« January 20, 2008 - January 26, 2008 | Main | February 3, 2008 - February 9, 2008 » January 27, 2008 - February 2, 2008 ArchivesJanuary 27, 2008Obama's SpeechHere it is on video: I would link to Hillary Clinton's concession speech but she, um, didn't deliver one. That combined with the Calvinball effort to get us to all go pay attention to Florida is pretty classless. She's still got a clear lead in the clear bulk of the February 5 states so that sort of funny business seems uncalled for. Prescient"Clinton says insurgency is failing", Associated Press, February 19, 2005: As 55 people died in Iraq on Saturday, the holiest day on the Shiite Muslim religious calendar, Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was "functioning quite well" and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing. I'll just observe that I don't think that take on things has been borne out by the subsequent years. The Typography PrimaryGraphic designers take a look at presidential campaign signs. Obama and McCain have the edge, but Edwards stands out from the crowd as the lone sans serif candidate. Nickname Needed
No football on today, but Bill Simmons sure is right about Brandon Jacobs being in need of a nickname: The Dwight Howard Award for "Guy who most needs a nickname" Maybe we should just get over it and call him "BJ." The ReminderI should be on Fox News today around 12:40 PM eastern time and what better way to spend your bye week than by watching? Monday Philosopher Anecdote BloggingThe subject of modern philosophers who lived interesting lives came up in conversation the other day, and it's just really hard to beat this anecdote about A.J. Ayer: One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ''A. J. Ayer: A Life,'' Ayer -- small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old -- was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. ''Do you know who . . . I am?'' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ''I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.'' ''And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,'' Ayer answered politely. ''We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.'' Meanwhile, I'm reading Samuel Freeman's Rawls which is excellent, but sorely lacking in that sort of thing. Dark PhoenixSpencer Ackerman does analogies and asks the question that needs to be asked: Is John McCain responsible for the deaths of billions of D'Bari? It's possible. Meanwhile, this came up as the two of us were watching a bit of McCain on the stump down in Florida. He has an odd manner -- he makes a lot of jokes and he's genuinely funny, but he sounds really angry, it's more like a Lewis Black routine than a stump speech. What's more, his efforts to appear concerned about the economy "my friends, we're all know about the housing, um, subrime mortgage, um, crisis" continue to be unconvincing -- I'm not sure McCain does know. TedLooks like Ted Kennedy's going to pull the trigger and endorse Barack Obama. Having the Kennedy/Kerry/Patrick trifecta should help Obama in Massachusetts, but more broadly one assumes that the iconic figure of American liberalism can help Obama convince people that he doesn't have shrines to David Broder and Ronald Reagan in his basement. Leadership"Who do you want to see take the lead role in setting policy for the country: George W. Bush or the Congress?" asks NBC/WSJ. The answer is congress by a 62 to 21 margin. One more reason to think that the weakness and conflict-aversion of the congressional Democrats is a bigger source of their low approval ratings than is any alleged overreaching. The President is very unpopular and people are apparently desperate for Congress to play a bigger role. Mile HighNarrow lead for Obama over Clinton in Colorado according to a Denver Post poll. I'd kind of figured that Obama was doomed anyplace where Latinos outnumber African-Americans but apparently not. One advantage he should have is that normally states with smaller black populations show less racially-polarized voting patterns. Thus, though Obama likely won't see many more states where the electorate contains such a high proportion of blacks as South Carolina, it should be much easier for him to win white votes in the whiter states just as he did in Iowa and seems to be doing in Colorado. Sunday Condiment BloggingEvery once in a while, I come across a person who still hasn't read Malcolm Gladwell's definitive article on ketchup. Well, you should read the article. You probably don't think ketchup is a very interesting subject, but you're wrong. Straight TalkJohn McCain, seeking to redirect the conversation in Florida away from the economy, about which he knows nothing and has little to say, back to his perceived strength of national security decides to tell a whopper about Mitt Romney's record. I have no particular desire to defend Romney, who's a liar and a buffoon himself, but one would hope that McCain's affection for such tactics might enter the media consciousness about what kind of "straight talker" he is. On that note, good for Jeffrey Toobin.
SebeliusMarc Ambinder reports that Kathleen Sebelius is planning to endorse Barack Obama but wants to wait until after the State of the Union address because she's scheduled to deliver the Democratic response (seems appropriate, maybe she can give Bill Clinton a lesson on etiquette). This further re-enforces the point that the clear sentiment among Democratic elected officials in the red areas is that a Nominee Obama or a President Obama would do more to expand the Democratic Party's geographical reach. January 28, 2008Mapping South Carolina
Nick Beaudrot makes a map showing Obama's performance county-by-county across South Carolina. Due to the scale of his victory, it's not actually a very interesting map (though that, of course, is an interesting finding). This map is more interesting, but I daren't try to explain exactly what it's a map of. The Torture HistorySpencer Ackerman has a big ol' feature on the recent history of CIA interrogations putting the use of brutal and illegal contexts in broader context. Specifically, putting them in the broader context of the fact that the CIA actually has very little experience with interrogations and with best practices involved in doing them correctly. Consequently, you have an equation that involves people who don't really know what they're doing working under intense pressure with little practical constraint and faced with an objectively difficult task -- torture is the result. What isn't the result is much in the way of usable intelligence. Specifically, there's no way to tell what's accurate and what's not: Many interrogators today are, in fact, concerned about that. But the program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy. [...] I had always thought "it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake" was something Joseph Fouché said (and his background in the secret police is more apropos given the subject of the article) but besides that it's an absolutely excellent piece. One area of inquiry that, for now, must remain shrouded in mystery and speculation is to what extent the problems with this approach are precisely what made them appealing to Bush. The US government has, after all, plenty of agencies who interrogate prisoners routinely and lots of interrogations have been done historically. If I had been President, I would have tasked such agencies with the new job. That would have resulted in "non-physical, non-coercive techniques like building rapports with detainees—much like the FBI does, and much like what worked 60 years ago at places like Fort Hunt against hardened, sadistic Nazi officers." And it wouldn't have even resulted in that outcome because I'm an especially humane kind of guy. It's just that that is, in fact, what the FBI does and what the military did when it had to interrogate Nazis, etc. That's the process, the process works, and it doesn't raise any moral or legal qualms so it's all good. Why on earth would I turn to the CIA and have them re-invent the wheel? Well, I suppose Bush might have if deep down he's just the sort of person who likes the idea of torture and brutality; someone who at some level would be disappointed to hear an agency official not respond to 9/11 by immediately requesting permission to start torturing people. But whatever the reason, it's just a huge, huge, huge mistake. Just as with surveillance policy, the Bush administration seems incapable of processing the idea that a certain level of formal constraint on what the security services are allowed to do may be necessary to make them work properly. Instead, the underlying presumption seems to be that transparency, the rule of law, accountability, etc. are all incredibly weaknesses in a system of government and that liberal democracies have been prevailing for the past couple of centuries despite the integral features of such a political system rather than because of them. CompassionJacob Weisberg, somewhat bizarrely, is sitting here in 2008 writing about Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as if it's a part of his persona that we ought to treat very seriously. Krugman wonders "Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase 'compassionate conservatism' wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right?" Beyond that, why are political writers still unaware that politicians deliberately lie in order to enhance the popularity of their political prospects? Compassionate conservatism obviously wasn't just a dog-whistle, it was also deliberately designed to foster an impression of a more moderate strain of Republicanism. And, indeed, to do that you had to toss some meat into the soup: The following year, in 2003, Mr. Bush pressed his case for invading Iraq and uttered the infamous 16 words (“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”). But alongside that disingenuous indictment, Mr. Bush presented Congress with a new raft of centrist-minded initiatives: $450 million to minister to the needs of children of prisoners, $600 million to treat drug addicts, $1.2 billion for hydrogen-powered cars, $10 billion in new money to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. You need to put $450 million into some kind of context relative to the federal budget -- $450 million is tiny. $450 million is the kind of budget request you make when you don't really care about the issue at hand but are hoping to gull innumerate reporters into writing about your $450 million initiative as if it were roughly on par with your proposed war whose costs run three orders of magnitude higher. Similarly with the hydrogen cars. Spending $1.2 billion on hydrogen-powered cars certainly could be an element of a centrist environmental policy. Certainly what doling out a subsidy like that suggests, logically speaking, is concern about carbon emissions and global warming. And of course, that's exactly the suggestion the subsidy was intended to implant but the Bush administration isn't concerned about carbon emissions and global warming at all. They hand out tons and tons of subsidies to the oil and coal industries, they steadfastly oppose all limits to curb carbon emissions, and they act like a diplomatic wrecking ball at international conferences. Compassionate conservatism was, in practice, nothing more than spin and a vague gesture at a higher-order justification for corruption. It's bad enough that the press got spun at the time, but to look backward from a Bush-critical perspective and get spun all over again is bizarre. Look at Bush -- he used to care and now he doesn't! But no, he never cared; what everyone can now see is what people who looked at his policies in detail and in context could see clearly back in 1999-2003. Why Teddy Matters
Marc Ambinder lays out his view of why he thinks Ted Kennedy's endorsement will matter. I won't go meta. I'll say it should matter. Note that I'm not a Camelot nostalgic. Indeed, I've written before on the blog of my distaste for JFK hagiography, and I laughed out loud at this. That said, Ted Kennedy is just a great liberal leader. He's the guy you wish every senator with a safe seat would be. A guy who doesn't just vote the right way, but who's willing to give voice to unseasonable opinions. After Iraq's elections in 2005, the right-wing was crowing. Many Democrats were ducking and covering. Hillary Clinton was repeating George W. Bush's lines. Ted Kennedy was delivering this speech: We must learn from our mistakes. We must recognize what a large and growing number of Iraqis now believe. The war in Iraq has become a war against the American occupation. We have reached the point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. We need a serious course correction, and we need it now. We must make it for the American soldiers who are paying with their lives.We must make it for the American people who cannot afford to spend our resources and national prestige protracting the war in the wrong way. We must make it for the sake of the Iraqi people who yearn for a country that is not a permanent battlefield and for a future free from permanent occupation. The elections in Iraq this weekend provide an opportunity for a fresh and honest approach. The man's not above criticism by any means. But I do think the theory that Hillary Clinton is the real candidate of commitment to progressive politics is put seriously to the test by Kennedy's judgment. His own commitment is, I think, above reproach. And he's been in a position to see Bill and Hillary Clinton and their gaggle of hangers-on for twenty years now all from a veteran perspective. Maybe he's just been blinded by the right-wing smear machine a something? BrokerageYesterday, Atrios wrote: Yes all political junkies dream of the brokered convention. It would be exciting!! But I started to think about how the news media would deal with such a thing if it were necessary. The primaries are early. The convention is in August. Between the primaries and the convention the bobblehead discussion would be unbearable. I don't know how the campaigns themselves would deal with it. They couldn't go dark, but they couldn't campaign as the presumptive nominee either. There'd be calls and pressures from various quarters for one of the candidates to "do the honorable thing" and bow out for the sake of the party, or Tim Russert's Nantucket vacation, or whatever. I kind of assume, in part for this reason, that even if the primaries don't result in anyone securing a majority of the delegates that the fight wouldn't actually go all the way to the convention. The answer to the question of what the campaigns do between the primaries and the convention is that they'd be brokering with all their might and most likely something would emerge. After all, what does anyone else have to do? War PollingPaul Krugman notes the 32-59 split on the question of whether or not the invasion of Iraq was worth it and remarks with satisfaction "the fact that we’re not squandering lives at the same rate we were a year ago (we’re still squandering money as fast as ever) does not seem to have convinced people that the war we were misled into was a good idea." Hasn't convinced people, that is, except for hard-core Republicans and Hillary Clinton who Krugman keeps telling us is preferable to Barack Obama and his unsound deviationism. Or is it that Clinton didn't think invading Iraq was a good idea but despite her 35 years of experience fighting for change didn't realize the significance of what she was voting on? I'm quite certain I'd be happier with the foreign policy Hillary Clinton would conduct in office than I'd be with the one John McCain would conduct, but her actual record on this count seems like a pretty sufficient reason to support a viable alternative in the primary. After all, if neither Clinton nor Obama had decided to run in 2008, it's hard for me to imagine that a lot of people would have been sitting around early in the cycle saying "you know what the party really needs in a nominee? -- an Iraq War supporter. Those people look really substantively and politically savvy, and I want to ensure that their hawkish gamble pays off to encourage future legislators to act just like them." Lunch TableBy popular demand, the latest edition of The Table is hereby submitted in time to serve as lunch break viewing: More Atlantic video here. Obama's EndorsementsBrian Beutler raises an interesting point -- if senior legislators like Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy, Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Ted Kennedy have all stuck their necks out to support Barack Obama, is it possible that Hillary Clinton may not be the master of the legislative process we've been led to believe? Something worth thinking about in the larger context of an odd campaign which is based on "experience" but not especially grounded in any concrete experiences. Photo I Meant to Blog Months Ago Blogging
I was looking at my Flickr page and I remembered that I'd snapped this photo fully intending to blog about it back months ago whenever I was in Amsterdam but then forgot. Nevertheless, the point still stands that there's a bar called Cheers in Amsterdam still trying to secure customers on the basis of an American sitcom that's been off the air for over a decade. Meanwhile, and perhaps relatedly, for some reason the in-flight entertainment on my flight involved a Cheers episode. A River in EgyptA while back I remarked that "I'm not sure there's very much the US government can or should do, in practice, to push Egypt into becoming a democracy." In response to that, Jonathan Kulick noted the existence of a CRS report, "Democracy Promotion: Cornerstone of US Policy?", on the subject. My read of the report, which, as is frequently the case with CRS reports, is a very useful summary is that we should be skeptical. As the report makes clear, the US does have a good deal of success with democracy promotion programs. But the bulk of the success is concentrated in efforts to assist countries that genuinely want to make a democratic transition. There's also some record of success in programs designed to bolster post-conflict situations. What there isn't is much of a track record of success for initiatives designed to coerce an autocratic regime into becoming democratic. Shadi Hamid also offered an impassioned defense of the view that there's stuff we can do: Egypt is one of our closest allies in the region. They depend on us for economic and military support. This means we have leverage, and we shouldn't be afraid to use that leverage to push for change. For starters, this can mean making the billions we give to Egypt conditional on political reform (for more on this, see here). For more forward-thinking policymakers, we can also explore ways to show the Egyptian regime we're serious (this could include starting a dialogue with the strongest opposition group in the country - the Muslim Brotherhood. For more on that, see here). Now there is a legitimate debate about how much we can do ultimately do to change Egypt. But the basic point remains - we can at least do something. On the aid, here's the thing. Presumably Mubarak's government would rather have our aid money than not have our aid money. But Mubarak's government would really prefer to hold on to power than to lose power. Thus aid-related threats aren't going to persuade them to adopt meaningful political reforms unless our bureaucrats manage to succeed in tricking Mubarak's into implementing reforms whose implications are more meaningful than the Egyptians realize. But given that the government of Egypt is stacked from top to bottom with people who spend just about all day every day thinking about how to maintain their regime and who are really good at achieving this goal, I think it's much more likely that we'd be tricked. Then next thing you know you've got the President of the United States and the Secretary of State proudly laying on hands and pronouncing a great victory for democracy, the reform remains ephermal, and ordinary Egyptians grow ever-more-skeptical of US activities. And this, to me, is the main thing to keep in mind for anyone's pet schemes for US-driven political change in Egypt, Pakistan, wherever. The United States is a much more powerful country than are those other countries. But that power is a very blunt instrument. We should try to employ it in pursuit of goals for which bluntness is not a problem. Micro-managing political outcomes and manipulating politicians is a delicate task. And savvy third-world leaders from Hosni Mubarak to Benazir Bhutto to the Gulf Sheikhs making multi-million dollar contributions to the Clinton and Bush presidential libraries are much better-positioned to manipulate our guys than we are to manipulate theirs. Rather than try to leverage our relationship into political change in those countries, my suggestion would be to simply say that insofar as these are repressive governments there's a certain degree of closeness we're going to put some distance between our country and theirs. In the specific case of Egypt, however, this is complicated by the fact that our aid relationship with Cairo is tied to our relationship with Israel. So you've got a thorny problem intimately connected to another thorny problem and I'd say I'm pessimistic that much will get done. That said, yes, we should be engaging with Egyptian opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and making it clear that we're prepared to have a relationship with whatever kind of government might emerge, but that we'd envision a closer relationship with a democratic government. FiftyIt seems we have 50 FBI agents who speak Arabic out of 10,000. Suppose that instead of deciding to spread our scarce language assets thinner by invading Iraq, the Bush administration had done something much cheaper like a $15 billion per year effort to massively boost America's base of people who speak Arabic, Turkic languages, Urdu, etc.? Wouldn't that have been more helpful? Obama's Progressive CritiqueI've gotten some pushback from Obama supporters for my less-than-enthusiastic response to his foreign policy messaging in this piece. And, indeed, there's a pretty strong section of his stump speech: I am running for President because I am sick and tired of democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security is by talking, and acting, and voting like George Bush Republicans. This is, I think, a great criticism of Hillary Clinton and it nicely expresses the key set of reasons why I'd rather see Obama be the nominee. But that said, this is still all pretty meta -- it's talking about how he'd talk about foreign policy, or talking about which things can and can't be said about him. A primary campaign has plenty of space for that kind of thing, but in a general election one does need to directly engage with Republican arguments. Now I know that one of Obama's quirks is that, for the purposes of the primary, he does much less direct Bush-bashing than one would expect and the foreign policy section of his speech reflects that. And if that's the choice he wants to make, that's the choice he wants to make. But it still does leave me sitting here a bit nervous about what the argument will look like when he's up against a Republican. All that said, as I've said several times before, I think he's been clearly superior to Clinton on foreign policy issues throughout the campaign. Credit Where DueGeorge W. Bush's advisors, whining to The Washington Post: For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy. It's worth saying that these things are doubly-asymmetric. For one thing, the president obviously doesn't control the economy which limits the amount of credit he can get. But for another thing, the economy is usually growing. We're not stuck in some pre-industrial malthusian trap here in the United States. GDP and employment grow in most of the time. So when the economy is growing but we're also mired in a military fiasco, the fiasco tends to occupy the mind. But when the rare event occurs -- financial system shocks, asset price declines, lots of talk of recessions -- people's attention shifts to that. Meanwhile, though, there's something puzzling about their inability to grasp why their Iraq policy isn't more popular. But in case anyone at the White House is reading, people don't like to see American troops killed in pointless wars. The war in Iraq became pointless some years ago. That the rate of casualties has declined is nice, and should soften public opposition to the war somewhat, but people are still getting killed and the way to get the casualty rate down even further is to end the war. Welfare DependenceBenjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey have a fairly preposterous article in The Weekly Standard about how virtue is awesome and so is John McCain so obviously he'd make a really good president I think Will's a bit off-base here myself, but mostly where he goes astray is in treating Storey & Storey in The Weekly Standard as worth taking so seriously. Ross and Will and Julian are all smart people (albeit chock full 'o abhorrent ideas), as are many people on the broad right in America, but what they're missing is that the conservative movement is full of idiots and that's all we're seeing here. Now I'm not saying that people who usually vote Republican are, on average, dumber than are the people who usually vote for Democrats. And I bet an earlier iteration of the conservative movement -- the one that came up from nothing and took over the Republican Party and the country, the one that built all the institutions of movement conservatism -- was full of bright people. But what we have today is a decadent third generation living in a fairly cushy institutional framework built by their forefathers in which lots of totally unimpressive people with totally unimpressive ideas can nonetheless make nice little lives for themselves. They don't even need to be hardworking or good at fund-raising or particularly likable. There are smart people availing themselves of the odd dose of wingnut welfare, but the fact of its availability keeps lots of silly people hanging around and lots of bad magazines staying in print. The relatively more meager resources available for someone who wants to be a liberal professionally mean that a higher proportion of the people in that line of work are at least good at something. So Storey & Storey tell us, I think, much more about the authors and about The Weekly Standard than it does aboutd essence of the case for John McCain. If you took a politician I liked and then got a dumb person to explain what was good about him, he'd give you a dumb answer. Conversely a smart, sophisticated person can make a smart, sophisticated case for a bad politician. Over ThereThe improving security situation in Iraq appears to be un-improving as five soldiers were killed today in an increasingly unstable Mosul. Souled Out
What did I find in my mail this afternoon but a slim new volume, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right by the estimable E.J. Dionne. Since I've only had it in my possession for a few hours I can't say a ton about the substance of the argument but from what I've seen it's the right kind of argument -- analytic about what's happened in the past, and then first-order about the future ending on a chapter about "Religion's True Calling" rather than something about how Al Gore should have gone to church more. What's more, Dionne is really the author I'd like to read on "The Agony of Liberal Catholicism" so I'm very much looking forward to that chapter. But in the interests of finding something else to say about a book I've barely read, let me just note that "Souled Out" is most frequently used a as a title in a context where "soul" means "black people" rather than "religion." See, e.g., Shaun Powell's Souled Out: How Blacks are Winning and Losing in Sports or C.L. Smooth's All Souled Out. SOTU PredictionBush is going to hit this one out of the park. His detractors always forget that he's a master of oratory. As soon as he gets up there to the podium and gets a chance to explain clearly the ways in which his policies -- removing Saddam, slashing taxes, offering subsidies to business, standing up for the right to work, pulling out of treaties, keeping the fossile fuels flowing -- have contributed to the past seven years of robust economic growth (complete with four out of the five best years of the 28 year Reagan Boom) his numbers are going to start to turn around. One problem the Republicans faced in the midterms (aside from earmarks run amok, something Bush is sure to tackle in the speech) is the long distance between November and January. During the spring and summer months the filter and the MSM's obsession with bad news out of Iraq took over. Having the presidentials all running away from Bush over the past year hasn't helped. But if Petraeus' testimony in September was one major turning point in the conservative comeback, I think tonight will go down as a second. The Democrats, hilariously, don't even see it coming. Will Blog for BeerI'd like to note that not only is The Washington Independent generously providing me with beer, pizza, and a place to watch the State of the Union, but its launch today is the most exciting event in journalism since The Atlantic started hiring bloggers. TraitorBush just called for bipartisan cooperation on solutions. Clearly, he's no more a real conservative than Barack Obama is a real liberal. AverageIt's good to see Bush talking about taxes again and busting out some classic dishonesty. Back when he initially passed his tax cuts, he argued they were "affordable" and cited what they would cost if we assumed they would phase out. Today he's outraged by the idea of letting the taxes phase out. Meanwhile, we're back to talking about the "average" tax cut, which is pretty large, in much the same sense that if you take me, Bill Gates, and a homeless guy the "average" one of us is a billionaire. Live Blog.What I need here is a live blog. I don't know anything about reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Thus, in principle, it's possible that Bush has just proposed a good idea, though the odds are against it. By contrast, Bush's plan to destroy America's health care system is a very bad idea. I like that Bush explicitly linked his plan to destroy the public school system with the idea of Pell Grants. That's appealing to liberals. And, of course, conservatives like George Bush are always shortchanging the Pell Grant system just as once they're done using poor kids as a bludgeon with which to beat down teachers they'll lose all interest in funding vouchers and return to their usual starve the poor attitude. "Generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions" -- a great idea; maybe next we can develop a pony-based source of power. Or maybe we could reduce emissions by relying on the floo network. The climate change section actually managed to get more faith-based after the carbon capture part. Innovation is, of course, essential to reducing emissions. But the way you create the incentives for emission-reducing innovation is to put a price on carbon by auctioning tradable emissions permits. Just standing around and hoping -- or even having the government shovel wheelbarrows full of money -- isn't going to do anything. "Entitlement spending and immigration" -- fascinating to watch the lame duck returning to the scene of the two big issues that wrecked his popularity . . . guest-workers for all, Social Security benefits for none! “We trust that people when given the chance will choose a future of freedom and peace” -- remember when conservatism was based on a dour, realistic view of human nature and the human condition? I miss those days. There's no time right now for a treatise on the full sociological naiveté of this bizarre statement but it's obviously -- obviously -- false that liberal democracy is some kind of human default condition. It took thousands of years to emerge! Constructing stable, legitimate political institutions is difficult. Surge stuff. I've written tons about this. Not going to do anymore in Iraq. Just note the total, utter, complete, all-encompassing lack of candor and honesty about the conflict between the CLCs and the Iraqi government. With regard to Iraq one has to wonder time and again why, if this policy is so great, does it need to be constantly sold by means of massive dishonesty. Okay, wait, it's impossible to avoid commenting on the GOP's loud Iraq-related cheers. Democrats take note -- the GOP thinks this is a winning issue for them and are bound to campaign on it; the other party needs to be prepared to fight on these issues and can't afford to count on the election being all-economy all-the-time. "The time has come for a Holy Land where a democratic Israel and a democratic Palestine live side-by-side in peace" -- well said. Too bad about those years worth of bad policymaking by "There has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11" -- anthrax! Anthrax! Oh well. For some reason that whole episode has been officially erased from the historical record or something. Lusty applause from the power of small government for unlimited surveillance power. Malaria -- good stuff. AIDS, too. I'll also note that banal diseases like measles kill way more people in the developing world than you'd think and we should put some emphasis on them as well. Wrap-UpI stand by my pregame predictions. The thing about patenting human life was odd. I'm concerned that human-animal hybrids using steroids may have taken over Mars already. We need to get that manned mission going, pronto. SebeliusThis is bad. On the other hand, SOTU responses are always bad. On an appropriate curve, I think she's doing pretty well. But on another level, it's just an impossible task; I think a sensible person would refuse to do it. In policy terms, I basically agree -- S-CHIP good, global warming bad, etc., etc. UPDATE: As many people are reminding me both in comments and IRL, Jim Webb gave a good response last year. Sebelius is, at any rate, better than such fiascos as Tim Kaine 2006 and Gary Locke 2003. RespondingOkay, it's not entirely impossible to give a somewhat effective SOTU response: I don't really think I believe a politics where we don't "demonize our opponents" is possible, but I liked the part about Iraq and al-Qaeda a great deal. January 29, 2008Suharto DeadIndonesian dictator Suharto is one of those people who I'd vaguely assumed was already dead until I read a story about his demise. I'm not sure I have much to say about Suharto beyond the obvious -- bad man, killed lots of people, etc. -- but John Quiggin has an interesting post making the case that since his departure from power "Indonesia has been remarkably successful in dealing with what was, in many respects, a poisonous legacy from the Suharto era." A Surge of ApplauseSOTU tea-leaf reading: Clinton and Obama’s divergent views on the troop surge in Iraq, however, were plainly visible. And there you have it. Jonah Goldberg, Punk'dHilarious. I may have to try one of these myself. Barack-as-CudgelI don't at all adhere to the school of thought that says "if Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks like Barack Obama, he must be evil." That said, I do think it's clear reading things like this doozy from Brooks today that one important driving force behind the sophisticated right's praise of Obama is a simple belief that he'll probably lose in the end. Then, when Clinton is nominated, having praised Obama to the skies they can lament that once again -- sigh -- the Democratic Party has let them down and they have no choice but to vote for the Republicans. The effort here is to somehow bracket the Bush years as just some kind of goofy one-off that we can forget about and remember that the real issue -- as it so often seems to be here in Washington -- is Bill Clinton's sex life. Or something. It's all pretty inane. I've developed an increasingly strong preference for Obama in this race, but there's no gaping substantive void between them policywise. Certainly, I don't think I can think of any respect in which an Obama administration would more closely resemble a McCain administration than it would a Clinton administration. Meanwhile, McCain, despite some admirable qualities, shares Bush's lunatic conception of America's role in the world, declined to endorse any climate change measures that might actually solve the problem, and has pledged fealty to Bush's irresponsible tax policy in a way that makes it impossible for him to do much of anything innovative on the domestic front. There's a big, clear choice facing the country between the party of war, tax cuts, and the destruction of the planet and the other party -- the notion that the big story is the fortunes of the Clinton family is preposterous. Giuliani's DoomSome good points from Brendan Nyhan: Rudy is the Joe Lieberman of 2008 -- his name recognition led to strong early numbers in national polling, but he's just fundamentally unacceptable to the base. People have mocked his strategy of waiting until Florida to compete, but what was he supposed to do? He tried to campaign in New Hampshire earlier but it didn't work. I think the fact that New York City looms large as a center of conservative punditry despite the fact that approximately zero members of the GOP rank and file live there, combined with the fact that a large streak of disdain for social conservatives seems to run through the conservative elite, helped created an illusion that the impossible was possible. For my money, the smart play for Giuliani would have been to just straightforwardly say that he was a pro-life Catholic who'd just been lying in order to secure the support of liberals in But The Talk is So StraightHere's a bit on Saint John of Arizona flip-flopping on the Law of the Sea Treaty: It's no surprise, really, as he's flip-flopped on a ton of stuff, though none of that seems to have penetrated into the narrative about him. UPDATE: More here. Obama NYCI feel as if it wouldn't be too shocking if Barack Obama really did manage to close the gap and win New York City. After all, it's pretty demographically friendly terrain for him -- sizable black population, plenty of highly educated whites, few Mexican-Americans -- and it's not as if Hillary Clinton has particularly deep roots in New York. What's more, Connecticut and New Jersey are both demographically promising areas for Obama, with Democratic Parties that consist primarily of African-Americans and educated people. But throughout the tri-state area, Obama's playing at a disadvantage because Clinton represents New York and has ties to political leaders throughout the region. It should, however, be interesting to see how close Obama can keep things throughout that area. Hawks for HillaryPaul "al-Qaeda is totalitarian so we should fight it by invading Iraq" Berman wants Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. So does Alan "everyone who disagrees with me is an anti-Semite" Dershowitz. And of course she's already secured the support of Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon. Got my links from Ari Berman. Out of Touch
So that's GDP growth over the course of different presidents' terms. This is, obviously, a very crude method by which to judge a president's economic performance. But surely this sort of thing ought to stop a New York Times reporter from writing that Bush "has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents." See also Dean Baker and Ezra Klein. That a newspaper would let a demonstrably false assertion into its news pages is no longer surprising, but it is telling that this apparently didn't "sound wrong" to anyone charged with editing the piece. If you'd submitted something about "Manhattan real estate has been in the doldroms throughout Mr. Bush's two terms" presumably an editor would have noticed that this seemed wrong. By say that it's been a historically good economy, and the Times thinks that scans just fine. Pandering in VainTom Schaller critiques Hillary Clinton's pander judgment: I can maybe see it in the immediate aftermath of Texas v. Johnson when such silliness briefly became a salient issue, but at this late date does anyone think that sponsoring Actually, to me here's the thing about the flag-burning legislation. Clinton sponsored it. I, at some point, wrote a blog post deploring that sort of thing. I promptly received an email from one of Hillaryland's liberal outreach people explaining that the real reason Clinton had sponsored the legislation was to forestall the drive for a flag-burning amendment. That, to me, is pathetic. If you're going to pander on a symbolic issue, you've got to own the pander, take the punch from the left and stand up, damnit, for the cause of flag preservation. Otherwise, what are you accomplishing. Somewhat similarly, the most pathetic thing about Barack Obama's efforts to bow and scrape for AIPAC are that the AIPAC crowd has been suspicious of him from Day One and his pandering doesn't change the fact that they don't like him. Why not just accept that he'll have to live without that small segment of the public and stand up for a more reasonable policy? Instead, he seems determined to pander in vain. The Un-Decisiveness of Florida
There's a growing conventional wisdom that tonight's Florida matchup between John McCain and Mitt Romney will be decisive. That may be true, but it's worth noting how silly it is. Assuming the jumble of polls pictured above is somewhat accurate, the final tally between McCain and Romney will be very close. Meanwhile, a non-trivial number of people are going to vote for Mike Huckabee or Rudy Giuliani. And the "winner" of Florida is going to secure a plurality that falls far short of a majority. If it winds up going 31/30/15/13 McCain/Romney/Huckabee/Rudy as InsiderAdvantage has it, there seems to me to be every reason for Mitt to soldier on. Similarly, if ARG's right and it comes down 32/34/12/11 there's every reason for McCain to keep running strong. Ah, LibertyRoger Pilon, Cato's chair in constitution studies, is apparently one of that breed of libertarians who believes strongly in unlimited government surveillance powers plus retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecom firms. Fortunately, we've also got this other breed of libertarianism around. Still, it's a bit hard to take Cato's claims to be sincerely serving a doctrine of small government when its people stake out this kind of position. False PopulismHere's a random note from last night. Bush, talking about a free trade pact with Colombia, said "If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere." The purveyors of false populism are, I guess, Hugo Chavez and other murky conspirators. But why is it false populism? Chavez is a real populist. Maybe you think he's a populist peddling fake solutions to Latin America's problems, but he's certainly not a secret pro-business neoliberal. Meanwhile, what about failing to ratify the Colombia trade deal will embolden false populism? This seems like a bizarre context in which to start applying fight them in Tikrit so we don't need to fight them in Tuscon logic. The MillenniumWatching the State of the Union, Megan McArdle reflected that "he's talking up the Millenium project, which is actually one of the great things this administration has done. This doesn't get nearly enough good press." The Millennium Challenge Corporation is certainly a good idea, but as Max Bermann points out one reason it doesn't get much good press is that the implementation has been problematic:
If Bush wants to salvage any kind of positive legacy, this initiative is going to be one of the few things he'll have to rely on. Given that, it'd be nice to think that he'll spend the next 12 months really trying to make sure these trains are running correctly and really fighting to keep the relatively modest amount of money in play here flowing from the Congress. Instead, though, all the energy seems to go into surveillance and pouring more cash and lives down the drain in Iraq. No Iraq Recession
There's a bunch of progressive groups experimenting with some interesting "Iraq recession" messaging which sounds promising to me, but as Paul Krugman explains doesn't fit the facts particularly well: The fact is that war is, in general, expansionary for the economy, at least in the short run. World War II, remember, ended the Great Depression. The $10 billion or so we’re spending each month in Iraq mainly goes to US-produced goods and services, which means that the war is actually supporting demand. Yes, there would be infinitely better ways to spend the money. But at a time when a shortfall of demand is the problem, the Iraq war nonetheless acts as a sort of WPA, supporting employment directly and indirectly. Krugman mentions the war's impact on the price of oil as one potential caveat. I would also add that the war's been going on long enough at this point that we're feeling some of the long-term consequences of war-related spending along with the short-term ones. Americans are probably somewhat poorer on average than we would be had the war never been fought. But the war's not responsible for the economic slowdown -- in the short-term it's helping to prop the economy up. Indeed, the DC area in particular (though also, I would note, Arizona -- though obviously Saint John's hawkish views reflect pure straight talky principle and owe nothing to the large number of defense contractors he represents) has seen a lot of defense-fueled growth. The End of an Era
John Hollinger thinks the unthinkable: Over the past 23 games, San Antonio has beaten all the bad teams and lost to all the good ones. In other words, it has been an average team. This in defense of the proposition that the Spurs might actually miss the playoffs: Even with all that, it's still hard to imagine a San Antonio team with the likes of Duncan, Tony Parker and Ginobili missing out on the playoffs entirely. But throw in an ankle sprain to one of those three and put them in a conference where 48 wins might be needed to gain entry to the postseason, and it's a different story. That's why the Playoff Odds say there's a 1-in-4 shot of the unthinkable happening. A playoffs without the Spurs seems hard to imagine. Even so, this is an even numbered year so anything could happen. The real question is whether the legendary Spurs machine is breaking down in a larger sense, leaving them unable to make the numerologically determined bounceback to win the 2009 NBA Championship. Photo by Flickr user Compujeramey used under a Creative Commons license FloridaNarrow lead so far for McCain. County-by-county breakdown seems to favor a narrow McCain victory. This, though, tends to re-enforce what I was saying earlier -- whoever wins is going to win a pretty narrow victory with less than forty percent of the vote. Hardly a decisive blow to the loser. But of course a McCain win of any sort will be spun by the press as the greatest landslide since Johnson/Goldwater. Clinton Wins!As expected, the Florida non-primary goes to Hillary Clinton. I congratulate her on her prize of zero delegates. Good luck to HRC with her lame spin. Bullets DodgedWhatever else happens in 2008, one thing that's certain is that Rudy Giuliani won't be elected president. That's something I'm thankful for. And, based on the results, I think it's something that virtually everyone in America can be thankful for -- something that can unite Americans across the cultural divide. From Red America to Blue America, everywhere but the Commentary office and the foreign policy wing of the American Enterprise Institute, we stand proud tonight as a nation that refuses to be governed by Rudy. Mike Huckabee's speech, meanwhile, is strangely charming. Insofar as Huckabee seems to have no chance of winning, he's a pretty likable guy. When one contemplates the prospect of him actually becoming president, it's pretty horrifying. But as a folksy loser thanking his supporters -- likable. McCain WinsLet the lovefest begin. Stuck in the Middle With MittThe really bad news for Mitt Romney here isn't really that he lost to John McCain. Rather, the problem is that Mike Huckabee is staying in the race, while Rudy Giuliani is dropping out and will presumably be endorsing McCain soon. In a head-to-head race it's quite possible to see Romney consolidating anti-McCain sentiment and winning. But if Huckabee can keep his fanbase, that lets McCain win primaries in conservative states without the need to secure majorities. "The Party of Bush"Truly a chilling phrase from the terrifying Rudy Giuliani. Romney as OutsiderI feel like Mitt Romney's outsider, anti-Washington message on display right now in his speech is a pretty good message. And as I've said before, I think he'd be a better president than John McCain (see also Poulos' endorsement). There is an opening here for someone to point out that McCain is a kind of empty suit -- a heroic biography followed by an extended legislative career that's been long on Sunday morning show appearances and short on worthwhile accomplishments. Stages of GriefNRO's Michael Graham, an orthodox anti-McCain conservative, is pretty amusing as he tries to reconcile himself to McCain getting the nomination. Expect much more of this in the near future. Meanwhile, it's interesting to see McCain kissing Huckabee's ass in his victory speech . . . could be VP material. If you squish Huckabee and McCain together, the combination looks more like a regular Republican than either does on his own. Less Jobs, More WarGood clip courtesy of Think Progress: Oddly, though, McCain keeps picking up the votes of Republican primary voters disgruntled with the Iraq War despite being, in reality, the candidate most fanatically devoted to the cause. Sanchez v. SanchezChris Matthews interviewing Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) who's supporting Obama just noted that her sister, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) is supporting Hillary Clinton. I'll note that it's pretty uncontroversial that Linda is the more liberal of the two. Maybe both sisters are just mixed up, but I don't think so. January 30, 2008McCain and the BaseKevin Drum notes that contrary to what you might think, John McCain won in Florida without really solving his base problem at all. He lost self-identified conservatives and he lost self-identified Republicans, too:
Kevin remarks: "Does anyone seriously think that any Republican candidate can kick such major ass among independents in November that he can afford a conservative base that's not charged up and working feverishly to turn out every last vote? I don't." Well, no, neither do I. But fortunately for the GOP, the Democratic front runner is still Hillary Clinton whose nomination would ensure solid base support for McCain despite the lack of genuine enthusiasm. Does anyone seriously think that any Democratic candidate is more likely than Clinton to ensure a conservative base that's charged up and working feverishly to turn out every last vote? I don't. Obama's ConservofansReading what Ross says here, I realize that what I wrote about Barack Obama's admirers among the conservative pundit class is open to misinterpretation. Here's something that people I talk to sometimes say, but that I don't believe: Conservative pundits like David Brooks like to praise Barack Obama because they think he'll be an easy mark in the general election. What I do think is that praising Barack Obama appeals to conservative pundits in large part because, right now, praising Obama is a useful means by which to denigrate Hillary Clinton. As such, I think part of the background for things like Brooks' praise of Obama is belief that he's likely to lose the primary. I think there's a desire on the right to make the 2008 election mostly about the Clinton family rather than being about contemporary American conservatism's horrid record in office. Portraying the current Democratic primary as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of Clintonism nicely sets up the general election as a second round between light and Clinton. Do I see this as a machiavellian scheme hatched out of Karl Rove's front office? No. But that's my diagnosis of the function of Obamafandom. If Obama loses the primary, Obamafandom becomes a reason to vote Republican -- the Democratic Party is so rotten that it rejected the One. If Obama wins the primary, I assume that Obamafandom will rapidly wither away. It will turn out that the Democratic Party is so rotten that tainted the One. Or something like that. Meanwhile, what I'm trying to say about the real world is that there's just no justification for viewing the Obama/Clinton choice as some kind of night and day Moment of Decision for America. There are differences between the two of them, but in the scheme of things they're either small differences or fuzzy ones, not the gaping void that many on the right seem to perceive. Credit and InequlitySome interesting observations from John Quiggin about easy credit in the United States: The relatively generous treatment of debtors in the US seems to illustrate, at the national level, a pattern found among US states. Pro-debtor institutions are, in political terms, a substitute for redistributive taxation. But as he points out, the equilibrium looks a bit shaky at the moment. The dominance of the pro-rich-people political movement in the United States set the condition for the recent bankruptcy reform which made it much harder for people to get out of their credit card debts. That, combined with declines in the housing market, has led to the increase in jingle mail that we're now seeing. Financial institutions will surely want protection from that, too. Edwards OutLooks like a two-person race now. It took me a long time to warm to John Edwards, and by the time I did it was almost over. But I think it was his presence in the race and his campaign that really set the tone for the whole thing, and he deserves an enormous amount of credit for any good things that may come in the next administration. After EdwardsThis seems like a good time to link to Dana Goldstein's article on where John Edwards' supporters will drift. The SlowdownLooks like Q4 of 2007 featured truly anemic growth of just 0.6 percent. That's a reminder that some of the "is it a recession?" talk that you hear in bad times is fairly arbitrary. To qualify as a real recession, you need economic contraction. But in the real world a quarter of 0.2 percent growth is very similar to a quarter of -0.2 percent growth, and quite different from a quarter of 3.2 percent growth. The hop over the zero mark doesn't actually cause anything magical to happen. A prolonged period of 0.6 percent growth would cause a ton of hardship and falling living standards even if things never crossed the line into official recession territory. The Horror, The HorrorIt seems that Barack Obama must remain forever in purgatory as far as Commentary's concerned since he once -- shudder -- called for an "even-handed approach" to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Needless to say, it was a similar formulation that got Howard Dean in so much trouble back during the 2004 cycle. I also have to say that this strikes me as a curiously nonsensical red line for Israel's false friends to be drawing. After all, supporting an "even-handed approach" sounds like exactly the sort of line someone not utterly steeped in the latest talking points might cross by accident. But on top of that, no matter how much you may believe deep in your heart that Arabs are less human than Jews and therefore less worthy of our consideration, it seems like for tactical purposes you ought to at least pretend to favor an even-handed approach and then just proclaim whichever approach you favor to be the even-handed one. That's just common sense. John Edwards, An AppreciationI've done a brief remembrance of John Edwards's campaign for The Guardian. A taste: It's widely noted that there's no enormous policy gap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Less widely noted is that it didn't always have to be that way. Both Clinton and Obama are running on domestic platforms that are much, much, much more ambitious than anything Al Gore or John Kerry put on the table. And not because Kerry was a notably right-wing Democrat or Clinton a from-the-left insurgent. Rather, the centre of gravity within the party shifted several notches left between the last cycle and this one. In part, that was a response to shifting dynamics in the real world. But to a surprising extent, it was simply a response to John Edwards. Something I don't get into in the piece is the extraordinarily vigorous efforts of Edwards-supporting blog commenters -- most notably Petey. As the months went by, I came to think increasingly well of Edwards, and those commenters along with the work of Edwards' formal online communications team made a big difference. Beyond that, what Jon Cohn said. Why I'll Take Any DemocratI'm pretty sure we're not going to see nonsense like this from either President Clinton or President Obama. Even if neither winds up really governing the way I'd be happiest with, we'll no longer have a policy guided by a knee-jerk aversion to pragmatism. That's More Like ItHere's Barack Obama talking today in Denver: It’s time for new leadership that understands that the way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq; who agreed with him by voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; who agrees with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don’t like; and who actually differed with him by arguing for exceptions for torture before changing positions when the politics of the moment changed. Obviously, Obama, too, would have some problems against John McCain who'll argue that he's too green. But the basic spirit here seems correct to me. You want to argue that discontentment with the fruits of Bush's policies should cause you to vote against John McCain, and the best argument you can make to that effect is that Bush and McCain have very similar records. But to make that argument, you need to be able to step a couple of paces back from your opponent and really wind up and throw a solid punch. All Kinds of PrimariesIt's worth recalling that the presidential primary isn't the only primary on the calendar this year. Maryland voters will, for example, seen be choosing between business Democrat incumbent Al Wynn and his challenger, Donna Edwards, backed by a "vast left-wing conspiracy" of progressive allies. These sorts of challenges are, in my view, extraordinarily important. Having a left-wing challenger beat just one incumbent Democrat would have an enormous exemplary effect on the others. After the SurgAfter rounding up evidence that the tenuous series of cease-fires that are currently keeping Iraq at levels of violence worse than what we saw in 2003 or 2004 but better than 2006 or 2007 may be unraveling, Fred Kaplan points to some indications that Admiral Fallon at CENTCOM thinks we should swiftly transition from un-surging in Iraq to deeper cutbacks in the force levels. This has tended to be a tension throughout the surge period, with a president psychologically and politically committed to Iraq willing to pour endlessly resources into that country, and a commanding general in David Petraeus who naturally likes the idea of his area of responsibility getting all the juice, but a host of other officials between Bush and Petraeus concerned about the strategic costs of this sort of overcommitment to Iraq. Wither Immigration?Remember a few months ago when the conventional wisdom had it that Democrats needed to be in a state of panic about how anti-immigration sentiments were going to run them out of down. At the time, I tried to cite polls which kept showing that the audience for anti-immigrant politics was, though loud, actually pretty small. A lot of people came back at me with the notion that, well, the incredible power of the immigration issue isn't something you can see in the polls. And maybe not, but here we have Captain Amnesty himself looking set to secure the Republican Party's nomination -- a turn of events which certainly makes it seem like the polls were right and this simply isn't an issue that very many people care all that deeply about. Surprisingly LiberalKevin Drum's right -- this here ad is pretty delicious: And to its credit, while everything in here has been stripped of context in a way that produces a misleading gestalt, it's all perfectly accurate. Jetty in Jeopardy
It seems the state of Utah is considering a proposal that would allow oil drilling near Robert Smithson's famous Spiral Jetty earthwork sculpture in the Great Salt Lake. Hulk Hogan's ViewHe's an Obama guy: Helps with the white working class? UPDATE: Craig from Craigslist too, though that's more of a wine track endorsement. Why Floridians Get No VotesEzra Klein takes a look at Hillary Clinton's complete and utter assent to the "Florida doesn't count" principle until her recent ex post facto efforts at a backtrack. Money quote from HRC's campaign manager commenting at the time on the DNC's decision to strip Florida of its delegates: We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role. Trying to wriggle out of that sort of thing at this point is just lame. The rules are arbitrary and unfair to tons of people in tons of states across this great nation of ours, but Clinton agreed to play by them and that's all anyone's asking her to do now. Simple LessonsWise words from Rich Lowry: The one blatantly obvious lesson from his candidacy that is going oddly unremarked is: Don't run as a pro-choicer for the Republican presidential nomination. The strange thing is that people keep re-learning this lesson -- Pete Wilson, Steve Forbes, now Rudy Giuliani. It's genuinely bizarre. You don't see any Democrats thinking they can win a Democratic presidential nomination as a pro-lifer. Phrase of the DayLou Dobbs refers to "the so-called Latino vote." What does he call it? January 31, 2008GOP DebateI went to see my friend's band The City Veins play a show and missed the debate. What happened? I understand sparks flew. No Laws for YouYou've got to be impressed by the audacity of George W. Bush's claims of executive power. In the latest adventure in signing statements, the congress appropriated some money for defense with the proviso that none of the money be used to finance the construction of permanent military bases in Iraq. Bush signed the appropriation into law but with the proviso that he won't abide by the restrictions. After all obeying the law he just signed "could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." And, of course, it's true. If we live in the sort of utterly lawless society that Bush appears to be envisioning, it's very easy to take care that the nonexistent laws be faithfully executed. In a country with the rule of law, by contrast, the president has a lot of hard work that might distract from having people tortured. Straight TalkOne interesting thing about politics is that you might think that when a politician develops a reputation for honesty, the way Saint John of Arizona has, that from that day forward he needs to be super-scrupulous about telling the truth. Otherwise, voters who might dismiss a small fib from a "regular" politician will suddenly be outraged. In truth, the reverse is the case. Thus, Mac was not only Back last night, but appears to have made his patently false accusation that Mitt Romney favored a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of his argument at last night's debate. Shocking stuff. McCain's made this claim before, everyone who's looked at it concluded that it wasn't true, and so McCain . . . just did it again in a higher-profile forum. Naturally, Jonathan Martin's Politico article on the subject was given the headline "Romney falls into McCain trap on Iraq" rather than, say, "McCain Lies His Ass Off." The Need for DisclosureI wrote back in October about the lack of transparency surrounding donations from corporate titans and foreign princes to Bill Clinton's foundation. My view was that it made sense for liberals to push for this disclosure sooner rather than later so that we could see if there are any stinkbombs in those records before Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. According to The New York Times there's at least one, where in exchange for a $31 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton helped a guy named Frank Giustra win some lucrative mining contracts from Kazakhstan's despotic government. The only Hillary connection that the Times could uncover really highlights the lack of a Hillary connection here "Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York." Still, this obviously reflects quite poorly on Bill. And more to the point, it highlights the need for rigorous disclosure of this stuff. The Clintons are by no means unique in this regard -- the fundraising for the George W. Bush presidential library is super-shady. Normally, the relevant shadiness goes down during a president's lame duck phase so nobody really notices, but it's been a huge looming problem for years. Wingnut Versus WingnutInfighting sure is fun! John McCain hates capitalism, and Mark Steyn's inspired to almost touch an anti-militarist note: Well, Kathryn, since most of the gang seems to have turned in early (too demoralized to opine?), I might as well chip in. I'm getting a bit tired of Senator McCain's anti-business shtick. The line about serving "for patriotism, not for profit" is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from? To me what's galling here is that it's not as if McCain took some kind of vow of poverty. When he divorces his first wife he "gave her a generous settlement, including houses in Virginia and Florida and financial support for her ongoing medical treatments" before marrying a wealthy heiress. Nobody's running around disparaging McCain's military service; there doesn't seem to me a need for him to disparage the life choice of people who got their money by earning it. The Politics of PersonalityEd Kilgore, reflecting on the lessons of John Edwards' campaign, makes an interesting observation: While no one will ever know how Edwards would have fared had he won Iowa, his campaign ultimately appealed to the same kind of voters he won in 2004 with a very different message: moderate-to-conservative white men. His exceptional weakness among African-Americans, in 2008 as in 2004, provides a cautionary tale about the breadth of appeal of "populism." But doesn't this seem like an unduly narrow reading of the point? Edwards adopted a very different political and policy approach in 2008 from what he did in 2004, but the results were very similar. The interesting fact here is that neither policy shifts nor messaging shifts trump the basic fact that the core constituency for a southern white dude is moderate-to-conservative white men. This is one of these things that everyone kinda sorta knows, but that often seems to drop out of the picture when it's being discussed. On The RoadI'm traveling today to a Liberty Fund conference. Bloggy goodness should continue throughout the day, but I may wind up a bit off the news if something important happens. Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports that security is re-deteriorating in Iraq according to "Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent." Pundit on Pundit ActionThe oft-mocked David Broder does us all an enormous services and writes the name of another Washington Post columnist: Unelected conservative ideologues -- such as Rush Limbaugh and George F. Will-- can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: "If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president -- and president-in-waiting." The unwritten first rule of the op-ed page -- you do not talk about other writers on the op-ed page -- has long struck me as in need of revision. If Broder can use his "dean" status to knock this wall down, good for him. You Might Call It "The Audacity of Hope"Jon Chait and Harold Meyerson both nail down what, to me, is the fundamental political case for Obama -- that to pick Hillary Clinton would be to reconcile ourselves to playing between the 49 yard lines at a time when it looks feasible to open the game up and throw downfield. Harold even comes up with an appropriately nice to the Clintons analogy: I've turned to a book Michael wrote 23 years ago -- "Exodus and Revolution," and its discussion of why the Jews had to spend 40 years in the desert before they could reach the promised land. It's hard to imagine more thankless tasks than organizing for George McGovern in Texas or bearing the torch of progressive politics in late-1970s and early-1980s Arkansas. And of course Bill Clinton really did take the lessons learned from winning in that inhospitable territory and put the Democratic Party back in the White House. From that vantage point, he governed well and proved to a country that had come to doubt it that Democrats could be trusted to run the federal government. But is 2008 the hour of Mark Penn? I don't see it. Bowden on InterrogationsSpencer Ackerman's trying an interesting experiment called "sources holler back" where he says that "from time to time I'll share with you the responses I get to my work from my sources, pending their approval, in the interest of providing a more in-depth airing of the issues I'm reporting on." Thus I note that in response to his piece on CIA interrogation policy, John Sullivan, longtime CIA polygrapher, complains: In your article, you made no mention of Michael Koubi, the legendary Israeli interrogator. May I refer you to Mark Bowden’s interview, "The Truth About Torture," that appeared in the September 11, 2003 Atlantic Monthly and his related article, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 2003. If I wanted to learn something about interrogating Arabs, Israel is the first place I would go. Thanks to our newly-free archives, you can read "The Truth About Torture" and "The Dark Art of Interrogation" along with Bowden's more recent, torture-free interrogation piece "The Ploy". The Price of GoogleAdam Thierer's making some other point in this post but his chart comparing the market capitalization of new to old media firms is fascinating. Did you know, for example, that at $214 billion the market capitalization of Google is about seven times that of the entire American newspaper sector ($31 billion)? Now admittedly, in part that just shows that the newspaper sector is small. But it also certainly reminds me of the circumstances that prevailed before the AOL-Time Warner merger (speaking of which, Time Warner's market cap is a bit below $60 billion). Maybe Google's just hugely overvalued. Or maybe not. Maybe this points the way to the future of news operations. Maybe after another decades of attrition pure aggregation functions like Google News won't work so well since there's so little actual news being written. Maybe the continued decline of newspapers will start to be a drag on the blogosphere. Maybe a newspaper chain gets picked up for a song as a kind of loss-leader for Google News, Google Reader, and Blogger. Or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about -- why, after all, would you take business advice from me? Post as PravdaDean Baker makes the analogy. As far as it pertains to the editorial page, I think it holds up pretty well. All The Pretty Communists
One genre of journalism I'm always very suspicious of starts with the observation that there appears to be a trend toward such and such, tosses off maybe an anecdote or two, then leaps to a broad sociological explanation of the trend's existence. Missing is any effort to quantify the extent or reality of the trend itself. Case in point, Anne Applebaum's article about how capitalism causes hot Russian women. She starts by saying that in the 1990s, one started to see a lot of hot Russian women around whereas "Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude." I looked it up and someone who has "pulchritude" is, roughly speaking, an attractive person. Thus the time has come to answer a question posed by a male friend of Applebaum's "where were they all before?" Her answer: Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics. This seems really, really dubious to me. Among other things, the contention that "there weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them" seems oddly gullible about Soviet claims to have created an egalitarian paradise. Surely there were high-ranking powerful party officials to seek out beautiful women and marry them. The idea that the Soviet entertainment industry was entirely insensitive to the basic principles of attracting an audience seems, likewise, bizarre. Zhanna Prokhorenko playing the love interest in Ballad of a Soldier certainly seems like an attractive woman to me. Here's a review essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film: Besides rejecting political rhetoric and monumental, classical cinematography, the films of the thaw also rejected the sexless, puritanical Soviet representation of love on the screen, reclaiming the body and a youthful, healthy sexuality––rather modest by today’s standards, but liberating for the times. After changing his mind on using the professional actors he had cast, Chukhrai picked two very young, unknown acting students, matching a prototypical, blond, open-faced, and handsome Russian everyman with a (Ukrainian-named) Slavic beauty; her luminous eyes, pouty lips, full figure and long glorious hair are often filmed with a halo effect. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Alyosha’s and Shura’s faces and her billowing hair are superimposed over the pure Russian birch forest the train is passing as they are finally able to exchange their unspoken expressions of love. Most likely, the change Applebaum is trying to explain is just something that hasn't actually changed. Instead, part of the Cold War dynamic was that most of the Russians a Westerner might see or interact with were government officials, who tended to be middle aged men rather than attractive young women. The idea that the Communist Party somehow managed to create a society in which "there was no market for female beauty" is pretty fantastical -- about on a par with the notion that the Party was going to create a New Soviet Man. Fare Thee Well, HegemonyNow that I read it, I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments made by Parag Khanna in his "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" article in The New York Times Magazine. However, in the interests of sobriety it's worth flagging two important caveats. One is that one shouldn't understate the extent to which the US/EU/China "big three" is still an unequal triad. The United States is a lot richer than China. We have a much larger and more competent military establishment. And while China is beginning to play a global role, we have much more deeply entrenched relationships with countries in every region of the world -- including places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in China's back yard. Meanwhile the EU, were it a cohesive nation-state, would be an extremely mighty power. But it isn't one. When Europe acts with common purpose, it's a very influential player, and it's every bit America's equal in certain commerce-related aspects of international relations where this happens, but Europe simply has much less institutional capacity to act in this way than does the United States. On top of that, the big thing to keep in mind when considering any particular "declinist" thesis about American hegemony is that we've actually been on the decline for a good long while. In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled and Robert Keohane's After Hegemony, a study of America's efforts to forge a diplomatic system to continue to get bye in this new world actually came out decades ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a kind of illusion of a return to hegemony since international politics had been organized as "USA or USSR" for so long, but all along throughout the postwar period other countries have been gaining in importance. What happens, I think, is that whenever the United States makes policy blunders such as Vietnam or Iraq, the fact that hegemony has been slowly slipping through our fingertips for decades suddenly becomes apparent. But we're still the most important country out there, our economy's still growing in absolute terms, and when our country implements sound policies the whole issue fades into the background. That said Khanna is fundamentally correct that the United States is not the be-all and end-all of world affairs and that it's increasingly possible to imagine important diplomatic and commercial endeavors being undertaken that we're not involved with. As Kevin Drum remarked "it's a useful article if only because it's so rare to see foreign policy pieces in the mainstream media that aren't almost completely America-centric" and it's fascinating and refreshing to see a take on world affairs that's not dominated by a "pro-American reformer versus anti-American despot -- go!" narrative. Revisiting False PopulismI'd like to revisit the false populism issue from Bush's State of the Union address the other night. Obviously, the Colombia Free Trade pact is hardly the most important thing in the world (Colombia's just too small for this to make a big impact on the US economy one way or the other), but the claim that "If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere" is an excellent example of the complete lack of strategic thought that characterizes this administration. James Poulos, like me, didn't understand how Hugo Chavez would be emboldened by our failure to ratify the agreement. Daniel Larison explains: It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild. That’s clear, isn’t it? That's really it, though. In Bush world, first you set out to do something. Then if that thing seems to not be working out or causing problems, what you need to do is do it again harder. Anything else, after all, would only embolden the bad guys. It's that simple and it's that dumb. John McCain, Grand StrategistI've written a bit about John McCain apparent ignorance of economic policy, but it's also worth noting the vacuity of his thoughts on national security. Check out this farce flagged by Kevin Drum and Steve Benen: John McCain says in almost every stump speech that he knows how to capture Osama bin Laden and that he'd follow the al Qaeda leader to the "Gates of Hell." On the small issue of fighting al-Qaeda, in short, he has no ideas whatsoever. Instead, he has a silly slogan about the gates of hell. Macho posturing? Check. Ideas about keeping the country safer? Not so much. But he's virtuous so who cares, right? Plus, though McCain may not know much about fighting al-Qaeda he really loves war which passes for statesmanship these days, I suppose. Fallows' Annotated State of the UnionA now annual tradition at The Atlantic presented for your reading pleasure. Official Super Bowl PredictionIt was clear to me that the Giants weren't going to beat the Green Bay Packers. But then again, it was also clear to me that the Giants weren't going to win their other two playoff games either. Thus, the mere fact that the preponderance of the available evidence strongly points in the direction of a Patriots win doesn't really prove anything. Thus, I predict that New England will wind up getting the loss they so richly deserve. Hayes' Case for ObamaTake a look at Chris Hayes' case for Barack Obama in The Nation. I find it pretty convincing but, of course, I was already convinced so what does that prove? We're Number ThreeYet another al-Qaeda number three man killed. I'm too tired to make a joke February 1, 2008Finally, The WarI didn't see the debate. But I espy an emerging consensus. Here's Mark Ambinder: I was tempted to call this encounter a draw but I am mindful that there are no zero sum debates in presidential politics. And twenty minutes of Iraq happened. And so I’ll give Obama the edge. Clinton was forced, for about 20 minutes, to recapitulate her vote on Iraq, over and over again. It was tough for her. She seemed to mire herself in the details of history. And here's Spencer Ackerman: The debate was tepid, very substantive and saw minimal distinction between Clinton and Obama. Then came Iraq. And it ceased to be close. I remember way back in 2005 thinking that contrary to the then-prevailing conventional wisdom, Hillary Clinton wasn't going to be the nominee. It just seemed inevitable that someone who hadn't backed the war would be able to ride that issue to the finish line. In the intervening years that judgment came to look really bad. Not just because Clinton was on top of the polls, but because even though a strong challenger who hadn't backed the war had emerged, he wasn't really making that difference central to his campaign. More recently, though, it seems to have been getting more prominent play in Obama's message and I think that's got to play to his advantage. About That ReconciliationIt looks as if, as was widely expected in dovish quarters, Iraq's new de-Baathification law is proving unacceptable to Sunni Arabs, and Iraq's Sunni Vice President is saying he'll veto it. Meanwhile, if I've said it once I've said it a thousand times -- the states purpose of the surge was to lay the groundwork for political reconciliation, reconciliation looks further away than ever and the surge is about to run out of time. That's a failed policy. Chain of CommandIlan Goldenberg notes this crucial sentence from Tom Ricks: "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and top military officers have said they would like to see continued withdrawals throughout this year, but Bush has indicated he is likely to be guided by Petraeus's views." I hope we can keep this in mind in the future. It's clearly within Bush's right as President to decide that he doesn't agree with his key advisors on military policy and instead wants to give David Petraeus extra resources that Petraeus' superiors think could be better used elsewhere. But that's what Bush is doing. He's not being guided by "military advice" as opposed to political logic inside the Beltway. Just as he decided upon the surge in the first place and then set about firing the already-in-place generals who disagreed with it, he's again siding with a minority viewpoint. In this particular case, though, it's worth asking what probative value Petraeus' opinions are supposed to have. It seems to me that any officer in Petraeus' position would probably feel that more resources should go to his mission and fewer resources should go to someone else's mission. If he were in charge of Afghanistan wouldn't he want more troops there, too? That's not to say anything against the guy. But it's just common sense that you need to discount these kind of claims. The people in charge of the Navy want the Navy's budget to go up, and every member of congress things his district deserves more highway spending. JobsI feel like I'd been hearing vague news that the news jobs report was going to have good news. Instead, terrible news as the number of jobs actually shrinks. Normally in a bad jobs report you see slow growth that fails to keep up with the rate of population growth. More interest rate cuts to look forward too. Post: Shocked, Shocked By Mukasey on TortureThis Washington Post editorial on Michael Mukasey's "tortured testimony" would sit a whole lot better with me if the Post had taken the same line back during Mukasey's confirmation hearings. After all, all this was perfectly clear back then -- asked directly whether he would condemn torture as torture, he declined to do so. So why are we surprised when, as AG, he refuses to do it? There's some kind of weird sense in which to maintain your respectable Village ID card you need to both resolutely oppose torture and oppose all the political steps that might actually put a stop to it. Instead, you're supposed to have childlike faith that Bush and his henchmen are going to stop it themselves because, after all, they're sweet and wonderful people. Or something. Mandates: Eh?Here's a letter signed by eighty people many of whom have impressive sounding titles who say the mandate difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doesn't really amount to very much in the end. It's hard for me to judge if that's right or not -- there are clearly a bunch of folks who see things the other way. In practice, I think this may not matter just because of the way the legislative process works; the relevant question is what position on this matter has the support of on-the-fence congressmen. Strange PollingMy dad says he got surveyed yesterday by the Marist poll and that after asking him a bunch of questions about the primary campaign they asked him some questions about the Super Bowl and then some demographic questions and then a question about whether or not he uses any home health remedies. What do you think that could be about? RankingsThe conclusion reached by our sister publication National Journal that Barack Obama is the most liberal Senator yesterday is sure to get a lot of play down the road if Obama wins the nomination:
I've always been skeptical, though, of these sort of subjective assessments. An interest group ranking can be interesting because it tells you what's important to the interest group. But for a global assessment, I like the Poole/Rosenthal optimal classification method that uses math to look at all votes and sort the members of congress. They say that Obama is the eleventh most liberal member On The Other HandVia Ezra Klein, the Urban Institute concludes that whether o not a health care plan includes an individual mandate does make a big difference. ChurrascariamaniI was on an airplane yesterday and found myself leafing through American's in-flight magazine. Most of the advertising was about what I would have expected -- items that are useful when traveling and vacation destinations -- but there was a surprising quantity of advertising for churrascaria chains. Previously, Fogo de Chao had been the only churrascaria chain I was even aware of, but there turn out to be two or three other ones and they're all advertising in this one magazine. Seems odd to me. On top of that, just tons and tons of ads for dating services, which I kind of assumed didn't even exist anymore. I Didn't Think Interesting Memoirs Were AllowedVia Ezra Klein, Lincoln Chaffee's memoir really does seem pretty interesting. I think that violates some kind of rule which says that memoirs need to be written by people who obviously could shed fascinating light on important events but who then proceed to refuse to do so. Instead, here we have Linc Chaffee, who no one ever thinks about, saying interesting things. This on the Democrats, in particular, is all that surprising but still interesting to hear directly from a colleague: Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. "The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were," writes Chafee. "They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom. [...] It's always worth remembering that not everyone took that path. Carl Levin didn't. Russ Feingold didn't. Robert Byrd didn't. Lincoln Chaffee didn't. Opposition was possible, a lot of Democrats just didn't choose to avail themselves of the option. It's worth recalling that a vicious cycle emerged here. Lots of politicians wanted to vote for the war for political reasons. Lots of "experts" in the think tank world who wanted to boost their own careers therefore found it expedient to likewise trim their sales and talk a lot about the "right way" to invade Iraq for no good reason rather than emphasize how unlikely this "right way" was to emerge. That, however, helped build both public and elite support for the war, which further pressured politicians to get online. Friday Kennedy BloggingLike Scott Lemieux, I'm glad that Teddy Kennedy decided to endorse Barack Obama, but find this disturbing if true: Sources say Kennedy was privately furious at Clinton for her praise of President Lyndon Baines Johnson for getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act accomplished. Jealously guarding the legacy of the Kennedy family dynasty, Senator Kennedy felt Clinton's LBJ comments were an implicit slight of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who first proposed the landmark civil rights initiative in a famous televised civil rights address in June 1963. I suppose if I were a Kennedy I, too, would feel that helping to preserve the Myth of JFK was important. But the myth is just that -- a myth. Kennedy, like his immediate predecessor in the White House, was a diffident advocate of civil rights who obtained only meager results. Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, proposed and signed into law several hugely important pieces of legislation that forever changed the landscape of the United States. I'd also say, though, that this report strikes me as odd on a psychological level. I would think that of all the people in the world to realize that Ted Kennedy has been a far more effective and important advocate of progressive causes than JFK ever was, that Ted himself would be high on that list. Would he admit publicly that his brother's deification is largely undeserved? Of course no. But who isn't privately painfully aware of his family members' shortcomings? Juan McCainI hadn't heard about this before, but apparently it's all the rage in some conservative circles to refer to John McCain as "Juan McCain." It's Glenn Beck, but it's not just Beck by any means. The idea, it seems, is that to call someone a Spanish name is a witty and cutting insult. After all, he likes immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have Spanish names. You can meet us in your neighborhoods or even read our blogs. It's sad to think someone somewhere might be calling Matt Church by my name as some kind of diss. Clarke on FearVia Adam Blickstein, Richard Clarke (who was worrying about al-Qaeda long before George W. Bush) has a great op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer eviscerating the president's arguments on FISA: For this president, fear is an easier political tactic than compromise. With FISA, he is attempting to rattle Congress into hastily expanding his own executive powers at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional protections. [...] It's striking that at the same time Bush thinks we need to ditch the constitution and basic principles of good government in order to fight al-Qaeda, he remains totally uninterested in orienting our foreign policy toward this goal. Instead today, just as it's been throughout his administration, the bulk of our policies reflects an unwillingness and inability to set priorities. We need to be mired in Iraq indefinitely, says Bush. We need to pick new fights with Iran, says Bush. We need missile defense and Virginia Class submarines and F-22. Nothing shall be compromised in order to better position ourselves against al-Qaeda. Nothing but the rule of law and our civil liberties. Pau!Wow. Pau Gasol and a second round pick heading to LA in exchange for Kwame Brown, Jarvis Crittenton, and future first-round picks in 2008 and 2010. I'd have to say the Lakers' shot at a championship just got a lot better. Bias, Anyone?Dave Roberts notes that last night's CNN debate was the fourth such debate sponsored by a coal industry front group, and that, coincidentally enough, none of the four coal-funded debate broadcasts featured any questions about climate change. Your liberal media in action. The Meta ProblemUh oh. Here's a frightening post from Kevin Drum in which he suggests that both Barack Obama and HIllary Clinton spent the national security session of the debate unduly fixated on the "meta" issue of who could best make arguments about national security without either of them actually making an argument. There does seem to be some truth to that. Here's Barack Obama, for example: The question is: Can we make an argument that this was a conceptually flawed mission, from the start? Now I agree with what Obama is saying here. I think it's important to make the argument that this was conceptually flawed from the start, and I do think Obama's better-positioned to make that argument. But he's not actually making the argument here. He's talking about the possibility of making the argument. He's got an advantage in pressing this argument against Clinton because Clinton, in this context, doesn't want to really portray herself as a war supporter so given the inherently awkward position she's in, any extended discussion of this issue winds up cutting in Obama's favor. But McCain is really going to stand there and say that he said at the time we needed to send more troops to Iraq, that the problems were caused by George W. Bush's unwillingness to listen to him, and that once more troops were sent the situation got better. Obama's going to need to defend the proposition that McCain's wrong about all this. I took a stab at making the argument a while back with Sam Rosenfeld. For now, I think what Obama's saying is serving is present purposes fairly well. But in the future, something deeper and more first-order is going to have to come into play from either candidate. Waiting for Gore
Now that MoveOn's decided to endorse Barack Obama there's really and truly not much out there worth having in endorsementland except the grand prize of Al Gore. Josh Green steps up to the plate with the breathless speculation you crave: On the other hand, Obama is now close enough to a big win that Gore’s endorsement could easily put him over the top. Gore is beloved among Democratic primary voters. His staunch denials have been unusually effective in tamping down speculation that he’ll endorse, so an announcement would be earthshaking and guaranteed to dominate the airwaves until the February 5 primaries. Take Tennessee, Gore’s home state, which could wind up making the difference. Democratic polling there is somewhat sparse, especially that done after John Edwards’s withdrawal. But Tennessee looks to be a state in which Clinton currently holds a lead—that is, unless a certain favorite son were to endorse her opponent. I think that's persuasive. On the other hand, I've never been totally sure where the widespread assumption that Gore prefers Obama has come from. I understand the basis for the idea that there are important Gore-Clinton tensions, but at the same time Gore seems like very much the sort of person who might be sufficiently persuaded by Clinton's arguments about experience, etc. that he just doesn't have strong feelings about the race. A Conservative for McCainJonah Goldberg chiding his fellow NROniks for their McCain-bashing seems pretty persuasive to me. I don't like John McCain, and I can see why he's not the conservatives' favorite, but he's clearly a conservative and one with high electoral appeal so it's not clear to me why you'd throw a fit over the prospect of him running. Then again, I actually think it's strange that Goldberg is the one with sensible views on this. Working within the frame of Goldberg's expansive definition of "fascism" I think it's pretty clear that John McCain comes much closer than any other major American political figure to fitting the bill. He offers a pure kind of politics-as-salvation where we're supposed to find a higher purpose through submission to the needs of the Nation. He doesn't just pay lip service to supporting the troops, he clearly believes that military service -- preferable in wartime -- is more virtuous than other pursuits (thus his dissing of Mitt Romney's business background) and he's thus sometimes led to seem to see war as a worthwhile end-in-itself. February 2, 2008The View From My WindowThe scene at my mysterious undisclosed location:
Fed PowerI think that, empirically speaking, the evidence that our independent Federal Reserve system works well is pretty strong. The current combination of deep concern about an economic slowdown in a presidential election year does, however, remind us of how much power has been concentrated in an office with little political accountability. After all, one huge factor in November's election is just going to be what decisions Ben Bernanke makes about interest rates over the next few months. Insofar as he's worried about the medium-term risk of inflation, that's good news for the Democrats. Of course, putting the Fed under tighter political supervision doesn't do anything to solve this problem. Still, it strikes me as an under-remarked-upon feature of our political system. ¡Obama!Barack Obama snags the endorsement of La Opinion, LA's large circulation spanish newspaper. John McCain (or "Juan McCain", as Glenn Beck calls him) unsurprisingly gets the nod on the GOP side. Honor Bites BackYuval Levin offers what is, I think, an insightful analysis of the problem with John McCain's approach to domestic policy issues and, indeed, I'd say all issues: On domestic issues, McCain’s problem is not that his views are too far from the public’s. It’s that he simply doesn’t care about any of the issues on the table. In fact (as I argue in next week’s issue of National Review) McCain doesn’t actually seem to care about any political “issues” at all. He is moved by honor and country, and this has driven him to be passionately active on a few domestic fronts, but for different reasons than those that motivate just about every other politician. (A misunderstanding of this point has, I think, been behind much of the often excessive distress at McCain’s apparent ascendancy in some quarters of the right this week). And he has not found a way to understand, say, health care in terms of honor, honesty, or character. So even though his campaign has offered a very strong conservative proposal for health care reform, McCain seems incapable of talking about it as though it were even remotely significant. Ross agrees and says it's "another difficulty with a politics that takes "national greatness" as its touchstone and heroism as its defining virtue - it breeds a disinterest, or even an impatience, with the more quotidian (but nonetheless crucial) aspects of policy and governance." But, look, the problem's worse than that. For a good long while now the Republican Party has been pushing an approach to economic policy that is contrary to the interests of most Americans. So how do they win office? Well, primarily by being a political party that's appealing in lots of other ways -- foreign policy and cultural hot-buttons, yes, but also a lot of stuff about character. In particular, character arguments were central to George W. Bush's critique of Al Gore and John Kerry and, indeed, were about all there was to Bob Dole's 1996 campaign. This has tended to work well as a tactic because the press is a great venue for transmitting character attacks but a terrible venue for transmitting issue attacks because reporters mostly don't understand issues and even when they do they pretend not to. It's been an effective political strategy. But one thing it does is open the door wide open to someone like John McCain who really and truly doesn't seem to have opinions about policy questions. The very same conservative opinion-mongering institutions that are so frightened of McCain are the very ones that played a key role in shifting the conversation in 2000 and 2004 to the politics of honor and character. And so they get McCain and they really lack the context to make the point that it's a problem that his thinking is so muddled and unclear. The Difference?David Leonhardt previews Barack Obama's approach to economic policy. He notes that "Indeed, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton hold similar or identical positions on a host of economic issues, and Democratic economists not aligned with either campaign often speak positively about both." Quite true, I think. He tries to sex things up by observing that "the two candidates offer strikingly different strategies for achieving their economic agendas." To me, though, the argument on that score is pretty unconvincing. When you control for the fact that it would sound silly for the candidates to just agree that they don't really have clear disagreements on the main issues, I mostly see two campaigns trying to make mountains out of molehills for the sake of having something to talk about. What's more, in practice there's only so much that "strategies for achieving" your legislative agenda can actually do. What matters most is not the strategy but the outcome of the congressional elections. The Surge of KagansSpencer Ackerman points out that Victoria Nuland, author of an op-ed on Afghanistan in The Washington Post, is actually . . . a Kagan by marriage! Specifically, she's Bob Kagan's wife. The McCain FactorEd Kilgore notes one beneficial impact of John McCain's emergence as the likely Republican nominee: It was most noticeable on the immigration issue, where the cramped defensiveness of past exchanges gave way to a wonkathon that mostly centered on the question of the extent to which illegal immigrants are depressing low-end wages (though Wolf Blitzer made every effort to drag the candidates back to the tedious and highly misleading question of drivers' licences). The simple reality is that John McCain's history on immigration reform largely takes the issue off the table in a general election contest. It could still play hell in down-ballot races, but unless McCain does a full-scale massive flip-flop, immigrant-bashing won't be a major feature of the presidential discussion. This even has some influence on the Democratic primary, since Barack Obama's campaign seems to have been emboldened to take a clear position against turning DMV officers into a locus of immigration enforcement in a way that's helped him secure the endorsement of La Opinion and perhaps of Latino voters. One very interesting question is how this will play out on the subject of climate change. In one possible universe, the fact that having John McCain as your opponent takes pure denialism off the table opens up a scenario where you have a debate between a timid strategy for tackling climate change and a bold strategy for doing the same. Thus, the political center of gravity shifts in a good direction. But in another possible universe, both sides vaguely pay lip service to the climate change either but neither really talks about it and the press just kind of writes this off as something on which McCain and Clinton/Obama basically agree. US Senate: Where Religious Minorities Are LovedIt seems to me that Mitt Romney's Mormonism has probably been a significant impediment to his presidential campaign. And yet, as this article about a Mormon leader's funeral makes clear, there are actually tons of successful LDS politicians. Indeed, we have five LDS Senators right now -- Gordon Smith, Harry Reid, Bob Bennett, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Crapo -- and it's pretty likely that they'll be joined by two more, Mark Udall and and Tom Udall after the election. Meanwhile, Wikipedia says there are thirteen Jewish senators. Considering that Jews and Mormons combined have to be less than five percent of the population, that's pretty astounding. |
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