« January 27, 2008 - February 2, 2008 | Main | February 10, 2008 - February 16, 2008 » February 3, 2008 - February 9, 2008 ArchivesFebruary 3, 2008Skipping TownI don't imagine there are many people leaving Arizona on this fine Super Bowl Sunday, but I'm one of the few. If I don't miss my connection in Dallas, I should even get home in time for the game. Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that God hates me and I'll miss my connection. Odom at the ThreeOne question that arose about the new Pau-ered Lakers is how effective they can be with Lamar Odom at the three. Some evidence is provided by the 82games.com's five man units page for the Lakers. Their most popular lineup this season has been Fisher-Bryant-Walton-Odom-Bynum. Second most popular has been Fisher-Bryant-Walton-Odom-Brown. But their third most popular lineup -- Fisher-Bryant-Odom-Radmanovic-Bynum -- has actually been more effective than either of those two. And Pau Gasol is a clear step up from Radmanovic, so I think they'll be fine. California DreamingThe latest polling has things very close in California with some even showing a lead for Barack Obama. Exciting stuff. It is worth noting that given the vagaries of the delegate allocation process, the odds overwhelmingly favor the February 5 outcome being fairly indecisive. InnovationDFW airport appears to have discovered an as-yet-unknown-to-me way of making air travel unpleasant -- there are no electrical outlets anywhere. At first, I'd thought this was just a particular instance of the common airport phenomenon of insufficient outlets. But no -- there are these power charging stations where you can pay money and charge up your iPod, cell phone, laptop, whatever. Nice work. It makes you wonder why they let you use the restrooms for free. Both in the airport and on the plane, that's a potentially lucrative profit center. Nobody?Here's an interesting tidbit from Mark Penn's latest strategy memo: "No one believes that if Hillary had been president she would have started the war." I don't have an incredibly firm view on the counterfactual here. After all, it's a bit hard to specify a scenario in which Hillary Clinton would have been president in the spring of 2003. But when Bush did start the war, Hillary surely could have said that despite her vote to authorize him to start a war she believed he was making a mistake in doing so. She didn't do that. She didn't say that in March of 2003, and she didn't say it in April of 2003 and she didn't say it in May of 2003. To the best of my knowledge, she didn't start saying anything of the sort until years after the invasion had happened. So I hardly think it's wildly unreasonable to take her statements, actions, and silences at face value and say she thought Bush was more-or-less doing what she would have done in his position. Or maybe not. I lot of people I know are convinced that Hillary did, in fact, all along believe that Bush was committing a huge strategic blunder but that she pretended not to believe that because she thought it was important to her presidential ambitions. I don't think I really buy that. Among other things, I don't think Clinton would have thought that backing a huge strategic blunder would help her presidential ambitions. Insofar as she thought the war was politically savvy, that would almost certainly have been related to a view that the war wasn't a huge substantive error. But either way, if Mark Penn thinks his candidate was only pretending to approve of Bush's conduct he ought to say so plainly. Clearly, she wasn't a major critic of his conduct at the time. Elections and DemocracyYes it's true, elections alone don't make a democracy. So why does western policy often seem myopically focused on elections? I used to wonder about this until I heard a wise man (but I can't quite remember who, I think he worked at Carnegie, though) explain that the international community tends to overemphasize this point because that's what we know how to do. If a government sincerely wants to run a free and fair election, we can help make that happen. We can give political parties advice about how to organize. We can monitor elections and have a pretty good system for assessing them. When it comes to elections, we know what we're doing. The rest . . . well, we know that the rest is very important. The rule of law, in particular, is crucial. But while have have a lot of knowledge about, say, the rule of law we don't have much know-how about instilling it elsewhere. So you see a lot of emphasis on elections. Touchdown!Woo! Go Giants! February 4, 2008The Celebrity FactorMaybe it's just me, but I'm not quite as taken with this now-famous Obama video as everyone: In particular, I'm always made uncomfortable for the celebrification of progressive politics in the United States. I think it's nice that a certain number of rich celebrities like progressive causes in the United States and certainly I encourage them to both use their richness to provide direct financial support to such causes and also, perhaps, to deploy their social connections to encourage other rich people they may know (rich people tend to know lots of rich people) to do the same. But to what extent do they really need to be putting themselves forward as the public face of a political candidacy? Are these people supporting good groups that are doing important work? Helping to build an infrastructure of progressive ideas and communications channels? Mostly, the answer is no. And yet a lot of them are really in a position to make a different rather than make a music video. Bad OmenObama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor put this out yesterday: A reminder - seven years ago, a patriotic group of Americans had to make a choice between conventional experience and change they desperately needed. It wasn’t an easy decision. Both options were compelling in their own right, but when it was time to make a decision, the choice was clear. The New England Patriots started Tom Brady over Drew Bledsoe, and Brady went on to be the MVP of Super Bowl XXXVI. Now that’s change we can believe in. No they can't! Swarthy GermansLuis Rumbaut adds some valuable perspective to the immigration debate by citing some of Ben Franklin's thoughts on the horrors of the US being overrun by German immigrants: [W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Seems like a good time to mention Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White. Obviously, it's about Irish people rather than Germans, but the pattern throughout American history is striking. On PointI should be on NPR's On Point talking about the youth vote pretty soon. DeLong and the DevilDon't miss Brad DeLong's strident defense of The Devil Wears Prada. McCain-HuckabeeIt seems to me that Mike Huckabee would be a smart VP choice for John McCain. Friday night, I pitched the idea to some libertarians at the same conference with me and they thought it was a terrible idea. Not just substantively frightening, but politically deadly as well. Indeed, some accused me of arguing in bad faith, dreaming of Huck sinking the GOP ticket. To me, this only makes the case more compelling. As a guide to cynical electoral politics "do what the libertarians are telling you not to do" seems like a pretty sound rule of thumb. Parades and TurnoutIt seems to me that the Giants' victory celebration tomorrow in New York, coinciding with primaries in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut is probably bad news for Barack Obama. Football fans, like Obama supporters, are going to be disproportionately male. A Substantive Post About AfghanistanPithlord requested a substantive post about Afghanistan the other day, and I think he's right to call for one. The main contribution to the debate that I think needs to be made is that beyond concrete matters about weapons, money, etc. the United States badly needs to undertake some gesture of commitment and investment to the mission in Afghanistan. We need our NATO allies to do more in Afghanistan. My sense is that a lot of NATO government officials are sympathetic to that message. But as I saw when I was across the Atlantic, European (and, I believe, Canadian) politicians feel enormous from their publics to do less. In this context, it's an incredible problem for politicians who'd like to be helpful to us that they can't very credibly point to Afghanistan and say "hey! look! this is a huge priority for the United States! it's really important to our bilateral relationship to show that we're valuable allies!" After all, not only is Iraq getting the lions share of American troops and money, it's taking up a wildly disproportionate share of the mindspace. Our commanding general in Iraq is a huge celebrity, relentlessly touted by leading politicians. Nobody can even name his counterpart in Afghanistan. And meanwhile, the president openly brags about how he likes to take the advice of his theater commander over the advice of all his superiors as to how US forces should be deployed. It all gives the impression of a country that cares a great deal about Iraq and thinks of Afghanistan as a backwater. Well, no European country is going to roll up its sleeves and pitch in in Iraq. And insofar as we don't seem to care about Afghanistan, it's difficult for them to care more than us. After all, it was the United States that got attacked from Afghanistan, and it was from Afghanistan that the United States got attacked. I can't speak at all to logistics, details, how many brigades would it be useful or feasible to switch from one theater to the next. But in broad political terms, I think it's crucial that the next president put down some very real markers of commitment, and even important that people running for president now indicate that this will be their policy. A Friendly RivalryHere's an important observation from Mark Kleiman: Here's a cheerful finding from the Pew poll: neither Obama's unfavorables among Clinton voters (now 30%) nor Clinton's unfavorables among Obama voters (now 31%) have been rising noticeably . So it looks as if (so far) the bitterness of the battle is largely restricted to the political junkies who read and write blogs. This jibes with my experience of talking to not-so-political folks. It also, I think, explains a lot of the volatility in the race. You have a large number of people who like both candidates and, as a consequence, can very easily be swayed from one to the other by relatively minor turns of events. Volume ThreeI think it's possible that, as a society, we've moved past recognizing that the Clipse is awesome and onward to a Clipse-backlash phase. But I still say they're awesome. And now you can stream We Got it for Cheap Volume Three up on their website. The BillTom Shanker reports for The New York Times that the Pentagon's $515.4 billion budget request means that if it's approved "annual military spending, when adjusted for inflation, will have reached its highest level since World War II." Indeed, that's an understatement because that figure "does not include supplemental spending on the war efforts or on nuclear weapon." Basically, military spending is way, way, way higher than it was during World War II since there's little reason to think that spending on a war shouldn't be counted as military spending. Now the country is obviously much richer than it was in the early 1940s so we can afford this kind of extravagance if the broader geopolitical context justifies it. But does it?
That above is a chart Ezra Klein made based on 2005 data. Little about that context suggests to me that we needed to add much more money than the entire Chinese defense budget to our own spending. It's worth keeping in mind the next time you hear that the country "can't afford" to do something or other. We can afford plenty when it's something that political and economic elites want us to spend money on. What It Don't Get I Can't UseA correspondent observed with regard to my post on the US Senate's affection for Mormons and Jews that the crux of the matter here may be that there are tons and tons of rich people in the Senate, and Mormons and Jews are a much larger swathe of the "rich people" population subset than we are of the general population. That seems plausible. Mother Versus SonAn interesting Son/Mother exchange on the Obama or Clinton question up at N + 1's website does a great job, I think, of highlighting both the arguments and the underlying dynamics in play. Money for NothingA friend points out to me that both John McCain and Barack Obama have agreed to accept matching funds and abide by spending limits for the general election if their opponent also agrees to do so. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made no such pledge. If you're a hard-core campaign finance reformer I guess this is a reason to support Obama. But if you're a normal person, it looks like a strategic mistake on Obama's part; he'd seem to be forfeiting a potentially large financial advantage. This gets especially problematic when you think about the intervention of outside groups. It's fairly easy for, say, a group of insurance companies to just decide to each pony up some cash and run ads attacking a candidate who they think is bad for their interests. By contrast, it's hard to see Obama's small- and mid-sized donor base spontaneously organizing itself into a viable independent expenditure group. The Pundit's Lament
Marc Ambinder posts the following data from Pew along with the observation that it shows us that "Republicans like McCain." And indeed they do. Which, from the viewpoint of professional status, is pretty depressing news. After all, conservative pundits hate John McCain. But if conservative pundits can't make self-identified Republicans dislike John McCain then maybe all pundits everywhere are powerless. I could try to console myself with the view that maybe Bill Kristol is just incredibly persuasive but I doubt that's right. Rather, I think the tendency is for people who participate in the political media to drastically to drastically overstate its importance. After all, the only people who pundits can affect are the relatively small number of people who consume political punditry. What's more, the consumers of political punditry are, by definition, people with an unusually strong interest in politics. But the people most open to persuasion are the people who don't take a strong interest in politics. On top of all that, I think Kevin Drum's right that strident campaigning by a pundit tends to be ineffective and annoying. Anyone who's undecided is undecided because their gut tells them it's a close call. Table-pounding does more to suggest that the pounder lacks perspective than it does to persuade. But if to be effective you can only try to nudge people gently, then it's just going to be very difficult to have a large effect. Blog EndorsementsMickey Kaus comes out in favor of Hillary Clinton, arguing convincingly that if you want to stop sensible, humane immigration reform a Clinton victory is your best shot. This seems right to me. The best scenario for immigration reform would be for Democrats to gain congressional seats and John McCain to be elected president. Kevin Drum, meanwhile, decides to back Obama. The National Picture
Here's Pollster.com's summary of the state of the race on the eve of super-duper-enormous Tuesday. There are kind of two ways you can look at this chart. One is that Clinton's had about the same level of support forever and now that it's a two person race the undecideds will break against the de facto incumbent and Obama wins. Another is that Clinton's maintaining a small lead and will probably secure a narrow victory tomorrow that takes the wind out of Obama's sails and leaves her victorious. As is frequently the case in America's oddly arbitrary candidate selection process, an enormous amount hinges not on the objective results tomorrow but on the reporting of the results. The ambiguity between the results viewed as a race for delegates, as a race for states, and as a race for the semi-national Feb 5 popular vote only increases the extent to which basically made-up media narratives will be very important. Given that he usually gets good press, Obama probably has the edge in terms of winning a spin war in the event of an ambiguous outcome. The God FactorI just heard David Tyree on CBS news attributing his astounding catch to . . . God. I guess it's not really my place to say, but I always find this idea that God is intervening in the big game sort of bizarre. Beyond the theological implications, it's sort of like saying the games are all rigged. February 5, 2008Wittgenstein and the Super BowlMichael Bérubé provides a Wittgensteinian account of the NFL rules governing the number of players who may be on the field. Reminiscent of Michael Frayn on the fog-like sensations. Go VoteJust a little reminder that if you live in a Super Awesome Incredible Tuesday state you should go vote today. And if you don't live in such a state but do know people who do, you should exhort them to vote. Participation is essential. CA DelegatesAs Marc Ambinder lays out here, it's extremely difficult for one candidate to gain a large delegate advantage over her opponent as long as there are only two candidates in the field and both have substantial bases of support. In particular in a congressional district that's been allocated an even number of delegates, you need to win a big supermajority in order to avoid an even split of the delegates. The Trouble With the Defense BudgetTo be clear about something, the big problem with America's sky-high Pentagon budget isn't merely that it's big -- we're obviously capable of spending this much without wrecking the national economy and we have, in the past, spent a higher share of our economy on this stuff -- it's that so much of it is so clearly unnecessary. Fred Kaplan notes, for example, that the iron laws of inter-service rivalry dictate that the money be split up almost exactly evenly between the Army, Air Force, and Navy irrespective of need: As I have noted before (and, I'm sure, will again), the budget has been divvied up this way, plus or minus 2 percent, each and every year since the 1960s. Is it remotely conceivable that our national-security needs coincide so precisely — and so consistently over the span of nearly a half-century — with the bureaucratic imperatives of giving the Army, Air Force, and Navy an even share of the money? Again, the question answers itself. As the Army's budget goes up to meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force's and Navy's budgets have to go up by roughly the same share, as well. It would be a miracle if this didn't sire a lot of waste and extravagance. What's more, as Kevin Drum argues it's not as if this has been accomplished by each service coming up with brilliant-but-expensive ways to fight terrorism. Rather, the rigid budget formula has been matched by rigid adherence to an R&D and procurement process developed in order to fight a large-scale war with a peer competitor like the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, you saw some rationale shifting and arguments about the need to to use this stuff to fight China (which has a relatively tiny military establishment, no real capacity to project power, and unlike the Soviet Union isn't really in a contest for global hegemony with the US anyway) and then after 9/11 you still sometimes hear that and you sometimes just get told we need this stuff to fight terrorism. And of course in a super-simplistic way, it's probably true that all else being equal having an extra F-22 Raptor is better for counter-terrorism purposes than not having it. But in the real world when you add up your F-22s and your missile defense systems and your DDG1000 and your Virgina Class submarines and all the rest little else is equal. This stuff is extremely expensive. So expensive, in fact, that to keep the purchasing order for it we wind up not actually procuring enough of the new equipment to fully replace our old stuff. We could lower our horizons a bit and make due with buying new and only-slightly-improved versions of existing military hardware (which, after all, seems to work pretty well when it's not old and broken) and save tons of money for other priorities. And don't just blame Bush, of course. Ike Skelton, the top House Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, released a statement yesterday calling Bush's budget request "a good and necessary increase." Meanwhile, proposals embraced by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to increase the number of ground troops in the military could be a good idea if this was done by shifting some spending from these not-so-necessary weapons programs over to manpower needs, but as a pure increase that rather than being offset will drive further increases in Air Force and Navy budgets to preserve the formula it just further entrenches the problem. At any rate, Fred Kaplan's book, Daydream Believers which is out now, goes into a bunch of this. He also notes that things get even worse when, in essence, policymakers start believing the propaganda associated with this kind of graft-driven endless buildup of equipment. The Bush administration, in particular, as Kaplan argues seems to have pointed out that this seemingly-useless policy of ensuring an ever-widening gap between US technological capabilities and those of any possible adversary must in fact have been super-useful -- maybe it would allow us to totally remake the ground-rules of the international order! Regime change quick and cheap! Why not! Well, we know how that turned out. The Bush BudgetUnlike me, Judd Gregg is a U.S. Senator from the Republican Party, so you can expect him to be relatively sympathetic to George W. Bush's budget request for Fiscal Year 2009, dubbed "Managing for Results". Instead, he says: "There's a lot of games, smoke, mirrors, incomplete numbers, basically there's not much realism'" in the budget, Senator Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said in an interview. "They're playing the usual games." In Bush's defense, however, it should be said that all he's doing is actually proposing what conservatives are constantly saying should be done -- big increases in "regular" military spending combined with large expenditures on the war in Iraq combined with low taxes all made possible through the magic of reduced spending. So what did Bush come up with? Well, a proposal to have more Americans get sick and die: The proposal [. . .] would cut discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services by more than 2 percent in part by freezing the budget of the National Institutes of Health, which heads the government's medical research efforts. Depriving the population of health care and health care resources in order to make room in the budget for an indefinite military commitment to Iraq and the extension of tax cuts for rich people doesn't seem like a good idea to me, but apparently this is Bush's strategy for long-run economic growth. Clinton's Iraq Evolution
Spencer Ackerman has a great piece laying out Hillary Clinton's evolving views of Iraq over the years: Clinton’s statements during October 2002 have received much attention. But what she’s said in the intervening years demonstrates a vertigo-inducing lack of clarity. Her position tracked the political zeitgeist elegantly: cautiously in favor of the war before it started; enthusiastically in favor of it during its first year; overtaken with doubt during 2004; nervously against withdrawal in 2005; cautiously in favor of withdrawal ever since—and all without so much as an acknowledgment of her myriad repositioning. At no point did she challenge the prevailing assumptions behind the war. Spencer also, and correctly in my mind, draws an analogy between Clinton's ambiguous positioning on the war issue and that of John Kerry during the 2004 campaign: And there’s a final significance to Clinton’s turn against the war. In November, the Democratic nominee will probably face a Republican who believed deeply in the war, but who also repeatedly criticized the war’s execution—Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). McCain, a war hero, has national-security bona fides that few candidates possess. He will be able to inhabit the space Clinton has carved out for herself over the past two years: sober critic and skeptic of Bush. However, he’ll also be able to pounce on her inconsistency and vacillation, if Thursday’s debate is any indication, in a replay of the "flip-flopper" charge that doomed Kerry four years ago. Unlike Obama, Clinton will have no way of pivoting to a broader indictment of the militarism that McCain cheerfully espouses. It may be that, nearly six years after Clinton thought she had positioned herself to avoid all the pitfalls of the war, her calculation itself was what ultimately sealed the fate of her candidacy. Now an important caveat that I would add to Spencer's critique is that Barack Obama followed up his extremely smart October 2002 speech on Iraq with what amounted to several years worth of Clinton-style vacillation and CW-mongering. The Clinton campaign has emphasized at various points that her record on Iraq and Obama's record on Iraq are actually very similar. And they're quite right. Still, the different positions they took in 2002 do put these records in a different context and, I think, the advantage overall clearly goes to Obama. UPDATE: It should be said that my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand, deals extensively with issues in this neighborhood. At a time when the country is being governed by fundamentally misguided ideas, the finger-in-the-wind approach fails to generate arguments that operate on the correct level and make it difficult for opposition politicians to reap the benefits that ought to follow from the fact that Bush's ideas have had disastrous consequences. DOD photo of Hillary Clinton at Kirkuk Airbase taken by A1C Alicia M. Sarkkinen, USAF, 29 November 2003 Microsoft-YahooHave I said anything about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger? I tend to take Alex Tabarrok's view of anti-trust issues in such cases. When you hear Google complaining that the merger "would pose threats to competition that need to be examined by policy makers around the world" you have to think the reality here is that Google's worried the merger will make the search market more competitive. That said, Peter Swire's notion that the FTC oughtto examine the impact on privacy does make sense to me. The Party of LameOne slightly odd fact about the Clinton-Obama race is that it has such clear undertones of a cool versus uncool dynamic. Obama has "Yes We Can", Clinton has Celine Dion. Obama likes The Wire, Clinton likes Ugly Betty. Given that there are serious issues in play in the country -- war, health care, climate change -- it all seems a bit unbecoming. But at least Obama supporters get to be on the "cool" side of the dichotomy. Alex Joseph tells the tale of woe of the student for Clinton: I'm a young male Democrat, and I support ... Hillary Clinton. I may be the loneliest man at Georgetown University, where I'm practically a social pariah. Supporting Hillary on a college campus this year is like being a Yankees fan at a Red Sox game, a Barry Manilow lover at a Radiohead concert. It's a good piece. Of course on another level, once you take the gender dynamics into account ("Among young Hillary supporters, men are virtually nonexistent. Of the 60 members of Facebook's "Hilltop—Georgetown Students for Hillary" group, only seven are men.") the young male Hillary fan on campus may not be in such bad shape. After VictoryObviously, Eli Manning won the Super Bowl on Sunday and nobody can take that away from him. That said, efforts to crown him the hero of the city seem to me to founder on the fact that scoring 17 points isn't an especially impressive performance for an NFL offense. Patriots opponents scored more than 17 points eight times during the course of the past season, but all of those teams lost. The difference-maker was that the Giants defense held New England to just 14 points. Teams that score 14 points tend to lose games whether or not the opposition musters a great quarterback to face off against them. CourageI think it bears mentioning that, in my view, the debate that's broken out in comments here and periodically elsewhere around the web as to whether or not it took any particular political courage for Barack Obama to oppose the war in the fall of 2002 is a bit irrelevant. Whatever you may say about Hillary Clinton, pro or con, she obviously didn't take the position she did on Iraq because of short term political calculations. Clinton wasn't up for re-election until 2006. For people in her position, the cynical calculus and the substantive calculus wound up giving very similar answers. For Clinton, the politically smart thing to do was to make her best judgment as to whether or not a vote for war would look smart in retrospect, and vote accordingly. Someone in Obama's position didn't face any real political risks in any direction. But the only cynical reason to speak out strongly against the war would have been a conviction that such speaking out would look smart in retrospect. Basically, political and substantive judgments track very closely. It's different for someone facing the Max Cleland scenario of a tough 2002 re-election battle where you might really think that an invasion would be a long-run disaster but that you had no choice other than to support it. Neither Clinton nor Obama were in that position. Both could have gotten away with saying or doing just about anything. But both were ambitious people looking to do things that would look smart in the medium- to long-run. And only Obama did, in fact, do something that looks smart in retrospect. To mention the book once again, one argument I make is that while it's hardly a law of nature that "good policy is good politics" when it comes to something like Iraq it's really difficult to get the politics right in a vacuum. It makes a ton of sense, even in the most cynical possible terms, to try to build your political strategy on a foundation of sound substantive judgment. Best PracticesThis 1943 article offering tips on how to manage female employees for business driven by WWII exigencies to expand their labor pool is pretty hilarious. Among other things, you've got to stay away from the skinny ones: 3. While there are exceptions, of course, to this rule, general experience indicates that "husky" girls – those who are just a little on the heavy side – are likely to be more even-tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters. It's always striking to be reminded that though the pace of change often feels frustrating slow when you're working for it, an incredibly amount of progress has actually been made thus far during the lifetimes of the older people alive today. McCain and Militarism
Justin Logan argues that John McCain's brand of militaristic nationalism extends to the home front: In fact, Senator McCain has indicated that not only would he like to unleash the U.S. military on substantial portions of the rest of the world, as president, he would work to militarize American society. In a 2001 article in the Washington Monthly, after lamenting that it was “not currently politically practical to revive the draft,” McCain went on to praise and argue for the expansion of the National Civilian Community Corps, a federally-administered program where volunteers “wear uniforms, work in teams, learn public speaking skills, and gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall.” I assume things won't quite get that bad. One striking fact about American society, however, is that our political culture is shot through with a strain of liberal individualism that tends to deeply effect politicians from both sides of the country's ideological divide. McCain, though, doesn't seem to share it. Instead, he appears to regard the self-sacrifice of the military man not as admirable because it helps protect and sustain a liberal society at home, but because it's actually preferable to have people's lives organized around regimentation, comformity, and sacrifice. Under the circumstances, what normal people might view as the downsides of war are in fact benefits, and the militarization of the home front is desirable as well. SpoilageIn general, nobody likes a spoiler. But John O'Sullivan argues that a conservative refusal to endorse John McCain may be rational even if one stipulates that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would be substantially more liberal: Many conservatives believe that the key question in this election is: Are there to be two multiculturalist open-borders parties or one? If McCain’s election were to make the GOP fundamentally similar to the Democrats on immigration, bilingualism, racial preferences, and all the National Question issues, that would be a resounding historical defeat for conservatives. I think it's probably true that, in practice, a comprehensive immigration reform is more likely to come in a McCain administration than it would in an Obama or a Clinton administration. So in a narrow sense, O'Sullivan's making sense. What's more, a deliberate effort by the nativist wing of the conservative movement to spike McCain would help ensure that, in the future, conservatives whose main priorities aren't immigration kowtow to the restrictionist side of the "National Question." Thus, in a strict sense O'Sullivan is making some sense here. But this analysis seems to entirely lack context. If electing a pro-amnesty Republican whose administration fails to ban affirmative action programs would be the end of the conservative movement, then Ronald Reagan's eight years in office were, just like George W. Bush's, a "resounding historical defeat for conservatives." Conservatives can be purists if they like, but the reality is that these are issues on which people who agree with O'Sullivan have never held the whip-hand, and it's unlikely that they ever really will as long as the GOP remains the party of business first and foremost. The Chris Hayes FraudAt last, someone has the courage to tell the truth about Chris Hayes and his efforts to destroy democracy: The truth of the matter is that I think Gravel's right about the desirability of scrapping the constitution. The Trouble With CoolFollowing up my observations on Obama as the cool candidate, another way of looking at it -- indeed, probably the correct way of looking at it -- is in terms of Garance Franke-Ruta's old observation (that I can't find on Google for some reason) that Hillary Clinton is the middlebrow candidate in the race. That, more than cool/uncool, captures the Wire versus Ugly Betty dynamic. And it's also, of course, Clinton's big advantage. TV critics like The Wire but Ugly Betty has a much bigger audience. At the end of the day, how many people know who will.i.am is? GeorgiaObama wins. That's fairly expected. Of course when the dust settles we're going to be most concerned with the delegate counts. UPDATE: Chuck Todd says Obama may have gotten as much as a 35 delegate advantage out of Georgia. Georgia GOPObviously, McCain's going to win tonight. It's striking, though, to see McCain even winning in places like Georgia where he only draws 38 percent of the vote. In short, even where anti-McCain sentiment runs strong it doesn't run nearly strong enough to unite people behind Mitt Romney. UPDATE: Sorry, brain fart. Georgia hasn't been called. I was looking at some random interim figures. 8PMClinton wins Oklahoma. Obama wins Illinois. Both expected, though I'm a bit surprised the Obama campaign hasn't even attempted any "Hillary's from Illinois" spin. After all, she is from Illinois. TennesseeClinton wins. Southern states with large black populations are good for Obama, but those like Tennessee and Oklahoma with relatively small numbers of African-Americans are bad for him. The New RichardsonWith facial hair, Bill Richardson looks a bit like a Klingon from the original Star Trek series. UPDATE: Here's the photo you crave:
It's an odd look. Massachusetts and New YorkClinton wins. This is a nice pickup. A few weeks ago, she had a giant lead, but the fact that Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Deval Patrick were all backing Obama let him make up a lot of ground. In the end, though, she seems to have held back the tide. And that's basically what she needs to do nationwide; there's no doubt that the momentum was shifting toward Obama, but Clinton had plenty of room to give up and still hold the line. Meanwhile, an unsurprising win for HRC in New York. Garden StateClinton wins. It seems to me, though, that this state was too close to produce a substantial delegate lead and much the same will be true no matter who wins in Connecticut. The networks' delegate math is, however, significantly lagging behind their ability to call the states. That said, the mere fact of the lag seems to me to be hurting Obama at this point since the states as such get "called" with great fanfare. It may take us until sometime tomorrow to actually piece together what happened with the delegates. AlabamaLooks like a large win for Obama, as one would predict from the demographics. Huckabee's Big NightNot that Mike Huckabee is going to be the Republican nominee, but he's put on an impressive showing tonight. His resiliency really seems to me to underscore how moribund orthodox conservatism is at the moment. On the one hand, John McCain is apparently going to win the nomination notwithstanding the fact that he's loathed by a significant swathe of conservative elites. And then on the other hand, Huckabee who's loathed by an even wider swathe of conservative elites keeps hanging around. He doesn't have the money or the policy substance necessary to break out of his niche, but his constituency -- an important part of the GOP base -- loves him and doesn't care what anyone says about it. Democratic AmbiguityOn the Democratic side, everything seems to be basically playing out as expected. Since "as expected" involved Clinton winning bigger states than the ones Obama would win, she ought to emerge with a lead in delegates. But Obama seems to have poached Connecticut from her column and held it close in New Jersey, so the delegate count ought to remain well within reach unless Clinton pulls off some kind of blowout in California. Romney's SpeechI believe I've noted before that I like Mitt Romney. Like not just in a typical liberal "I want our guy to run against the Mormon" kind of way. I like him! I think he'd be a better president than John McCain. I voted for him in Massachusetts in 2002. And right now I think he's delivering a pretty damn good speech. Education policy expert Sara Mead says "this isn't a winning message for him" -- too negative -- but it taps into my anti-Beltway rage (anti-Beltway rage only gets worse when you move all the way into the District of Columbia and realize that the country is run by jerks who ride the Orange Line). That said, I couldn't really get a handle on the feistiness of it. It's hard for me to see any way that he's not dead in the water. Given the number of delegates McCain's been able to wrack up in big winner-take-all states, he seems to me to have a nearly insurmountable lead. Clinton SpeechShe's not a brilliant orator, but in her better moments she has a way of making it work. Like tonight, she observes "politics isn't a game, it's about your lives and your problems." Then she goes off onto a whole list of kinds of people with kinds of problems that she's prepared to solve. In that context, she turns her very lack of rhetorical flourish into a kind of signifier of seriousness. She's speaking plainly and directly -- telling you what she wants to do for you if she wins -- and asking you to support her for clear-cut, concrete reasons. You don't vote for her because you want to hear from her at greater length, you vote for her because you want to see action. Rural ObamaI'm a bit surprised as to the source of Barack Obama's strength in rural states like North Dakota and Kansas. These would seem to be places where the demographics run heavily in Clinton's favor -- older, whiter, less educated populations. Obama should be counting on big cities with plenty of black people and young hipsters. North Dakota and Kansas are basically the reverse. Now, these are states the Clinton campaign didn't invest many resources in, but we know Obama did very well in the rural areas of Nevada as well. Since these are kinds of places where relatively few people, and especially few Democrats, live we don't hear much about them. As a result, we're left a bit in the dark. There's a clear pattern, but it doesn't fit with our larger pattern. California ExitsBased on the exit polls in California it seems we could be looking at the very unusual situation of Obama winning white voters and black voters and nonetheless losing the state thanks to Hillary Clinton's large margins among Latinos and Asians. That's kind of an "only in California" dynamic (New Mexico and Hawaii also have unusual ethnic makeups that make something like this possible, but almost no black people live in those states) but it's a very large state and, more to the point, a signpost of how things are changing in America. Time was winning whites and winning blacks was by definition the same thing as winning. Show Us The Districts!Given that the delegates are allocated by congressional district, wouldn't it be nice if some of CNN's maps actually broke the results down on a district-by-district basis? Instead I've been watching analysis of an irrelevant county-by-county breakdown. Military DonationsIt looks like anti-war candidates Ron Paul and Barack Obama are getting the most campaign contributions from members of the military. I'm not sure exactly what that proves at the end of the day, but certainly it's a reminder that "the troops" are hardly marching in lockstep behind the Bush/McCain perpetual war agenda. February 6, 2008The Wrap UpThe Obama campaign points out that their man won a majority of the states in play, which is certainly true. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that Utah, Idaho, and North Dakota are a better prize than New York and California. The bottom-line, however, is that if you factor out the more exuberant Zogby-fueled dreams of the weekend, Obama did quite well relative to his baseline of a week ago. The February 5 landscape favored Clinton, and Obama managed to not lose any of "his" states while poaching Connecticut and narrowly grabbing contested Missouri. Clinton won, but most indications are that she won't have won nearly enough delegates to put this thing out of reach. Now the landscape gets much more favorable for Obama. On Saturday, it's Louisiana, Nebraska, and Washington. Then on Sunday it's Maine. Then Tuesday offers Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Then February 19 offers Wisconsin and Hawaii. That's a lot of states, but not a ton of delegates. On March 4 comes the big showdown in Texas and Ohio. The question is whether Obama can build up enough momentum between now and March 4 to put Clinton away, or whether Clinton can draw enough blood in the intermediate states to shut him down on the March 4 firewall. Who wins that is anyone's guess at this point. One thing I can predict is that you'll see a lot of handwringing about how this fight is dooming the Democratic Party. It's all, as best I can tell, total nonsense. Disagreeing about which of two strong leaders should go try to implement a pretty widely agreed upon vision of national policy is a healthy thing to do. Meanwhile, the stuff that really matters for general election purposes won't for many months. This Is Impact
Stanley Kurtz observes that "It’s been noted how little difference a raft of high profile endorsements by the Kennedy clan and other heavy hitters in Massachusetts made to the outcome there." I have heard that from a lot of people. I think those people may have unrealistic expectations. Look at this chart from Pollster.com which fairly accurately forecast the Bay State as a solid Clinton win. That's still a state in which Obama achieved a massive late-stage surge, helped along by high-profile endorsements. If he'd had another two weeks to campaign, maybe he would have closed the gap. Or maybe not. Certainly if he'd had more time to build on the endorsements in order to construct an actual Massachusetts ground game that would have helped. But the idea that Ted Kennedy just bounced off the electorate isn't well supported by the evidence. Trouble?I'm not sure I really buy John Judis' argument here. First, he observes: Hillary Clinton won the big states she had to win, and arrested Barack Obama’s momentum, but she is going to have problems with white male voters. Obama is having trouble with white working-class voters and Latinos. Then he goes on to extend this analysis to the general election, arguing that both Clinton and Obama have critical weaknesses. The trouble here is that Judis' method is going to reach the conclusion "Party X is Doomed" any time Party X has two fairly equally matched contenders. Even if the two contenders are both very strong, each is going to look "weak" among whichever groups of voters prefer the other candidate. Conversely, if there are two very weak contenders then they're both going to look "strong" within the demographic groups where their rival is especially weak. To me, most indications are that the Democrats have two strong contenders. Consider that in Missouri about 552,000 people came out to vote in the GOP primary -- a primary that all three candidates seriously contested. By contrast 800,000 people came to vote on the Democratic side. If you put all five candidates into a single election, Hillary Clinton's second place showing of 395,000 would have trounced John McCain's 194,304 for third place. Both candidates, in short, are good at appealing to large numbers of voters and getting them to show up. The SqueezeUnited to start charging passengers extra if they want to more than one bag. Can pay bathrooms on airplanes be far behind? Actually, though, one can imagine charging for baggage being a good thing for most people. There are real, if minor, externalities involved in checking additional bags. All that said, I find the trend over time to reduced quality and lower prices for air travel slightly odd. It seems like the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a country that was becoming poorer over time rather than in a growing economy. Shaq-Marion?I'd like a bit of what the Phoenix Suns are smoking if they're seriously contemplating this deal. I understand that there are some Marion-related chemistry issues, but he's six years younger than Shaq and already at this point in their respective careers Marion is more productive. Shaq's going to mesh with Phoenix's up-tempo offense? Who's going to replace Marion as a wing defender? It doesn't make any sense. About Last NightOne thing to say about last night's results is that I hope we can someday put to rest this business of misusing and over-interpreting early exit polls. At this point, it's very well established that these polls have a marked tendency to oversample young voters and thus produce erroneously optimistic forecasts about Democrats running against Republicans or about Obama running against Clinton. Nevertheless, media circles are constantly awash in this information and if you have it in front of you, you can watch it influencing the live coverage on the TV networks as the hosts find themselves surprised when the polls turn out to be wrong. It's dumb. It's not even that the methodology behind exit polling doesn't work. Rather, part of the methodology involves taking some time, getting further data, doing some re-weighting and so forth, etc. There's no excuse for perpetually acting shocked that the early exit polls don't forecast the outcome. The Desert
Ryan Avent comments on a great Washington Post article on the utter devastation the housing bust is wreaking on the Phoenix area. All across the country, prices are declining and the economy is slowing. But sunbelt boom towns have gotten caught up in the bubble feeback loop in a way that just doesn't seem to be true in northeastern downtowns. First the micro level, meet the Ao family: They bought their first home in 2005, for $269,000. They paid for it using an Option ARM, which allowed them to make a monthly payment of $850, which was less than what they paid for rent in Los Angeles. Only later did they realize that meant that their loan amount would grow over time, not shrink, as would their payments. On the macro level, the article notes that fully ten percent of the Maricopa County labor force works in the housing sector. But with prices in decline, there's not going to be much new residential construction until the area "works through its inventory of about 37,000 unsold homes, which could take three or four years." Meanwhile, rather than being in a position to help out with a little juice, the Arizona "state government is staring at a billion-dollar shortfall in its $11 billion budget." And of course local government budgets are normally hit harder than state ones by declining property assessments. Not only are most families seeing their home equity go down, but families like the Aos facing increased debt are going to need to cut back on spending. So will people who work in the building trades. So will some categories of public employees and public assistance recipients as the state cuts its budget. That means a spiraling economic downturn. Now of course if the rest of the national economy were humming along, all that excesses property might just get snapped up. It's a lovely part of the country with great weather -- a lot of people might want to move there if a housing bust made the property cheap temporarily. That, in turn, could inject some new economic activity into the area. But with prices on the decline everywhere, it's hard to see where the new demand comes from. Photo by me, available under a Creative Commons license. Andray's Out of LuckLooks like the DCPD's finally gone and busted up the prostitution ring working out of the Washington Plaza Hotel in Thomas Circle. I wouldn't normally post on a local issue like that, but these are the hookers that Wizards F/C Andray Blatche got arrested for soliciting. Notwithstanding his troubles with the law, Blatche is having a breakout season in which he's catapulted himself from "interesting prospect" to "okay player" status so with any luck he can find himself a classier brand of call girl at this point. No PeacekeepingIt seems that amidst the vast amount of money he's prepared to budget for defense, the Bush administration couldn't be bothered to fully fund peacekeeping operations, choosing instead to pick a figure that's $500 million short of what we're supposed to pony up. This sort of thing is just incredibly short-sighted. Traditional peacekeeping missions aren't very exciting. They involve a situation where two (or more) parties to a conflict reach some kind of conflict-ending agreement and, as part of the agreement, both parties agree to accept the presence of some peacekeepers. After all, two groups of people who were trying to kill each other on Monday probably aren't going to trust each other on Wednesday, even if they reach a negotiated settlement to the conflict on Tuesday. Missions of this sort have a decent track record of success, and they're quite cheap. Oftentimes, there's no real need for peacekeepers to do much of anything. The point is simply that their presence helps resolve a prisoner's dilemma. Unfortunately, in the US there's a strong tendency for discussions of humanitarianism abroad to emphasize very costly and destructive combat operations and totally neglect cheaper, easier, and more effective methods like participating in and funding consensual peacemaking. My guess is that, for example, approximately zero percent of the "liberal hawks" who've accused Iraq War opponents of neglecting the humanitarian plight of the Iraqi people will speak up to complain about this aspect of the Bush budget. Does History Matter?Via Ezra Klein, George Packer gets into my favorite hobby of wondering why comparing someone to JFK is supposed to me a good thing: J.F.K. was a mediocre President. For two and a half years his position on civil rights was legalistic—he stood up for enforcing court orders—until the dramatic images from Birmingham in May 1963 forced him to describe the issue as a moral one. The civil-rights bill he then introduced into Congress stood little chance of passing partly because Kennedy was unwilling to spend the huge amount of necessary political capital. For those who believe he was on his way out of Vietnam when he was assassinated, how to explain the dramatic coup three weeks before his death that overthrew the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and pulled the U.S. ever deeper into the quagmire? Kennedy’s main domestic accomplishment was a tax cut; his main foreign accomplishment was avoiding nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba (his finest hour). All I'd observe is that it's actually common for invocations of the heroes of the past to be someone vacuous. FDR-praising liberals typically don't have the details of the New Deal legislative program in mind or any particular inclination to reinstitute something like the National Industrial Recovery Act. Similarly, it's been noted ad nauseam that the historical Ronald Reagan doesn't greatly resemble the Reagan Myth the right has constructed. At the end of the day, there's probably not much point in worrying too much about the strict accuracy of our comparisons. Shaq-MarionOkay. I thought that this trade talk might just have been an election-induced hallucination. But apparently Phoenix is seriously considering doing this. A few points. One, as Hollinger says, it's bizarre to be making a big deal of any sort if you're the Suns: The Phoenix Suns have the best record in the Western Conference, 1½ games ahead of their closest rival. They have the best scoring margin in the conference, and the best offensive efficiency in the NBA. They're 8-2 in their past 10 games (while outscoring opponents by nine points per game). And the Suns have a slew of home games coming up because their early schedule was so road-heavy. On top of that, you don't even need to subscribe to an especially strong form of the "Shaq is dead" thesis to think this is a bad deal. The Matrix is a very, very, very good basketball player. An excellent defender, a great rebounder, and a very efficient scorer. And he's a great fit for the Suns' system, which doesn't rely on him to "create his own shot" but does need someone like Marion who can offer speed and shooting at the four spot. It's on top of all that that you need to look at Marion as a guy who's offering basically peak-level performance while Shaq is past his sell-by date. Sons of IraqVia Spencer Ackerman, it seems the term "Concerned Local Citizens" has been deemed insufficiently euphemism-y and now Paul McLeary reports: But now, no one is mentioning the CLCs. With the amazing speed of an acronym-happy military, I’ve found out that the new, hot-off-the-presses Iraqi-approved term is "Sons of Iraq." SOI for short. Seems that "Concerned Local Citizen" didn’t translate into Arabic so well, and the Iraqis didn’t like it. So now, when you mention armed groups of civilians manning checkpoints and doing the work that the Iraqi Police and Army either will not or can not do, be sure to call them the "Sons of Iraq." And there you have it. Personally, I'm glad for the change since Concerned Local Citizens always made me think of the Upright Citizens Brigade. The Trouble With "Progressive"Commenter Freddie mentioned something yesterday that I'd like to endorse: You know, I really dislike the use of "progressive" in the place of "liberal". Among other things, it makes the Jonah Goldberg-style conflation of the Progressives of the 1920s with contemporary American liberalism that much easier. Quite so only one shouldn't even really blame Jonah Goldberg in this instance. The people who went about rebranding liberals as "progressives" were clearly and deliberately inviting this conflation. But while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives. "Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for. Best Macro Forecast Anywhere
Larry Kudlow posts the chart above before observing "While there may be no direct causality, one can’t help but wonder whether the investor class hasn’t been disappointed with the shape of this election battle." It was nice of him to concede that there may be no direct causality here, but he then of course uncorks his explanation of why there was, in fact, causality. Basically, investors hate Democrats so when primaries happen including the Republicans-only Michigan primary, the markets go down. You can see why Fox Business News isn't getting any viewers. This kind of dogmatism may work as political commentary, but it's poison as actual economic analysis. A Different Kind of Election AnalysisIlan Goldenberg notes that while the US elections may get a bit nasty, provincial elections in Iraq could actually touch off a new round of bloodshed. His analysis seems smart, but I also agree with Eric Martin that it seems that not holding the elections could also touch of a new round of bloodshed -- long story short, it's just the case that the underlying tensions in Iraq continue to make it the case that we need to be looking for the exits, not devising new rationales for an indefinite presence. Clinton Self-FinancingNot only is Hillary Clinton apparently weighing making a loan to her own campaign to try to keep pace with Barack Obama's big fundraising haul, but it seems she's already loaned herself $5 million. Howard Wolfson says: Late last month Senator Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million.The loan illustrates Sen. Clinton’s commitment to this effort and to ensuring that our campaign has the resources it needs to compete and win across this nation. We have had one of our best fundraising efforts ever on the web today and our Super Tuesday victories will only help in bringing more support for her candidacy. Now it seems to me that, logically, one problem with self-financing ought to be that it hurts fundraising. The reminder that the Clintons are multi-millionaires would seem to me to make giving them a modest cash donation of $250 or $500 seem like a less attractive proposition. Does it turn you into an Obama donor? Of course not. But maybe you donate that money to the poor, or to a favorite congressional candidate, or you buy yourself something nice. After all, why would you donate money to someone much richer than yourself? Of course, if Clinton wins you give her money to pay back her loan because you're looking for favors from the White House. But from where we're sitting now, but for now, what's the point? Of course regular people may not look at it that way. I've had more than one person, including people who aren't necessarily Clinton supporters but who aren't Clinton-haters either, tell me they will "feel sorry" for Clinton if she loses. From where I sit, a multimillionaire US Senator has an okay life whether or not she gets elected president. But obviously a lot of rank-and-file Democrats feel a deep, personally connection to the Clinton family in a way that transcends the banal reality that the Clintons are much, much better off than the average American. [Not, of course, that the Obamas are the wretched of the earth at this point, but they're not as loaded as the Clintons] February 7, 2008Health Care, Destroyer of Worlds
Ezra Klein uses this chart from the CBO to illustrate the point that "Medicare and Medicaid aren't in any unique distress -- that their cost problems are a function of health inflation across the whole economy, not just in government programs, and that to get their growth under control will require wholesale reform." To play devil's advocate for a bit, though, one can imagine a scenario in which the economy grows fast enough between 2007 and 2082 for the non-health care sector of the economy to grow notwithstanding the vast growth in the share of the economy going to health care. Indeed, if we keep up a two percent annual growth rate (which would be on the slow side), the size of our economy will double in just 35 years. So there's plenty of room for health spending to escalate enormously as a share over the next 75 years without that actually reducing people to penury. When it comes to public sector programs, by contrast, there's an argument that if the share of GDP that's going to taxes goes that high, it'll destroy the economy. Incentives, deadweight loss, etc. I don't know that I really think that's the case, but that's the argument you would hear for why runaway Medicare and Medicaid growth is a special kind of horribleness. Now for my view, there's little evidence that health care spending really helps people, so it really would be a shame -- albeit a survivable one -- for health spending to grow on this trajectory. On top of that, there's good reason to believe that the most effective method of radically restraining health care spending is through full-bore socialized medicine as in the UK's National Health Services. UK health care is slightly worse than what you can get elsewhere, but it's way cheaper and UK health outcomes aren't wildly worse than outcomes anywhere else. Save money by providing universal mediocre health care, à la NHS, leave some of the savings in people's pockets and spend the rest on subsidizing mass transit and bike paths. Or to look at it another way, if Hillary Clinton's entire agenda were enacted, her climate change proposals would wind up doing more to improve public health than would her health care proposals. Lump of FundraisingIf you look at the fundraising in the Democratic race, you'll see that Hillary Clinton has put together an amazing organization that's shattering all the records except . . . the ones being created by Barack Obama. In short, both contenders are raising tons of money. This sort of thing, which you see time and again, ought to debunk the "lump of fundraising" fallacy that seems to underwrite much establishmentarian loathing of contested primaries. It's true that if you look at all this money and simply assume it would be out there even if there were no contest happening, that it looks like a lot of cash being burned in a negative-sum intra-party fight. In the real world, though, it's the contests that drive the fundraising. AlternativesI liked this Tyler Cowen post so much I decided to quote the whole thing: A new Cato study, by Indur Goklany, suggests that instead of carbon taxes we should spend money on better water policy, drought prevention, anti-malarials, sea level protection, and so on. In general we should make the world as wealthy as possible. Here is the link, the piece is intelligent throughout and well worth reading. One way to raise the money necessary to "spend money on better water policy, drought prevention, anti-malarials, sea level protection, and so on" would, of course, be through a carbon tax or (more politically realistic) an auction of tradable carbon emissions permits. Meanwhile, there's an issue of consistency here. The style of argument here is don't do X because if we did Z, which costs as much as X, we would see more benefits. That's a very stringent standard to meet. Can Goklany's own argument meet it? Is collaborating with libertarian think tanks to oppose carbon restrictions really the most efficacious method of boosting spending on anti-malarials? As best I can tell, historically, Cato's only been interested in malaria as a pretext to complain about DDT regulations. Now I suppose we can add carbon regulations to the list. But actual malaria-related advocacy doesn't seem to be on the agenda. Why not say we should eliminate all these subsidies and tax breaks for oil, gas, and coal firms and use that money to finance "better water policy, drought prevention, anti-malarials, sea level protection, and so on"? Meanwhile, if the planet just keeps getting hotter and hotter with more and more carbon in the atmosphere forever surely at some point it overwhelms are capacity to adapt. No Stimulus for YouThe Senate's green stimulus package was blocked last night by a minority of Senators. Not voting was John McCain, erstwhile maverick, erstwhile environmentalist, and the sort of guy inclined to say things like "we've got to give them some stimulus" didn't bother to show up. Other presidential candidates showed up -- Obama was there, Clinton was there. Other Arizonians showed up -- Jon Kyl was there. Other contrarians showed up -- Joe Lieberman was there. Indeed, ninety-nine senators thought it was worth taking the time out of their busy schedules to show up and vote on an important piece of legislation. But not John McCain. He's too mavericky for that. How The Supers Could MatterBack when I was reporting this article for the January 2004 issue of The American Prospect, I became convinced that most "superdelegates" would actually be loathe to use their influence to reverse the outcome of the primaries. Thus, I've always thought that superdelegate support should probably be discounted at this point. There's nothing stopping the SDs pledged to Clinton from switching to Obama and vice versa. This Chris Bowers post did, however, suggest to me a way in which they really might come into play: A campaign that is now on course to be down by more than 100 pledged delegates in two weeks didn't "tie." Just like Mitt Romney, any campaign that is talking about changing delegate allocation rules didn't "tie." A campaign that is plugging its website to try and raise money didn't "tie." A campaign that talks about stopping the momentum currently enjoyed by its opponent didn't "tie." That is a campaign back on its heels. As I wrote last night, this was not a tie, and Obama clearly has the edge. Imagine a scenario in which Obama has the majority among pledged delegates, but Clinton has the lead among all delegate. Her superdelegates probably won't want to give the election to the candidate who lost. But they could use their majority at the convention to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations. And then Michigan and Florida could put Clinton over the top in a way that could be construed as more democratic than the alternative. Just idle speculation for now, but who doesn't like idle speculation? EstablishmentsThere's something a little silly about Hillary Clinton's efforts to label Barack Obama "the establishment candidate" considering that she's also bragging about her lead in superdelegates, is running on experience, and is backed by the bulk of the senior leadership cadres from her husband's administration. And of course, her husband used to be president. At the same time, it's clearly true that many well-established figures have flocked to the Obama banner at this point. It's not like he's running a small gritty insurgent campaign based on a handful of longtime loyalists from his home state plus a rogue political strategist. From Day One in the Senate, Obama's attracted very experienced, very high-profile people to his cause and the further he goes the more that happens. The main difference is that the establishment that's behind Clinton comes much closer to being worthy of talked about as a unitary entity. Team Clinton is composed of people from all dimensions of politics -- from interest groups like AFSCME to national security hands like Holbrooke and Albright to pure politics people like Wolfson and Penn -- who've all been working together and working for the Clintons for a long time. Obama has behind him a much more disparate group of people. They're not "outsiders" -- Peter Rouse worked for the Senate Minority Leader, Ted Kennedy's been important forever, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize, all kinds of random prominent pundits like him, Zbig Brzerzinski was National Security Advisor -- but they weren't on the inside of the Clinton administration. In that sense, an Obama win would represent an alternation of elites. Important left-of-center people who haven't happened to be the most important left of center people over the past 15 years or so would rise to leadership. A Clinton win would be the return of the people who ran the show in the late 1990s and who continued to be the predominant influence in the 21st century. But in neither case are you getting a real toppling of hierarchies and massive infusion of outsiders. Romney's OutApparently he didn't bother to inform his staff in advance. A bit of campaigning against token opposition from Mike Huckabee should allow conservative elites to reconcile themselves a bit to John McCain, since that crowd seems to hate Huckabee more. Into the Monkey CageHenry Farrell explains why I'm wrong about conservative activists and John McCain. What's more, he does so by quoting a George Tsebelis book: Contra Matt, there’s a good case to be made that it would be rational under many circumstances for conservatives to oppose McCain. George Tsebelis, in his book Nested Games, makes just this argument about the internal dynamics of the UK Labour party in the 1980s. The relevant chapter is entitled “Why Do British Labour Party Activists Commit Political Suicide?” As Tsebelis discusses, left-wingers within the Labour party often opposed more moderate candidates, even when there was a real risk that this would lead to defeat for the party in the general election. This is because they were playing a nested game, in which they were concerned not only about a one shot electoral victory, but also in getting others to take them seriously over the longer term. I sometimes tell people that Tsebelis' Veto Players is a book I always have mixed feelings about recommending. I think it's incredibly insightful and explains an enormous amount of very important things. But it's also a very long, hard, slog of a read and something you probably don't want to undertake. But very informative. So I guess I'd better pick up Nested Games, too. Chart of the Day
Via Ezra Klein, the Alexa rankings of our presidential candidates. Obama beating Clinton this badly is pretty much expected -- it falls out from the differing demographics of their bases with Obama doing better among younger people, better educated people, and wealthier people, all webbier groups. John McCain's pathetic performance seems noteworthy -- is he just exclusively the candidate of the elderly? The Cuba FactorVia Mark Kleiman, Rodger Payne rounds up the several respects in which Barack Obama has outlined a more sensible Cuba policy than has Hillary Clinton. He's not been willing to move toward full sensibleness, but Clinton has indicated that she'll take a full-on "whatever CANF wants" approach to the issue. Somewhat similarly, while Obama's hardly been a saint on Israel-Palestine issues, he's at least managed to make AIPAC somewhat uncomfortable with his approach. This is how it goes down the line on foreign policy issues -- there are no yawning gaps between Clinton and Obama, but across a broad range of subjects Obama has positioned himself substantively better, while Clinton has been very cautious about challenge any aspects of entrenched conventional wisdom. To me, ultimately, that's what my preference for Obama is about. I find the cult a little creepy, too. The Liberal LabelEric Alterman makes the case for embracing it. It's worth emphasizing that there's something mighty impractical about the whole "no, we're liberals" kick. Whatever the methodological problems with the National Journal "omg he's the most liberal senator evar!" surveys it is, in fact, the case that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both in the left-most third of the Senator distribution and any reasonable approach will show that. Meanwhile, "liberal" just is the term people use for that side of the political spectrum in the modern United States. Chris Bowers and the Center for American Progress don't get to unilaterally alter the country's language. If liberals don't use the word "liberal," in other words, the only people using it will be using it as an insult and people using it as a neutral descriptor. And the neutral descriptor people are going to keep using it no matter what liberals do. Romney's SpeechI've seen lots of posts on Mittens' wingnutty farewell speech that focus on the "surrender to terror" bit, but what about this? Did you see that today, government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector. Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats? This seems bizarre. A lot of the people working for the government have specialized skills. They're lawyers, scientists, accountants, etc. and, in good market fashion, they earn more money than do unskilled workers. Teachers, to name a very large category of public sector worker, are, for obvious reasons, better-educated than the average person. Police officers and firefighters have demanding, often dangerous jobs. It's not as if the people handing out forms at the DMV earn more money than hedge fund managers. I'm retroactively reconsidering my support for this clown. Straight TalkIt's nice to see McCain lying about FISA at his CPAC speech. There are a lot of reasons you can come up with for why John McCain may not be a strong general election candidate. But this is the flipside. Since he has a reputation for straight-talk, he's been granted by the press an unrestricted licenses to lie. It's hard to beat someone with one of those. Red MeatIt's interesting that even a CPAC audience that provides wild applause for every lame right-wing talking point could barely muster a cheer for McCain's promise to cut entitlement spending. Any Way You LookIt occurred to me that maybe Dave Berri has some counterintuitive argument as to why the Shaq-Matrix trade makes sense for Phoenix. The answer is no. Instead, he has a counterintuitive argument that even if Shaq were to return to his 2004-2005 season level of production the trade still wouldn't help Phoenix. And, of course, that's not going to happen. Meanwhile, an additional consideration here is that Shawn Marion is not only better, cheaper, and younger than Shaq, but he logs more minutes per game. Indeed, he plays more minutes per game than anyone else on the Phoenix roster. So expect to see more Brian Skinner and Boris Diaw in the future. The (rare) defenses of this trade, meanwhile, don't seem to grasp that just because Phoenix was relatively unlikely to win a championship pre-trade hardly justifies doing a deal that makes the team worse. The Wizards aren't going to win as presently constituted, either, but that doesn't mean Ernie Grunfeld should go do something ridiculous. Maybe if Phoenix hadn't sold those draft picks they could have struck gold. Anything but this. Captain AmnestyMark Krikorian argues: As I point out in my piece on the homepage today, the open-borders cackling that Amnesty John's victory shows immigration to be politically irrelevant is wishful thinking. Some might say that the prospects for an anti-immigrant movement that can't secure control over either political party aren't good, and that with the hispanic share of the electorate only growing the idea of the coming Age of Krikorian is wishful thinking. But more to the point, this "Amnesty John" business is no good. Let's stick with "Juan McCain" or, my personal favorite, "Captain Amnesty", which I'm especially drawn to because it reminds me of Anti-Flag's "Captain Anarchy". I keep trying to come up with McCain alternate lyrics for the song, but I don't have the chops for it. NY versus IllinoisI was looking over the exit polls for Illinois and New York and there's an interesting pattern to the data. In her home state, Hillary Clinton did better among pretty much all groups than she does nationwide. Still, Obama won his core constituencies -- young people and African-Americans. In Illinois, by contrast, Obama pretty much ran the table, eking out narrow wins even in bad demographic groups like old people and Hispanics. He even won women 64-35. Now maybe this just reflects that fact that New York was more seriously contested than Illinois. Obama didn't put resources into trying to win the state per se, but he was playing for New Jersey and Connecticut in the same media market and did some fundraisers and rallies over the months. But on the other hand, it does fit a broader pattern, namely that the better people keep to know Obama, the more they seem to like him. Every state he campaigns in shows a strong upward trajectory, and in the state where he's best-known, even the most skeptical demographic groups come around to him. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has her base and it's a big base, but the tendency is to only drop down from that level. February 8, 2008Cafferty Wacks McCainI heard Jack Cafferty did a nice segment on CNN smacking John McCain for not bothering to show up for the stimulus bill vote. Nice to hear of someone in the press breaking with the love-fest. You can see his blog post on the subject and it's pretty solid stuff: It was one of those moments that says a lot about someone’s character. What did McCain do? Nothing. He ducked. Instead of representing the people in Arizona who elected him, he simply chose not to vote at all. John McCain, pilot of the Straight Talk Express, wimped out. People on the road are going to miss votes, but which ones you choose to show up for and which you consider skippable are telling. Especially the ones where you're the only absent Senator, as McCain was on this vote. Obama's Asian ProblemIsaac Chotiner takes a look at possible reasons why Asian American voters don't seem to like Barack Obama very much. Most of this comes down to Asian voters just not being particularly liberal along a couple of dimensions, but Isaac also points to some political clumsiness on Obama's part, from the "D-Punjab" incident to a tendency to sometimes forget Asians exists when off on a post-racial reverie. Chain BookstoresI met Brooke Allen over the weekend, and yesterday thanks to Lee Siegelman I discovered her 2001 Atlantic article "Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores". I've always had slightly off-key opinions on this topic, because when I was a kid and there really were no chain bookstores, the independent book store where my family usually shopped was a place called Barnes & Noble. So mostly I've just been watching my local bookstore expand across the country, not watched local shops be stomped on by some giant. Still, by and large I've always come down on Allen's side of the argument despite some affection for independent stores. Now, though, I wonder if the rise of the internet isn't going to lead to a rebalancing. After all, the practical advantages offered by the big chains, though very real, are done even better by the online retailers. Allen writes: Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are), however, the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in. Amazon, Powells, and BarnesAndNoble.com, however, are located everywhere. And their stock is very comprehensive. Even for browsing purposes, they've actually gotten pretty good. If you have some sense of what kind of book you might want to buy and you don't need the book immediately, the practical advantages to shopping online are just enormous. Thus, what the brick and mortar store has to offer is, increasingly, not practical advantage but a bookstore experience. And though I think the chains actually do deliver a decent experience, they don't really match the better independents and I'm not sure they ever can since part of the experience of a well-liked independent bookstore, from Politics and Prose to Blue Hill Books is precisely it's independent-ness. Now that the chains have primed large swathes of the country to think of "wandering around a bookstore looking for something to buy" as a possible activity, while online retailers have emerged offering to send you any book anywhere you want, could we be ready for a revenge of the independents? I see it as at least a distinct possibility. I've seen it argued recently and plausibly that Starbucks has done just as much to build the market for high-end coffee, and thus independent coffee shops, as it has to put existing independent shops out of business. Department of Silly ArgumentsIn the interests of being less of an Obama-shill, let's note that Nick Kristof really ought to dump this electability argument: But one clue emerged in Tuesday’s balloting in 14 “red states” that were won by President George W. Bush in 2004. Mr. Obama won nine while Hillary Rodham Clinton won four and is ahead in the fifth. But, look, Obama's not going to win Utah so what's the point of counting like this. Meanwhile, the idea that the primary electorate in state x is a good proxy for that state's general election is badly flawed. The South Carolina Democratic primary, to cite a salient example, is a contest in which one's appeal to white voters is not very important. A South Carolina general election isn't like that at all. Conversely, the demographic magic that let Hillary Clinton win California while losing white voters and losing black voters isn't going to work in a general election. Reasoning from independent facts, however, lets us know that this isn't going to happen in HRC in California any more than Obama would lose New York. Taxi to the Dark SideIt seems this film, which I saw a screening of a few months ago, is opening tonight in DC. I believe that means it's already been available in New York and LA, and may or may not be coming to a city near you. But if it is playing near you, you should definitely check it out. There've been a lot of dumb "war on terror"-related films released over the past couple of years; lame efforts to do fiction-as-polemic. This is different. It's a documentary, it's brilliantly well-executed, and it not only presents and argument but it does so in an emotionally searing way: It's about torture, so it's not exactly the most fun Friday plan you could imagine, but it's a great, important film and you should really check it out. The Trouble With BiofuelsThe evils of ethanol are fairly well-known, but apparently it may be more evil than we thought: The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming. Let me just note that any story you ever read that involves a mildly rigorous look at the carbon impact of doing anything simply underscores the need for a carbon tax or an auctioned permit system. Put a price on carbon, and through the Hayekian magic of market signals the aggregate carbon impact of products will be reflected in what they cost at the store. Nothing else can possibly work. Won't You Be My Podcast?So I'm contemplating trying to do some podcast interviews as part of the Atlantic's ever-growing commitment to multimedia. Basically, I'd talk to someone, record the conversation, and then you could listen to us talking. Is that something there'd be any interest in? Are there (plausible) interview candidates you'd be interested in hearing from? Arguments in PlayOn Iraq, and whatever broader set of issues one believes are implicated in the Iraq debate, I only ever hear one message coming from the Obama campaign, namely:
Clinton Argument Two can be made pretty persuasively. Plenty of anti-war folks are on Clinton's side, and Obama's never really spelled out what, exactly, on the level of doctrine he and Clinton disagree about. But the fact that Clinton Argument One does, in fact, get trotted out (especially when the intended audience isn't yours truly) seems to me to badly undercut Argument Two. Meanwhile, and somewhat relatedly, I keep encountering people whose view of the race seems to be shaped by the assumption that it's not possible that good-faith disagreements exist about national security issues among Democrats. That, in essence, all Democrats have very lefty ideas about this stuff and all deviations from an ideal plane of leftiness are explained by political cowardice. I'm not really sure what evidence anyone would find convincing on this score, but perhaps part of the value of having an inside-the-beltway corrupt Villager on your list of blogs-I-read is that I can tell you that in my experience this is false. There are lots of strongly partisan Democrats who very much think Bush has taken the country in the wrong direction but who vigorously disagree among themselves about what national security policy ought to look like. The Trouble With Local Control
This map accompanies Matt Miller's article on education policy in the January/February issue of The Atlantic that I thought I should recommend before March (issue) madness overtakes the site. It highlights the incredibly large disparities in school funding that exist in our fine nation. These huge gaps are hardly the be-all and end-all of our education problems in the United States, but they're hard to justify. It's just as important to educate children in Alabama as it is to educate them in Massachusetts, but kids in the latter state get double the money of kids in the former. Miller's article isn't even primarily about money. Instead, it's about the fact that these general institutional issue persists throughout our educational system -- things are wildly different from district to district, and especially from state to state. That's the American tradition of local control at work. But while this is very much our tradition, it's not a very good one. It doesn't really make sense to have the standard of what counts as reading proficiency to be different in Massachusetts than it is in Alabama. Nor, of course, do American families live hermetically sealed, locally controlled lives -- kids move from district to district or state to state all the time. Few other countries do things the American way, and they're generally getting better results. It's time for us to change. But don't listen to me, read Miller's article. One thing I'd add, though, is that the goofy primary system is a large obstacle to reform here. Iowa and New Hampshire happen to be two of the most fanatical local control states out there, and everyone tailors their education policy to accord with sensibilities in those places. Important Things We Haven't Talked AboutI'm pretty well-sick of the primary campaign at this point, having gone through about the nine millionth iteration of "Obama's shallow" versus "HRC's unprincipled" this morning. That said, one reason the campaign often feels so tedious is that both campaigns keep talking about the same very narrow set of things over and over again. But they really are a narrow set of things. It's as if the Western Front featured this brutal trench warfare just because nobody noticed some giant open plain right next to the battlefield. There are a whole bunch of critical substantive issues about which I think it's genuinely unclear where both major contenders stand. These are points where a person who's strongly committed to Candidate A could make a strong argument to me that Candidate A secretly agrees with my views on Issue X, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in getting serious, public expressions. I'm gonna do it list-style:
That's all for now, I guess. I've said before that I'm an Obama guy, but I think a lot of the criticism of him out there have at least some merit. In principle, I'd be perfectly open to revising my prospective vote (I think it would be overly grandiose to call it an "endorsement") if Hillary Clinton staked out clearly better stances on some of these things (and for the record, I don't take the left-most side on all of these questions) before Tuesday's Potomac Primary. AlternativesChad Ford writes up six better deals that Phoenix could have made for Shawn Marion. Of course not trading Shawn Marion would also have been a good move. This whole thing makes their decision to let Kurt Thomas walk seem all the more baffling. Competition and InsuranceI think the points Kevin Drum is making here start out in a good place but wind up heading in the wrong direction. The salient fact about competition and health insurance isn't that one can't imagine policies that would create a more effectively competitive insurance market, the problem is simply that decent people think the results of such a market would be undesirable. Under competitive conditions, companies get better at what they do. Normally, that's good. Electronics companies make gadgets that people want, at a cost cheap enough for them to afford them. Restaurants offer tasty food, enjoyable ambiance, efficient service, etc. But what well-functioning insurance companies do is assess risk accurately. And the general premise of health care policies in most countries is that health care should be delivered to people who need health care. This is just fundamentally incompatible with well-functioning insurance companies playing a large role in the financing of health care. Question of the DayDavid Shuster: "doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?" Me: No, it doesn't seem like that at all. It seems like Hillary Clinton's adult daughter is campaigning for her in much the way you would expect. Still Broken
If you only buy one foreign policy book this year, it should obviously be Heads in the Sand by a talented young writer with whom I'm acquainted. But if you buy a second, you could do a lot worse than A.J. Rosmiller's Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failure From Baghdad to the Pentagon. You've got some memoir, some policy analysis, and even a touch of action-adventure thrills. It shows on both a micro and a macro level in what bad shape we are, intelligence-wise. The system doesn't work, and good intelligence product isn't getting into the right hands and being acted on in the right way. But what's more, the system's driving smart, talented, patriotic, and knowledgeable people right out of the system. AJ's writing books and blog posts (and going to law school) instead of still working in the IC in part because it's the kind of screwed-up place that's driving the best people away rather than pulling them in. So to repeat, pre-order Heads in the Sand but it won't come for a while, so while you wait pick up a copy of Still Broken (available Tuesday!) and read that. I Vote for "Free Pass"Dave Roberts has questions about John McCain and the environment: Will the media learn from its mistake, or will it give the candidates another free pass on climate? If it does look a little closer, it will find that McCain is no green champion (more on that in a subsequent post). It might even force McCain to put or shut up on this issue -- while voters who care about it still have a chance to act on their convictions. Easy answer: free pass. But to move beyond media-bashing, one reason George W. Bush was able to get away with climate flim-flam so easily in 2000, was that Al Gore didn't seriously try to make an issue out of this. His advisors thought they had good reasons to not make a big issue out of global warming. I think they were wrong, but their argument isn't crazy. And right or wrong, the point is that they had a deliberate strategy. The strategy had some benefits, but it also had some costs. And one cost is that it's much easier for your opponent to get away with flim-flam when you don't focus on the issue in question. It would be nice for the media to just kind of do politicians' job for them, but it doesn't work like that. When the leading members of the Democratic Party didn't make a big deal out of the administration's bogus intelligence claims in 2002, the press didn't make a big deal out of it either. If the candidate doesn't make a big deal out of the phoniness of McCain's environmental agenda, neither will TV news. That's life. February 9, 2008On The RecordPredictions are a mug's game, but I was right about the Super Bowl, so I thought I might go on record with mine. I think Hillary Clinton's going to win this thing. I think the college educated men who dominate punditland have spent a lot of time missing the fact that there actually are enthusiastic Clinton fans out there -- they're just mostly working class women and thus mostly not in the room when this CW gets hashed out. On top of that, I think Clinton's succeeded in managing the expectations savvily. If she wins anywhere at all between now and March 4, that counts as a win for her, then Ohio is mildly favorable ground for her and Texas is extremely favorable ground. That, I think, will seal it for her as the anti-Obama backlash brewing in the press hits full stride. Shuster OutHe screwed up, but I think I'd have to agree that he's more being punished for Chris Matthews' sins than for his own. What he did is by no means worse than stuff MSNBC gives a free pass to all the time. And as long as I'm making sure that General Electric News will never have me on, why not like again to "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert". Cluster BombsObama's against 'em, Hillary Clinton's for 'em. Read more about cluster bombs here if you can stomach it. At the MarginYesterday, Avedon said: Just for the record, I have never in my life met anyone who quit working because their taxes were too high, nor have I ever even heard of someone who suddenly wanted to work harder because of a tax break. But this argument seems to prove too much. I never heard of someone who didn't buy a product because it cost $0.01 more than he wanted to pay. Still, I take it that we all agree that price is a factor in purchasing decisions. Nobody would be shocked if I told you about a scenario where I was offered $150 to write a column and turned it down because I was too busy at the moment but then reconsidered when the offer was upped to $200. But of course the value in terms of take home pay of a $200 freelance gig is very different (especially in places with a progressive state income tax) depending on what tax bracket you're in. So I don't think it's crazy to think that marginal income tax rates could have an impact on people's willingness to take these kinds of assignments. When you extrapolate out to something like Ezra Klein's example of a high-paid CEO it really is hard to imagine the tax incentives driving effort. The difference is that the quanta of effort available to a CEO a very large. Basically, you can either do the job and work the long hours it entails or else you can quit and do something entirely different. There's very little ability to respond to small changes in marginal tax rates with small changes in behavior. And that's how it goes with all of this -- a change needs to be big enough for there to be some alternative course of action that it makes sense to take. In practice, we debate the top income tax rate within a very narrow band so we don't see much impact. But that's not because the theory that tax changes have consequences is crazy -- it's just because the contemplated changes are small. Class and the DemocratsBrian Beutler points to one problem with David Brooks' column on Obama versus Clinton as consumer items. Brooks writes: Why do you bother me with simple problems? Listen, the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop. As Brian says, this would just imply straightforwardly that Obama will lose. And, indeed, that was the point of the original Ron Brownstein "wine track" / "beer track" analysis. But at the moment, more people have voted for Obama and Obama has more pledged delegates. Meanwhile, in the real world relatively few people use Macs and shop at Whole Foods. So Obama's appeal is a good deal wider than this, extending to, for example, working class African-Americans, people in sparsely populated plains states, and younger people from all kinds of backgrounds. But there is an important class dynamic to the Democratic race, and Brooks does a good job of spelling out the broader diverge than the split over which candidate to pick reflects: The consumer marketplace has been bifurcating for years! It’s happening because the educated and uneducated lead different sorts of lives. Educated people are not only growing richer than less-educated people, but their lifestyles are diverging as well. A generation ago, educated families and less-educated families looked the same, but now high school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. High school grads are much more likely to be obese. They’re much more likely to smoke and to die younger. It's definitely true that this struggle-versus-fulfillment dichotomy plays out in the difference between the candidates' rhetoric. But what's fascinating given their rather different bases of support is that this really doesn't wind up leading to any major policy disagreements. Given the different educational status of their electoral bases, you might expect Clinton and Obama to have major policy differences over climate change, trade, and immigration but in fact their differences on these topics are small and oftentimes seem trumped up. You see something similar on the GOP side where Mike Huckabee often talks as if his policy agenda is more favorable to the interests of his more downscale constituency, but there's actually very little evidence that it is. And yet, as Brooks points out the divergence in living conditions between college graduates and people who don't go to college is very much a real thing with concrete, tactile effects in the real world. One way or another, the political system ought to be responding to that divergence and not just reflecting it. Tet in Virginia
A little slice of the changing face of the United States, as Northern Virginia's Vietnamese community celebrates Tet in a strip mall parking lot. The unassuming Eden Center features a great Asian supermarket, but several excellent ban mi shops and sit-down Vietnamese restaurants. For the purposes of the holiday, the mall was festooned with Republic of Vietnam flags. Don't Count The SupersYesterday, Chris Bowers explained why it doesn't make sense to start tallying up how many superdelegates won candidate or another "has." It's a good post, but to boil it down to a sentence: These are unpledged delegates and they're allowed to change their minds. I would also, however, note another factor -- very few people know who the superdelegates are. Indeed, I heard an anecdote the other day about a politician who was wondering whether or not she was a superdelegate. The person who related the anecdote to me didn't know either. Well, I knew that she was, in fact, a superdelegate but I understand the rules -- but at this point in time the rules are so poorly understood that some superdelegates don't realize they're superdelegates. Coronation InterruptedMike Huckabee wins Kansas decisively. Of course as we've learned from Thomas Frank and Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas GOP activist class has become unusually wingnutty in recent years so it's not exactly a huge surprised. Still, base resistance to John McCain remains striking. Meawhile, it's a reminder that a candidate launched into the mainstream by his strong showing in Iowa isn't quite the Dixie regional candidate he's sometimes portrayed as. Defense Spending is Spending TooHere's a nice piece by Veronique de Rugy pointing out that, yes, spending on "defense" counts as spending too, a fact which seems to have gone missing from our political discourse. It's a lot of spending! Multimedia MeI'm going to be on Fox News tomorrow at 12:50 PM eastern time. Hopefully this time the segment won't get cut so short as it was a couple of weeks ago. Four WinsObama wins Nebraska. Obama wins Louisiana. Obama wins Washington. And Obama wins the US Virgin Islands. It's a nice haul. Like Andrew, I'm struck by the complete and devastating nature of Obama's win in Washington, where he appears to have carried every single county in a state where Asians and Hispanics outnumber African-Americans. Ambinder says: Though Clinton can't win the small states (unless she controls the machine -- think Nevada), Obama cannot win the states where the majority of Democrats reside. This seems like a mighty gerrymandered "can't" for Obama. He can win Democratic states like Washington, Connecticut, and Delaware. He can win states the Democrats sometimes carry like Iowa and Missouri. Is the criticism that Obama can't win big heavily Democratic states? Well, he won his home state of Illinois and Clinton won her home state of New York. So this amounts to saying Obama lost California. Which, of course, he did. And it's a big state so California gets a lot of delegates. But one can hardly proclaim the winner of California the winner on some "states where the majority of Democrats reside" theory when Obama's winning more states and winning more delegates and winning them in all regions of the country. |
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Heads in the Sand