To revise and extend my remarks on the "Hussein" factor from yesterday, I think part of my point would be that there's really no use in deploring somewhat underhanded attacks in the course of a primary campaign. Part of the idea of a primary is for the eventual winner to be someone who's tested. In those terms, I actually think the race thus far has been too nice in a lot of ways. There's a lot more stuff about Barack Obama's Afrocentric church that the Republican Party is virtually certain to use against him if he becomes the nominee, so under the circumstances I'd sort of prefer to have Hillary Clinton's people bring it up and see if Obama can perform well in the midst of the "freak show".
Similarly, I've heard it said that so much shit's already been slung in Hillary Clinton's direction that the American people have already heard it all and won't be further impressed by anything they hear. I think that's a bit naive. Relatively few people remember, for example, when Bill Clinton pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists in the midst of her 2000 Senate campaign, but I'm pretty damn sure the RNC research team remembers. I don't want to dwell on this sort of thing, personally, but insofar as I think it's bound to get dwelled on sooner or later, I'd tend to vote for "sooner" as the best time to hear about it all.
Part of the dynamics of the primary campaign has been a certain tendency of foreign policy issues to go into eclipse as the leading contenders from each side compete with one another for the affections of base voters who tend to be motivated by each coalition's core economic and cultural interests. But Tom Edsall wisely points out that even if the economic situation worsens, a general election campaign is bound to have a hefty focus on terrorism and security if for no other reason than that the GOP doesn't really have any other good options. Brian Katulis says some smart things about this deeper into the piece:
The most nuanced analysis of the politics of terror was provided by Brian Katulis, a less well known figure in the Democratic foreign policy establishment who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he is a Senior Advisor to the Center's Middle East Progress project.
"I wouldn't say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond 'Bush screwed things up.'....Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it's not dissimilar to Bush's narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it's kind of an easy story line....
"It's those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.
"So I think there's a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we're just not hearing it yet at that political communications level. We're seeing and hearing tick lists that make the broader public's eyes glaze over. On the conservative side, we hear a story line - a batshit crazy one for the most part that got us in the predicament that we're in now, but hey, it's a story. Most people would rather go to a movie that has a plot."
I would add that one thing I still don't see from Democrats on these issues is the correct atmospherics of confidence. When the candidates talk about most things, they talk about them with an apparent air that they believe everything they're saying. But when they talk about terrorism or Iraq they have a tendency, in my view, to often sound like they're stuck in 2002 -- nervous, defensive, cautious. They don't sound like a political party that believes that the evident failures of Bush's policies throughout 2005 and 2006 played a major role in boosting their party's political fortunes. And they don't sound to me as if they're eager to engage with these issues. But while confidence alone is no guarantee of success, going into a fight believing your going to lose is a recipe for trouble.
As promised earlier, here's Jacob Hacker's response to the CBO study calling into question his finding of an increase in economic volatility in America. Given that it's Sunday morning, I can't say that I've thoroughly looked into what he has to say, but I thought it made sense to put the link up at the earliest possible time since I'm going to have to see what others make of this as I don't necessarily have the relevant skills.
Who would you like to be in the White House if Pakistan fell to al Qaeda and the Islamists gained control of its nuclear arsenal?
Answer that question and you will know your candidate. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.
One issue here is that this is a pretty outlandish hypothetical. The odds of the Pakistani government collapsing and al-Qaeda taking over are low. But more to the point, much more than a president who'll respond effectively when al-Qaeda seizes control of a nuclear arsenal you want a president who'll make it unlikely that al-Qaeda seizes a nuclear arsenal. There's an unfortunately tendency to look at crisis-response as the essence of statesmanship when in reality it's avoiding crises that is most important. I think, for example, that George H.W. Bush did the right thing in prosecuting the first Gulf War and, indeed, that he did a good job of waging the war. But an even better president might have been able ot avoid the whole thing in the first place by dissuading Saddam from invading Kuwait.
My hope, in short, isn't that the next president will be better than Bush at reacting than disaster strikes, but that he (or, more likely, she) will be better than Bush at forestalling disaster.
There's lots of reporting out there on Hillary Clinton's strong win -- 64-26 -- over Barack Obama among Latino voters in Nevada. One thing I would add to this is that Clinton did pretty well with whites, too -- beating Obama 52-34. What's more, we've seen over and over again that Obama does better with more affluent voters and with better-educated voters. And, of course, the pool of non-hispanic whites is more affluent and better-educated than is the pool of Latinos.
Long story short, I'd be interested in seeing how different hispanics and non-hispanic whites really look once you control for non-ethnic demographic factors. Or, in other words, does Obama really have a specific problem with Latino voters, or is this more of a class phenomenon?
Patrick Ruffini makes a lot of sense on the state of the Republican race, and Matt Stoller observes Barack Obama bleeding support among self-identified liberals. I doubt one can really attribute Obama's problems in this regard specifically to his remarks about Ronald Reagan, but the overall tendency has been for Obama to find himself positioned to HRC's right which isn't where you want to be in a primary.
New England and Green Bay are favored to win, and I think I have nothing to add to the conventional wisdom on this score. But make your case for the Chargers or Giants if you're so inclined.
Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor -- no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.
According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.
The case for the surge, and the war more generally, has long been bound up in a failure to think coherently about purposes and objectives. If, instead, you throw a bunch of troops into the mix, have them do a bunch of stuff, see what happens, and then define in retrospect whatever it is they're accomplishing as the purpose of the mission, then, sure, new tactics are working. When our old tactics were aimed at having our troops wander around the desert and kill armed Sunni Arabs, we succeeded in doing that. Switch tactics to helping to train and equip these very same people, and now we're succeeding at doing that. But what are we trying to accompish?
When corruption ruled, he challenged it. When welfare failed, he changed it. When crime thrived, he fought it. When government broke, he fixed it. And when the world wavered. And history hesitated. He never did. Rudy Giuliani. Leadership. When it matters most.
When history hesitated? What's that supposed to mean? There's been a lot of mockery of the frequency of Rudy Giuliani's invocations of 9/11, but for my money its the vacuity of the invocations that's really striking.
Barack Obama's MLK speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church is extremely good. It should remind Obama fans of what they like best about him. For campaign purposes, though, I think nobody's ever doubted that he's a great orator. The difficulty is that he hasn't established a policy argument on his behalf that people find compelling. With little differentiation between the candidates in terms of issues, things are breaking down on demographic lines and women outnumber men, old people outnumber young people, nonblacks outnumber blacks, and working-class people outnumber college graduates among the target audience on the primaries.
Well, nobody thought the Giants would win tonight, but nobody thought they would win last week either. Or the week before that. I remember that after the Giants won their first game of this season my dad was worrying that if they won too many Tom Coughlin might not get fired. And now the hopes of a whole nation of haters rest on their shoulders.
One of the odd manifestations of America's new enthusiasm for imperialism is, I suppose, that the capital is now full of gossip and intrigue regarding which generals will be assigned to which posts.
Meanwhile, because of the way these terms play out it's worth noting that dealing with the inherited brass is would be a substantial challenge for a new Democratic president. Since these are theoretically apolitical jobs, a new president can't just come in and clean house. But since the Bush administration will have been in charge for eight years most of which have been occupied by a politically controversial war, many top generals are now de facto political figures. If whoever's running CENTCOM (and this may well be General Petraeus) of MNF-Iraq (or both) in January 2009 disagrees with the new president's preferred Iraq policy, those people will be in a position to make life awkward for the new president. This is a concrete area where I do put some stock in the Clinton/experience argument, as she seems less likely to get rolled, though at the same time I have more doubts that her policy judgment would be the same as mine.
Are people aware of this gesture? It's apparently a hand gesture the kids make these days during an awkward moment. Here's an example of the awkward turtle in action:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or. unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.
I feel as if the issue of King's commitment to non-violence tends to get obscured on these occasions. How many politicians who pay homage to King today will tomorrow be preaching the necessity of keeping preventive war "on the table" as a tool of non-proliferation policy?
As you can read here in The New York Times, starting tomorrow articles from The Atlantic will all be available for free online. That'll be a boon to bloggers and the Web in general in at least two ways. First, it'll let us link to and discuss new magazine content as it comes out with a free and clear conscience. Second, and in some ways even more exciting, it means that I'll be able to mine the magazine's extensive 150+ years of archives willy-nilly for interesting tidbits and noteworthy perspectives on events.
That said, a subscription is still a great bargain at less than $25 a year. You can read it on a plane or a train, you can see the visual elements of the magazine in all their intended glory, and you can leave recent issues scattered about your house so as to suggest to your friends that you're the sort of intelligent person who reads highbrow magazines.
I think this is getting a bit silly. In his column, Paul Krugman seems to suggest that the main reason the Clinton administration failed to bring about major progressive change in the 1990s is that they didn't talk enough smack about Ronald Reagan. And now on the blog we learn that Clinton is clearly the more progressive alternative to Obama because here's one quote of Clinton saying something lefty sounding and here's one quote which Krugman insists on willfully misconstruing.
Whatever happened to the Krugman who used to urge journalists to worry less about what rhetorical style politicians adopt and more looking at their policies? Didn't this all start because Krugman thought Obama's health care plan, while constituting an improvement over the status quo, isn't as good as Hillary Clinton's? That's what I remember. And I think it was a fair point. But now we're supposed to believe that Obama's the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Or something. Meanwhile, I wish Krugman would at least acknowledge that there are foreign policy issues facing the country and some of us think they're important. I don't think "that Candidate B [i.e, Hillary Clinton], despite the progressive talk, is just Bush the third" but at times she's shown a disturbing amount of common ground with Bush's foreign policy views. At other times, she's seemed quite good, but her record on Iraq is bad.
Back to the beginning, I think it's extremely clear that the meager results of the Clinton administration relate, in the first instance, to the large number of conservatives in congress when Clinton was president, and in the second instance to the moderate views of Clinton administration figures. An inability to upend narratives about Reagan was neither here nor there. In terms of congress, again, one thing a lot of people like about Obama is that Democratic politicians running in marginal areas overwhelmingly seem to believe that they would do better with Obama at the head of the ticket.
That said, I'll freely grant that I'm getting a bit tired of defending Obama and his campaign. Stuff like this from Krugman clearly hurts them, but the easiest way to deflect claims that Obama is the more conservative choice would be for Obama to say so himself in a clear and direct way. Given that Clinton is very much running as her husband's wife, it should hardly be impossible to make the case that establishing continuity with the moderate Clinton administration is the moderate choice.
Live on YouTube, sundry pundits discuss the fact that Barack Obama would be a stronger general election candidate matched up against John McCain. As readers know, that's certainly my view. And it's certainly the view of Democrats running in "red" states who feel he'd be better for down-ballot candidates than would Hillary Clinton.
It's been my experience, though, that it's basically impossible to convince people on this score. At the end of the day, there's a ton of uncertainty surrounding this question and there's nothing one could do to prove things one way or another. Given the uncertainty, it's open to people who like Clinton to just insist that, well, sure, Obama's more popular now but things would look different after a campaign.
In recent months, some emerging market investors have preached the idea that fast-growing areas like most of Asia have “decoupled” from developed markets, meaning the economies of the two groups no longer move in tandem. The investing adage “When the United States sneezes, Asia catches a cold” no longer applies, the proponents of decoupling argue.
But a recent slump in emerging markets, capped by Monday’s slide, means investor sentiment is changing.
Indeed, this seems doubly wrong. The big hope for avoiding a recession, or for keeping a recession relatively short and painless, is that a pickupin exports tied to the declining dollar will cushion the employment situation even as the building sector collapses. That, however, means that a sharp decline in US imports from Asia is all-but-inevitable. That's what would happen in a recession, but it's also what would happen in the most-plausible non-recession scenario.
Dan Balz writes of Florida for The Washington Post that it "looms as a potential showdown in the GOP nomination battle not only because of its size and importance but because it will be the first place this year where all the leading candidates are competing." Perhaps. On the other hand, Pollster.com currently has things as Rudy 21.7 percent, McCain 20 percent, Huckabee 18.3 percent, Romney 17.9 percent, Thompson 8 percent, and Paul 5 percent.
Now Florida's a winner-take-all state, so if Rudy really does sneak ahead of McCain he'll end up with a nice parcel full of delegates. That's real and that matters. Still, as a test of strength Rudy's ability to secure 21.7 percent of the vote against a badly divided field wouldn't be particular impressive. Similarly, if Rudy's slide continues and McCain gets a boost and he wins with 22-23 percent, that wouldn't be particularly impressive. The very depth of the field makes it all-but-certain that the winner will be pulling in a pretty pathetic plurality which, in turn, makes it hard to see this as a decisive test. Simply put, there are too many candidates in the race.
Photo by Flickr user Bryan Sereny used under a Creative Commons license
From The New York Times archives, David Frum writes on July 7, 1999 that the country needs to be more fiscally prudent:
It's time to blow the froth off the latte and make some prudent plans. Otherwise, the Government is going to find itself three or four years from now in the same jam as its citizens: pacing fretfully at 2 o'clock in the morning through a $100,000 kitchen renovation, wondering how on earth it talked itself into the delusion that it was going to finance its obligations with a big, soggy mass of Surplus.com shares.
Later, of course, Frum went on to work for the Bush administration where, in lieu of prudent plans, the decision was made to squander all the money in question on a set of giant tax cuts for rich people. Then to squander more money in a giant giveaway to drug and insurance companies. And to squander more money on a pointless and destructive war in Iraq. And more tax cuts! Always, always more tax cuts.
I'm going to try as hard as I can to resist the temptation to write further about the electability question but what Jon Chait said. I'd only add that the McCain/Romney gap seems much bigger than the Obama/Clinton gap to me; the generally unfavorable political climate for Republicans makes the specific choice of nominee unusually important.
I continue to march in lockstep with my comrades-of-convenience National Review against the attempted coronation of John McCain. For example, did you know what Michael Graham notes:
In 2000, running against George W. Bush and the entire Carroll Campbell machine in South Carolina, John McCain got 42% of the vote, and 240,000 votes out of 573,000 or so cast.
Tonight, he got 33% of the vote in a field where his top challengers—Romney and Giuliani—aren't even running, and 135,000 actual votes. If just the same people who voted for McCain in 2000 had voted for him today, he would have won 50+% of the South Carolina vote. That would have been truly impressive.
Go, Mitt, go! (I'd also note that the open cheerleading for Romney in progressive circles seems to me to have gotten shockingly little play in the world of conservative commentary)
UPDATE: Let me note that while I do think Romney is a weak general election candidate, one shouldn't exaggerate this to much. In the modern era, I think we can expect all presidential elections to be relatively close and Romney does have a certain "I know what I'm doing" appeal that I think the American people mostly haven't seen yet.
This is pretty neat. According to Howard Wolfson, pointing out that Bill Clinton is lying is a "right-wing talking point" and thus all good liberals have a duty to grant Clinton a blanket license to fib. So when Clinton said he opposed the Iraq War, that must have been true, because I'm a liberal. And when Clinton said Barack Obama didn't oppose the Iraq War, that must have been true too, because I'm a liberal.
Look, obviously Bill's in an odd position because we've never had an ex-president's wife run for president before. But if he wants to be treated as an elder statesman figure for fellow progressives, he needs to act like one. If he wants to be Hillary Clinton's attack dog in a primary campaign, then he's going to be treated as one. Certainly he's not above criticism.
I think the fact that John McCain is very old and very much looks his age is probably going to be a problem for him in electoral terms. Still, there's a question in my mind of why one could raise this issue in a reasonable way. Chuck Norris seems a bit crude here:
I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency.
Naturally enough, Mike Huckabee just wound up needing to distance himself from those sentiments. The issue here is probably that Norris is too closely identified with Huckabee at this point. You want the issue raised by by people who aren't just seen as part of your campaign.
The Washington Post that one important feature of the current weakness in the economy is an increase in the number of long-term unemployed. The economy as an issue is normally seen as competing with the war for attention, but I can't help but wonder if economy wouldn't be stronger if all this money that's been squandered in Iraq over the years had been invested (by public or private actors) in productive ways.
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
It's a searing moment because the silence in the face of moral crisis of which King speaks is no mere cowardice or opportunism. King's life and career have been dedicated to the Civil Rights movement -- to the cause of bettering the well-being of African-Americans. And from the death of Abraham Lincoln until the present day, that cause's most crucial ally has been Lyndon Johnson who in a monumental act of political courage chose finally to decisively align the Democratic Party with the cause of Civil Rights dooming its political coalition to oblivion.
And yet here in Vietnam was Johnson's war. A Johnson increasingly in political trouble from his left. A Johnson who could very much use the support of a Martin Luther King. Indeed, a Johnson who in many ways deserves the support of a Martin Luther King. To ask a man to publicly defend a war he deplores would be too much. But would it really be so much to ask King to simply stay quiet -- to focus on his core issues, and praise Johnson on those terms -- not for King's own sake but for the sake of his movement? Who then or now would blame the great Civil RIghts leader for standing behind the great Civil Rights president? But he came to believe that it couldn't be done. That wrong was wrong and someone had to say so.
Um...forgot this debate was happening until a quarter to ten. I hear there's been a lot of rough stuff out there so far. The two minutes I've watched thus far involve Barack Obama seeming fairly cogent.
UPDATE: I don't like John Edwards' defeatism talking about taking on John McCain. Don't give up hope for Mitt Romney!
UPDATE II: Glad to see Barack Obama taking HRC on on her claim that her record of backing catastrophic invasions of Iraq makes her uniquely qualified to battle Republicans on national security issues.
UPDATE III: I think Wolf Blitzer's question about who Martin Luther King would endorse if he were alive today is possibly a new low for inane debate questions. It almost makes me feel bad I ever spoke ill of Tim Russert.
Commenter Ryan sums up my feelings about the debate based on the clips I saw:
It's really strange... each time Hillary really goes for the jugular (fairly or unfairly), I am repulsed. And then 30 seconds later, I realize that that's the whole rationale for her candidacy! She (and Bill) will simply do whatever it takes to win. And she's really whip smart, and was quicker than Obama in this debate. I think it will come down to whoever the media spins as the "winner" of the early flare-up -- otherwise, another draw.
It's an uncomfortable truth, but there you have it -- the very tendentiousness of some of her attacks on Barack Obama is sort of the point. Those of us who remember Florida 2000 from the butterfly ballot to the "bourgeois riot" to the rigged Supreme Court ruling appreciate that the other side plays to win and there's no real honor in letting the country fall under a spell of catastrophic malgovernance. But still, if voters are considering being persuaded by the merits of Clinton's arguments about Obama and the war, or about the "present" votes or whatever else they ought to be aware that this is all basically bogus. What's more, I think it's worth pointing out that Clinton seems to have gotten herself firmly into "flip-flop" territory on the war at this point; hawk was bad, substantively and politically, but this may be worse.
The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.
Ah, those sad, sad, Democrats. So unaware that the war's over. The dude who killed at least fourteen and wounded seventeen in Tikrit must, like the Democrats, have been wearing partisan blinders when he failed to acknowledge the surge's success in bringing the war to an end. Similarly, the US military has these newish Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles known as MRAPs. As you can tell from the name, the vehicles are designed to be resistant to roadside bombs. Only trouble is insurgents seems to have figured out how to foil them, since we had our first instance of a roadside bomb blowing up an MRAP just on Saturday.
Obviously, though, this improvement in the tactics and doctrine of anti-American fighters in Iraq can't be a big deal since the war is largely over. If the war were still happening, this kind of thing might illustrate the illusory nature of tactical improvements in the face of a bleak strategic situation. But since the war is "largely" over already there's probably no problem here.
I think Ross must be forgetting the context if he really thinks Democrats would have been better off had they pressured Bill Clinton to resign when Monicagate broke. Recall that Ken Starr was, at the time, engaged in an investigation of the Clintons that had no defined legal scope an unlimited budget, and an indefinite period of time. And he wasn't the only such independent counsel operating at the time. Had that farce been legitimated by Democratic acquiescence in the cynical manipulation of the law to hound Clinton from office, there would have been no end to the investigations of President Gore or into whoever Gore wound up nominating for Vice President.
At the worst, while VP-designate Lieberman was tied up in confirmation hearings new articles of impeachment would have been drawn up against Gore referring to something or other (most likely something related to '96 campaign fundraising) aimed at putting Newt Gingrich in the White House. But even under more likely scenarios, we would have been plunged into an endless nightmare of prosecutions. Recall that the members of congress we perpetrated the inquisition were basically the exact same people who from 2001-2006 sat on their hands and launched not a single serious inquiry into anything the Bush administration did -- from routinized torture to casual lying to congress about Medicaid reforms to destruction of videotaped evidence to politicization of the US Attorneys' offices to corruption in contracting all the rest.
Ultimately, the whole thing was a political matter and the only viable remedy to it was politics. The Democrats stood tall, called bullshit on the Republicans' bullshit, and picked up seats in 1998. Their problems started when people started seeking the ex post facto approval of the Quinn-Broder axis
As I said yesterday, The Atlantic's print content is now available for all to read on the website, including not just the current issue but also tons of archival stuff. Check out Rene Chun's "Bobby Fischer’s Pathetic Endgame" from 2002, for example.
Obviously, if I thought I had any real insight into the movements of the stock market I'd be keeping those insights private and using them to get rich. But the fact that stock markets worldwide seem to be melting down does seem noteworthy. Idle speculation? Investment tips?
You've probably heard about the Democrats' fundraising edge thus far in terms of congressional campaign committee fundraising. Well, Brad Plumer notes that that edge will be blown way out of the water if Sheldon Adelson's "Freedom's Watch" outfit really spends $250 million on the 2008 elections.
It's always worth keeping in mind that inequality in the United States has allowed certain concentrations of wealth to exist that, in principle, mean things could get really crazy. Adelson could decide that $250 million is chump change and that he actually wants to spend five billion dollars on the 2008 election, and then give $1 billion to each of his five children, and then then live very comfortably for the rest of his life on his remaining $1.5 billion. Now I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it could. And Adelson's only #15 on the Forbes 400 list.
Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.
The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!
Via Brendan Nyhan, some evidence that Barack Obama has a ceiling of around 35 percent of the white vote in any given primary.
To me, the "ceiling" metaphor seems misleading in this instance. It's plain from the polling on Obama's favorable/unfavorable ratings that way more than 35 percent of white Democrats are well-disposed toward Obama. Since the knock on Hillary Clinton has tended to be that she's "polarizing" people forget that that's a two-way street -- lots and lots of people really really like Hillary Clinton which makes her hard to beat in a primary.
Initial estimates by the Congressional Budget Office project that an economy-wide cap-and-trade program would generate at least $50 billion per year, but could reach up to $300 billion. Approximately 10 percent of this revenue should be allocated to help offset costs to businesses and shareholders of affected industries. Of the remaining revenue, approximately half should be devoted to help offset any energy price increases for low- and middle-income Americans that may occur as a result of the transition to more efficient energy sources. The other half of the remaining revenue should be used to invest in renewable energy, efficiency, low-carbon transportation technologies, green-collar job training, and the transition to a low-carbon economy. Some resources should also be invested in the energy, environment, and infrastructure sectors in developing nations to alleviate energy poverty with low-carbon energy systems and help these nations adapt to the inevitable effects of global warming. Revenues from the permit auction would essentially be “recycled” back into the economy to facilitate the transition to an efficient, low-carbon energy economy and ensure that consumers are not unduly burdened by potentially higher energy costs.
That sounds about right to me. I'm not sure that as a matter of abstract morality I really agree that it makes sense to set aside a chunk of the funds to defray "costs to businesses and shareholders of affected industries" but one can imagine putting something like that on the table as being crucial to actually getting anything done, and it's probably not worth being too fastidious about the precise ins and outs.
Photo by Flickr user Joi used under a Creative Commons license
Tyler Cowen says he agrees that market operations will be flawed due to the irrationality of the participants, but "relative to social democrats, I tend to think that politicians are irrational actors trying to pander to irrational voters and that it can't be any other way. I am much less optimistic about democracy as an instrument for fine-tuning good policy or for that matter as a medium for enforcing progressive sentiments." This is similar to Bryan Caplan's argument for libertarianism in The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Libertarians have always been against democracy (the rapprochement with democracy being one of the key steps in the transition from classical to modern liberalism) but this new vintage of arguments is a curious inversion of the traditional line of attack. The main problem used to be the fear that voters were too rational and that the unlimited prerogatives of property had to be protected through a lack of democracy. Now the fear is that the dire consequences of democracy can best be preserved through the unlimited prerogatives of property.
Needless to say I think this is wrong along several dimensions. One point of dispute, though, is that to me the idea of state committed to neutral and effective administration of justice around laissez faire lines seems like an illusion. The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn't free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration.
Hillary Clinton's campaign emailed this video clip to me, so in hopes that they'll make me an Assistant Secretary of something or other if I post it, here it is:
I don't find the thought that Obama secretly harbors dreams of a single-payer health care system all that damning, but obviously he was shading his somewhat nuanced view left back in the day and right a the moment.
My brief is really to write about national issues here, but since one big problem with urban governance is that there's a fairly impoverished public sphere for discussion of local politics with the consequence that there's a tendency for squeaky wheels to dominate things. Thus, I might note that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty seemed completely justified in his decision to fire these six social workers whose screwups contributed to the murder of four girls. That other civil servants are pissed off about that accountability moment is understandable, but it's simply vital that this city demand a higher quality of public services.
Similarly, this school closure plan seems mostly spot-on (the families who don't want their kids to need to cross a highway on foot en route to school seem to have a good point so the aspect of the plan affecting those people needs to be rethought). The District's school population has fallen dramatically from its current peak, and closing especially under-utilized schools is a no-brainer response. Right now we have underpopulated yet poorly maintained buildings. With some closures and rationalizations, kids could attend properly maintained schools.
Max Bergmann's polite explanation of why there's no viable "middle way" in Iraq between an indefinite military presence and an expeditious withdrawal is recommended to all and sundry. Or, rather, there is a middle way but that way simply consists of adopting the logic of indefinite engagement and then adding hope that things will just work out very nicely and we'll be done in five more years' time.
This, though, is just what the Bush administration has been doing all this time. The proponents of the tactical policy framework du jour never explicitly outline their favored policy as likely to fail and require the war to continue indefinitely. Rather, each gambit from the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004 to the first, second, and third Baghdad security plans to the rise of Ibrahim al-Jafari to the fall of Jafari to the rise of Maliki to the surge and beyond were supposed to succeed, it's just that they all failed. One needs to answer the strategic question at some point of whether this is all worth it. I think the answer is clearly "no." There are pressing, fairly urgent reasons to disengage from Iraq not least of which is the continued piling-on of the death toll. Meanwhile, there aren't good odds of accomplishing anything especially worthwhile there within a reasonable time frame.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s son, MLK III, endorses John Edwards and urges him to stay in the race. Certainly, I think he should. Thus far, Edwards' impact on the primary has been overwhelmingly positive and I see no reason to think that will cease to be the case in the future. Obviously the odds are strongly against Edwards winning the nomination, but the odds don't get better if he drops out, and he's doing more to advance his issues and his causes by staying in and hoping for the best than he would be dropping out and endorsing someone.
John McCain's unquestionably a popular figure, but David Kusnet is also surely right that it's hard to see him winning in bleak economic times if he keeps talking the way he was talking at his South Carolina victory speech. There's just nothing in there whatsoever to suggest that McCain has any awareness of anyone experiencing any kind of financial difficulties. What's more, I think it'll actually be quite hard for him to pivot in a more sympathetic direction. After all, throughout all his flipping and flopping and back again of the past ten years, the "cares about people in economic pain" persona is one he's never tried on. And I think he's never tried it on because it runs contrary to his entire schtick, which is all about finding causes greater than ourselves, salvation through nationalism, etc., etc. On some emotional level, he probably thinks a woman who needs to declare bankruptcy because the racked up massive credit card bills while her uninsured husband was dying of cancer should just grin and bear it the way he did as a POW.
After what he's been through, it's probably hard to muster a ton of sympathy for workaday problems. And yet that's what politics is all about. By the same token, though, I think it would be foolish to confidently predict economic conditions eleven months from now. Maybe things will get worse . . . maybe they'll turn around. But if they don't turn around, it does seem like potentially big trouble for McCain.
From The Atlantic's incomparable archives and in honor of the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade let me give you August of 1965's "One Woman's Abortion" by the mysterious Mrs. X:
I set out recently to find an abortionist in the large Eastern city where I live. My husband and I are in our mid-forties and have three children. When I discovered that I was pregnant for the fourth time, my husband and I considered the situation as honestly as we could. We both admitted that we lacked the physical resources to face 2 A.M. feedings, diapers, and the seemingly endless cycle of measles, mumps, and concussions of another child. Years of keeping a wary eye on expenditures (a new suit for my husband every two years and one for me every five) had allowed us to set up a fund which we felt would enable the children to attend reasonably good colleges away from home if some financial assistance in the form of grants or scholarships could be obtained. Since my husband's income has reached its zenith, it was plain that one of the four would have to forgo all or part of a chance at higher education. The part-time secretarial work which I had been doing for some years to augment our income would have to stop since the revenue it produces would not cover baby-sitting fees. We have no rich uncles likely to make our children their beneficiaries. We have also had sufficient experience living to acknowledge that while the Lord will sometimes provide, He may be busy looking after somebody else when you need Him most.
For further discussion, let me just note that I think the effort to convince even pro-choice people that there's something legally dodgy about Roe ought to be resisted.
Fred Thompson is dropping out. Marc Ambinder offers a Thompson campaign retrospective. He says "in many ways, he tried to occupy a space that John McCain more credibly occupied; national security strength, straight talk on the economic challenges facing the country and resiliency." Maybe. Certainly I'd assume that Thompson, who's pals with McCain, hopes that's right and his pool of supporters drifts that way. But in most regards I'd say Thompson tried to occupy a space that Mitt Romney less credibly but more effectively occupied -- plain-vanilla conservative.
As a human being, I'm obviously glad that Etan Thomas seems to be well on the road to recovery. As a Wizards fan, I'm worried. Brendan Haywood is playing his best basketball ever and playing a big role in keeping the Wizards good even with Gilbert Arenas out, and Andray Blatche and Oleksiy Pecherov both look like reasonably promising guys who deserve a chance to develop. Thomas' return just promises to throw a good situation into disarray.
Economic model of the day, that is. Ryan Avent excerpts a bit from an interesting paper by Edward Glaeser, Matthew Kahn, and Jordan Rappaport. Let WRich be a rich person's opportunity cost of time, F be the fixed time cost of public transportation, and C be the fixed time cost of driving you get:
Alternatively, if WRichF < C then some rich people will take public transportation. In this case, a four ring city can be one outcome. In the inner ring, the rich take public transportation. In the next ring, the poor take public transportation. In the third ring, the rich drive and there may be a fourth ring where the poor drive.
That seems about right for some of our larger metro areas.
I'm not going to say that they're my four favorite films of the year, but the four best picture nominees I've seen are all good movies! What were they thinking? The only possibility is that Atonement is both terrible and destined to win.
I wouldn't say I agree with him in every last detail, but I would recommend Scott Lemieux's three part series of posts arguing that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided as well as his American Prospect article arguing against those who think it would somehow be no big deal were Roe overturned.
When I was over in the Netherlands I caught wind of this big controversy about whether or not to cut down this big tree near the Anne Frank house that's mentioned in her diaries but that's become a threat to the structure. In a small country without a lot of really big social problems, public controversy seemed to consist of fighting about immigration and then fighting about the tree. But now the spirit of compromise has prevailed with regard to the tree: "city authorities, residents, the Anne Frank museum and conservationists said they had agreed to build a frame around the 150-year-old tree before the end of May."
Immigration, though, I imagine will stay controversial.
Remember the de-Baathification law the Iraqi government passed that kinda sorta seemed like maybe it did the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did? Turns out it does the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did: "More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation."
Amit Paley and Joshua Partlow have put together an admirably straightforward and well-reported article for The Washington Post so I won't get too upset that they write "the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation" rather than "the opposite of Bush administration claims for the legislation." Still, it's noteworthy that not only has this gone awry, but the Bush administration just spent last week telling us it hadn't gone awry.
I've been poking around in our newly liberated archives for interesting things to link to, and it's just such an incredibly rich source. The December 1866 issue had, for example, a Frederick Douglass essay setting forth his view of what was needed to make Reconstruction successful:
The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks, and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.
The Better World Campaign asks what do you think the next president should do on his or her first day in office. Putting my "let's think about this overly literally" hat for a moment, what you probably want to do on day one is focus on a bunch of below-the-radar executive order type stuff that it'll be easy to make sure gets buried in the news because you also made a few important personnel announcements that the papers are obligated to cover.
Closer to the spirit of the question, I'd like to see an announcement disavowing the preventive war doctrine outlined by the Bush administration coupled with a statement outlining a vision for re-invigorating the global non-proliferation regime.
The Bush administration's ability not just to outrage, but to so frequently surpass and resurpass one's capacity for outrage is striking. All that's left now is a cold, callous, cynicism. My understanding is that the country was genuinely shocked to learn about 18 missing minutes on the Watergate tapes. Now what can one say about the hundreds of days of missing White House emails and all manner of dissembling and mumbo-jumbo lurking around the question of what's gone missing.
Elana Schorr looks at the voting records of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US Senate. They're similar records, but Obama's a bit too fond of coal and Clinton's a bit too fond of war. Brian Beutler says:
My sense of it is that Obama has been somewhat reconstructed from his early, coal-driven, anti-environmental days, while Hillary Clinton remains a largely unreformed liberal hawk. But I suppose it'll be hard to say how true that is until at least one of them is off the campaign trail.
I think what we see on the campaign trail actually does shed some light. Illinois has a coal industry, so Obama started out as a soft on coal guy (though hardly as the worst offender in this regard), but as soon as Obama moved toward running a national campaign, he began steadily moving to a less coal-friendly position. This doesn't do wonders for Obama's reputation as the Golden Man of Principle (see also that he used to talk more lefty on health care) or whatever, but it also doesn't suggest a deep-seated desire to see the country dotted with coal plants. By contrast, to whatever extent Clinton was driven by political expediency rather than conviction to authorize the Iraq War, it was a vision of national politics and her presidential campaign.
As recently as Monday night, after all, she was bragging to a Democratic audience that her status as a relatively hawkish Democrat makes her uniquely well-suited to taking on John McCain, whereas I'm pretty sure I've never heard Barack Obama make a parallel claim regarding the environment.
Photo by Flickr user MRE 770 used under a Creative Commons license
Matt Stoller points out that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could be using their platforms to highlight the legislative fight over FISA issues in a way that would likely be very effective. But time and again they've declined to do so and there's little indication they'll change their minds now.
Like Kevin Drum, I've been pretty pessimistic for a while that a good health care bill will be signed into law in 2009-10 as so many seem to hope. And I agree with him that Ezra Klein's new American Prospect article does a reasonable amount to temper that pessimism. That said, the way the article is framed explicitly as a look back at the "lessons of '94" winds up leaving some of my concerns unaddressed.
For example, mightn't we see something analogous to the Medicare prescription drug fiasco where a reasonably sound proposal to help some people out with some health care problems turned into a feeding fest for pharmaceutical and insurance company lobbyists?
Speaking of which, one thing that's bothered me about the health care conversation as it's tended to play out among progressives over the past year has been a tendency to equate determination to achieve universal health care with determination to fight the entrenched power of the insurance companies. In reality, the main measures by which people are proposing to achieve universality -- forcing people to purchase health insurance and providing government subsidies to help people buy insurance -- aren't contrary to the interests of insurance companies at all. Similarly, the main measures on the table that are contrary to the interests of health insurance companies -- community rating, guaranteed issue, and public-private competition -- don't achieve universality (as Barack Obama's critics will hasten to tell you). Under the circumstances, the easiest way to get universal health care may be to not fight the insurance companies at all: just give them the mandates and subsidies they crave with none of the regulation.
Now go too far in that direction and the overall price tag gets so high that the whole thing collapses. But it's quite possible to imagine congress constructing a bill that throws public-private competition overboard and then is structured so as to both increase health insurance firms' profitability and to give everyone health insurance. Again, the 2003 Medicare reform bill would be the model. Depending on the details, a bill like that might even be an improvement over the status quo (though I kind of doubt it). After all, a program for "universal car ownership" isn't something you'd expect to achieve by fighting the car companies.
One obvious question surrounding the new policy in Iraq of paying groups of former Sunni Arab insurgents to start calling themselves Concerned Local Citizens and helping us fight al-Qaeda in Iraq is how do we know that the people they're fighting are really AQI? After all, the main thing the CLCs give us is information not firepower, but if we depend on them for our information then we have no way of knowing that it's good. Or maybe we do. Spencer Ackerman asked MNF-Iraq spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith about this and revealed that MNF-Iraq needs to come up with some better spin:
"The sense is, as we partner with tribal chiefs, the chief knows who’s working for him," Smith said when I asked him about the reliability of these bands on a blogger conference call this morning. "You’ve got to put some trust and confidence in these people." That trust, he said, isn’t built overnight, and the U.S. will have a "relationship" with a tribal leader before committing resources to him or including him in a program.
But is that all it amounts to? Trust?
"It boils down to trust," Smith confirmed. "And over time, you can earn it or lose it." In response to a follow-up from Cogitamus’s Nicholas Beaudrot, Smith reminded that in Diyala Province, Colonel David Sutherland, commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, had to fire and even arrest some CLC members. (Sutherland confirmed that to me in an October conference call.) He meant that as a defense of the U.S. military’s vetting process, but it also gives a sense of the trustworthiness of these so-called allies.
But look: If you can't trust the militiaman who was shooting at you a year ago until you started bribing him, then who can you trust? Honestly, it's almost enough to make me nostalgic for the days when we were using The Arab Mind as a guide to understanding Iraq. Sometimes people lie!
Of the three basic types of campaign coverage -- horserace/process stories; "outrage of the day" hyperventilating; and actual policy coverage -- I'd peg the blogosphere's overall percentages at about 40/50/10. That's probably better than Chris Matthews, but not that much better.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I don't think I wrote any posts yesterday covering substantive policy issues in the Democratic primary campaign because nothing new happened in terms of substantive policy issues. And so it goes. It's hardly MSNBC's fault that in the midst of an interesting primary campaign it has some days where its campaign coverage is all horse race -- some days nothing happens except the horses go racing; after all the campaigns are long and you can't release new policy ideas every day. The trouble is what the press does on the days when policy news does happen -- the tendency is to cover the policy news as a kind of horse race story rather than doing some coverage of the policy question and accepting the reality that there'll be plenty of days down the road when there's nothing to cover but the horse race.
My friend Jeff pointed out to me that the obvious solution to the Wizards' Etan Thomas problem is for Ernie Grunfeld to work out a trade for him before he gets healthy enough for Eddie Jordan to put him back in the rotation and ruin things. Given that the team is basically fine with Thomas injured, I'd be willing to trade him for just about anything but we need $6 million in salary to match so it's a bit trickier than just dumping him off for a couple of undesirable draft picks or something.
Looks like the government of Saudi Arabia is poised to start letting women drive. I think it's safe to say that the case here is pretty unassailable, though I suppose there's some reason to believe that the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large.
I missed Holly Yeager's January 11 column on the thin "bench" of potential female presidential candidates behind Hillary Clinton, but it's still all true two weeks later and worth reading. I found it, meanwhile, while reading this excellent post by Mark Schmitt (aka Holly Yeager's husband) taking note of the incredible run of bad luck that struck down a whole string of promising 1970s-vintage New York political women.
The next very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made before with such care or in such detail is ready to hit the shelves soon:
He also wheels out the novel claim that he's being attacked because he's "hit something real," a defensive gesture I'll be sure to remember when my new project, Freemasons Rule the World, hits bookstores next month. I expect to take some knocks for my argument -- which essentially exposes the fact that Freemasons control the world -- but I'm pretty sure my anti-Masonic friends will understand that I'm actually making a very cautious, thoughtful argument. In spite of what the title suggests -- it comes from an episode of The Simpsons, an allusion my Masonic critics are bound to miss -- I don't argue that contemporary Freemasons actually control the world. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that important Freemasons around the world exert control over lots of things that are in the world, like governments, the global economy, science, and those sorts of things. It's a work of political theory.
Sounds provocative! (I actually live near a Masonic temple on 10th and U which a few months ago started renting out its first floor to CVS, a company that I think really might control the world)
House Democrats once again postpone a vote on holding Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers in contempt of congress for refusing to testify in the US Attorneys matter. There's some kind of nominal rationale for this, but an anonymous "top Democratic insider" says:
When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there.
Basically, we seem to have some fraidy-cat Dems out there who for some reason don't think picking a fight with the White House over their gross distortions of the rule of law would be a smart idea and then we have a weak leadership that for some reason doesn't want to bring them into line.
I'm no monetary policy expert, but Clive Crook's point that it seems a bit misguided for the Fed to respond so dramatically to stock market news certainly looks sound to me. After all, interest-rate decisions and forecasts about interest-rate decisions are one of the determinants of stock market prices. Insofar as people get the idea that the Fed will act directly to avoid stock market price declines, that seems like something that will feed back into stock purchasing decisions in a potentially destructive way.
Brendan Nyhan calls me out for too much psychologizing in my last post on John McCain. And it's true. I don't like the guy. He's not the worst politician on the planet, but he's pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure he's the most overrated politician so thinking about him aggravates me. But these would be my sober-minded, non-psychic points about John McCain and the economy:
He has a tendency to flip-flop not on specific economic policies, but on broad economic themes like whether or not inequality is a problem.
His constituents in the elite press are weirdly obsessed with the idea that public policy should force average people to endure economic pain.
All of this leads me to conclude that John McCain would not govern very well on economic policy issues, and would fare poorly in a campaign that focused heavily on economic problems.
I'll admit that I clicked onto Ruth Marcus' column grading candidates' stimulus plans specifically expecting to find something I could object to and thus write a feisty blog post about. But actually it seems about right, except that giving Bush "extra credit" for "not insisting on extending his tax cuts, which made no sense as stimulus and would have doomed its chance of passing" seems silly -- you don't extra credit for not screwing up.
Of course the whole stimulus package issue on the campaign trail is a little bit surreal since clearly the situation will be different twelve months from now when any of these people are president. Consequently, I'm not sure how much we really learn from this except for the somewhat disturbing fact that John McCain doesn't appear to know what a "stimulus package" even is or how to ask someone on his staff to explain the idea to him. There's a certain artificiality to the whole thing in that I assume the Clinton and Obama campaigns each felt pressure to differentiate themselves from each other even though by most accounts there isn't, in fact, any kind of gaping philosophical void between the two of them. Mostly I wish I'd seen something creative like Dean Baker's "green stimulus" concepts thrown in along with the more conventional ideas.
Having let Republican filibusters stymie a frighteningly large proportion of the Democrats congressional agenda, Harry Reid's finally had enough and is going to try to curb abuse of the process . . . to try to stop Chris Dodd from blocking bad FISA legislation.
Reid's office is organizing some kind of progressive media event on Monday and I imagine he'll hear a thing or two about this.
In Washington today, telecom lobbyists have launched a full-court press to win retroactive immunity for their illegal eavesdropping on American citizens. Granting retroactive immunity will let corporate law-breakers off the hook and hamstring efforts to learn the truth about Bush's illegal spying program.
It's time for Senate Democrats to show a little backbone and stand up to George W. Bush and the corporate lobbyists. They should do everything in their power -- including joining Senator Dodd's efforts to filibuster this legislation -- to stop retroactive immunity. The Constitution should not be for sale at any price.
I'll add that I think Edwards is right to see as largely an issue of "corporate lobbyists" with the Democrats using their habitual spinelessness on national security issues as a pretext for the more tawdry business of simply handing out favors to telecom companies. But if the congress -- an opposition party led congress responding to a discovery that pierced a years-long executive branch coverup -- accepts this "it's not a crime if the president asks you to do it" theory of legal liability we may as well not have any laws at all. (Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to Edwards' 2004-vintage enthusiasm for creating a domestic intelligence agency)
The retirement of Rep. Jim Walsh from the New York 25 is big news. Not only is the seat favored to go Democratic now that it's open, but this is one of those congressional districts that's going to become a pretty safe seat for a liberal Democrat rather than bringing in someone who's going to be perpetually looking over his shoulder.
I'll happily admit that I'm not much of a charitable donor one way or the other. Still, I'm always a bit flabbergasted by the fundraising solicitations I get from Harvard. It seems to me that insofar as I give money away, it should be directed at an institution that actually helps people in need. As Kevin Carey puts it:
As Richard Vedder pointed out in the Post over the weekend, Princeton recently built a new residence facility, Whitman College, named after major donor and alumna Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, which cost a staggering $388,571 per unit, roughly what Donald Trump spends building a luxury resort. Here we have a fabulously wealthy person donating money to a fabously wealthy university to built a fabulously expensive facility for the benefit of students who come from, in many cases, very wealthy families. I have no problem with that personally if that's how they want to spend their money, but why am I, as a taxpayer, footing part of the bill?
I'm not 100 percent sure on the best remedy. Tyler Cowen argues fairly persuasively in Good and Plenty that the U.S. tax code's scattershot approach to subsidizing charitable donations is a very effective form of arts subsidy for a diverse society. And I think it would be pretty reductive to say that it would be a good thing if all of our donor supported museums, ballets, symphonies, aquariums, zoos, libraries, classics departments, etc. all shut down and had their funds redirected to soup kitchens and drug treatment programs.
To me, to figure this out we'd need to have some serious estimates about the impact of restricting charitable deductions. How much new tax revenue are we talking about? If we kept the deduction in place for institutions aimed at helping the poor, how much charity would be redirected in their direction? But how difficult would it be to administer a rule like that? How much would giving to cultural institutions decline? It's a lot of thorny policy questions. But it'd certainly be my advice to any super-rich people out there that if you're considering making a large charitable donation in the near future, a big gift to an Ivy League university is one of the least socially useful applications of your cash imaginable.
Photo by Flickr user Mr. Littlehand used under a Creative Commons license
With my 2008 vote still up for grabs, Obama seized the upper hand after I read this New York Times feature and learned his chief speechwriter is a Red Sox fan and a 2003 graduate from the College of the Holy Cross! Let's see, Obama sounds like Cyrus from "The Warriors"; he wears a nicotine patch; he plays hoops; he loves "The Wire"; and now, the guy writing speeches for him went to the Cross. That's pretty tough to top.
I feel like the endorsment Obama really needs, though, is from the Sports Gal (plus her football picks were much better this season IIRC). Meanwhile, I have the reverse reaction to revelations about Red Sox fans from Cross.
My post on the prospect of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson deciding to really dig deep and spend on politics prompted a certain amount of silly partisan responses (yes, there are liberal billionaires, too, but a world in which politics is a contest between competing teams of billionaires is a depressing idea) but also some interesting discussion. In particular, Chicounsel's post:
My question to Matt is "So what?" Are you saying that it should be illegal for him to spend his own money in what amounts to the exercise of his First Amendment rights of free speech, to peacably assemble and petition the government?
Actually, no. One of the many things I don't like about John McCain is that I think his vision of how to fix the campaign finance system is off-base. My answer would be more like Matt Weiner's suggestion:
One possible answer is that we should prevent such extreme concentrations of wealth. John Rawls thought extreme concentrations of wealth were bad precisely because that much money led to disproportionate political power (and meant that people without the money were shut out of political power in important ways).
I think one should draw a distinction between the top-level and bottom-level issues here. It seems to me that the only way to prevent the super-duper-rich from having an unjustly large ability to influence the political process is simply to prevent such utterly massive concentrations of wealth to occur. On the flipside, things like Larry Bartels' finding that legislators are only affected by the views of the richest two-thirds of their constituents are where proposals for public financing of campaigns or especially ideas like "patriot dollars" could come into play.
Photo by Flickr user Yomanumus used under a Creative Commons license
John Hollinger says "I don't understand why they don't just give Noah the job already. He's been far better than Wallace." Since I went on record as a proponent of the Wallace signing at the time it happened, I was vaguely hoping to find some evidence to debunk the idea that Noah's been far better, but as you'll see below the evidence is hard to find:
Given the age difference, the case for giving Noah the lion's share of the minutes seems to get even more compelling. The experience will probably help him improve whereas the extra wear-and-tear can only hurt Wallace. Meanwhile, bad signing. Noah, however, is making all us veterans of Manhattan private school basketball programs proud.
Yesterday, I considered the possibility that one might get a law past that covers all of the currently uninsured by that does so on terms that are extremely favorable to the insurance industry -- basically a whole porridge of mandates and subsidies paired with fairly weak regulatory measures. Ezra Klein says a system like that would still be a step on the road to a better health care system overall, since eventually the simple reality that there's a need for cost controls would kick in.
Maybe so. What's more, obviously delivering health care to the uninsured would be a good thing even if it's done in a somewhat wasteful manner. The point is simply that the push among progressives to make universal health care priority number one is not, in practice, the same thing as a push to make fighting the insurance companies priority number one. In practice, if you define the short-term goal as "universal health care" and elevate its priority to the point where you're willing to make large expenditures on its behalf, the easiest way to do that is to buy off the affected companies and it seems to me that, primary season posturing aside, this is the direction in which political strategy is evolving.
And if I were in charge of things, this isn't the direction I would choose -- why not spend the billions on preschool and mass transit? Why not buy off the agribusiness interests instead of the health care ones and formulate a farm policy that prioritizes healthy heating for the public? I'm not someone who accepts the logic of "this money you're proposing to spend on health care would be better spent on preschool and therefore I'll oppose your health care bill even though preschool is not, in practice, on the table as an alternative" -- large social forces have pushed political priorities in this direction and that's the way it is. But America has a screwed-up health care finance system today and is likely to continue to to have a screwed-up system even if Klein-style optimism about the short-term prospects for big-picture reform proves correct.
Photo by Flickr user Waldo Jaquith used under a Creative Commons license
Spencer Ackerman has a nice column up at TAP Online about the speculation surrounding what's next for David Petraeus. At one point he observes that "Petraeus emerged from his first two assignments in Iraq -- commanding the 101st Airborne Division from 2003 to 2004 and then the training of Iraqi security forces from 2004 to 2005 -- as the only general to leave the war with his reputation enhanced." One interesting question is: How did this happen? Indeed, I think that's one of the greatest stories never told of the Iraq War.
The good reputation he emerged with following his time commanding the 101st can be attributed in large part to the fact that conditions remained unusually good in his AOR compared to what was happening in adjacent AORs. But it was thanks to his good reputation from that first tour that he was selected to head up the vital ISF training mission during his second tour. That mission, however, didn't go well at all. So why did Petraeus' reputation stay good?
Well in part it happened because he's a smart, articulate, well-educated general. But in large part it happened because he's a smart, articulate, well-educated general who was (and is) very good at cultivating the press. In particular, before being appointed to command MNF-Iraq Petraeus was a source, both on and off the record, for a wide variety of journalists both those working "straight" reporting jobs and those doing more opiniated work critical of the Bush administration from both a moderate liberal perspective and a neocon perspective. During that period, he cultivated a lot of good will and credibility that he's deployed to great effect since taking command. The fact that Petraeus has been a source for a lot of the journalists who cover the Iraq debate is a key element in understanding the politics of the surge and of the "Petraeus report." But it's a story that you'll never see reported on in detail because that would violate the rules of the game.
Chris Hayes looks at the pretty disappointing stimulus package that's apparently been agreed to and argues "I think progressives have to do some very long, deep, sustained thinking about why this congress has been such a failure." I dunno about that. The man's not single-handedly to blame for every problem with this congress, but the main reason the congress has been so disappointing has been that George W. Bush is still President.
The initial Democratic proposal was much better than what eventually got agreed to. The Republicans were, however, fanatically opposed to using the food stamps or unemployment insurance programs as stimulus levers, and, as ever, focused on trying to make the thing as helpful as possible to rich people. Go to Kevin Drum for the details. The result is, it's true, a not-very-good package. But the reason it's not very good is the Republicans not some mystifying failure on Nancy Pelosi's fault.
I've seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn't know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:
It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
And indeed, both sides are right in this dispute between Rice and Scowcroft. But Scowcroft's point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence. The Bush administration's strategy, by contrast, is a mess. You see that resentment over US support for the despotic governments in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf is fueling anti-American terrorism and decide that the solution is to . . . keep supporting those governments and invade Iraq. After all, we support our clients for a reason so any modification to those policies would entail a cost. Iraq, by contrast, had been a regional adversary for quite some time. So why not support democracy by supporting it in Iraq? It's about on a par with worrying about gangrene developing in your right hand, but also worrying that you're right-handed and may not be able to write without it, so instead you decide to amputate the left hand and hope for the best.
Shockingly, it didn't work out.
But the point still holds. The US faces two different kinds of problems in Iraq. On the one hand, there are the geopolitical aims of revisionist powers like Iran and Syria and (back in the day) Iraq. On the other hand, there's the relationship between populist Arab anger at the United States and our dysfunctional relationships with sundry clients in the region. These are both thorny issues, but they don't get less thorny if you mix them together and decide to go for a double bankshot the way the Bush administration did.
The New York Times' look at Concerned Local Citizens getting blown up and the prospect that some of their recruits are going to start deserting is interesting, but for my money the most interested part is in the eighth graf (emphasis added):
Officials say that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has a two-pronged strategy: directing strikes against Awakening members to intimidate and punish them for cooperating with the Americans, and infiltrating the groups to glean intelligence and discredit the movement in the eyes of an already wary Shiite-led government. “Al Qaeda is trying to assassinate all the Awakening members that support the government, but I believe that criminal militias are also doing this,” Mr. Bolani said during a recent interview in Taji.
This infiltration issue was, as I recall, the fatal flaw in what was really Version 1.0 of the Awakening strategy several years ago when we were first trying to build up the Iraqi police force. We wanted to get Sunni personnel to join the police in Sunni areas, but what would up happening was that Sunni insurgents just signed up to join the police. Our trust-based approach to recruiting and arming our new CLC allies seems to be vulnerable to the precise same flaw. Since the whole point is to sign up former insurgents, there's no real way to screen out tell the difference between an insurgent infiltrating the operation and an ex-insurgent who's decided to change his ways.
Paul Waldman says Hillary Clinton is going after Barack Obama just like a Republican would -- without a lot of honesty or conscience. Frankly, I don't have a big problem with that. As Ezra Klein says "The winner of the Democratic primary, after all, will have to run against a Republican." Indeed, the thing that's given me the most doubts about Obama thus far has been the campaign's tendency to whine ineffectually about Clinton campaign gambits.
Dishonest attacks are part of the game and the only way for a candidate to protect himself against them is to turn them into jujitsu. This hear from Obama's camp is, in that light, very good stuff. The Clinton campaign has attacked him unfairly on choice issues so now Obama's got NOW's Lorna Brett Howard on video explaining why Clinton's wrong and why she's flipped from being a Clinton supporter to being an Obama supporter.
There are various interesting tidbits in Gabriel Sherman's article on Bill Kristol's appointment as a New York Times columnist, but as a professional the most interesting part is the revelation that Kristol "was paid roughly five dollars a word" for his Time column. I think that's about three bajillion times more than I've ever gotten.
You also need to wonder about the economics of it. You're thinking of paying Kristol about $4,000 per column to be a columnist. How much revenue is Kristol really supposed to bring in relative to the best neoconnish writer you could have snagged for $2k per column? My sense is that we pundits are actually pretty interchangeable. What's the marginal value of Kristol over Max Boot? If Tom Friedman and Sebastian Mallaby switched newspapers, would the Times' circulation really drop?
Meanwhile, for the purposes of the campaign I'd certainly like to believe that faced with a choice between a Republican decorated war hero and veteran senator, and a Democratic ex-first lady and junior senator, both of whom supported the invasion of Iraq, both of whom became early critics of Donald Rumsfeld's conduct of the occupation, and both of whom support long-term American military engagement in Iraqi affairs, that the American people will come down on Clinton's side. But I pay attention to this stuff. I know that Clinton's an open-minded person who takes advice from a wide circle of people and may well conduct an excellent foreign policy once in office. I also know that McCain is a committed militarist, a pre-September 11 advocate of "rogue state rollback," and a politician who seems to have few firm beliefs beyond an inchoate nationalism. But, realistically, insofar as the campaign turns on national security issues (the economy will, of course, also matter) the average person is going to go for the popular war hero.
Obama's approach is better but not, frankly, anywhere near as much better as one would hope. For months, he's been unwilling to make a forceful case from the left on national security issues in a Democratic primary, so it's far from clear that he would, in practice, make the sort of strong arguments his record leaves him capable of making. If McCain (or, for that matter, Mitt Romney) starts talking about how in a Democratic administration North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and some Iraqi dude who doesn't like having a foreign army occupy his country are all going to team up and kill your children, it won't do to respond by whining about the politics of fear. He'll have to learn to say something in response, perhaps about how the real best way to keep Americans safe is with a focused, targeted effort that gives us the maximum chance of actually killing or capturing our deadliest foes rather than one that lets them escape while needlessly stirring up unrelated trouble that multiplies the number of adversaries we face.
A useful rundown of how Democratic delegates are allocated, superdelegates, etc., etc. from Sam Boyd. Plus bonus brokered convention speculation:
Brokered conventions (where no candidate arrives with a majority of the delegates) are predicted every four years, and every four years they don't actually happen. However, it does seem likely this year that we'll, at the very least, see a closer result than any since 1980 or even 1968. We might not even know who will win until the convention gets underway. Edwards could act as a kingmaker by throwing his delegates to Clinton or Obama and putting him or her over the top (his delegates would not be required to follow his instructions, but they will likely be personally loyal to him). Or, unelected superdelegates could throw the nomination to a candidate who comes in second in pledged delegates. Even if the result is known at the start of the convention, it might not be determined until June or July.
A number of people have written to me in a very excited tone about Robert Reich's blast in the direction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It's worth noting in this regard that even though Reich served in the Clinton cabinet and is an old friend of Bill's from Oxford, it's not really all that surprising. His memoir of his years in government is quite critical of the Clinton administration, so it's not shocking to see that he's not eager for a Clinton Restoration.
The main thing I would take away from the fracas is that Reich has been a from the left critic of Clintonism on economics, precisely the set of issues on which Obama's been criticized as insufficiently right-wing. As a bonus, Reich and Paul Krugman seem to have some kind of longstanding feud, so this can serve as more grist for the mill.
It's kind of odd of John McCain to deny ever having said that he's not that well informed about economics when he quite clearly has said that several times. What's more, while the admission is damning, it at least qualified as some of the straight talk for which McCain is legendary ("I may not make a very good president, but at least I'm willing to admit that electing me would be a huge mistake") now he's just a guy who doesn't know much about economics and also likes to lie about his own past confessions of ignorance.
I went to the Washington Auto Show last night which I was expecting to be interesting but wasn't. It did, however, get me thinking about cars. Specifically taxis. Specifically, why don't I see more hybrids being used as cabs. A hybrid is more expensive than a conventional car, but it uses less fuel which saves you money. Thus if you drive a lot, a hybrid can save you money. And what kind of car puts on more miles than a taxi? Plus, they're mostly city miles where hybrids are super-duper efficient. Or maybe there are Prius cabs all over the country and DC's just behind the curve.
Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs.
Of course I myself am far too smart to fall into any such patterns of misestimation.
There's nothing surprising about the fact that the Bush administration seems to be seeking to ensure that US mercenaries contractors serving in Iraq be legally unaccountable but it is shocking. That's not something any genuinely sovereign government in Iraq or anywhere else would ever agree to, and it makes a mockery of the pretense that the purpose of our policy in Iraq is to help Iraqis (for a way to help Iraqis, check out this refugees bill) or that we're doing everything we can to shield civilians from harm.
Illinois blogger Archpundit has what seems to me to be a useful roundup of the links between Barack Obama and Tony Rezko. The essence of the matter is that there doesn't seem to have been any quid to go with the pro quo here. Rezko tried to curry favor with politicians in order to get stuff from them, and Obama was no exception. And, indeed, when one of Rezko's business partners had a son who wanted an internship in Obama's office, Rezko wrote a letter of recommendation and the kid got the job. It's possible that had Obama remained in the Senate and had Rezko not gotten indicted, that he would have found occasion to do some more serious favors but in the real world there's nothing there.
Basically, as with Obama's questionable record on coal I'm not particularly impressed. But it is true that, to an unusual degree, Obama's campaign has tried to portray their man as a living saint of some kind when, in reality, he's a normal pol who stands up for home-state industries and gives internships to buddies of sons of campaign contributors. On the other hand, what makes this sort of line of attack curious to me is that if there's one thing we absolutely know for sure about the Clintons it's that if you're inclined to make mountains out of molehills there are tons and tons of thin ethical charges you can make against them.
One of Jonah Goldberg's readers chimes in with a suggestion:
Dear Jonah, One reader asked last night, "can we ever, please, PLEASE get just ONE debate moderated by actual CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS???" This reader asks: Why doesn't NRO host a debate? That would be a sight to behold.
That sounds like a good idea to me. Especially given the enormous quantity of debates that both fields are enduring this cycle, why can't we have more experimentation with the formats? In particular, it really does seem likely to me that a panel of smart conservative ideologues would produce a debate that's more useful to Republican primary voters than would Tim Russert or Wolf Blitzer being a pain in the ass. And, of course, vice versa as well. Katrina vanden Heuvel and Harold Meyerson know the questions actual Democrats would like to see the Democratic candidates answer. If that experiment worked well, you might even consider mixing things up -- let Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru grill the Democrats and see what happens. Certainly it's not as if the CNN and MSNBC teams have covered themselves in so much glory this cycle that I'm sitting here thinking if only Russert could moderate seventy debates next year instead of only fifty!
To add a bit to what I said the other day about John McCain's apparently tenuous grasp on economic issues, I learn from Mark Schmitt that when the New America Foundation asked campaigns to send an economic advisor to participate in a roundtable discussion, Team McCain sent Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett.
As usual, the latest Pew survey has a lot of interesting data to chew over. The finding that the gap between what self-identified Republicans say they want and what self-identified Democrats say they want is interesting. But that, to me, makes points where you see a relatively large amount of consensus all the more interesting.
For example, every Republican from George Bush to John Boehner to Mitch McConnel to Mitt Romney to John McCain will tell you that the absolute first thing the country needs to do is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. After all, doing so will put a ton of money in the hands of extremely rich people and making sure that the rich get richer is, according to Republicans, the very essence of good government.
But it seems that among rank-and-file voters, not even a majority of self-identified Republicans can bring themselves to believe that bringing a little extra-relief to America's long-suffering super-wealthy ought to be a top priority.
Spencer Ackerman has the penetrating analysis of The New York Times's somewhat unclear reporting on efforts to negotiate a status of forces agreement for American troops in Iraq. Basically, as Spencer says, it would be a huge mistake to make a big deal out of the fact that the agreement won't say "these bases of yours are permanent."
It took the Philippines nearly 100 years to get the U.S. out of Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base. That’s because the fact of the U.S. presence creates additional, subordinate facts—economic dependency in the area around the base, for one, and more fundamentally, a political dependency on the U.S. for a security guarantee, which is the whole point of the bilateral deal. In Iraq, a weak central government requires the U.S. to keep it alive against its multitudinous armed adversaries, a weakness that Iraq’s sectarian quasi-democracy actually fuels. (Elections in Iraq tend to become sectarian census counts in a power struggle.) So while the Iraqis may push back, no Iraqi government that could actually take power—one led by the Sadrists, for instance, or the harder-line Sunnis—would actually kick the U.S. out. That in turn drives a divide between the fearful Iraqi government and the anti-occupation Iraqi populace, further entrenching the government’s dependency.
Meanwhile, I'd also note that there's little sign that the training and equipping missions we're doing in Iraq are actually geared to creating a situation whereby Iraq can defend itself without outside support. Instead, security institutions are being set up in such a way as to presuppose enduring American involvement. Spencer's post, incidentally, appears in The Washington Independent a new and exciting online media venture dedicated to investigative reporting on a non-profit basis.
Some have wondered where all the Wire blogging has gone. The answer is that it's gone over here and become a dialogue with some other worthy folks. Meanwhile, The Onionhas the scoop on the biggest scandal in Wire commentary.
Tyler Cowen marvels at the popularity of Tide and wonders "Is Tide so good? Does Tide really 'know fabric best'?" My eighth grade science project actually involved comparing different brands of laundry detergent and while I don't recall the details, the conclusion was that Tide was, in fact, superior to the then-available alternatives. Things may have changed since then, however.
It seems that during the debate last night, Mike Huckabee proposed adding two extra lanes on I-95 all the way from Bangor to Miami. David Freddoso doesn't approve, sniffing a hint of FDR about the plan. Ross Douthat's all for it.
I won't rehearse the standard argument against the view that if we just build enough highways our traffic problems will go away, but what I'd really like to see in our urban corridors is true high-speed intercity rail. The TGV in France cruises at 200 miles per hour for commercial purposes. That'd make the 400 or so mile trip between DC and Charlotte something you'd probably want to do on the train. Similarly, the 250 or so miles between Charlotte and Atlanta, the 345 miles between Atlanta and Jacksonville, and the 349 miles between Jacksonville and Miami. And that, of course, is to say nothing of the possibilities of high-speed rail along the Boston-Washington corridor. In the real world, of course, there are a million reasons why we're not going to build a Boston-to-Miami high-speed rail line up to European or Asian standards. But we really should (and there are, of course, other appropriate corridors in parts of the country where I don't happen to live) it would make a lot of things in life better, and it's a bit pathetic that dysfunctional politics in the United States has just doomed the erstwhile Greatest Country Ever to get by with inferior infrastructure.
It seems that the U.S. Army has once again lowered recruiting standards in order to meet the manpower exigencies of the Iraq War. Fred Kaplan goes through what this is likely to mean in terms of the performance of our troops in Iraq. Read him for the gory details, but the short version is: nothing good. What's more, the context for this is a prolonged counterinsurgency of the sort that, as General Petraeus' field manual makes clear, requires soldiers who are smarter than we've usually relied upen even as, in reality, they're getting less smart. Kaplan observes:
Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.
This is all true. But I also think that this turn of events is not only bad news for our prospects in Iraq, but bad news for counterinsurgency enthusiasts in general. After all, these recruiting issues aren't something that just happened out of the blue. The proximate cause of the bad-for-counterinsurgency recruiting situation is the fact that we're trying to wage a counterinsurgency. And it's not just the rank and file, either. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the Army's handful of top counterinsurgency thinkers, decided he'd rather work at a think tank. The Army we had in 2003 didn't have enough of the right kind of people to do counterinsurgency well, and the effort to do counterinsurgency has pushed the trends in the wrong direction.
Furthermore, the five years or so we've been fighting in Iraq is actually small beer by the standards that counterinsurgency theory suggests is necessary. So how are we supposed to prevent this kind of counterinsurgency-induced collapse in capacity to do effective counterinsurgency? The job is, after all, by its very nature pretty arduous and unpleasant the kind of thing that most people with bright prospects elsewhere are going to wind up avoiding in favor of more pleasant opportunities elsewhere. This is true of even very public-spirited people who are going to be able to think of plenty of other ways to serve their community, their country, or the world that don't involve the kind of sacrifices entailed by repeated deployments to a war zone. There will be exceptions, of course, but an effective military requires more than exceptions -- it's by definition a mass institution.
The exception, of course, is that in a situation of genuine national emergency you can convince/conscript pretty much whomever you want into military work. But it's hard to imagine the United States being faced with a serious domestic insurgency. And it's also very hard to imagine an insurgency abroad rising to that level of threat.
James Fallows says he hasn't seen all the Republicans debate before last night and that Mitt Romney kicked ass:
McCain, Giuliani, and Huckabee all notably ill at ease when asked to say anything about the economy. (Huckabee: building two new lanes on I-95, Maine to Florida, as an energy saving measure???) When Romney asked Giuliani a specific question about how to deal with China, the answer reminded me of the way I would sound if asked to fill 90 seconds discussing my favorite fashion designers. McCain attempting to describe his economy policy by listing his advisors. (Jack Kemp?) The more the economy matters as The general election issue, the less this will cut it -- and the more Romney can use at least the veneer of his being able to discuss the issue.
Jack Kemp? It's fascinating that McCain is not only relying on this "some of my best friends have opinions about economic policy" but that he doesn't seem to have any idea who these people are or what it is they think. After all, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin is also a senior economic policy advisor for McCain. Holtz-Eakin is a well-respected guy with mainstream cred. He's a traditional conservative and a big deficit hawk. Kemp is the complete reverse, the original legislative leader of the supply-side faction that came to dominate the GOP with its "less taxes, more tax revenue but in principle we should cut spending anyway for some reason" dogma.
When Mike Huckabee revealed his ignorance of foreign policy by proclaiming himself a Tom Friedman meets Frank Gaffney kind of guy on national security issues, he took big, big hits in the press. Will McCain suffer for similar flailing as he tries to establish an identity on economics? Somehow I doubt it, but like Fallows I think an inability to get a grip on this stuff is bound to catch up with him sooner or later.
Is Bill Clinton going to keep running the Clinton Global Initiative when his wife is President? I was talking with a friend the other day who thought the answer was obviously no. I thought the answer was obviously yes. Under the circumstances, it seems like the answer's not obvious.
Here's a bit more Table this time discussing the fact that Barack Obama's not a Muslim no matter how many people send around emails saying that he is:
If you'd rather download this -- or any other -- installment of The Table as an audio file to listen to while on the go, click here and you'll find them all.
There's something hilarious about the tone of this Washington Post "analysis" article on the stimulus package. Basically, the theme of the piece is that bipartisanship is good, that passing legislation is good, and that bipartisanship is good because it makes it easier to pass legislation, which is good. Lost in the fog somewhere is the point that it's better to pass good bills than bad ones and that this stimulus package is a pretty bad one.
Indeed, the CBO estimated that the most effective stimulus idea would be a temporary boost in food stamps. They concluded that the second most effective stimulus idea would be an increase in the duration of unemployment benefits. Democrats proposed both of those things. But Republicans wouldn't go along with either. So in order to make the bill bipartisan, the best idea was stripped out. And so was the second best idea. I don't necessarily blame the Democrats for making the compromises necessary to get a bill passed, but the fact of the matter is that bipartisanship made this bill worse than a one-party bill would have been.
Like Jonathan Orszag, I don't really understand why we (used to) tax estates rather than taxing inheritances. If Sheldon Adelson wants to give $50 to each American when he dies, there's no particular reason for the taxman to take a bite out of that. Conversely, if 100 different people all die in 2008 and each leave me $900,000 I really ought to may some taxes on my $90 million windfall. In practice, I imagine the consequences of switching from one situation to another wouldn't be large as these kind of extreme scenarios are obviously unlikely, but still it seems like we ought to do this properly.
I have to say that I agree with this: For all the hype, this isn't an especially vicious primary race on the Democratic side. The fact that there aren't large issue differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is lending their efforts to attack each other a bit of an odd vibe, but high-stakes political campaigns are always at least a little bit nasty.
The idea that this might open up some unbridgeable rift within the Democratic Party, meanwhile, strikes me as almost laughable. There ideological lines of cleavage within the Democratic coalition are much smaller than they were five or ten years ago when the party was riven by contentious arguments about globalization, etc.
Meanwhile, what Josh said about Hillary Clinton's efforts to change the rules of the primary midstream. There was a time and a place to stand up for the Michigan and Florida primaries, but she didn't do it. Instead, she signed a pledge agreeing not to "campaign or participate" in them and the DNC, without her dissenting, said they would get no delegates. She could have decided to do something different, but she didn't and that's the way it is.
Via Andrew, Barack Obama talks about getting roughed up by Hillary and Bill Clinton: "This is good practice for me so, you know, when I take on these Republicans I'll be accustomed to it."
I have no idea if he genuinely means that, but it's true either way. Given Bill's status as an ex-president and party figure, I do wish that he, personally, were not so involved as an anti-Obama surrogate, but I think it's good for the rival campaigns to really go after one another. It's politics, and people who want to succeed in it need the practice.
I'm not sure I understand the state of the expectations game at this point. Obama's going to win, but even if he does win it doesn't count because there are too many black people in SC? Is that right? But John Edwards is surging and there's some chance of Clinton falling into third? But as we learned in Iowa, doing well in primaries doesn't count if it's John Edwards doing the doing? Something like that? Oh well. It'll be on to February 5 either way.
Some interesting news on the labor front as it seems that the proportion of the work force that belongs to a union went up last year for the first time since the BLS started tracking this stuff in the early 1980s -- from 12 percent of the workforce to 12.1 percent. Ezra Klein comments:
Manufacturing, amazingly, has been so decimated that your average manufacturing employee is less likely to be unionized than another American worker picked at random. Given that the manufacturing sector was once the backbone of the union economy, that's real testament to how ruined the old order is, and how impressive even these small gains are. Now, one year does not a trend make, and the uptick is unquestionably minor. But still: Gains for the first time in 25 years. And centered around the fast-growing, immigrant-heavy economies of the West.
The actual numbers involved here are, clearly, very small. But it's worth saying something about momentum. For a long time now, some heavily unionized sectors of the economy have been losing members. In more recent years, though, you've also seen quite a lot of vibrancy on the union front with a large amount of service-sector organizing. That, however, has tended to be masked by the continued decline of the manufacturing sector. What we seem to be seeing, however, is that the two lines are crossing -- manufacturing has declined so much already that continued declines no longer swamp gains in other sectors. If we have political change in 2009 that brings about labor law reform, pro-labor appointments to regulatory bodies and judgships, and perhaps even dares to use the bully-pulpit to make the case for union membership one can easily imagine seeing these trends continue.
Apparently there's a nasal spray called Narcan that can reverse the impact of a heroin overdose. Doctors give it to patients, but it doesn't actually require training to use effectively, so public health workers around the country have started giving out OD kits to drug users, saving thousands of lives. Naturally, the Office of National Drug Control Policy wants to shut this down. As Mark Kleiman observes the logic here seems to be that we should make heroin use as dangerous as possible, the better to scare off potential users: "Why not just go all the way and poison the heroin supply? If withholding Narcan in order to generate more overdoses in order to scare addicts into quitting were proposed as an experiment, it could never get past human-subjects review. But since it's a failure to act rather than an action, there's no rule to require that it be even vaguely rational."
Take the top ten most popular books at each college according to Facebook, then look at the average SAT/ACT score for students at each college, and bam a list of which books are smart and which are dumb. Given the dubious methodology, there's not much here of interest, but I was intrigued by the gap between Crime and Punishment (super-smart) and Anna Karenina (kinda middlebrow) which would seem to me to appeal to more-or-less the same audience.
Good to see Michael Gerson taking on the big issues like are text messages ruining America. He says they aren't: "The Internet, and texting in particular, has led to the return of writing." Of course that construction makes it sound as if "texting in particular" is a special case of "the internet," as in "the internet, and The Atlantic's web archives in particular, are full of people mocking Michael Gerson".
"The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won't raise it," said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, "If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida." [...]
A slim minority of parliamentarians approved the new flag, which doesn't have Saddam Hussein's handwriting or the three stars that represented his Sunni-dominated Baath Party.
The good news is that I assume our new friends aren't literally going to turn around tomorrow and fight alongside al-Qaeda over this flag issue. Still, if you're looking for a clearer indication that the "Awakening"/CLC movement is not going to be the basis of national unity in Iraq I don't think you need to look much further than this.
According to MSNBC, 70 percent of voters (including 68 percent of white voters) thought Hillary Clinton was unfairly attacking Barack Obama. 56 percent of voters thought Barack Obama was unfairly attacking Hillary Clinton. 50 percent thought both were being unfair. Those results reflect about what I'd say . . . there was unfairness on both sides, but also a definite asymmetry -- most of it is coming from the Clinton camp.
The Clinton surrogate, Kiki McLean, on air now is saying "I think campaigns are tough" by way of response. That's true, but also non-responsive in what I think is a telling way.
He wins, as expected. Apparently it's a big win, though, which wasn't inevitable and exit polls are incapable of telling whether John Edwards may overtake Hillary Clinton for second place. Obama's likely to wind up with a pretty substantial lead in delegates after this.
It looks like Bill Clinton's heavy-handed attacks on Barack Obama didn't serve his wife well in South Carolina, with about sixty percent of voters saying Clinton's actions were a factor in their decision in what looks to have been a landslide win for Barack Obama.
That, I think, is about as it should be. Team Clinton has consistently, and rightly, maintained that they're within their rights to be tough on Obama. And so they are -- politics is a contact sport. But that doesn't mean that maximum viciousness is actually a good idea. You want to be seen as likable, fair, judicious, etc. and over the past few weeks the Clinton campaign has been making its candidate look like something other than the mature, experienced, sober-minded choice.
The fact that big turnout seems to have powered Obama to his big win strikes me as perhaps more significant than his margin of victory as such. Obama's message of "bringing people together" to create "change" is often castigated by his critics as a "kumbaya schtick" but it looks like something very different whenever he can deliver on promises to mobilize new people and bring them into the process. At the end of the day, politicians respond to facts on the ground. A presidential candidate who can change the facts on the ground by bringing new people into the process can carry a lot of supporters on his coattails. A president who can organize people at the grassroots in support of his agenda could get amazing things done.
Could Obama really do that? Well, it's hard to know for sure. But it does fit his background as a community organizer, and it does fit his results in Iowa and South Carolina.
Y'all know I'm not one to say that everything is good news for John McCain. But tonight there is actual very good news for McCain as Florida's super-popular and somewhat moderate governor Charlie Crist is going to endorse him. This comes on the heels of his endorsement from Senator Mel Martinez yesterday.
After all this time being told by the Clinton campaign that Barack Obama is some kind of closet Reagan-worshipping right-winger, it's a bit confusing to be told that he's the second coming of Jesse Jackson, too.
Man. If you'd asked me yesterday to list Barack Obama's strengths and weaknesses, I would have told you he's much more impressive giving a formal speech than on a debate stage. But it's doubly-impressive all over again when you see him giving a big formal speech -- he's much better in this format. I somehow doubt that a broad swathe of Americans are sitting at home on a Saturday night (though maybe in California where it's only a quarter past six), but if they are I think they'll be very impressed. When forgotten element of this campaign is that even though Obama's given several speeches that are quite well-known among political junkies, most voters have almost certainly never sat and watched him deliver one.
The Obama Temptation [Kathryn Jean Lopez] I tell you, he almost had me tonight until he talked about the war that shouldn't have been authorized and reminded me there are real policy issues at stake in this election! But listening to his inspirational, rallying speech tonight it's clear and obvious that if he's the nominee, he will be tough to beat.
There is, however, a less charismatic Democratic alternative who does think the war should have been authorized.
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Heads in the Sand
