I try to admit I'm wrong when I'm wrong, but I don't like to eat crow any more than the next guy. So when I saw a New York Times headline "Iraq Eases Curb on Ex-Officials of Baath Party" I thought, "uh oh, one of those 'good for the world, bad for Yglesias' turns of events." Unless, of course, like most good news out of Iraq it evaporates upon examination:
While the measure would reinstate many former Baathists, some political leaders said it would also force thousands of other former party members out of current government jobs and into retirement — especially in the security forces, where American military officials have worked hard to increase the role of Sunnis. One member of Iraq’s current de-Baathification committee said the law could even push 7,000 active Interior Ministry employees into retirement. [...]
One Shiite politician, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, said the new law could forcibly retire up to 27,000 former Baathists, who would receive pensions.
Other officials said the legislation could allow from 13,000 to 31,000 former Baathists back into the government.
Basically, it's totally unclear how this is going to work in practice and different Iraqi political leaders are making wildly different claims according to their own priorities. Under the circumstances, things could work out for the best, but little has really been achieved here. More to the point, the conflict over what the law says indicates that there isn't any underlying consensus about what ought to be happening, which tends to cast the prospects for reconciliation into doubt.
Meanwhile, though I know the right-wing tends to take every effort to make a realistic assessment of conditions in Iraq as nothing more than ideological axe-grinding, nothing could make me happier than real progress toward political reconciliation in Iraq. Unlike the ephemeral "success" of the surge, reconciliation really would create the conditions under which US forces could withdraw on an uncontroversial note of success and things would be hunky-dory from most all points of view.
Senator Claire McCaskill endorses Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton still obviously has the overall endorsements leader, as the establishment candidate is bound to, but the recent high-profile endorsements have all tilted Obama's way. I have to say that I don't totally understand why that is. You would have thought this would have come after Iowa as people try to jump on the apparently victorious bandwagon. It's true that Obama's odds look better than they did in, say, November but I think you'd have to say that Clinton is the favorite to win so Obama's endorses are taking risks and politicians aren't normally big risk takers.
Ed Kilgore makes a good point about the decline of Unity '08 into a draft Bloomberg "movement":
These developments are depressingly predictable and familiar. History is replete with examples of extra-partisan, extra-ideological "populist" movements that take a turn towards the authoritarian desire for a Big Man who can squash the petty, squabbling parliamentarians and govern in the "true" national interest. Mr. Smith often yields to Mr. Bonaparte.
Right. It's worth saying that I think there's some real merit to this kind of thinking when it comes to local government issues. There's a reason why the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani administration is terrifying, but he was a fine mayor. Similarly, the brand of quasi-apolitical technocracy that Michael Bloomberg brought to the mayor's office made him an excellent mayor with most of Giuliani's virtues and few of his demerits, but it's silly as a program for national office. The issues change when you go national, elements of authoritarianism get more scary, the "petty, quabbling" parliamentarians become people of a lot more substance and in general the unit of governance becomes so large that the idea of a transcendent "national interest" becomes more than a little meaningless.
On top of that, something about the global warming issue seems to for whatever reason spawn a disproportionate quantity of weird, vaguely authoritarian anti-political talk -- suggestions that not only is this a serious problem which we must tackle, but that's it's somehow beyond bargaining or the ordinary cut-and-thrust of elections and interest groups.
It seems that for a long time, the Nevada teachers union didn't have a problem with a plan to set up caucus sites on the Las Vegas Strip. But then the union that represents casino workers endorsed Barack Obama. The teachers are for Hillary Clinton. So now the teachers are suing to make it harder for casino workers to vote.
It was not easy to be against that war back when we cast that vote in October of 2002. I was one of 23 who voted against the war. Barack was supportive - one of the few candidates speaking out strongly against it in Illinois. If President Clinton had opposed that war as strongly as Barack Obama at the time, it would have helped a lot of us who had voted against authorizing an invasion.
Every time I criticize a war supporter's past support for the war, someone comes along and chimes in with "well didn't you support the war?" And, of course, I did -- it was a big mistake. Be that as it may, there's an objective difference between the status of an important political leader and that of a college senior. In other words, I supported the war in part because Bill Clinton and people like him were supporting the war. As Durbin is indicating here, had anti-war Senators like himself, Carl Levin, Nancy Pelosi and Russ Feingold had more backing from high-profile national leaders they might have had more success.
But Bill and Hillary Clinton were for the war. Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were for the war. Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke were for the war. I remember sitting around the dorm feeling smarter and better-informed than my anti-war friends and smugly noting all this: Sure, you may not trust Bush but look at all these good Democrats, I would say. Needless to say, in retrospect that looks like a very foolish argument to have been making. It was naive to trust those people. But a lot of people did trust them. Every blog commenter and emailer on the internet now claims to have been 100 percent prescient about the war, but if you look back at the polling you'll see that lots of Democrats, like me, followed the party's leadership in giving Bush the benefit of the doubt and wound up burned by it.
I think it's valid to say that other considerations might outweigh this one, but I have to say that it really rankles that the Clintons seem unwilling to even acknowledge what happened -- that there was a debate and they took one side of it, and other politicians took the other side -- and take responsibility for it.
McMegan points to John Henke's compendium of quotes by Paul Krugman which is supposed to illustrate Megan's earlier contention that "Paul Krugman has predicted eight of the last none recessions under the Bush administration." If this is the best Henke's got, then he really doesn't have the goods. Henke has nine quotations. Three of them are recent enough that they seem to me to be predicting the economic slowdown that is now widely believed to be underway (see, e.g., Ben Bernanke and other Republicans who obviously aren't grinding anti-Bush axes).
Krugman's May 2005 prediction that we were nearing the end of a speculative bubble in the housing market, similarly, looks really good in retrospect -- prices were about flat throughout 2006, and are now headed downward. Again, in April 2005 Krugman said "rising inflation in an economy still well short of full employment - has already arrived" and, indeed, it had; the inflation rate was rising and the employment-population ration remained quite a bit lower than it had been in the late 1990s. With five out of nine correct forecasts, this Krugman guy is looking pretty smart.
Similarly, Henke wants to mock the April 2004 observation that "An oil-driven recession does not look at all far-fetched" but it would be worth reading the actual column to see what Krugman's talking about:
Could an oil shock actually lead to 1970's-style stagflation — a combination of inflation and rising unemployment? Well, there are several comfort factors, reasons we're less vulnerable now than a generation ago. Despite the rise of the S.U.V., the U.S. consumes only about half as much oil per dollar of real G.D.P. as it did in 1973. Also, in the 1970's the economy was already primed for inflation: given the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in labor contracts and the experience of past inflation, oil price increases rapidly fed into a wage-price spiral. That's less likely to happen today.
Still, if there is a major supply disruption, the world will have to get by with less oil, and the only way that can happen in the short run is if there is a world economic slowdown. An oil-driven recession does not look at all far-fetched.
In context, that's a not-especially-alarmist warning that I think looks fine in retrospect. The others look a bit better for Henke. But Krugman's track record looks pretty good, even in the context of a series of quotes cherry-picked to make him look bad. I find the endless array of complaints people pretend to have with Krugman's work fascinating. Krugman is an effective and high-profile advocate for progressive politics. Lots of people want progressive politics to fail. Therefore, they don't like Krugman's columns. That's not so hard to say! But nobody seems willing to say it. Instead, you get a lot of bizarre tut-tutting as if I were to fret that Charles Krauthammer should really write more serious psychology columns or something.
Rudy Giuliani says straightforwardly that tax cuts increase revenues, but the fascinating element of Chris Wallace's efforts to ask Republicans about this issue comes when he talks to John McCain:
WALLACE: Do you believe the tax cuts pay for themselves or do you believe that they add to the deficit?
MCCAIN: I think they stimulate the economy. I think that one of the first things we have to do that I forgot to mention is make these tax cuts permanent, because we've got to give some certainty to families and businesses all over America that these tax cuts will not expire and then give them the effect of a tax increase. So I believe they stimulate the economy, but, Chris, you've got to cut spending.
I'm proud to have been a member of the Reagan revolution, a foot soldier. And we cut taxes, but Ronald Reagan knew we had to cut spending at the same time. And that was our great failure as a party, is we cut taxes and then we let spending get out of control.
And frankly, it cost us a great deal. If we had adopted the tax cut package that I had, which entails spending cuts, then we would be talking about more tax cuts today.
It seems that he doesn't really want to just flat-out lie, Giuliani-style. At the same time, he hardly dares tell the truth. After all, when you're the Consensus King of Straight-Talk and your base wants you to say some nonsense, you have to avoid telling the base that the nonsense they want you to say is nonsense. So instead he gets in with some Reagan mumbo-jumbo: "Ronald Reagan knew we had to cut spending at the same time." If by "knew we had to cut spending" you mean "increased defense spending enormously and caused a huge deficit at which point he turned around and raised taxes" then this turns out as accurate.
I was in the car during the Colts-Chargers game, and I have to say that it didn't seriously occur to me that the Chargers might win the game. I'm of two minds about the consequences. On the one hand, the Patriots must be stopped, and it seems that Indianapolis would have had a much better chance of doing so than will the Chargers. On the other hand, I find Payton Manning deeply annoying and don't really want to root for the Colts. In a Pats-Chargers context, by contrast, I can happily back San Diego.
As I've mentioned before, in his more coherent moments, Mike Huckabee appears to be gesturing in the direction of a sort of American version of the Christian Democratic politics that are common on the European right, but it's very hard to imagine that succeeding unless Huckabee can win the support of observant Catholics. This sort of thing is unlikely to help him in that quest.
Republican Talking Points, First Black Billionaire Edition
When trying to put the Robert Johnson fracas in context, it's worth recalling that it's not just the estate tax, Johnson took a position on Bush's rigged Social Security commission where his designated job was to provide bipartisan (and multiracial) cover for privatization and he took to the job like a fish to water. I found that article, meanwhile, while searching for a great Jon Chait piece on the whole Johnson phenomenon that seems, unfortunately, to have gone missing in TNR's troubled archives.
To add to what Ezra Klein says about the new round of Iraq-related attacks Hillary Clinton is making on Barack Obama, my issue here is that I don't understand what point her campaign is trying to make. Has Obama been less of a consistent, strong anti-war leader than I would have liked? Unquestionably, yes. It seems that between the time he entered the Senate and the time he started gearing up to run for President, he adopted a pretty cautious political strategy when I wish he had adopted a bold one. That said, Russ Feingold's not his opponent. Hillary Clinton is.
Is she trying to argue that her view on Iraq has been to Obama's left? Seemingly not. After all, she supported the war and he didn't, and all the things she's criticizing him for doing are also things she did.
Is she trying to argue that, Iraq aside, she has a forward-looking vision for US policy to the Middle East that anti-war voters should find more compelling? I wish she were arguing this. I think Barack Obama's campaign has laid out some good ideas in terms of a forward-looking vision, but that there's plenty of room for improvement on what he's done. It wouldn't be hard for Clinton to do better if she wanted to. But thus far she hasn't. Instead, on every issue where I can see daylight between them (non-proliferation policy, Cuba policy, meetings with foreign leaders, residual forces in Iraq, nuclear first strikes on Pakistan, grand bargain with Iran), Obama is somewhat better. But he's vulnerable, Clinton could easily undercut his anti-war appeal with bold thinking on some of these forward-looking issues. Instead, though, her campaign keeps going back to efforts to muddy the waters around who did what in the fall of 2002.
Bill Kristol on The New York Times breaking a major story back in June of 2006: "I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution." Public Editor Clark Hoyt reports:
Rosenthal said Kristol’s comment about prosecution bothered him. It was, Rosenthal said, “a heavy accusation that put him in a category other than a journalist.” But he said that Op-Ed columnists are not necessarily traditional journalists, and he did not think that “holding one opinion” should be the basis for selecting or rejecting a columnist.
Sulzberger said The Times wanted “a columnist who brought to our pages a deeply held and well articulated point of view in line with what you might call the conservative Republican movement. ... Our Op-Ed page is a marketplace of ideas. He’ll strengthen the discussion.”
Spencer Ackerman observes: "Truly a liberal fascist is one who won't take his own side in a putsch."
Joking aside, Sulzberger's comments are revealing. Clearly, one ought to consume a diversity of points of view. That's why back when he was still blogging I always liked to read Max Sawicky's brand of lefty economics even though I'm more inclined toward Brad DeLong's brand of center-left technocracy. For that matter, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok are one of my daily must-reads as well. I highly recommend the American Scene as an interesting source of various kinds of rightwingery, as well as the Technology Liberation Front for a free market perspective on tech policy. And of course there's my colleagues Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, and Ross Douthat. A healthy intellectual diet needs diversity.
But does it really require a "point of view in line with what you might call the conservative Republican movement" irrespective of its merits? I think there are lots of smart people who have some views on some subjects that are in line with the conservative movement, but to hire a columnist purely because his views mirror The Line from the Conintern is absurd. Suppose the conservative movement wants to mislead people about something or other. It happens fairly often. Now the Times's obligation is to publish articles designed to mislead the Times's audience? Really? And we're supposed to pay to acquire a product that's dedicated to publishing "all the news that's fit to print plus some stuff that's in line with the conservative Republican movement." Why would we do that?
Am I reading this right? Intel czar Michael McConnell thinks waterboarding would be torture but no waterboarding that was actually done was torture, because torture is a crime and so that would mean that the people who ordered waterboarding (i.e., his bosses) are criminals. But what does this mean? If it's torture, it's torture.
The context, recall, is that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are allowed to vote in tomorrow's Michigan Primary and since there's no Democratic primary, Kos and others are urging Democrats to pull the lever for Mitt Romney. I do want to continue to make the point that, cynicism aside, it really does seem to me that Romney would be a less dangerous president than Mike Huckabee or John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. Voting for Romney in a primary is win-win.
Kerry Howley reads Venkatesh & Leavitt, "An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution" and observes "Pimps pay better than the market wage and keep you safe and keep the police from demanding freebies. Who wouldn't want a pimp?" Meanwhile, it seems that pimp-inflicted beatings cancel out the reduction in customer-inflicted beatings that come with working with a pimp.
This all via Radley Balko who focuses on the deplorable conduct of the police. I think this blog takes a legalize-and-regulate line on prostitution, believing that this would give hookers legal recourse against maltreatment and improve their situation.
UPDATE: And, yes, in this context it would seem that "by 'police ... demanding freebies' we mean police committing rape."
The fascinating thing about this invitation to come bribe Rep. Al Wynn (D-MD) is that while AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and TimeWarner Cable all have PACs, Verizon has a "Good Government Committee." Truly they're on the Orwellian frontier here, the rest of the telecom industry risks being left in the dust.
Ever since I found out about the ridiculous Apple RAM overcharges, I've become slightly obsessed. I'm not sure, for example, what you would really want 32 gigs of RAM in your MacBook Pro for, but Apple will do the job for $9,100 (that's the price of the RAM alone, the computer costs more) but you could buy the same thing over here for $2,749. That's a jaw-dropping price differential.
Matt Stoller reminds us that BET chair Robert Johnson was also involved in lobbying to maintain the hedge fund tax loophole. That on top of the estate tax and Social Security business. Surely, Hillary Clinton can find some better African-American surrogates than this.
In addition to commenting on more significant issues, I wondered on primary night why Howard Wolfson was dressed so shabily on the night of the New Hampshire primary. Ryan Lizza's reporting offers a potential explanation (emphasis added): "According to sources on her campaign team, if Clinton had lost in New Hampshire, several senior advisers, including her communications director, Howard Wolfson, were planning to offer their resignation, and Clinton was prepared to skip the next two contests, Nevada and South Carolina, a decision that could have ceded all the momentum, and even the nomination, to Obama."
Was it a resigning sweater? Rest assured that this blog will stay on the case in a half-assed way.
I've been over this a few times already, but Mother Jones's David Corn delves into more detail and concludes: "Clinton and her aides have been peddling false information about Obama to undercut one of his primary arguments: she voted for the war; I was against it. Engaging in such disingenuous attacks may help Clinton beat back Obama, but it is hardly the way for her to counter Obama's claim that she represents poltics-as-usual. It only proves his point."
Yesterday, Andrew was fretting about the turn toward a focus on identity politics in the presidential campaign:
Some cultural identification is inevitable in America, and not the worst thing in the world. What's worrying is when candidates do not just accept this, but seek to exploit it directly. Huckabee's appeal to Christianists is the most troubling; but Clinton's on gender grounds is not that much better. So far, Obama's campaign has resisted crude racial appeals, but this has seemed to unravel a bit in the wake of the Clintons' rhetorical slips this past week. Less is more, on this front. Or we begin to lose the capacity to see ourselves as equal participants in a democracy, rather than interest groups fighting for what's and who's ours.
I believe things are different in the UK, but it's worth saying that American politics has typically been more structured around issues of identity than around issues or ideology. In northeastern urban areas, for example, Italian-Americans have traditionally been Republicans for no better reason than that Irish-Americans have traditionally been Democrats. Similarly, white protestants were Republicans because Catholics were Democrats (except for the Italians) but southern white protestants were Democrats because Abe Lincoln was a Republican.
I tend to agree that this tradition hasn't been the most admirable element of the American political system, but parties organized around clumsy ethno-sectarian coalitions are the practical alternative to the much-bemoaned partisan polarization of the present day. On the Democratic side, the candidates have allowed almost no ideological daylight to shine between them, so you get identity-based coalitions. On the GOP side there are bigger ideological differences so the voters aren't breaking down as strictly along demographic lines. Even here, though, each Republican is presenting himself as the One True Reagan Conservative instead of explicitly self-identifying as representing an ideological sub-sect.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's ex-wife Cécilia has branded him a "stingy philanderer" with a "behavioural problem" who is an "unworthy president" of France... Mrs Sarkozy alleged that her 52-year-old ex-husband was "a man who likes no-one, not even his children".
Seems rougher, even, than anything Robert Johnon's putting out there.
Here's Jim Pinkerton talking to a baffled David Corn making the case that his new boss Mike Huckabee can win votes from working class Democrats:
One interesting point here is that Pinkerton seems to think that "non-citizens" and "illegal immigrants" refer to the same group of people. The other point to make, of course, is that while in principle I think Huckabee-esque populist positioning could work for the GOP, thus far Huckabee seems to have almost no appeal outside the group of white evangelicals (see, e.g., his apparent problem with Catholic voters) so the problem remains pretty theoretical. In the 2004 exit polls, white evangelicals were only 23 percent of the population.
One problem with Jim Pinkerton's optimistic take on Mike Huckabee's electability (and he's by no means alone in this regard) is that in the real world Huckabee seems to be very unpopular. Check this out from the latest CNN / Opinion Research Corporation poll (PDF), for example. Of course if that's bad news for Huckabee, it's terrible news for Romney. I think the best face he could put on those results is simply that it's extremely implausible any nominee could possibly do as badly as this suggests he would. The poll also agrees with my intuition that Hillary Clinton has the higher floor, but Barack Obama the higher ceiling of the two candidates and that John McCain is hard to beat but by no means a shoo-in.
I bet you were sitting at home thinking to yourself what I really need is the perspective of three white dues on race and gender in the presidential primary. Well you're in luck! It's the latest edition of The Table the smartest conversation on the web:
More from this taping will be forthcoming soon enough.
A bit more from that CNN / OCR poll (PDF) in the form of these presidential head-to-head matchups. As you can see, all the non-McCain Republicans are getting trounced by either Democrat, though more soundly trounced by Obama. On the flipside, Hillary Clinton's narrow lead over McCain is a bit bigger than Barack Obama's super-duper-narrow lead over the King of Straight Talk.
The other day, I asked All Seeing Eye Marc Ambinder whether you could pick Michael Bloomberg as your running mate and then have him spend his vast fortune on getting the ticket elected. Ambinder asked an election lawyer and the answer turns out to be: Maybe.
Barack Obama's favorite TV show is The Wire and his favorite character is Omar. Omar's certainly the popular choice, though Avon Barksdale's recent return reminded me of what a great character he is.
The Wire has always been deliberately dancing on the edge of commercial and aesthetic viability. One of the things that makes the show so great -- it's uncompromising approach to storytelling -- has also tended to make it difficult to secure an audience. It's not intended to be watched "like a television show" where you just tune in on any given week when you happen to be bored. You need to watch one episode after another, in sequence, and pay attention. But people (myself included) tend to like the ability to dip in and out of things as schedule allows. Still, The Wire's approach has allowed the writers to craft a much more compelling product than what you normally see on television.
But after the second episode of Season five, I'm coming to share the doubts expressed by Kay Steiger and Jesse Singal. It seems very strange to pick now -- when the show can't be renewed or cancelled no matter what happens to viewership -- to suddenly decide to incorporate way more exposition than we're accustomed to. But that seems to be what's happening. Everything in the Sun plot is being marked out like a runway. Do you think the Unscrupulous Journalist and the Douchebag Editor are going to conspire to cause the Fall of American Journalism? I think they just might!
Maybe there's some cool double-reverse in the works and this is only being done in an apparently heavy-handed manner to throw us emotionally off track. Here's hoping....
Ed Kilgore takes a gander at poll results indicating that people are excited about the idea of electing a 72 year-old man to the presidency and observes that "this kind of polling may soon make McCain's age and health the issue a lot of observers have expected it to become for a long time." Actually, though, I doubt that it will. Will the media raise this issue? Probably not, since it clearly cuts against John McCain and in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong. Will McCain's political adversaries raise the issue? Maybe, but it'll be hard for it to have a big effect, since in the eyes of the press John McCain can do no wrong and launching this sort of attack on him will prompt a backlash and be viewed as underhanded.
Meanwhile, I looked up some mortality statistics courtesy of the CDC. It seems that a white man has a cumulative 15 percent chance of dying between the ages of 72 and 76 (see page seventeen for the data). In case of re-election, a white man faces an additional 22 percent chance of dying between his 76th birthday and his 80th. Now of course to look at this more closely you'd have to consider McCain's history of skin cancer and so forth. In addition, as President he'd be subjected to the well-known horrors of socialized medicine.
I mentioned Jonathan Chait's great piece on Robert Johnson, HRC's new best friend, from back when he was George W. Bush's new best friend earlier today. In light of Johnson's renewed salience, the article seems to have been rescued from TNR's FUBAR archives and is now available here.
So Dana Goldstein went and read the Wesley Yang essay on "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" in N + 1 that I recommended so highly earlier and came away with some criticisms. Or, rather, she came across a somewhat ambiguous passage which, if you construe one way, seems to be making an objectionable claim. When I read that part, I assumed that that wasn't what Yang was trying to say since, as Dana argues, that wouldn't be a very smart thing to say.
In general, I think it's usually wise to be generous in your interpretation of other people's arguments when they don't have some kind of bad track record or something. At any rate, Yang himself jumps into the comment thread and says what I would have expected him to say -- that's not what he meant, and the essay isn't really about why Seung-Hui Cho become a mass murderer at all. Rather, it's about looking into the face of a mass murderer and seeing and exploring character traits that are much more widespread.
I stand accused -- "Yglesias and Marshall are quite busy not readying themselves to own up to the fact that one of their main candidates is using surrogates (in this case, a black surrogate, a fiendishly clever move) to peddle the charge of cocaine use to scare off the white women. Period. That’s what she’s doing."
Look, I think the idea that I'm turning a blind eye here is dumb. Anyone who reads the blog knows I'd rather see Barack Obama win the nomination than Hillary Clinton. Her campaign's strategy seems to be to taunt Obama and his supporters into calling her and her campaign a bunch of racists, and then because black people outnumber white people she wins an election that's all about race. It's cynical as hell, and I don't want to be a part of it. Now Bill Clinton's on the radio whining that Obama called Hillary a racist when Obama never did any such thing.
Nor will I call her one, it's a red herring that Clinton's people have injected into the campaign instead of trying to make a stronger affirmative case for their candidate
Let me just fall back to what I've said before: I don't envision core domestic policy issues unfolding incredibly differently in a Clinton or in an Obama administration. I think Barack Obama has given us more indication, both in his record and his proposals, that he'll pursue the kind of foreign policy we need to get the country on track. I'll buy that Obama doesn't have a ton of experience, but the reality is that Clinton doesn't have a ton either. And while Hillary Clinton can probably win in the general election, I think that the bulk of the evidence supports the idea that Obama would have an easier time -- in particular would have an easier time of generating the sort of big win that would be necessary to pass ambitious legislation. Ultimately, that's what the campaign is about. I won't even pretend to be appalled by Clinton's cynicism -- the disenfranchisementgambit and all the rest -- because, frankly, the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her. At the end of the day, though, while I think she'd be okay it's always seemed to me that with other viable options in the field it's made more sense to go with "other options" and now that it's a clear two-person race, I think Obama is clearly the better option.
I sometimes find myself disturbed by how, um, boring and banal my dreams tend to be. Under the circumstances, I was glad to learn that it's actually common to dream about your job as I've certainly had my fair share of dreams about blogging.
Can't say it's much of a surprise that despite all the Friedman Units and talk of victory and how Iraq won't really play in the 2008 campaign that four years after the 2008 campaign there'll be the 2012 campaign. And four years after that comes the 2016 campaign. And two years after that comes 2018 when Iraqi officials say it might be possible for American troops to leave. My then you'll have 20 year-olds serving in Iraq who were five when the war started. But a couple of key phrases from The New York Times's account:
Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad. And they suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated.
Pentagon officials expressed no surprise at Mr. Qadir’s projections, which were even less optimistic than those he made last year.
One, if the surge is working so well, why is it that Mr. Qadir's projections are getting less optimistic? Answer -- maybe the surge isn't working so well and maybe this Upright Citizens Brigade strategy doesn't contain the seeds of any kind of stable equilibrium for Iraq. Two, why is it that officials "expressed no surprise" at projections that "suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated"? Answer -- both governments have not been indicating things accurately. They've been misleading.
This is, in my view, the key to breaking the political deadlock over Iraq in the United States. A large number of people agree with my preference for an expeditious withdrawal from Iraq. Unfortunately, though, it's not a majority of people. But the number of people who favor the sort of decade-plus engagement that constitutes the actual alternative to expeditious withdrawal is incredibly small. What's needed, however, are political leaders who are willing and able to re-enforce the point that's been revealed again and again by American reporters -- the alternative to leaving is staying for a very, very, very long time.
U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Jonathan Snyder
Mark Kleiman's with me that Mitt Romney would make the least-bad president of anyone in the field. Kevin Drum sort of agrees with us but got disturbed after talking to Hugh Hewitt: "Hugh is a smart guy and a consummate Republican Party apparatchik, and he supports Romney. I don't remember all the specific details of why he prefers Romney, but just in general he obviously thinks that Romney is the most reliably conservative candidate in the GOP field."
A couple of general observations here before delving into the case for Romney (relative, of course, to the GOP alternatives). One would be that "most conservative" is not the same as "worst" unless you just define conservative to mean "bad stuff." George W. Bush has, after all, actually departed from conservative tradition in a number of ways, they've just mostly been bad ways that involve him being corrupt and/or crazy (for example "By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world") rather than Bush being moderate. Another observation is that one thing a smart Republican apparatchik would want in a GOP president would be for that president to do a decent job and undue some of the damage Bush has done to the brand.
The affirmative case for Romney as the least-bad Republican involves stealing an insight from my colleague Josh Green: The constant throughout Romney's career is a cautious, paint-by-numbers approach. He's running as a conservative right now, and that means that if he wins he'll govern as a conservative -- no use hoping for him to morph back into the moderate he was in 1994 or 2002. But that said, it seems very unlikely that he'd roll the dice on some hair-brained scheme if elected. He might do major harm, but I think it's relatively unlikely.
Compare this to, say, John McCain. He's flighty as hell. For years, he's an orthodox conservative. Then he's an orthodox conservative who also supports this one ill-conceived campaign finance restriction. Then he's running for president. Now suddenly Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell are forces of evil. Then Bush beats him with some sleazy campaign stunts. Now he wants to regulate carbon emissions! And import drugs from Canada! Bush sucks, he's evil and corrupt and incompetent and wrecking the country and oh he's up for re-election well of course I'll strongly support him etc., etc,. etc. Then the establishment warms up to him so he warms up to the establishment. So now he supports the Bush tax cuts and the Bush plan for Iraq and the Bush immigration plan. Oh wait voters don't like the Bush immigration plan? Well then I've learned my lesson and I was never for amnesty and by the way I'm now against carbon curbs. But you know what's great? The surge. And Joe Lieberman in his crazy uncle phase. And David Petraeus. Petraeus is so great that I think civilian control of the military is obsolete and I won't say whether or not I think tax cuts increase revenue but let's cut spending a lot, eh?
In other words, on eighty percent of issues McCain seems to me to be making it up as he goes along. At his best, he's cravenly flip-flopping according to the political headwinds. But other times, he just seems to be acting on whim or out of pique. Or he's coming to middle-ground positions that don't make sense, like "global warming is real and we should stop it, but only through measures that wouldn't actually stop it!" The rest of the time, he's just really, really, really committed to the military and to militarism. Worst of all, like all the other candidates for president, his personal level of experience with foreign policy issues is minimal, but unlike the other candidates he doesn't seem to realize this believing instead that his enthusiasm about the military and for soldiers and soldiering constitutes a close substitute for having real ideas about international relations. With McCain, it's possible that the chips will just all fall in the right place and he'll stumble upon some workable Teddy Roosevelt synthesis but we're just as likely to end up conscripting teenagers to build nuclear plants or bombing Iran or convincing ourselves that ranting and raving about the evils of earmarks is an adequate replacement for a grasp of fiscal policy.
About Giuliani, enough has already been said. Mike Huckabee is fun to talk about, but he kind of reminds me of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone. We really don't want him in office. So that leaves Romney. Or, obviously, a Democrat.
Ooops! "Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say."
This is probably worth keeping in mind as we read about rushed and ill-conceived plans to export the Anbar Awakening worldwide. Supporting violent groups you don't really control or understand who are driven by their own interests and ideologies can be a very dangerous game.
Hillary Clinton fans looking to make racially charged attacks on Barack Obama should really read today's Richard Cohen column for a look at how it's done properly. As Steve Sailer won't hesitate to point out in comments, the Trinity United Church of Christ is a potential font of this sort of thing.
Tonight's Michigan primary raises an important question in the eyes of the east coast media elite -- what time zone is Michigan in? As we see above, despite its alleged Midwest status, Michigan is an eastern time zone state. Meanwhile, check out this business along the border between Idaho, Oregon, and Washington -- why doesn't the time zone line just correspond to the border?
If you want to halt nuclear proliferation, you need to follow the Non-Proliferation Treaty like Australia's new Labour government. But of course Australia exchanging Howard for Rudd will do little good in this regard unless the United States exchanges Bush for someone better.
It seems that nothing gets conservatives off nearly so much as writing obviously unserious books with patently offensive titles, designed in every way to not be taken seriously, and then get huffy when people make fun of them without having given their precious works the deep consideration they deserve. So while I've been poking and jibing at Jonah Goldberg, I've also been making my way through his book. It gets pretty tedious in parts, contrary to the faint praise with which a lot of people have been damning it it's not witty or clever, so I won't deny having skimmed over parts where I already got the point. But I've read it, and here's what I think.
One major problem with the book is that Goldberg has no ability whatsoever to stick to a coherent line of argument. You might call this book "disparate essays about fascism and American liberalism designed to annoy liberals." He doesn't seem to care about what his various claims amount to or even whether or not they're inconsistent. Thus, sometimes liberals are too mean to the non-Hitler fascists of the world. Other times, the problem is that people on the left in the 1920s were, at the time, unduly soft on fascism. But other times the problem is that people on the left now have views on some subjects (e.g., the importance of public health) that are similar to views fascists had back in the day.
Here's an interesting and even-handed account of the case against AIPAC's Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen for passing along classified information. Emotionally, I'm torn between amusement at the idea of seeing AIPAC's ox gored and the reality that the precedent the government is seeking to put in place here has some grim implications for press freedom. I am sure, however, that this line of argument is absurd:
“It’s absurd for anyone to think that the Israelis have to enlist people to spy,” says Sandra Charles, a former Pentagon and National Security Council official who consults in Washington for Persian Gulf Arab governments. “They can go to the highest levels of the administration if they want to find out what the thinking is on US policy.”
Charles might want to visit Jonathan Pollard in prison if she really thinks Israel would never try to enlist spies. The fact that so many US government officials are willing to talk to Israeli officials or Israel's friends is precisely the point, it makes Israeli espionage possible, not superfluous.
This chart should put the wrong track numbers from yesterday's NYT poll (PDF) in some perspective. This is the first read of the year for each year of the Bush administration. The NYT provides data on this question going back to 1983. The pre-Bush high for "wrong track" was 65 percent in November of 1994. We got over 65 in March of 2006 and the public mood has stayed at least that bleak ever since then.
The panhandle of Idaho is geographically isolated from the rest of the state by lots of wilderness. Up there, they have a lot of activity with the cities on the Washington side of the border, like Spokane. It's a pain in the ass to change time zones everytime someone in Coeur D'Alene has to run over to Spokane to do some shopping.
And, indeed, as illustrated above there's an interstate link going from Coeur D'Alene into Washington, while the north-south road links aren't nearly as good. Thus, the northern bit of the state is more closely integrated with parts of Washington than with southern Idaho. You learn something new every day as a blogger.
The CBO says a temporary increase in food stamp benefits would be an economic stimulus with a lot of bang for the buck. Makes sense. A stimulus should be temporary. Meanwhile, food stamps are something you have to spend, and people on public assistance are likely to spend any additional income quickly. Greg Mankiw demurs:
I wonder if we really want to target such cyclical measures on the poorest members of society. That is, for any mean level of food stamps, wouldn't the poor be better off with a constant stream of benefits than with a benefit that fluctuates over the business cycle? Using food stamps as a cyclical tool seems to risk destabilizing some families' food consumption in an attempt to stabilize the overall business cycle.
Like Felix Salmon, I'm skeptical that opposing such an increase out of tender concern for the poor makes much sense. Mankiw's larger point that "we should think harder about improving the economy's automatic stabilizers" seems quite correct, but as long as congress wants to enact a stimulus package it ought to enact a good, useful stimulus package.
In terms of automatic stabilizers, it seems like the best thing to do for the long run would be to try to enact some kind of policy designed to counteract the counterproductive and pro-cyclical nature of state and local level budget policies. If not for that pesky constitution we could force states to accumulate responsible-sized rainy day funds during booms in order to avoid budget cuts during slowdowns, but I'm pretty sure the federal government can't do this in the real world.
Photo by Flickr user ChicagoEye used under a Creative Commons license
Via "d" at Lawyers, Guns, and Money check out this bizarre comic book put together by George Wallace during one of his campaigns to be governor of Alabama. It's fascinating how casually his steadfast white supremacy is wound into a general populist appeal that's all about job creation and the need to boost pensions.
The things PR people try to pitch me on get pretty hilarious at times. For example:
For any upcoming hair-care stories, I’d like to offer you Martha Clemence (see photo and bio below), lead stylist for Fantastic Sams® Hair Salons. Some ideas that came to mind which Martha would love comment on:
The Hillary Do – Yay or Nay?
Washing that man right out of your hair - Post-Relationship at home hair care; what to do with the flowers, chocolate and wine he gave youHow to look and feel your best, even on a budget
How NOT to go gray naturally
Everyday tips and tricks on how to keep hair healthy, even if you use an iron or curler
Everyone knows you put the flowers, chocolate, and wine he gave you into your hair -- it forms an excellent shampoo.
Neil Sinhababu brings the funny as we get to ask the GOP Presidential contenders "which Buffy villain are you?" Romney as "The Mayor" seems particularly apt.
We learned this morning that Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qadir says he'll want US troops around until 2018 or so. Meanwhile, Swopa notes that Qadir seems to have been placed in office by US occupation authorities rather than by domestic Iraqi political actors. Which, of course, is to be expected since all signs are that the presence of US troops in Iraq is unpopular and not the sort of thing Iraqi politicians accountable to their constituents would be asking to continue forever and ever.
Blake Hounshell takes a look at George W. Bush getting friendly with King Fahd and writes, "if you're a gasoline-consuming American, you're deeply complicit in this marriage, too. So laugh all you want at Bush, but he kisses Saudi cheek for thee—just as U.S. presidents have done for decades. There's nothing particularly unique about Bush's relationship with the Saudis." Justin Logan vigorously dissents.
I'm with Justin here. It's true that Bush isn't unique in this regard, but a very broad swathe of the American political elite has a level of personal friendliness with vicious Arab dictators that's totally unjustifiable in terms of the basic politics or economics of oil. The United States has what I'd deem an unduly chilly relationship with Venezuela at the moment, but the oil still flows and Citgo stations are still around. The process by which oil-rich states in the Persian Gulf export oil to oil-consuming states is a business arrangement for mutual advantage driven by the exchange of money for fuel. Maintaining it requires us to, yes, not deliberately launch any massive destabilizing operations in the region.
But it doesn't require our policies to be especially friendly to the regimes at hand, and it certainly doesn't require the unseemly degree of friendliness that you often see. At gatherings of the great and the good, one often sees some Arab princeling or queen treated as the equivalent to an entrepreneur or a democratically elected politician, and there's just no reason to do that.
It seems to me that a lot of the reaction to Richard Cohen's column about how Barack Obama's minister's daughter likes Louis Farrakhan is pretty overstated. I feel like someone like Jeff Weintraub who's taking this issue seriously is being an idiot, but Cohen's just being a mildly cynical columnist who doesn't want Obama to win the election. Lots and lots of our political debate consists of things that aren't incredibly serious, and I've certainly made not-especially-serious criticisms of politicians I don't like in my day.
Meanwhile, it's not as if if Cohen had kept his mouth shut this whole thing was going to go unnoticed and unaddressed for the next ten months. It's political common sense to have your surrogates attack Obama on these grounds and it's common sense for Obama's campaign to have had a perfectly good response up his sleeve.
Paul Krugman criticized Barack Obama's plans for economic stimulus as compared to those offered by John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. Brad DeLong, on the other hand, thinks Obama is on the right track, seeing it as closer in line with the principles articulated here by Jason Furman and Douglas W. Elmendorf.
Of course, the two perspectives aren't necessarily in tension. Krugman writes that:
Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right . . . the Obama plan appears to contain none of the alternative energy initiatives that are in both the Edwards and Clinton proposals, and emphasizes across-the-board tax cuts over both aid to the hardest-hit families and help for state and local governments. I know that Mr. Obama’s supporters hate to hear this, but he really is less progressive than his rivals on matters of domestic policy. In short, the stimulus debate offers a pretty good portrait of the men and woman who would be president. And I haven’t said a word about their hairstyles.
DeLong thinks Obama has a better plan. Krugman thinks Obama's plan is less left-wing than is Clinton's or Edwards' and that this provides a window into Obama's soul -- a more meaningful window than is offered by speculations about haircuts, and one which reveals a man who lacks mettle. DeLong, by contrast, says:
John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton and their staffs--they don't seem to have grasped that governance is best when you ask congress to do things that are within its competence, and ask the administrative branch to do things that are within its competence. They might respond that these stimulus packages are political rather than policy documents--acts of campaigning rather than acts of governance--and they are right, up to a point.
To me, I see documents that are almost entirely about political positioning. None of these people can possibly become president until January of 2009 at which point appropriate short-term economic policy is going to be different from appropriate short-term economic policy for January 2008. I see some reason to believe that an Edwards administration would draw more senior staff from the labor-liberal, trade skeptical, deficit-friendly wing of the center-left than would an Obama or a Clinton administration. But the two front-running candidates would, based on everything I know, be staffed by a very similar group of people on big-picture macroeconomic issues.
One striking thing about the praise for Liberal Fascism page is that several of the praisers appear to be touting the book purely for its analytical scoop that it's a mistake to simply speak of fascism and socialism as "opposites." This thesis has the virtue of being true, so that one can cite it in order to praise Goldberg's book without making an ass of oneself. At the same time, however, it's both completely banal and also not the main point of his book.
I'm a little baffled about all these people on TV reporting with baited breath that the exit polls in Michigan are showing a ton of concern about the economy. Had they not realized that the Michigan economy was in the shitter before this? I feel like this whole "entire auto industry in collapse" story has been pretty widely reported.
I'd been a bit concerned that this race/gender business was tearing progressives apart, but I think all decent people can come together now in loathing of Tim Russert and his refusal to ask questions about actual issues in the campaign.
UPDATE: Twenty minutes in, still no substantive questions!
Speaking of this terrible debate, don't miss my article on why Tim Russert is whack in the current issue of The Washington Monthly. Sadly, it's not online.
Holy shit, Brian Williams is promising to talk about the economy after the advertising break. I was beginning to think these NBC hosts melted when they started talking about issues.
Mitt Romney's win looks pretty solid -- 39 percent to just 30 percent for John McCain. What's more, it would seem to be an ominous sign for John McCain that he got beaten so badly among registered Republicans. New Hampshire had an open primary, lots of non-Republicans voted, and he won. Michigan had an open primary, but not so many non-Republicans voted, so he lost. In more and more of the states going forward, however, only Republicans are going to be able to vote in the Republican primary.
Of course it's not a two-person race, so things get much more complicated than that, but the basic shape of the river is still that Republicans need to like you if you want to win a Republican primary.
Did Tim Russert really just ask if John Edwards speaking to Musharraf after the Bhutto assassination was part of an effort to give Musharraf "cover" of some kind? I believe he did. It would have been pretty sweet if Edwards had broken down Perry Mason-style and 'fessed up to the fact that he and Pervez conspired to kill her. But no dice. Alternatively, Edwards could have gone with the old "Tim, you've asked a lot of dumb questions in your day, but this really takes the cake."
I suppose the trouble with this debate is that while it was very annoying when the moderates were focused on inane trivia, once they moved to substance it turned out that the candidates don't really have large disagreements on the issues.
Chris Matthews doesn't appear to know what an ad hominem argument is. Noting that Bush's efforts to beg Saudi Arabia to sell us more cheap oil are "pathetic" doesn't qualify.
I've got a Guardian piece up about the debate -- basic takeaway point is that when the Democrats turn away from trivia and toward substance, one is overwhelmingly reminded of the lack of big disagreements between them. Watching the race you get caught up and, of course, since it's an important decision even small differences loom large. But objectively the most noteworthy thing about it is how small those differences are. One note of worry:
Few big disagreements about big ideas are in play on the Democratic field. For now, most liberals find that consensus heartening, but we may come to regret it if it means that the eventual winner emerges into the field of battle without having really tested his or her arguments against a candidate willing to draw sharp lines of contrast.
Indeed, even though these are views I don't hold, I wish someone in the field was saying the surge is working. I wish someone was saying that an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 was unrealistic and likely to cripple the economy. I wish someone was saying we can't afford the kind of health care spending these folks are putting on the table. I'd like to see the candidates dealing with the obvious opposition arguments. Instead, this was probably the high point:
It's not, though, an incredibly beefy moment. Like Josh Marshall, I was a bit confused by MSNBC's rush to proclaim Hillary Clinton the winner. What I think she did was turn in a front-runner's performance. But that's only a win if she's really the front-runner and I don't think that's clear at all.
A bit lost in my case for Mitt Romney was my offhand comparison of Mike Huckabee to Greg Stillson. But it is worth saying that Huckabee, though an amusing sideshow as a sideshow, is also a frightening prospect to contemplate as a potential nationwide political force. And, frankly, it just gets worse. Check out, for example, new Huckabee advisor Jim Pinkerton's explain to David Corn that we ought to put a cop in front of every mosque in America:
I also saw on TV last night that Huckabee's going beyond his new restrictionist line on illegal immigration to start talking about a broader crackdown on immigration in general, another Pinkerton signature. Plus Huckabee wants to change the constitution to make it accord more closely with the Bible. It's scary stuff.
Can it it really be true that Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton are all left handed. Four out of the last six presidents? With lefties representing such a tiny proportion of the overall population. Is there some kind of crazy conspiracy out there? Of course, I suppose George W. Bush isn't making a very strong case for right-handed leadership.
Looks like John McCain's big pocket of strength among Michigan voters was from people who don't approve of the Iraq War. Because, of course, the man who's managed to always position himself to George W. Bush's right on the whole "should we squander the nation's blood and treasure in Iraq for no reason" issue is exactly the kind of guy you want to turn to if you're disgruntled with the course things are taking. Meanwhile, part of the bad news for the country here is that I think Mitt Romney's made it clear that he'll be the candidate the voters want him to be, and if that means becoming the country's leading cheerleader for the war, then cheer he shall. McCain, meanwhile, doesn't have it in his character to be anything other than a cheerleader for the war. So the Republican Party will continue to be in denial about the realities of the situation.
Speaking of which, today in reality we learn: "Highly promising figures that the administration cited to demonstrate economic progress in Iraq last fall, when Congress was considering whether to continue financing the war, cannot be substantiated by official Iraqi budget records, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday."
The press needs to come up with some consistent language to describe margins of victory. Barack Obama's 7 point win in Iowa was referred to as a "big win". But MSNBC is currently running with a headline "Romney edges McCain in Michigan". But Romney won by 9 points! Doesn't that make it a "big win"?
He's neglecting, of course, the fact that reporting it this way is good for John McCain. You'll recall, after all, that when Mike Huckabee won in Iowa and Mitt Romney took second place in Iowa, that the "real winner" was John McCain. In Michigan, his loss at least got reported as a loss.
Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel report for Reason that it was primarily Lew Rockwell, probably working with a few associates, also named. They also report that the racist writings in the Ron Paul newsletters were part of a larger strategy:
Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."
The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America." [...]
The presidential campaign Rothbard and Rockwell supported in 1988 was Ron Paul's run on the Libertarian Party ticket. In 1992, they were again ready to back Paul, until Pat Buchanan convinced the obstetrician to withdraw and back his conservative challenge to then-president Bush. "We have a dream," Rockwell wrote in that same January 1992 edition of RRR, "and perhaps someday it will come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream, why can't we?) Our dream is that, one day, we Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with a dramatic choice....We can say: 'Look, gang: you have a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke.'"
Sanchez and Weigel go on to note that Paul has shifted gears well away from this political strategy:
But perhaps the best refutation of the old approach is not the absence of race-baiting rhetoric from its progenitors, but the success of the 2008 Ron Paul phenomenon. The man who was once the Great Paleolibertarian Hope has built a broad base of enthusiastic supporters without resorting to venomous rhetoric or coded racism. He has stuck stubbornly to the issues of sound money, "humble foreign policy," and shrinking the state. He wraps up his speeches with a three-part paean to individualism: "I don't want to run your life," "I don't want to run the economy," and "I don't want to run the world." He talks about the disproportionate effect of the drug war on African-Americans, and appeared at a September 2007 Republican debate on black issues that was boycotted by the then-frontrunners. All this and more have brought him $30 million-plus from more than 100,000 donors; thousands of campaign volunteers, and the largest rallies he's ever spoken to, including a crowd of almost 5,000 in Philadelphia.
This is all true enough as far as the strategic direction of the libertarian movement goes. Then again, as best I can tell Paul's anti-immigration views have about as much appeal as his libertarian ones. Most of all, though, I think this dog won't hunt: "Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists—and taking 'moral responsibility' for that now means more than just uttering the phrase." That's right on moral responsibility, but I don't think it's right on racism. To have the sort of indifference to the well-being and sentiments of black people that you'd have to have to be complicit in "a strategy of pandering to racists" in the way that Paul was, just is racism in my view.
The entire Vietnam Veterans Against McCain site seems so preposterous that I almost hope it's a deliberate effort to generate a sympathy vote for McCain. I suspect, though, that it's meant in earnest. What's more, it's so preposterous that it doesn't even rise to the level of smear. If you were trying to think of damaging rumors to make up about McCain, you'd surely come up with something more plausible than this. Instead, the sad reality seems to be that some folks are unhinged enough to actually believe this kind of thing.
Who wins under Mike Huckabee's plan to replace the income tax with a hefty national retail sales tax? It seems that the very rich would get most of the gains, plus the very, very poor. Of course, the elderly in particular get hammered here which I assume makes this a non-starters in real world politics, though thus far Huckabee has been remarkably adept at avoiding the real world.
David Frum remarks on Mitt Romney's win that "Michigan faces some of the worst economic troubles in the nation. Romney addressed those problems in a more sustained and detailed way than his main Republican challengers in the state (Huckabee, McCain)." Ross dubs this "absolutely right." And it sounds right to me. But I'm not sure the exit polls bear it out -- Romney did better among voters who think economic conditions are good than among those who think it's bad.
Similarly, Romney did better among voters making over $50,000 than among voters making less than $50,000. He did better among college educated voters than among those without college education. It's true that he did best among voters who named the economy as the most important issue, but the businessman candidate's main constituency seems to be among affluent business class types who aren't feeling an especially large amount of economic pain. More primaries and more polls should give us more data, but provisionally it's not clear that "economic troubles" are really all that central to his appeal.
Jon Chait, like me, is a Mitt Romney fan. The key bits:
Last year, The Boston Globe obtained his campaign strategy document laying out what it called "Primal Code for Brand Romney." "Primal" is a perfect description for Romney's view of the GOP base. He approaches conservatism not as a respectable ideology but as a series of (in Lionel Trilling's famous phrase) irritable mental gestures. The strategy memo suggests he drive home the message "Hillary = France." Romney has promised to "double Guantanamo" and demanded that Mike Huckabee apologize for criticizing President Bush's foreign policy. This is like a Hollywood parody of a right-wing Republican--think "Bob Roberts," or Tom Cruise's character in Lions for Lambs--but more clever.
If Romney's public sentiments were more intelligent than this, I'd fear he actually believed it. Giuliani's conservatism, to offer up one contrast, is intelligent enough for me to think he genuinely buys into it but still dumb enough for me to fear for the future of our country if he manages to win the election. The mindless tribalism of Romney's pandering is paradoxically reassuring. The form his pandering takes is a measure of the contempt in which he holds the electorate in general and Bush-era Republicans in particular. I share his sentiments completely.
Right. I don't think one should delude oneself into thinking that Romney is a secret liberal or would become one in office, but he's a careful, calculating guy. No furtive motions. Rudy Giuliani's not as right-wing on some issues, but he's bonkers on others. John McCain, as I've said, is flighty -- he flip-flops for no good reason, takes up policy positions as a way to prosecute grudges, and loves war. Huckabee's bonkers. In this GOP field, Romney would be the least-bad president.
The primary's been making it hard for me to follow the NBA as closely as I'd like, but wtf is happening with my Wizards. First we beat Boston. Then we beat Boston again. Then we . . . lose to the Knicks. I've got tickets to tomorrow's rematch, and I'd had it marked down in my calendar as a definite win. Now -- who knows? Meanwhile, I'm trying to puzzle together whether or not there's any reason to worry that an eventual return of Agent Zero might harm the team's improved defense. It's possible that the Daniels-Arenas backcourt that Eddie Jordan liked to use pretty often is just super weak. DeShawn Stevenson rarely looks impressive to me, but the plus-minus stats indicate that he's contributing on defense.
I sometimes wonder why political ads are so rarely clever the way, you know, real ads are. Al Franken, naturally enough, is shaking things up:
I don't really know anything about Franken's opponent in the primary, so I'd hesitate to say anything substantive about the race but I feel like this kind of innovation is a good thing.
Robert Farley wonders "why isn't Mitt Romney being treated as the overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican race? He's won two of the four contests so far, and placed second twice. Moreover, Michigan differs from the other three contests in that it's inhabited by actual people, twice as many as the other three states combined. He's also the leader in total money and trails only minor also-ran candidate Rudy Giuliani in cash on hand."
All true. What's more, as you'll see in the chart overhead, he actually has a narrow majority in terms of delegates allocated. The Republican race is by no means over, but Romney unmistakably has the lead. What's more, Romney seems to me to have the advantage of internal lines in the three-way Huckabee-McCain-Romney battle. McCain's big hope was to knock Romney out of the race (or, more precisely, to have Mike Huckabee knock Romney out of the race) in order to become the establishment candidate with maverick cred. But having added a solid win in Michigan to his Wyoming pickup, Romney is a clearly a viable candidate for the establishment to back and McCain is back to being a guy who Republicans don't really like.
Matt Welch painstakingly documents the fact that the John McCain newspaper endorsements flowing out from around the country keep making elementary factual errors. It's really aggravating stuff. It would be one thing if people were saying "I support John McCain because I want to see a candidate with hazy ideas about domestic policy issues and a steadfast record of support for preventive war." But instead the papers are all endorsing some other guy who never lies, always sticks to his guns, and at times is even an Iraq skeptic.
Last night, Hillary Clinton called the 2005 energy bill that Barack Obama voted for the "Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill" citing its "enormous giveaways to oil and gas industry." Washington Post fact-checker Michael Dobbs says she's wrong, but in the real world she's right. I assume Obama was more swayed by giveaways to coal interests -- Illinois is a coal-producing state and before his presidential campaign geared up he was trying to grope his way toward a coal-friendly environmentalism before eventually, and rightly, giving up -- than to the oil and gas industry, but it was still a bad bill and a fair tag.
John Heileman says that despite it all Rudy Giuliani's situation now looks pretty good. Ross tries to pour some cold water on that, but I think Giuliani could easily close the narrow gap that now exists between him and McCain in Florida.
The problem for Giuliani, however, is that the only way for him to win in Florida or anywhere else if for their to be enough candidates in the field for someone with his record to sneak through with a pretty thin plurality. In Florida he'll likely have Huckabee, McCain, and Romney in the field as three viable pro-life alternatives, plus a pro-life Ron Paul soaking up some votes. It's hard to imagine that happening over and over again in enough states for Giuliani to win a majority of delegates. More realistically, Rudy might win a couple of big clutches of delegates, taking them off the table, and raising the odds of a brokered convention scenario.
Yikes this show is bad. They'd really better settle this writer's strike some day soon and get some better stuff on the air. The Terminator show on Fox sucks, too.
The latest Diageo/Hotline poll (PDF) is full of interesting information. One point is that Hillary Clinton, though somewhat less popular than Barack Obama, seems like a reasonably popular figure. Certainly while you might say that she's polarizing and George W. Bush is polarizing, that elides the crucial fact that most people like Clinton while most people don't like Bush. John McCain, meanwhile, is much better regarded than the other Republicans.
Michael Ledeen, who has some bizarre views about the Middle East but indisputably knows a lot about fascism, has a worthwhile pan of Liberal Fascism made all the more devastating by the fact that Ledeen's no liberal but is unfailingly polite to Goldberg. Highlights:
The great masterpiece that drew the blood lines from Robespierre to modern mass movements and regimes, is Jacob Talmon’s “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” now nearly half a century old. There’s no evidence that Jonah has read it. [...] It doesn’t seem that Jonah is aware of this literature. [...] What is missing from Jonah’s book—he mentions it in passing a few times, but never gives it the weight it deserves—is the specific historical context from which fascism was born [...] Jonah, instead, says (pg. 80) “Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state.” That is not fascism [...] Just a few lines later, he claims that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator,” and that’s just silly. [...] Jonah trivializes Nazi racism [...] The best that can be said about this is that it’s imaginative. But it’s what happens when you are bound and determined to put liberals, Socialists, Communists, fascists and Nazis into a common political home.
Barack Obama tosses off a vague comparison between himself and Ronald Regan and Matt Stoller gets really pissed. I don't really get it. Obama is pretty unambiguously claiming that much as Reagan was a friendly, popular face of a much more conservative governing agenda than the country had seen before, he thinks he can be the friendly, popular face of a much more liberal governing agenda than the country has seen before.
Obama thinks -- as do a lot of people -- that the country may be primed for big change in 2008 the way it was in 1980 and that he's the kind of person who can sell the country on that sort of big change. He may be wrong, either in his assessment of the times or in his assessment of himself, but those are exactly the sort of claims you want to see a leader make on behalf of itself. Those who read the comments section here will know that strong John Edwards partisans like "Petey" frequently compare their man to Reagan, not because they're closet right-wingers but because they think Edwards can dramatically expand the popularity of progressive ideas.
Lt. Col. John Nagl's excellent book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, which came out several years ago was sufficiently well-regarded in military circles that it got him tapped to work on the Counterinsurgency Field Manual that David Petraeus was working on pre-surge. But now he's retiring to go work instead at the centrist CNAS think tank where Hillary Clinton's future assistant secretaries are cooling their heels. This, in turn, has produced a lot of interesting commentary. James Fallows remarks:
Petraeus, as is obvious, has been greeted as a savior by politicians of both parties. The striking thing that Nagl's resignation illustrates is that younger officers in the Petraeus model and, like Nagl, around Petraeus himself are faring nowhere near as well. The other most famous case, too resonant and complicated to do more than mention at the moment, involves Col. H.R. McMaster: author of Dereliction of Duty, a book that has had tremendous influence within the military. (More on McMaster here.) He has been a successful combat leader in Iraq but, as every serving officer knows, he has twice been "passed over" for promotion to general. Unfortunately there are a lot of other examples, involving not just Petraeus's own coterie but promising-yet-stifled officers more generally.
Fred Kaplan puts this in the context of a larger retention problem the Army is having with its mid-level officers, an issue explored in even more depth by Andrew Tilgman here.
All of which makes me curious to see what, exactly, Nagl will wind up saying and doing once he's at CNAS free and clear of the obligations of active duty service. In my view, the smart counterinsurgency set -- Petraeus, Nagl, McMaster, T.X. Hammes, David Kilcullen, and all the rest (guys who, unlike seemingly everyone else who writes about these issues I've never met) -- tend to outline the requirements for successful counterinsurgency in terms that make it clear to me that successful counterinsurgency is almost never going to happen and almost never going to be worth the cost. But they themselves don't see it that way. Instead, you get analysis that very much reflects the "can-do" spirit of America in general and the Army in particular.
And of course a can-do spirit is precisely what you want from a soldier. But from an analytic perspective, there's a real issue here: Who's going to do the kind of stuff Nagl says the military needs to be doing? Kaplan concludes:
The Army is so desperate to retain good captains that it's offering $35,000 bonuses if they stay in the service for another term. For many officers, that's not enough; money isn't really the issue, and if it were, they could make much more on the outside. Can't the Army come up with another incentive to officers like John Nagl—maybe offer them the lure of a stable life?
Presumably the Army could to more to offer the lure of a stable life to key officers. But conducting the counterinsurgency warfare pretty clearly isn't compatible with all officers having stable lives. Someone needs to rotate in-and-out of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, presumably, one would want our top counterinsurgency people doing that rotating. But nobody really wants, personally, to engage in a multi-decade counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. And yet that's what the COIN people seem to think would be necessary to get the job done.
Hillary Clinton drops a little anti-tax demagoguery on the voters of Nevada. I wish Barack Obama hadn't started talking about the need to fix Social Security, but it's no bettter for Clinton to go around slamming a lifting of the FICA cap as some kind of death blow to the middle class. I assume at some point in her administration she'll want to increase the tax burden on high-income individuals for some purpose or other.
UPDATE: What Jon Cohn said (he, for the record, is much more of an Obama-critic than I am).
The Mittster seems to have decided to accept a third place finish in South Carolina and will focus on Nevada instead which has been a big deal on the Democratic side, but largely overlooked among Republicans. Nevada's probably a good state for Romney, since Nevada contains a lot of Mormons and relatively few Protestants.
Here's another look at the polarization question drawing on the data from the Hotline/Diageo poll (PDF). Here, I suppose, we can see a sense in which Hillary Clinton is "polarizing" -- she has relatively few mild detractors. Those who don't approve of her tend to strongly disapprove of her. Of course to really qualify as polarizing, I would want to see someone have a "U"-shaped distribution on this four-point scale -- more strong approval than somewhat approval, more strong disapproval than somewhat disapproval.
We see here that fully forty percent of the population is in one or the other "somewhat" category. I myself would have said I have a somewhat favorable view of Clinton and I think that, despite the "polarizing" label, this is actually pretty common.
Of course insofar as his main constituency in the primaries seems to be older, more conservative white people this may not be the precise right note to hit.
When Jacob Hacker's Great Risk Shift came out, many liberals were super excited, here's a brand new argument for a bunch of conclusions I already agree with. I had no quarrel with Hacker's data, showing a rise in economic instability over the past few decades, but I wasn't so excited about his book which struck me as an unduly esoteric argument on behalf of policies that are perfectly defensible on other grounds -- I think, for example, that a better-designed health care system would boost economic growth, improve public health, and enhance social justice and any consideration relating to volatility is putting us on track to debate a side issue.
Well, now here comes the CBO and its very credible director Peter Orszag to report that "In previous work released in 2007 ... report concluded ... earnings volatility had not increased" and in a new study "preliminary results suggest that household income is much less volatile than individual worker’s earnings, and that household income volatility has not increased over time — and perhaps even declined slightly." Now as I say, I still think the vast majority of Hacker's policy ideas are perfectly good whether or not the CBO is right about this but obviously this is going to be a problem for folks who've tried to hang progressive policies on Hackerian arguments so it's no surprise that Greg Mankiw's linking to the report.
The public opinion polling available on immigration is so confused and contradictory that I think anyone who claims to be super-confident about this is deluding himself, but this presentation from Third Way seems fairly convincing to me. The main point to make is that only a amnesty plan path to citizenship that includes a fine turns illegal immigrants and the businesses that hire them into taxpayers.
Adam Blinick, upset at John Edwards' anti-nuclear stance, asserts that "nuclear power is the only environmentally friendly, economic, and efficient source of energy that can help the U.S. wean itself off foreign oil." We'll be weaned off the dastardly power, perhaps, with nuclear powered cars? I have no problem with the idea that putting a proper price on carbon might lead to good things for the nuclear power industry, but the issue in practice is that nuclear advocates are busy demanding large subsidies. It makes sense to some extent to subsidize clean sources of electricity, but we should target subsidies on really, truly clean sources of power -- and nuclear's not that.
The idea that dastardly anti-nuclear activists are the main thing standing between us and a halt to global warming is, I guess, a neat contrarian conceit but it really doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.
Photo by Flickr user Tobin used under a Creative Commons license
I'm going to put on my grumpy think-like-an-economist cap and say that while Adrian Fenty's decision to move DC toward a meter system is excellent, his move to lower fares may not be. Lower fares means, after all, less supply -- it's not as if Fenty's going to acquire a vast army of slave cabdrivers to shuttle us around the city at low, low rates. Difficulty finding a free cab when you want one is a cost, too, so I'd want to see some kind of estimate of the impact before I immediately laud the move.
For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%. We also find evidence that upsets result in larger increases in crime than games that do not produce an upset. For instance, an upset loss at home is associated with a 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism. We discuss these results in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression.
''The Democratic Party, I believe, respectfully, has left the strongest roots of its foreign policy and national security,'' Lieberman said, adding that McCain "has always believed that Israel is our natural ally, from the beginning of its modern existence to this day in the war against Islamic extremists and terrorists.''
Now I assume that most practical Democratic Party politicians are going to want to deny that there's any real difference between the parties here. But I think Lieberman's probably correct to see a disagreement here between people with the Lieberman/McCain worldview and sensible people. As Lieberman/McCain see it, Israel has long been the subject of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims. Then, on September 11, 2001 the United States was hit by Muslim terrorists. Ergo, the US and Israel are allies in a common war against a common threat.
On a different, more accurate account, while there are unquestionably some points of ideological similarity between Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda these should all be seen as separate entities with discrete agendas. It's a huge mistake to, for example, assume that every Hamas militant or supporter shares anything resembling the grandiose overall al-Qaeda vision. Hamas and Hezbollah both arise in the context of concrete national conflicts and thus have different textures and aims from al-Qaeda (and, for that matter, from each other). The effort to run all these groups together has been a useful way for Israeli politicians to try to secure US support for their policies, and has been politically expedient for many American politicians, but it's ultimately founded on serious analytical errors and, as such, doesn't lead either Israel or the United States to adopt smart policies that serves our respective countries respective interests.
Use of airstrikes way up in Iraq. Colin Kahl forecasts even more in the future:
"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."
Increased reliance on firepower as a substitute for adequate manpower strikes me as a classic COIN no-no, but Kahl seems to approve and even told USA Today last week that due to increased carefulness, the civil toll is being reduced: "You saw a lot more damage to the civilian population in 2004 than you're seeing now. Even though you have a huge uptick in offensive operations, it looks like the military is taking greater care not to harm civilians." Obviously, I hope that's right. It's my understanding, however, that the Defense Department still doesn't count civilian casualties so I don't really understand how they would know whether or not you're seeing a reduction in damage to the civilian population. In my book, the first step in "taking greater care" to avoid something is to measure what's happening.
Via Tyler Cowen, a neat map that renames US states after countries that have similar GDPs to the state in question. Note that Iran, allegedly about to embark on a campaign of world domination, has the same approximate level of economic output as Alabama. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia is like Tennessee, Israel is like Oregon, and Turkey is like Washington. I don't like Alabama's odds in a big for hegemony against those three. Puts things in perspective.
I've been trying, desperately, to hold off on idle speculation about a brokered Republican convention. This is the kind of thing journalists love to speculate about, but it's very, very, very unlikely. That said, I write a ton of blog posts. And with each day that passes without a clear shape emerging to the Republican race the temptation grows deeper. And now that Charles Babbington's speculating for the AP, I say let's let the gates slip.
My take is that the insider CW drastically overestimates the idea that such a convention would be a disaster for the party that held it. In general, I think the whole line of thought that's led both parties to conclude in recent cycles that short primary campaigns are beneficial doesn't make a ton of sense to me. To me, the longer the campaign continues, the longer the candidates get tons and tons of free media attention. Things like debates and cable networks showing clips of candidates speaking at rallies and pictures of supporters waving signs are all good for the candidate. The main form of negative media attention a candidate gets during a primary are process stories in the wake of a defeat (see, e.g., Dean after Iowa in 2004, Clinton after Iowa in 2008, McCain during his big collapse in national poll numbers in 2007) but that kind of thing is primarily a problem for whoever wins.
A GOP race that goes all the way to the convention would be a huge, fascinating, and dramatic story that would direct attention away from the star-studded Clinton-Obama race in a probably beneficial way. And it would still leave the eventual winner with plenty of time to make his case to the American people. One of the great ironies of the evolution of presidential politics is that the campaign seasons have been getting longer at the very same time that the rise of cable news and the internet has made it possible for candidates to rise and fall faster than ever. Obviously, the GOP is looking at a generally adverse political climate this year so the odds favor them losing no matter what happens, but I think an extended race could easily wind up helping.
According to George W. Bush, Egypt is making progress toward "greater political openness." That's, um, not true.
I'm not sure there's very much the US government can or should do, in practice, to push Egypt into becoming a democracy. And, certainly, I grasp the pragmatic need to get along with governments willing to get along with us. But I don't really understand why this need is pragmatically construed as the need to lie and pretend to believe that Hosni Mubarak is moving his country toward democracy when everyone knows that he's cracking down on the opposition and trying to install his son as the next pharaoh. The schizophrenia of American policy -- invading Iraq to spread the flame of democracy, and then spinning on Mubarak's behalf in Cairo; between demonizing Hugo Chavez as a totalitarian menace and then hanging out with Saudi officials at the president's vacation home -- is really absurd.
The idea that these tin pot dictators would somehow turn on us if we didn't kiss their assess doesn't hold much water. We need Saudi oil, and the Saudis need our money. We have interests that can be advanced through collaboration with the government of Egypt and the government of Egypt has interests that can be advanced through cooperation with our government. The pretense that every country we have a dispute with is run by the New Hitler while every country we opportunistically ally with is run by a Bold Reformer is incredibly dumb and something a grownup country ought to be able to move past.
The courts have ruled that the at-large caucus sites for shift workers in casinos on the Vegas strip are legal. The Clinton team's nominal complaint that this procedure still makes it very difficult for other shift workers to vote is accurate, but of course their proposed remedy of making it harder for casino workers to vote is no remedy at all. Caucuses are, in general, an abomination but working to make them even less democratic doesn't help anything.
Brad DeLong tries to assess the situation. One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is that people in Washington are pretty out of touch with the basic economic picture in the United States. Not in the usual, pat, pseudo-populist "oh you're out of touch" sense but in a pretty literal one -- the DC metro area is both quite affluent and economically unusual; much of our region is experiencing a war-driven boom that doesn't have much to do with the experience of other areas (though parts of the southwest are, I believe, the same way). People know, intellectually, that "data" isn't the plural of "anecdote" but still people tend in practice to be affected by what they see, and what there is to see around here doesn't really mirror nationwide trends all that well.
Via Kevin Drum, this sure is interesting -- France is moving to establish a military presence in the Persian Gulf which, as Marc Lynch says, "challenges American exclusivity, and potentially undermines the fundamental architecture of the hegemonic American position in the Gulf."
I'd put that in my "it's a good thing" file. The United States doesn't have any fundamental clashes of interest with France or other Western European countries. But the current nature of our relationship with them is dysfunctional. We try to play a hegemonic role in parts of the world that they take an interest in. Thus, we wind up acting unilaterally. They get upset with our policies and with our hegemony. Then we whine back that we're doing it, in a sense, for their own good and they're free-riding on our costly military posture. Then they retort that we're doing it all for our own reasons.
At the end of the day, everyone's right. It'll be a healthy US-European relationship if the Europeans both do more and, in exchange, wind up getting more say.
UNITE-HERE, the union representing the casino workers Hillary Clinton's campaign tried to stop from voting, issues a vicious Spanish-language attack, arguing that "Hillary Clinton no respeta nuestra gente" and urging people to vote for Barack Obama. According to CBS, "the Clinton campaign called on the Obama campaign to condemn the ad" but it's very hard to see why they would do that. The ad's a bit over-the-top in its language, but the substance of the charge, that Clinton allies tried to make it more difficult for members of the union to vote, is perfectly accurate.
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press.
“In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”
We'll recall George Wallace's pledge to get rid of "every freedom rider, sit in, and every other trouble-maker backed by the NAACP that meddles in our affairs." Robert Farley wonders how flag pole ramming fits into Huckabee's vision of bible-centric ethics. "What if it's done for fun, and not for punishment?"
Pondering UNITE-HERE's SPanish language ad against Hillary Clinton, it occurs to me that this year we're looking for the first time in ages at meaningful primary contests in a whole bunch of states -- Nevada, New York, Florida, California, New Jersey, Illinois -- with large Hispanic populations. And yet our major national newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are sorely lacking in token Hispanic columnists. In case anyone else is pondering this, I'd just like to note that I'm available....
In a non-joking vein, I've been a bit surprised at the volume of commentary speculating that Hillary Clinton will have some kind of a firewall among Latino voters, much of which seems pretty reductive to me. In a lot of urban areas, you see conflict between black and hispanic local political elites as they compete for power and patronage. But it would be a mistake to assume this will carry over into some latino antipathy to Barack Obama. After all, Hillary Clinton has actually secured the support of a lot of black leaders. What's more, it seems very likely that Obama being elected president would undermine the power of African-American urban machine politicians -- a President Clinton or a President Edwards would rely on such politicians to be intermediaries between them and black voters, but a President Obama would be much less in need of their support.
Now that said, Obama probably will have trouble with the Cuban exile community because of his position on Cuba policy, and since Hillary Clinton represents New York in the Senate she may have the Puerto Rican vote in the NYC region locked down. None of that, though, would be about Obama's race. I'm not at all surprised to see that out west Obama's gotten the support of unions with large Latino membership in Las Vegas and LA or the endorsement of Rep. Linda Sanchez.
If you dial the time machine back to April of 2006, Hillary Clinton was giving a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago back when she was burnishing her centrist credentials and expecting a primary challenge from the right from Mark Warner or Evan Bayh. Barack Obama was, at the time, a young and promising senator. And Clinton had a health care agenda, including a bill on health care information technology she did with Bill Frist and working with Newt Gingrich because "we actually agree that the private sector could demand much more accountability from the insurance industry and get it," and the punchline:
And I'm working with Senator Obama on his grand bargain bill offering American auto companies voluntary for retiree healthcare costs in exchange for their commitment to use the savings to build more fuel efficient cars.
That would be this plan which is now, I guess, a forgotten relic of the past.
I blogged yesterday on some new research purporting to show that the increase in earnings volatility Jacob Hacker documents in The Great Risk Shift didn't actually happen. I'm now told that Hacker will be coauthoring a followup study soon which is going to argue that while his earlier research may have overestimated the extent of the effect somewhat, but it's still real.
All worth keeping one's eye on. Still, as I say, I think the main lesson of all this is that it's a mistake to ground arguments for big agenda items like health care reform in transient economic trends. At the end of the day, most of these things are either good ideas on their own terms, or else they aren't. Getting bogged down in these trend analyses isn't, I think, especially helpful or important in political terms.
Interesting chart from the Pew Center. One piece of bad news for liberals is that it seems that the self-assessed ideology of the American people is still somewhat right of center. It's also funny how unhinged Republicans' views of Hillary Clinton are. Contrast their exile of her to the outer fringes somewhere near Lenin and Pol Pot to the "all voters" pool which correctly sees her and Obama as occupying similar ground on the center-left. And that's even with the wacky Republican views factored in.
Looking at the GOP side where ideological distinctions between the candidates are more pronounced, it's interesting that all voters seem to classify the contenders almost entirely on the basis of cultural matters. Thus, Rudy Giuliani who's running to the right of everyone else on economic issues and foreign policy issues is seen as close to the center, while Mike Huckabee is viewed as the most conservative option.
This kind of skepticism is entirely a good thing, I'd say. The one unfair critique is that Obama lacks policy substance. His campaign is laden with policy substance. Oodles of it. More, I wager, than Leon's interest would ever bear.
This is very true. I hear this complaint a lot, and while I think it's very fair to say that Obama's fans sometimes make a policy-free case on his behalf, it's just not true that there's no policy substance to the campaign. From the small-bore (here'ss a safe drinking water plan) to the giant (here's a comprehensive global warming plan) he's chock full o' policies. That's just how Democratic campaigns work -- the left-of-center universe if full of busy bee think tankers who are happy to write up a plan about anything ready to fit just about any specification. Neither the Obama campaign nor the Clinton campaign talk in much detail about policy, because I think ordinary people mostly don't care, but also because I don't think they seriously disagree about very much of this.
Each year, the disease kills about 55,000 people — that’s 150 a day — almost all of them in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, and more than 7 million people receive post-exposure treatment after being bitten by a rabid animal. Treatment is not just expensive, but time-consuming: a full course of vaccination requires five visits to a hospital or health clinic during one month. Which, if you live in rural Africa, can mean many hours of travel and time not working. Indeed, the global economic cost of rabies is estimated to be more than $583 million. And that doesn’t count the trauma that deaths from rabies inflict on families and communities. For though rabies kills many fewer people than malaria, it causes far, far more fear.
Olivia Judson says the good news is that "Rabies could be eliminated in as little as five years" if we were willing to commit the resources. And, indeed, we should. One unfortunate consequence of the "aid doesn't work" literature is that it's tended to obscure the fact that even if aid doesn't produce economic growth (and I think this claim is overstated), public health aid most certainly does save lives. People used to die of smallpox and now they don't. 150 people die of rabies every day, and if we took action to stop that, that would be "working" in my book.
One of the odder elements of the Liberal Fascism argument is that having defined both "liberal" and "fascist" in very odd ways, at the end of his book Jonah Goldberg gets around to dealing with the recent rise in the United States of a more statist strand of conservatism which he then construes as a brand of liberal fascism. Michael Gerson is, as you can see in today's column, basically the Julius Streicher of this new movement:
Thompson's argument reflects an anti-government extremism, which I am sure his defenders would call a belief in limited government. In this case, Thompson is limiting government to a half-full thimble. Its duties apparently do not extend to the treatment of sick people in extreme poverty, which should be "the role of us as individuals and as Christians." One wonders, in his view, if responding to the 2004 tsunami should also have been a private responsibility. Religious groups are essential to fighting AIDS, but they cannot act on a sufficient scale.
On a Goldberg-free note, the specific position Gerson is defending here -- conservatives should support government action to combat extreme public health emergencies in the third world -- probably isn't super-controversial, but the logic of his argument certainly is quite different from the strand of thinking that's dominated the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan. But like most other reform-minded conservatives out there, I've never seen Gerson quite confront the point that you can't have a more activist state unless you make taxes higher.
I'm pretty sure that at one point my book refers to "chess grandmaster turned nutjob recluse Bobby Fischer" in the present tense so it's a good thing I've still got time for some last minute corrections.
Meanwhile, I note that while I've met plenty of people who don't know the rules to chess, I think that out of the set of people who know how to play, I may be the worst chess player in the universe.
Proposed new lyrics for the Spanish national anthem rejected on the theory that "long live Spain!" is objectionable because the words "had an authoritarian ring to them and one prominent left-wing leader said they 'stank' of the Franco era." Seems odd to complain about too much nationalism in a national anthem.
Eve Fairbanks, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, discovers that John McCain's not quite the straight-talker he's made out to be. In fact, he's pandering in search of votes!
“Because I’m like, an ordinary person, I thought that they meant what’s your biggest weakness?” Mr. Obama said. “So I said, ‘Well, I don’t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.’ So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ‘I’m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.”
As the room erupts in laughter, he continues: “If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ‘Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’”
My biggest weakness is that I'm bad at chess. Otherwise, I'm a stellar human being.
Photo by Flickr user Elliottcable used under a Creative Commons license
Hillary Clinton, looking to emphasize that some of her best friends are black, had Magic Johnson record a radio spot (via Ambinder) to play in South Carolina:
This is Magic Johnson. On the court and in life, successful leadership comes from hard work and experience. That’s why I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton for President. We have great candidates this year, but I believe only Hillary is a proven leader, with 35 years’ experience dealing with challenges facing America. Are you looking for better jobs, universal health care, better treatment for veterans, opportunities for your children? Then you want Hillary Clinton for President. My rookie year, we won our first game on a last second shot. I was so hyped. But the captain of my team said, “take it easy rookie, it’s a long season, it’s a long road to the championship.” He was right. Winning comes from years of hard work and preparation. Whether it’s winning championships or a President who can lead us back to greatness, I’ll always want the most prepared and experienced person leading my team. That’s why I’m asking you to join me in voting for Hillary Clinton for President.
Okay, fair enough, but the Lakers won the championship in Magic's rookie season. I suppose that squad was really led by seasoned veteran Kareem Abdul-Jabar, but it still seems like a mixed message. Now the Michael Jordan story maybe shows you need to gain experience before you can win championships.
Photo by Flickr user ChuckyPurdue used under a Creative Commons license
As Rea pointed out in yesterday's thread on tokenism, my ambiguous ethnic identity can be explored in fictional form in my grandfather's book Tristan and the Hispanics:
In this sardonic tale of two cultures, New Yorker Tristan Granados; Yale undergrad, son of a Cuban-born screenwriter and WASP mother is dispatched to Tampa, Fla., to make funeral arrangements after the death of his paternal grandfather, a modestly successful leftist novelist. Cultural differences spark comic but more often inane folderol as Tristan, a patrician figure among the the dead writer's extended Cuban family, tries to arrange for a cremation. Although this symbol of rational Yankee officiousness is blasphemy to the Cubans, Tristan is treated with a pathetic deference that yields his endorsement of a raucous wake. In a biting twist, Tristan is won over to respect for his late grandfather when he discovers the old man's classy Volvo ("with Bengy box"), his Toshiba 3200 ("one up on Dad's 3100") and his collection of "Bruce CDs." Yglesias ( Home Again ) acidly skewers the pomposity of Anglo culture and the desperate assimilationist tendencies of the emigre Cuban community.
This was written when I was a little kid, and the Tristan character's college age so it's not literally me. But part of the book involves Tristan reminiscing about old times with his grandfather and much of that material is ripped from the headlines. Also dad really did used to use Toshibas.
Barack Obama's campaign fires back on the Magic Johnson issue, noting that he was an All-Star starter as a rookie and referencing his historic performance in the 1980 Finals.
But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks. As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list.
Maybe we can put this dumb controversy to rest? Reagan was, though not someone I would call a good president or one of my favorites, undeniably an effective president in the sense that he had a very ambitious agenda and got a lot of it enacted before handing things off to his designated successor, and it's perfectly reasonable for aspiring presidents to want to emulate him in some regards. I'm not, however, ever in favor of talking about the need for "new ideas" or whatever.
I think Noam Scheiber's analysis of how whoever wins in South Carolina, Mitt Romney has the advantage is pretty shrewd. I would only add to what Noam says that Romney's already leading in delegates, and since he's going to pick up even more in Nevada that will further strengthen his position. The fact that The Washington Post can make reference to Romney having a "delegate strategy" strikes me as telling. At the end of the day, you need delegates to win. A strategy to win delegates seems like a smart strategy.
Sounds like there's very low turnout in South Carolina. Good for Huckabee? Actually, I have no idea. But whoever wins, let's turn around and attribute it to the low turnout.
As predicted by the entrance polls, Hillary Clinton's secured a narrow-but-not-too-narrow victory in the Nevada caucuses by splitting the union vote pretty evenly with Obama.
According to CNN's exil poll, over a quarter of voters in the GOP primary were Mormons. And boy-oh-boy do they love their man Mitt Romney -- he got an overwhelming 94 percent of the Mormon vote.
I suppose it's true that it's a bit icky when Barack Obama's opponents keep pointedly repeating the phrase "Barack Hussein Obama" in their robocalls. That said, when his campaign and his fans complain about it, that rings a bit hollow to me. After all, his exotic background is an important part of his appeal to those who find him appealing. Andrew Sullivan's laudatory article on Obama contained this memorable passage:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
If he's going to get praised in these terms, he's going to get knocked in them, too. That's just how it is.
Chris Matthews just said it was fitting that Fred Thompson's campaign has Bud at its South Carolina HQ because his campaign has a "clydesdale quality" to it, "slow and steady . . . traditional."
Still no result in the South Carolina primary. The exit polling on the issue landscape seems to me to look bad for John McCain -- lots of concern about the economy and immigration -- but it seems that Fred Thompson's presence in the race is preventing Mike Huckabee from putting him away. Still, even if John McCain wins, he still doesn't seem to be getting above his ceiling.
Well, they haven't called the race yet, but based on the returns that have come in so far I don't see how Mike Huckabee could possibly win. That said, McCain's victory here clearly seems founded on Thompson and Huckabee splitting a similar constituency. Of course, that may continue to happen (Thompson and McCain are buddies, after all) in future southern primaries, in which case McCain may be in okay shape. Onward to Florida.
Is there really this much pro-choice sentiment among Republican primary voters in South Carolina? You'd think that would be a very, very, very, very conservative group of people.
This morning, Mitt Romney had more delegates than John McCain. Following today's primaries, Romney's lead has grown even larger because Nevada has more delegates than South Carolina and Romney won a larger proportion of the vote in NV than McCain got in South Carolina. Naturally, the press is declaring this a big win for McCain. I just saw Howard Fineman explain that "there is no longer any strong candidate in the race" to oppose McCain. Nobody but the guy who's leading, that is.
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Heads in the Sand
