we might have had:
The current geographical and ideological makeup of the GOP coalition hasn't become inherently non-viable, and outside the margins the components aren't ripe to be permanently picked off by the Democrats. And while it's true that the Republican primary seems to have opened up major divisions between cultural reactionaries and fiscal reactionaries, I think this is largely illusory. Essentially, it's just the product of peculiar circumstances: the plain-vanilla Southern conservative who seemed like the frontrunner turned lost a Senate election with a racial slur thrown in, and the plain-vanilla Southern conservative who contested the primary seems to be using Weekend at Bernie's as a campaign manual. Hence, the primary is being seriously fought between a recent convert to Reaganism and other candidates with little crossover appeal between the party's factions.
I agree entirely. In a larger sense, though, I would say to Jack Balkin and anyone else with vision of big changes in American politics to just remember that it all depends on what happens. I ended a review of some recent political books thusly:
A glance at Jacobson's poll charts reminds us what a fleeting thing political success is. Polarization has been a semi-constant theme of the Bush years, but the president who once enjoyed record-high approval levels is, today, flirting with Nixon territory. The political X-factor, as Harold MacMillan famously remarked, is "events, my dear boy, events." Had Bush responded effectively to the challenges of 9-11, one could imagine the GOP regaining Reaganesque levels of dominance. Instead, his policies have failed and created a moment of opportunity for Democrats -- one whose outcome, boring as it is to observe, will depend in part on the quality of their own efforts and in part on events outside their control. Popular (or unpopular) response to contingencies, if sustained, can create not just the appearance of political dominance but the reality as well.
And that's basically how I see things. If President Obama and a Democratic congress manage to pass a few pieces of popular legislation that have been clever designed to re-enforce pro-Democrat institutional and social trends, and if President Obama manages to avoid any noteworthy foreign policy screw-ups or personal scandals then Democrats will be well-positioned to make some gains in the midterms. Meanwhile, a prolonged period of Democratic control of congress would serve to keep controversial cultural wedge issues off the legislative table, which, combined with a decent macroeconomic situation, could pave the way for Democratic inroads into a widish swathe of "red" America. It could totally happen.
But there are a lot of "ifs" in there and it's just as plausible that something totally different will happen. John McCain could revitalize the Republican coalition. A terrorist attack could discredit the new Democratic president and wreck the Democratic Party. Who knows. It's all about the events.
Yes they can. It's worth saying that the conventional wisdom that the culinary workers can deliver Nevada to their preferred candidate has very little in the way of hard evidence behind it. As best one can tell, this is a huge asset, but there Nevada caucus has no real history to it so one can't look back at precedents.
One element of George W. Bush's rise to power that tends to be forgotten in retrospect is that Republicans were really looking in 2000 for someone who, though solidly conservative, didn't have a conservative voting record. Under Newt Gingrich, after all, the congressional GOP tried to implement conservatism and the voters didn't like it. But before John McCain was a maverick, he was an orthodox Republican Senator and he lived through the whole thing. If he becomes the GOP nominee, when the Democrats go through his voting record they'll find all the greatest hits from the 1996 re-election campaign -- stuff about $270 billion in Medicare cuts and tens of thousands of senior citizens forced into poverty.
That's ancient history now, so in some ways the impact will be blunted. But still, any long-serving senator faces some real risks in having random elements of his voting record dragged back out during the campaign, and as best anyone can tell rabid opposition to government services actually is something McCain believes in. How will that play out in the end? It's hard to say. But the essence of McCain's strength in the polls right now is that for years he's been attacked by the right as insufficiently loyal and sporadically praised by Democrats as a valued collaborator. If he wins, that changes, and we start hearing about a whole other side of McCain's record.
The main drawback is that it allows more time for sniping and bloodletting among the Democrats, which could leave the eventual nominee worse off. This is an asymmetrical risk: Hillary Clinton has already been as sniped-at as she can possibly be -- over, as we know, her 35 years of public service. Indeed, that's part of her argument: the oppo researchers won't come up with anything new. Obama has not yet been scarred or vetted in quite the same way. Maybe it would toughen him to go through a round of true negative campaigning. But maybe it would mainly wound him. And if he ends up as the nominee, he won’t be happy about a lot of footage of a former Democratic President putting him down, which Bill Clinton provided this week.
Clearly on some level this is true, but I think these kinds of fears tend to get overstated. As we've seen from how rapidly the CW on this primary has whipsawed, even if the nomination battle were to go all the way up to convention, the remaining months of general election would provide ample time for Republicans to make whatever attacks they have to make and generally air the laundry. Meanwhile, an extended primary means the eventually winner will have honed his or her message. Since the Democrats are all saying the same general kinds of things -- Bush has screwed everything up and I can fix it, especially terrorism, health care, and climate change -- having competing Democratic candidates out there stealing from each other (both Clinton and Obama seems to be moving toward coopting elements of Edwards' appeal) creates a Darwinian dynamic whereby the stronger message prevails.
It's true that really ugly negative campaigning could come around to damage the eventual nominee, especially if delivered by surrogates like Bill Clinton, but the basic dynamics of this thing don't really lead me to believe that ugly negative campaigning would be a very effective tactic. Both candidates are likable and well-liked, and there seems to be a lot of backlash potential when anyone gets really cutting.
The world often seems awash in people with hazily-defined "consultant" jobs of various sorts, so I was fascinated to read this (emphasis added) in Tyler Cowen's review of Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day:
His, subject, too has moved on. J.T. grew tired of running a gang, particularly when the crack trade dried up and with it a lot of the business. He tried managing a dry cleaning business and then started a barber shop, which failed. For a while, he tried to market himself as a consultant for higher-ups in the drug economy. Right now he seems to be living off his savings. The two men see each other every now and then, but they don't seem to have established their previous rapport.
It's interesting that it didn't work out. I wonder if that was due to some specific failure on J.T.'s part or if the world of drug distribution just shows an admirable ability to resist the consultantification that's sweeping over the rest of the economy.
One point I've heard time and again repeated by Pakistan analysts is that the popularity of Islamist movements in Pakistan is often wildly overestimated by casual western observers. In particular, people seem to be falling prey to an inability to appreciate scale. Pakistan has 161 million people, so the ability of Islamist parties to organize large demonstrations doesn't necessarily indicate that they've got a widely popular mass movement on the verge of taking control of the country. When election day comes, they're rarely gotten anything more than fringe levels of support.
That said, five years ago they did get their best result ever. But Jonathan Landay reports for McClatchy that much of that support has slipped away, and they're almost certain to do worse this time around. Fear of an radical takeover, in short, isn't a good reason to welcome lack of democracy in Pakistan.
As you can see from this convenient map drawn from my short print article on foreclosures in the new issue of The Atlantic, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is a place that's bit especially hard-hit by the wave of foreclosures afflicting the country. Thus, a potentially huge political story hasn't really gotten much political play with all the candidates focused on the early states and all the political press focused on the candidates.
That's about the change. Clark County, Nevada comprising Las Vegas and its suburbs is one of the very hardest-hit places in the country, and Florida and California are full of badly afflicted counties. Since neither candidates has staked out a clear profile on this topic, it seems like a good opportunity for both of them to try to exploit.
Spencer Ackerman's noted that somehow in the course of composing his tome You're a Fascist: Nanny-nanny boo-boo, Jonah Goldberg managed to become a pretty serious apologist for Mussolini. And now here on his brand new "liberal fascism" blog we see the same thing. He means to argue that Mussolini, Hitler, and Vladimir Putin all admirered FDR and that therefore FDR was a fascist, but he can't help but get himself tied up with the idea "that Mussolini was the first world leader to stand-up to Nazi aggression" and some bemoaning of the fact that many of the pro-Mussolini segments of his book got left on the cutting room floor.
Now we shouldn't find this surprising since, as Jeet Heer has observed, National Review were Goldberg works has a long history of admiration for fascist political movements. But of course this is why people associate fascism with the political right. Jonah Goldberg, American conservative, thinks Mussolini, fascist, gets a bad rap just as his predecessors at NR used to pen paens to Franco.
As I noted this morning the New Hampshire polls didn't actually get the level of support for Barack Obama wrong. Instead, they undercounted Hillary Clinton's supporters. How'd that happen? Jay Carney has friends of friends who have the answer:
He didn't find any evidence that white respondents who were telling pollsters they planned to vote for Obama did not. What he found, instead, is that a certain percentage of Democratic voters in the last days of polling presumed Biden (especially) and (to a lesser degree) Dodd hadn't dropped out. By and large, come election day, those Biden and Dodd supporters ended up casting ballots for Hillary. Also, of the 5 percent or so who were still undecideds in the last polls, almost all broke for Hillary. And a tiny percentage of Edwards supporters switched to Hillary.
When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Obama got 38 percent of the vote in Iowa. Not only is Iowa only one small state, but 38 percent of the vote is way less than half. Nevertheless, based on that plurality he was about to march to the nomination. As a result, while Obama continued to hold his own in terms of his baseline level of support, all the uncommitted people -- supporters of minor candidates, undecideds, some soft Edwards people -- voted for Clinton to keep the race going. In Iowa, a similar dynamic probably helped Obama. People knew that a Clinton win might end the competition, so Obama can, so to speak, the benefit of the doubt. Unlike most political bloggers, most voters haven't been following this thing since the first quarter of 2007. A lot of them want to see how the competition plays out.
A reader remarks. "Here's one prediction for a potentially game-changing event on the Democratic side that can come at any time, and I won't venture a guess as who would ultimately benefit: a Gore endorsement." It seems to me that were Gore to endorse, he would almost certainly endorse Obama and that might do him some good, but my sense is that Gore's trying to be less-and-less involved in US politics.
Rudy Giuliani's biggest fan, Pat Robertson, on the failure of his 2007 forecast of a nuclear attack on an American city to come true: ""So did I miss it? Possibly, or, on the other hand, did God avert it? Possibly. But whatever, it didn't happen, so I think we can all rejoice."
Mark Kleiman posts an email from a friend who thinks that Barack Obama doesn't identify with the poor. Chris Bowers notes that Obama got trounced among New Hampshire Democrats who describe themselves as "angry" with Bush. In both instances, I think, we're seeing the downside to Obama's successful effort to present a persona that's acceptable to white America.
He almost certainly feels that he can't come anywhere near the level of outrage at economic injustice in America that you see from a John Edwards, or give voice to the anger that many of us feel about George W. Bush's malgovernment without losing his status as "one of the good ones." To be the most mainstream progressive black political figure ever, he's crafted a relentlessly upbeat, uplifting message. And it's a good message, but it is a bit out of step with how a lot of us really feel about the state of things.
Six killed in attack in Diyala province. What appears to have happened is that with surge forces concentrated in Baghdad and Anbar province, the insurgents eventually regrouped and relocated to Diyala and Ninawa provinces where we're now seeing an uptick in violence. This might nonetheless be big progress except for the fact that we need to de-surge soon, so the odds seem very good that the insurgency will re-spread as we try to return to a sustainable posture. Meanwhile, Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung report that "U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves."
This, I think, is what's technically known as failing and giving up and then pretending that failing and giving up are part of a brilliant new strategy. On top of that, via Spencer Ackerman I see the Defense Department growing increasingly desperate in its spin: "Recent terrorist attacks on Iraqi concerned citizens groups indicate al Qaeda in Iraq’s increasing desperation."
I got one of my early big breaks as a blogger back when Segio Vieira de Mello was killed in an early insurgent attack on a UN building. The rightwing spin was that this showed the insurgency was getting desperate. I said that was dumb. Josh Marshall linked to me. And that was in the summer of 2003. Over forty months later it's unbelievable that we're still hearing this inane line.
A new epidemiological study of Iraq by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization sees 151,000 or so dead through violence since the Iraq War began and "also found a 60 percent increase in nonviolent deaths -- from such causes as childhood infections and kidney failure -- during the period." The news account contrasts this with the earlier statistical survey that found 655,000 "excess deaths" during the war period, of which 601,000 were from violence.
Unfortunately, I don't understand from the coverage how different the total fatality rate in these two studies is. In other words, how much of the disagreement is about what to attribute an increase in the death rate to (violence or other) and how much is about disagreement over how many people died. This section implies, however, that the disagreement is primarily over causes:
Les Roberts, an epidemiologist now at Columbia University who helped direct the Johns Hopkins survey, also praised the new one. While both found a large increase in mortality, his found that much more of it was caused by violence.
"My gut feeling is that most of the difference between the two studies is a reluctance to report to the government a death due to violence," he said. "If your son is fighting the government and died, that may not be something you'd want to admit to the government."
Further difficulties include the fact that many people have been displaced by the conflict and also I assume that some entire households have been wiped out. It remains noteworthy to me that while the US military insists that it takes measures to minimize the civilian death toll, it doesn't take any measures to quantify the civilian death toll, which makes it impossible to know what their measures accomplish. Step one in trying to increase blog traffic, for example, is to measure blog traffic.
He's picking up John Kerry, George Miller, and Tim Johnson as supporters. Johnson is, to me, the most interesting one of the batch. Obama partisans like to argue that he'll be better for downballot Democrats in tough races. That's a hard thing to prove one way or the other, but Johnson's one of the affected parties in this dispute so his judgment counts for something.
UPDATE: See also this post reflecting on Obama's endorsements from the likes of Ted Kennedy.
Unity '08 to shut down and reconstitute itself as a "Draft Bloomberg" movement. Because in the wake of catastrophic conservative governance, America needs two center-left candidates to split the vote and ensure the catastrophe continues!
I'd really drifted away from watching cable news for several years, but on these big primary news days, one needs to shift back. In the meantime, I've gotten used to watching most programming either on DVD or else in high definition. Once you grow accustomed to it, it's really striking to turn back to something low def like MSNBC or CNN. One can't help but think that if these news channels broadcast in higher definition, it would make a big difference to how some of these candidates look and, in turn, how the voters perceive them. John McCain, most notably, is covering up some very old man looking skin under a big ol' layer of makeup in a way that I bet wouldn't work nearly as well.
I'm on a listserve where someone mentioned, as people tend to do, disquiet over the fact that Hillary Clinton "won't admit she was wrong" to vote for the war. It reminds me, once again, that I think many more people need to seriously consider the possibility that this isn't an instance of her stubbornly refusing to "admit" that she was wrong nearly so much as it is a case of her not believing she was wrong just as, for example, Michael O'Hanlon doesn't think he was wrong to have supported the war. Lots of people who supported the war don't think they were wrong to have supported the war, Hillary Clinton doesn't say she thinks she was wrong to have supported the war, and I've never seen any serious reporting that indicates that she thinks she was wrong to have supported the war.
The biggest inquiry I've seen into the question of why Clinton won't apologize for having supported the war was done by Michael Crowley wherein he concluded that she probably won't "admit" that she was wrong because she thinks she did the right thing. It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's worth keeping in mind both for what it may hint about how she'll govern and also for how it's going to play out in a general election campaign.
Kevin Drum tries to cheer me up about the prospects of a Clinton/McCain matchup. Like most of the most convincing pro-Clinton commentary out there, it seems to me to succeed by taking on a weak charge. I know a certain number of people who think McCain is a shoo-in against Clinton. As Drum says, those people are wrong. That said, I think McCain is pretty clearly a stronger nominee than the main alternatives on the Republican side. And, again, Clinton looks like a weaker nominee than the alternatives.
In the wake of the John Kerry Fiasco people have tended to deprecate the "electability" test. And, I think, rightly so. The most important determinant of election outcomes is the broad national fundamentals. Beyond that, the most important thing is running a solid campaign. That means there's intrinsically a lot of uncertainty and it makes sense to not put a ton of weight on this factor. That said, all the available evidence points to there being more people with friendly feelings toward Obama than there are with friendly feelings toward Hillary.
I remember having been very interested in the Implicit Association Test I took a few years ago on racial bias, but then kind of forgot about the whole thing for a while. Eve Fairbanks mentioned taking one on gender in a blog post, so I thought I'd check it out. But en route to discovering what kind of a sexist I am, I was waylaid by a test that examines your biases about the presidential candidates.
I took it and discovered the results you see at left. This is a question of relative bias. They explain that "a committed Republican might have negative associations with all of these candidates, but in this display, the ones that are least negative would appear toward the top and the ones that are most negative would appear toward the bottom." All four candidates cluster in the middle third of the spectrum, so I don't have any really extreme implicit associations with the candidates, but as we can see there's a distinct pro-Obama leaning.
That jibes with what I learned about myself the night of the Iowa caucuses. Thinking and writing about it beforehand, I'd definitely found Obama to be a praiseworthy figure but never really committed myself super-strongly in his favor, and in the couple of weeks leading up to the caucus felt increasingly persuaded by arguments made on John Edwards' behalf. But when it was announced the he won I was thrilled even though my official view continues to be that the differences between the candidates in the field are non-enormous.
Meanwhile, demographically speaking I'm in Obama's wheelhouse -- young, male, college educated -- and I had pre-existing pro-Obama views on the issues. I'd be interested to see what kind of results you can from people whose views are more at odds with their demographics.
Reihan Salam raved about this essay in the new n + 1 and rightly so. It's by far the best thing I've read in a good long while. I don't really want to tease it beyond that; you should go and buy a copy of the magazine, it contains other good stuff and they deserve your support.
Iranian authorities appear to be presiding over a surge of brutality, with hangings way up over the past several years. Meanwhile, "human rights groups in Iran expressed shock after judicial authorities disclosed they had amputated the left feet and right hands of five criminals convicted of armed robbery in the southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan." Optimistically, one can perhaps view this kind of activity as reflecting a regime that knows it's in crisis.
Steven Weisman reports: "Speaking in Israel at the beginning of his visit to the Middle East, Mr. Bush took a hard line on Iran over its nuclear program and said that 'all options are on the table' to guard against more military provocations like the Iranian threats to American ships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday."
Good lord. Just think about the term "provocations." Ponder it for a minute. Does it seem likely that musing about how all options are on the table is likely to deter a provocation? Does a provocation really seem like the kind of thing you can deter? Obviously, if push comes to shove, a US Navy vessel is going to have to defend itself but the way you dissuade an adversary from staging provocations is by indicating that you're not going to give him what he wants. There's an effort under way to goad the United States into doing something that will rally the Iranian people behind its leadership. Unfortunately, from time to time there seems to be a parallel effort inside the US government, rather than a counter-effort to maintain international consensus on Iranian nuclear activities while avoiding any big blowups.
There's an awful lot to object to in the McCain/Lieberman "The Surge Worked" op-ed. Notably, they don't grapple with the fact that before the surge began, the surge's proponents outlined goals for the surge, and the surge's goals have not been achieved. But there's also John McCain's almost frightening inability to understand the appropriate division of labor in the policymaking process:
As the surge should have taught us by now, troop numbers matter in Iraq. We should adjust those numbers based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders in Iraq -- first and foremost, Gen. Petraeus, who above all others has proven that he knows how to steer this war to a successful outcome.
So what if Petraeus says he needs to maintain surge-level forces indefinitely and the Joint Chiefs say the only way to do that would be to cut back on deployments in Afghanistan but our commanders in Afghanistan say they can't afford to cut back. Indeed, what if they say they need a surge of their own? Who do we listen to? Admiral Fallon? Who knows? The answer, clearly, is that while a responsible president needs to listen to what his military commanders in theater think but then he needs to use independent judgment. You're never going to get an answer like "Sir, my strategy has failed" or "Sir, this other guy's mission is more important than mine" out of an official in any kind of organization -- military or civilian.
What's President McCain going to do when it turns out that all of his subordinates throughout the government want more resources to be put at their disposal?
Back in the summer of 2005 I was giddy about the way Pat Riley was wrecking the Heat's future in a desperate and doomed-to-fail effort to win the championship in 2006. Unfortunately, he actually did win the championship. But now, as John Hollinger observes, the team is totally screwed and needs to blow things up:
All year, speculation has had Miami trading its expiring contracts (Jason Williams, Ricky Davis, Dorell Wright) to get another player and kick-start a playoff push. But actually, the Heat needs to go in the opposite direction. They should begin unloading the likes of Mark Blount, Williams, Davis, and perhaps even Udonis Haslem, tell Wade to take a break until he's truly healthy, and figure out how to get back into the mix another year or two down the road. Because at 8-27, it sure as heck ain't happening this year.
Sounds like good advice to me. I'd keep Haslem, though, he's young and pretty good. You just need to let the expiring contracts expire, let the team be bad, get a draft pick, let Wade get healthy, etc. I'm not sure what you can get in exchange for "the likes of Mark Blount," though. He doesn't seem like an in-demand player.
The difference in their estimate of total excess deaths (655,000 vs. 393,000) isn't huge for a study with such inherent difficulties, but the difference in the violent death rate is. The Lancet study calculates that 92% of all post-invasion excess deaths were from violent causes, while WHO figures it at 38%.
Be all that as it may, The New York Timesobserves that "because of its timing, the study missed the period of what is believed to be the worst sectarian killings, during the latter half of 2006 and the first eight months of 2007." The Lancet study, clearly, having been from even earlier also missed that period. So even if you have a great deal of confidence that one or the other of these studies got things right, the studies' figures are probably badly outdated by now.
One issue this whole controversy raises relates to casualty figures from civil wars that aren't political hot potatoes in the United States. When a study comes out in Iraq, there's intense political pressure from one side or another (or both) to expose real and imagined methodological flaws. But what about things like the millions who've died recently in Congo where the studies get done in a context where nobody's seriously trying to work the refs?
I'm as glad as anyone that young people hate Republicans but the Pew Center needs to stop calling them "Generation Next." This is Generation Next:
That's right. A lame Pepsi advertising campaign. Featuring the Spice Girls. The "generation next" brand will forever be tarnished. The youth are the future of our country and they deserve something better.
Oscar Pistorius had both legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old, but equipped with Cheetah prosthetics he's trained to become an extremely accomplished runner who's in search of an olympic qualifying time. Only problem is that the International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body for track and field, says the prosthetics give him an advantage over conventional runners.
Clearly, I'm not in a position to assess the validity of a claim like that. But they make a lot of these high-end prosthetics in Iceland, and when I was over there I met a guy who works in that industry and it was certainly his claim that their products exceeded the capabilities of organic limbs. As you see with the HGH and steroid scandals in baseball and Deep Blue's success in chess, our ideas about human competition are coming under increasing strain and there's no sign of that trend ending. Right now all of this exists on such esoteric levels that it doesn't really impinge on the political realm, but I bet that day is coming soon.
Those thinking Barack Obama needed to get more down to earth and concrete will be disappointed with this new ad:
On the other hand, I do think it captures something important. Obama's "unity" message has sometimes seems to be mirroring Broder-like calls for "bipartisanship" -- for closer collaboration between elites in both parties. But there's always been a different, better side to the message, going back to The Speech from 2004:
We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.
The point here of coming together, which I think is echoed in the new ad, isn't about cross-party collaboration among elites. Rather, the idea here is that conservative politicians have succeeded achieved political success by portraying progressive political leaders as un-American and culturally alien but that this move itself is alien to the real spirit of America.
Enough already. We've had a president who was the Great Emancipator. And another who was the Great Communicator. Bush is the Great Conflater. In his first term he conflated the threat from Al Qaeda with the threat from Saddam ("You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush said in September 2002), and then tossed groups like Hizbullah and Hamas into the mix (though their goals were markedly different from Al Qaeda's). Now Bush is suggesting that all the problems he lumped in together can be solved by an equally lumpy panacea of freedom and democracy.
If hollow sloganeering were an adequate substitute for serious American leadership freedom would, of course, have been on the march long ago. On the specifics of the Palestinian issue, Bush's conflation of freedom, democracy, and self-determination are especially dangerous since he plainly has no intention of taking any of the steps that might actually lead to the creation of an independent Palestine as the main impact at this point is to simply re-enforce the idea that high-flying American rhetoric is just a mask for violence against Arabs.
I'm not fool enough to try to predict macroeconomic trends. I will say, though, that when the Fed chief hints at the prospect of a big rate cut on the heels of bad holiday retail sales, my first instinct is to think "panic!" rather than "looks like Ben Bernanke is responding appropriately to signs of economic trouble!" Both, however, seem like reasonably valid responses.
UPDATE: Krugman votes for doom, says interest rate cuts effect the economy mainly through their impact on the housing market, but it may not be possible to further prop-up the housing market at this point.
I thought last night's Republican presidential debate served as a useful reminder of how much of John McCain's much-vaunted political comeback has been driven by the configuration of alternatives. The level of support McCain is currently drawing is perfectly compatible with losing badly to a much more popular alternative. But the field is incredibly fractured. You have Mike Huckabee constantly eating away ate Mitt Romney's efforts to consolidate GOP "regulars" to stop McCain. And then last night you had a suddenly vigorous Fred Thompson in the field. Ron Paul's eating up 7 percent or so of the vote. And Rudy Giuliani's still in the race and still doing very well in national polling.
With so many candidates in the field, you're in true anything can happen territory. John McCain doesn't seem to have more support than he had in 2000 when he lost. Indeed, in some respects he seems to have less support. But keep enough candidates in the mix and a losing level of support suddenly becomes a winning one. Presumably, Thompson and Giuliani will drop out if they don't stage miraculous recoveries of some sort soon, though I suppose one might think that Thompson is staying in the race precisely in order to help out McCain.
Contemplating the prospect of a Bill Richardson vice presidential nomination, Ed Kilgore remarks:
Richardson's handicap in the veepstakes, ironically, is part of what made him interesting as a presidential candidate: his Latino identity. Would the first female or first African-American presidential nominee really want to double down by selecting the first Latino vice presidential candidate? It's doubtful, though by no means impossible.
Sentiment against a "double-down" ticket seems strong in this town, but I think it would make perfect sense for Obama to try to re-enforce his message of change and transcendence by picking a red state woman governor like Kathleen Sebelius or Janet Napolitano as his running mate. For Clinton it's harder to see the case for doubling down since it doesn't have the same kind of harmony with her message. At the same time, whatever sexist assumptions people may have about the ability of a women to do the job aren't really going to be alleviated by having a white man in the number two spot, so I don't see huge harm.
Given that there's no Democratic primary in Michigan and Michigan has an open primary, Kos offers the devilish suggestions that Democrats and Democrat-friendly independents should turn out and vote for Mitt Romney, who seems like a much easier general election opponent in November.
I'll only note that there's no reason one need be so cynical about it. I would much rather live under President Clinton or President Obama than under President Romney, but I'd take President Romney over President McCain or President Huckabee. Romney's a pathetic liar and he's running on a shitty agenda, but in a pinch you can say that the man has a track-record of managerial competence that Huckabee and McCain distinctly lack. Meanwhile, Romney appears not to quite have either McCain's zeal for war or Huckabee's zeal for not knowing what he's talking about. So there's really no downside to going and casting a ballot for Romney.
It's true that the "catfight" subtext Jay Newton-Small is trying to tease out of George Miller's decision to endorse Barack Obama seems pretty dubious. That said, it really is true that Rep. Miller is very close to Nancy Pelosi and almost certainly wouldn't do something like that without Pelosi's approval.
That said, it seems to me that the correct speculation here is that Pelosi doesn't want a president who's so close to Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel is one of Pelosi's main rivals for power in the House, was a former aide to Bill Clinton, and endorsed Hillary in the primary even though it's a major breach of political protocol to go against a home state candidate. Pelosi has, in short, perfectly good reasons to want Clinton to lose that have nothing to do with undue fear of ovaries.
I've noted time and again that one curious element of current US strategy in Iraq is that many of the people charged with planning and implementing it think it will probably fail. Here's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle Eastern Affairs Mark Kimmitt telling people at the Heritage Foundation "if I had to put a number to it, maybe it’s three in 10, maybe it’s 50-50, if we play our cards right." Now, I think the surge's proponents are being overly optimistic about this stuff.
But the optimists aren't especially optimistic. And it's not as if we're locked in some desperate battle for national survival where it makes sense to roll the dice on low-probability gambles. The war's costs are very real and enormous, while the benefits of success are hard to discern and unlikely to materialize.
So all these people are wringing their hands about how Ron Paul turns out to have been a racist and homophobe back in tha day -- but it really didn't come as a shock to me at all. It wasn't like I suspected him of such leanings, having not even heard of the man until this past year, but as soon as I heard that he was a gold standard-bearer, I immediately put him into the conspiracist-loon pile of my brain. And once someone is already an "out" loony, there's no reason to be surprised by the additional lunacies to which they turn out to subscribe. Anyway, just a thought.
That seems about right to me. I am curious, though, as to how belief in the gold standard went from being a total CW position held against the dangerous radical William Jennings Bryan to its current status as a lunatic fringe notion, a good indicator that you belong in the "conspiracist-loon pile" of the brain.
One thing about Rudy Giuliani's plan to cut taxes by about four percent of GDP that's worth keeping in mind, is that in his Foreign Affairsessay he also writes that "The idea of a post-Cold War "peace dividend" was a serious mistake . . . We must rebuild a military force that can deter aggression and meet the wide variety of present and future challenges." That suggests that he wants to boost defense spending from the four percent or so of GDP we have now to the 6.2 percent of GDP it reached under Ronald Reagan.
Or perhaps even higher. The Reagan years were peacetime; back during Vietnam we got to over 9 percent of GDP. I'm of the view that the evils of budget deficits are often overstated, but Rudy's talking about blowing a genuinely gigantic hole in the budget up to the levels where it would almost certainly be a serious economic problem. And he wants to do it at a time when we already have relatively low taxes and extremely high defense spending.
Photo by Flickr user Crystalflickr used under a Creative Commons license
Peter Wehner at Commentarygets upset that George W. Bush referred to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as an "occupation." What's his ilk going to say about Bush's disparagement of efforts to turn Palestine into a "Swiss cheese" of isolated cantons?
Meanwhile, good for Bush. His track record on this topic has been so terrible that it's hard to take his current initiative seriously, but so far as one can tell he's now moving things in the right direction and I may have been too harsh in this morning's post. What he's doing right now is creating positive momentum and could very well lead to a situation where the next president is set up to really accomplish something big.
Spencer Ackerman says "Hormuz" may be Farsi for "Tonkin" as he reads Robin Wright report that, in fact, the Pentagon has no idea what happened and the radio threats "may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them" and may not have been directed at US forces.
Yes, that's right, the threats against US Navy ships made by IRGC speedboats may not have been made by IRGC speedboats and may not have been against US Navy ships. Nevertheless, the Bush administration chose to leap to conclusions and warmongering.
Now the converse is that I wouldn't hang too much on the idea that this whole thing was just made up by the Bush administration. If the Bushies cooked it up out of nothing, then it's not a good idea to raise tensions with Iran. If things went down exactly how they were originally reported, then it's not a good idea to raise tensions with Iran. The problem is with the administration's misguided strategic approach to Iran, not with the details of this or that possibly-made-up incident.
When I wrote this morning that "it would make perfect sense for Obama to try to re-enforce his message of change and transcendence by picking a red state woman governor like Kathleen Sebelius or Janet Napolitano as his running mate" I hadn't realized that Napolitano was gearing up to endorse Barack Obama which presumably helps strengthen the case.
Chris Bowers, incidentally, agrees with me that a VP pick should re-enforce the candidate's message not balance the ticket, but sees Napolitano as a "balancing" choice. Maybe the fact that Chris sees her as a balance pick while I see her as a re-enforcement pick means she has the best of both worlds. Now, though, is probably a good time to admit that I don't actually know a great deal about Governor Napolitano and maybe she's terrible on some key issues or something.
He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president. And that's his prerogative. That's his right. But I think it is important to compare and contrast our records.
Part time, okay....
Meanwhile, the experience thing is obviously a good issue for Clinton but I feel like when you put it this bluntly, it sort of evaporates. I mean, compare their records? Clinton's record turns out to be really thin -- she's only been a Senator since 2001 and hasn't authored any major legislation. Barack Obama's been in the US Senate even more briefly, but did write some significant bills as an Illinois Senator, and has served more years in elected office than has Clinton. Like everyone else, I can't shake the sense that Clinton's years of first ladying amount to some kind of substantial experience, but they don't really amount to a record. What's more, in a lot of ways she's really not running on her husband's record -- she's certainly not emphasizing the idea that she's going to be a committed free trader and budget balancer.
UPDATE: To be clear, it's not Clinton's fault that she hasn't authored any significant legislation -- it wasn't in the cards given the larger political situation. But that's what makes it strange for her to specifically ask us to compare her "record" with Obama's; what are we supposed to find when we look?
In local news, Washington DC is abuzz with a horrifying case in which police found a woman living with the skeletal remains of her four children, apparently killed by their mother who explains they were possessed by demons. Mayor Adrian Fenty revealed today that the city's social services agencies had been looking into intervening on behalf of the children when a nurse reported that the family was living in a van and one or both parents had substance abuse problems. At this point they decided to close the interview because . . . the family had no fixed address. Because that, of course, is always great news.
It's just terrible stuff; in a country with as many resources as this one, we really ought to be able to stop kids from falling through the crack like this. A banal sentiment, yes, but it's true nevertheless.
Mr. Huckabee, for his part, responded with trademark humor. “The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.”
This is basically a form of affirming the consequent. If you're over the target, you'll catch flak and Huckabee is catching flak "therefore" he must be over the target. Nyhan says that MIMS makes the same error in "This is Why I'm Hot":
In particular, he thinks "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly / You ain't [hot] 'cause you're not [fly]" is an example of the fallacy. I disagree. Nyhan's reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with "'cause" as a material conditional but there's no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he's hot because he's fly and (2) you're not hot because you're not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn't. I don't, however, see a fallacy here.
Britt Peterson: "Unity08's founders, old media hands Gerald Rafshoon and Doug Bailey, have just left to work on drafting Bloomberg, taking most of the credibility and experience Unity08 ever had with them and leaving celebrity promoter Sam Waterston to his own devices. Will he form a joint L&O ticket with Thompson?" Sounds good to me.
The Democratic race, in chart form, according to the new CNN/Opinion Research national poll. Hillary Clinton's closing in on the fifty percent mark. My not-backed-up-by-evidence guess would be that undecided voters are very susceptible to "bounce" effects, but people who've psychologically committed themselves to a candidate aren't. In short, even winning in Nevada and South Carolina may not give Barack Obama what he needs.
I think I side with Brad DeLong in thinking that a fiscal stimulus plan doesn't sound like the hottest idea. On the other hand, I enthusiastically endorse the practice of using the alleged need for fiscal stimulus as a pretext for passing otherwise desirable measures. I've heard suggestions, for example, that we might provide people subsidies to do green retrofits of their homes. If you want to call that a "fiscal stimulus" to broaden the political coalition in support of it, more power to you.
The Bush administration, however, is likely to see things my way in terms of pretext but have a different notion of what "otherwise desirable measures" amounts to, so we'll have to see how the sausage gets made. Meanwhile, in terms of stimulus-qua-stimulus the reality is that the sausage-making process is usually too slow and too crude to seriously impact the business cycle.
A graph based on the same national polling referenced before, this time for the Republican side. John McCain is obviously surging, but his level of support is much closer to the percentage of voters Barack Obama is pulling in than to what Hillary has. If all of these campaigns stay in the race through February 5, the fragmentation of the race will likely have some odd consequences. McCain could move into a dominant position by winning almost everywhere without getting more than forty percent of the vote anywhere. Alternatively, if the states go in different directions the delegate allocation rules (which vary from place to place) could start looking very significant.
Commenter Steve expresses the thing that most people bring up when I mention the idea of Janet Napolitano on a national ticket: "She's single, never married, and doesn't seem to have much of a romantic life, so she gets the same closeted-lesbian rumors that dog (fairly or un-) other never-married woman politicians like Condi Rice or Babs Mikulski."
Okay, fair enough. But she was first elected to statewide office in Arizona in 1998. Then she won again in 2002. And then she won again in 2006. So what's the problem, in practice? It's not as if Arizona's a super-liberal state. Bush got a higher proportion of the vote there than he got in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Iowa, and Missouri. Compared to, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama there's quite a lot of evidence that Napolitano is a marketable commodity for the median voter.
To the best of my knowledge, Jim Pinkerton is America's tallest political pundit by a pretty wide margin, big enough to be an NBA swingman, in my judgment (no idea about his game, don't actually know the guy, but have been in an elevator with him). He's also hopping aboard Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign where he's supposed to add some policy substance to the folksy populism and stuff about Chuck Norris:
A Newsday columnist and Fox News contributor, Pinkerton worked in both the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses as well as the presidential campaigns of each. As a respected voice among right-leaning pundits, he'll bring instant credibility to a campaign that has drawn scorn from the conservative establishment.
Maybe. But depending on how you look at it, Pinkerton is some combination of too interesting, too honest, and too wacky to really add credibility to a GOP primary campaign. Consider his April 2004 column slamming George W. Bush for failing to react more forcefully to the CIA's summer 2001 warnings about the likelihood of an al-Qaeda attack. The base has gotten disillusioned with Bush, but I still don't think they're ready to hear that the hero of 9/11's incompetence played a role in leaving the country so vulnerable to attack.
He's a member of the "Futurists Board" of the Lifeboat Foundation, an organization that advocates for "effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail." He's a contributing editor at The American Conservative, the paleocon magazine, and recently has been waxing orthodox with a heavy emphasis on his anti-immigration views. But back in 2005, he wrote a column titled "Slaughter of Sunni Foes is Inevitable" which made some arguments that are rather at odds with the current logic of the Awakening strategy:
When will the anti-American violence in Iraq end? It will end when we unleash the Shia Arab Muslims and the Kurds to finish the job, all the way to the bloody extreme. We're not ready for such unleashing just yet, but we're getting close.
Advocacy of genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy aside, hiring Pinkerton is a big step forward for Huckabee. He's a smart guy with a lot of ideas. But he's a very unorthodox thinker many of whose ideas are at odds with the prevailing CW in the conservative camp (sometimes in a good way, other times, as with the aforementioned counterinsurgency-by-genocide in not so good ways) and it strikes me as unlikely that this will really endear Huckabee to institutional conservatism.
I think if you want to properly understand what Pinker's up to, it's worth thinking about something else: Math. When we do math, we talk a lot about numbers. We don't talk about numerals, the concrete typographical signifiers of numbers. "V" is a numeral (a Roman numeral) as is "5" but they both stand for the number that you get when you add the number represented by the numeral "4" to the number represented by the numeral "1." In short, unlike numerals, number are abstract entities. From a certain point of view, this can make the whole enterprise of math come to seem very mysterious. If the numbers are abstract, how can we interact with them causally? And if we can't interact with them causally, how can know anything about them? One can easily stumble into the view that either all this math talk is just so much BS, or else that there is some heavenly Realm of the Numbers where they live and send us messages through the ether.
Der Spiegel is not impressed with George W. Bush's last minute Israel-Palestine efforts:
The world in which politicians smile at each other, in which all kinds of promises are made and donations are pledged, is merely a virtual world. Next to it stands the real life arena of terrorists, settlers and fanatics. The real and virtual worlds are totally separate -- like two parallel lines, they will only meet in eternity.
I tend to agree, but I've been convinced by people active in these issues that it's important to provide positive reenforcement. Bush is moving in the right direction and deserves to secure some credit for his troubles.
The powers that be in the Wizards front office decided that my 21 game ticket package should include neither of DC's home games against the Celtic, and I'm now doubly-pissed that I missed the game when it turns out to be a big upset against the erstwhile top team in the league.
The powers that be in the Wizards front office decided that my 21 game ticket package should include neither of DC's home games against the Celtic, and I'm now doubly-pissed that I missed the game when it turns out to be a big upset against the erstwhile top team in the league.
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Heads in the Sand
