A Question of Principle
I've been boycotting Bill Maher for the past twenty six years, but like Jonah Goldberg I'd be willing to make an exception to promote my book.
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February 10, 2008 - February 16, 2008 Archives
February 10, 2008
The Economics of Military History
Tyler Cowen comments on Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History which I've also been reading:
The table of contents looks amazing, but my browsing indicated this book to be boring. Still, some of you should read it. It is full of factual substance, slotted into an economic framework.
The book is, indeed, a disappointment mostly brought low by poor prose style. The analysis of the issues at hand is, however, often quite interesting. The chapter on mercenaries in Italy is an excellent take on the subject, and I'll have more to say later inspired by the book's account of the strategic bombing campaign in Germany.
The Rules of the Game
Chris Bowers is outraged by the prospect of superdelegates determining the winner of the Democratic primary. Kevin Drum is blasé. I'll take a middle ground view -- I think Chris is right to think it'd be a pretty bitter pill to swallow if that's how things shake out, but the controlling principle here is that "the rules are the rules." The superdelegates business, which seems to favor Clinton, is just the flipside of things like the Michigan/Florida exclusion or the weird rules that let Obama win Nevada even while Clinton had many more votes -- there's a lot of oddness in the nominating system and there's no point of plucking out any particular feature and slamming it as unfair as the process unfolds.
Conversely, this stuff gets tweaked every cycle. The Democrats have had this dumb superdelegate thing in there for a couple of decades now with people mostly not focusing on it because it never comes into play. Well, now it might come into play and it doesn't sit well with people. They ought to ditch the rule going forward.
Buyer's Remorse
John McCain reels in a pathetic 26 percent in Washington, loses Kansas, and loses Louisiana. It's not going to stop him from winning the nomination, but obviously conservatives haven't quite reconciled themselves to the Straight Talk Era. Conservatives not feeling the McMentum is, I believem going to be one of my topics on Fox News today at 12:50 PM. Be there (and as long as I'm self-promoting, buy the book).
Virginia Polls
Josh Patashnik did a smart article on how Virginia may not be as favorable to Obama as the press seems to think. But then there's the matter of the Virginia polling which shows a big lead for Obama. It's not been a heavily polled state, so I'm not sure how much confidence you should have in the accuracy of those surveys, but they certainly seem to show that Virginians (other than my aunt Lisa) like Obama.
Awakening Versus the State
Anbar Awakening forces and the official security services of Iraq appear to be going at it in Diyala.
Now as long as neither of these contenders are shooting at US troops, which neither of them seem to be, that's fine for us as long as you think an indefinite occupation of Iraq serves American interests. But that's what this is about. We're not preventing civil conflict in Iraq, or helping the Iraqis to build a coherent state.
CFL
Just to piss Ross off, I acquired some CFL bulbs yesterday at Target and installed them. The light they emit looks, um, totally fine to me. Congressional action to ban incandescent bulbs does, however, strike me as at least somewhat unfortunate insofar as they've now made it inevitable that claiming to be able to detect a major difference between CFL light and traditional bulbs is now going to become a point of pride for conservatives across the country. Once again, the best thing to do would be to put a price and carbon and let people work out the best adjustments on their own rather than trying to mandate specific technological solutions.
Donna Edwards
Donna Edwards' primary challenge to Al Wynn in Maryland has long been a cause celebre in the blogosphere, but it seems the Washington Post editorial board is on board too:
Mr. Wynn has long touted what he regards as a pragmatic ability to work across partisan lines. We're all for bipartisanship, but in Mr. Wynn's case, too often his stances have been unthinking and out of step with his district's interests. His vote to scrap the estate tax suggested he was indifferent to his own middle-class constituents. By flip-flopping on fuel-efficiency standards and opposing campaign finance reforms, he showed his contempt for clean air and clean government. And he seems scarcely aware of the import of his votes to permit federal courts to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case and to support a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning: granting federal courts a license to meddle in private affairs and cramping free speech.
Peace between the 'sphere and the Village -- brought to you by Donna Edwards.
Shake-Up
Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, is out and will be replaced by Maggie Williams who was chief of staff in Clinton's First Lady's office.
The Grammy Primary
Barack Obama beats out Bill Clinton to win a Grammy (really), his second (also really). Bill already has two (also also really).
Afghanistan
I think absolutely everything Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to say to European leaders about the central importance of NATO's mission in Afghanistan and the need for Europe to do more is correct. But what Gates needs to recognize is that realistically it's going to be hard to accomplish very much on this front until the United States puts some distance between itself and the Iraq War. Both politically and strategically, a deep European investment in Afghanistan just isn't going to be forthcoming as long as the U.S. remains politically and strategically invested in a hare-brained scheme to conquer the Persian Gulf.
My guess would be that Gates recognizes this on some level. But if he does, he needs to communicate that fact to George W. Bush and the other people who make the decisions.
Mapping Maine
These are the precincts in Maine that have reported so far. No huge surprises in the data, but I'd say this looks good for Obama. He's winning the Bangor area, which is kind of a swing region between metro Maine and backwoods Maine, the fancy-pants set from Bar Harbor hasn't reported yet and that big swatch of territory in the West where no votes have been counted yet and HRC may do well contains very few people (and they'll have trouble going anywhere in the terrible weather) so it should be hard to make up ground there.
Maine for Obama
Back in October 2007, Clinton was beating Obama in Maine by a hilarious 47 to 10 margin, but it seems he's carried the state today, once again by a large margin. My understanding, though, is that this doesn't really count because it's a small state, much as Utah doesn't count because there aren't many Democrats there, DC doesn't count because there are too many black people, Washington doesn't count because it's a caucus, Illinois doesn't count because Obama represents it in the Senate even though Hillary was born there, Hawaii won't count because Obama was born there. I'm not sure why Delaware and Connecticut don't count, but they definitely don't.
Realistically, Clinton seems to have difficulty winning anywhere she can't mobilize racial polarization in her favor. Obama has, of course, deployed polarization to his benefit in a number of states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana most notably) but he's also dominated the states with very few black voters.
UPDATE: I forgot about Missouri. Obama's win in Missouri, of course, doesn't count because the state was called too late.
Selective Release
Clearly the big news in this story relates to the bombings, but an interesting B plot begins here:
Officials released two seized documents they said were handwritten by members of the group, in despair about defections and decreasing popular support.
The article then goes on to describe the contents of those documents as supporting that official interpretation and then notes that:
The military, citing security concerns, released only excerpts of the two documents.
Of course they are. It couldn't be that the documents were released primarily for domestic propaganda purposes but that making them effective propaganda required some editing, thus leading to the excerpts only policy.
I will say, though, that there does seem to be a ray of genuinely good news lurking about. The anti-"Awakening" forces appear to have decided that operations resulting in large numbers of Sunni Arab civilian casualties are counterproductive and have focused on attacking Awakening fighters and police instead. That should make continued combat somewhat less deadly, which counts as a small mercy.
Count Every Vote
Huckabee demands justice from the Washington State GOP, which apparently thinks calling the state for John McCain with only 87 percent of votes counted is a good idea.
February 11, 2008
Obama and the Details
One anti-Obama meme that I notice has gotten a lot of support even among people sympathetic to his cause is the notion that he's somehow shallow or insufficiently well-versed in policy matters. Obviously, I can't crawl into either candidate's brain and take a look around, but this idea doesn't seem to me to be especially well-supported by the evidence. Instead, it seems to draw support from a kind of implicit Law of Conservation of Virtues -- the pretty girl can't be smart, the not-so-good-looking guy must be really nice -- that has people notice that Clinton is well-versed in policy but isn't a charismatic figure, and Obama is charismatic so it "must" be that he's not well-versed in policy. He's cool and she's the nerd.
This suits the media's taste for parallels and lazy narratives into which events can be squeezed. But there's really not much basis for it.
For one thing, these takes tend to have a certain vague quality to them and often are offered by people who don't, themselves, have a particular aptitude for policy. I've never heard an anecdote that involved someone talking to Obama about some policy question and walking away feeling he had a notably poor grasp of the issue. Those things do happen, though. I definitely had a conversation with a then-Senator about Iraq in 2006 in which I got the impression that though the Senator was working earnestly to inform himself about the issue his actual knowledge base was shockingly low considering how long the war had been going on. But with Obama? I haven't heard about it.
Meanwhile, this story is one of several narratives that seems to me to overlook his time in the Illinois State Senate. Obama didn't have some vast army of staffers to rely on in that role, and he wasn't just serving time there, either. He successfully authored and passed legislation and impressed a lot of Illinois progressives. Nor is the University of Chicago Law School in the habit of handing out teaching positions to dullards. Which brings to mind the additional point that one way the allegedly vast Clinton edge in policy expertise sometimes gets argued for seems to be defining "policy" in such a way as to make things where Obama clearly has more knowledge, interest, and experience -- constitutional law, criminal justice, non-proliferation policy -- not count as "policy." In the real world, appointing federal judges and prosecutors and weighing-in on federal litigation is an important presidential function.
Last there's the question of staff and advisors. The various smart people working with him on a whole variety of issues -- starting with Samantha Power and Karen Kornbluh when he first got to the Senate and expanding ever since -- don't have any really compelling reasons to have been working with him unless they thought he was a smart, impressive person who was up to the task of doing a good job on the issues they care the most about. Unlike dynasts like George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton or ex-veeps like George H.W. Bush or Al Gore, Obama hasn't had the luxury of simply inheriting a vast apparatus by default, he's had to build it himself. That's hard to do if experts come away from talking with you worried that you don't know what you're talking about.
UPDATE: On the conservation of virtues point, note that everyone agrees that Bill Clinton is both very well-versed in policy (like his wife) and a charismatic figure. There's no fundamental tension here.
The Big States
I wanted to see what, if any, reaction Hillary Clinton's campaign had up on their website to her loss in Maine, but it seems they're ignoring it. Also Louisiana. And Washington. And Nebraska. And of course the US Virgin Islands. Instead, the latest results-related thing I saw was a post-Super Tuesday memo from Mark Penn that featured the illogic we've come to expect from the man since long before he started working for HRC's presidential bid:
As super-delegates consider which candidate to support, they will be looking at which one candidate has a base and can win the big states, including the crucial swing constituencies. We believe the impressive wins in NY, CA, MA, MI, FL, NJ, AZ suggest that Hillary is the one who can motivate a strong turnout in November.
But of course Democrats couldn't possibly lose NY, CA, MA, or NJ there was no campaign in FL or MI and it'll be a cold day in hell before John McCain loses an election in Arizona. I think the reverse inference that Obama won swing states like Colorado, Iowa, and Missouri and will therefore carry those states in the general election doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but at least I understand what the argument is supposed to be. What about Clinton winning Massachusetts is supposed to convince me that Clinton can motivate a strong turnout?
A Polling Crisis
For a long time it seemed inconceivable that we would face this problem, but don't we need some more polling to be done on this primary? All throughout 2007 I feel like I was being inundated with a new, meaningless national poll every 36 hours. And for a while, it seemed as if multiple Iowa and New Hampshire polls were coming out every day. But now, there's just an eerie silence. But I, for one, would be very interested in a poll of likely voters in the Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania Democratic Party primaries and I can't be the only one.
For that matter, will nobody think of the small states? With regard to, say, Hawaii all of our information is based on conjecture and hearsay. Obama was born in Hawaii, but then you read things about "the Democratic establishment is aggressively working to inoculate the state against Obama--priming their warhorses, the two biggest government unions, for a major turnout effort and bringing professional organizers from the mainland." How about a poll? It's a weird situation.
Washington Map
Nick Beaudrot made this map of Barack Obama's convincing win in Washington State. As you can see, in essence the pattern is for him to win everywhere. Though he certainly does win by more in some parts of the state. In Louisiana, by contrast, you saw a very strong dynamic of racial polarization with black areas going for Obama and white ones going for Clinton.
Maybe a Coverup Would Help
The Army asked the RAND Corporation to do a kind of lessons-learned report on Iraq soon after the invasion. In the summer of 2005, after 18 months of study, "Rebuilding Iraq" was done. RAND submitted a classified version and an unclassified version "hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts." Naturally, the report was critical of the conduct of the White House and the Defense Department, since the whole thing had turned into a huge disaster so any useful review would need to be critical of the key people.
Apparently, what happened next was that the Army launched a big effort to suppress the report and keep its findings secret. Because, hey, why seek to inform the public when there are asses to cover?
National Review and Democracy
John O'Sullivan launches another episode in the oft-fraught relationship as he muses "Alas, Lee [Kuan Yew] is not eligible for the U.S. presidency." Lee is an impressive figure in many respects, but as we really supposed to deem it regrettable that we're not allowed to hand control of the country over to a foreign dictator?
10,000 Years
Funny video:
My understanding is that it's supposed to be unfair to charge McCain with having proposed that we fight a 100 (or, at times, 10,000) Years War in Iraq because he stipulated that Americans would stop getting killed (via magic!) during this indefinite occupation. Maybe so, but viewed in that light the comment merely reflects McCain's utter lack of strategic and diplomatic understanding. Such masters of nuance and sensitivity as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld all had the good sense to recognize that loose talk of perpetual American occupation of Iraq drives anti-American violence and gets US troops killed.
The Critique of Pure Huckabee
It seems that over the weekend, Mike Huckabee made the following remark about the fact that it's not really possible for him to beat John McCain at this point no matter how many primaries he won:
The pundits say the math doesn't work out. Well, folks, I didn't major in math. I majored in miracles.
This raises some serious questions about Huckabee's philosophy. Normally, the truths of mathematics are regarded as "necessary" truths and one way of explaining that idea is that these are truths that even God couldn't alter. For example, it's true that all squares have four sides because having four sides is part of what it means to be a square. God could make pretty much any kind of five-sided object He cared to, but even He couldn't make a five-sided square because something with five sides just isn't a square. This basic tension between God and math is surely something a minister should be familiar with.
Alternatively, perhaps Huckabee was suggest not a miraculous repeal of the mathematical certainty of his defeat, but rather a form of divine intervention that would make the delegate math irrelevant. It's difficult, however, to see what that could be except for the possibility that McCain might die or suffer some kind of illness or injury that prevents him from accepting the nomination. That doesn't, however, seem like a very Christian thing to wish for. Nor, I might add, is there any real reason to think that even McCain's untimely death would deliver the nomination to Huckabee.
Obama at J-J Dinner
For those who want to hear less about "hope" and more about his policy agenda, Barack Obama's Jefferson-Jackson Day speech in Virginia was full of that kind of thing. Personally, I think it's probably a mistake for a speech to turn into two much of a laundry-list, but if you really want to see his agenda spelled out in some detail, the Blueprint for Change document has it in spades. My guess is that about none of the people who purport to be troubled by his lack of specifics have read this, but who knows? Certainly, it meets any possible standard of plodding earnestness that one might want.
I liked this line from Obama a lot:
It’s a choice between debating John McCain about who has the most experience in Washington, or debating him about who’s most likely to change Washington. Because that’s a debate we can win.
That seems right to me. Electability issues are fuzzy and who knows. But as someone who participates in political arguments for a living, the debate Obama is proposing strikes me as a more inviting one than the debate Clinton is proposing.
Captain Amnesty Lyrics
Read JB went the extra mile and wrote the lyrics to "Captain Amnesty" that I've been looking for. Here's the original lyrics for the sake of comparison. And here at the new ones (spelling "oi" as "oy" is deliberate):
National Poll
I asked for more polls and now we have an AP/Ipsos national poll showing Barack Obama in the lead. Of course, national polling is even less relevant than usual since such a large proportion of the population has already missed its chance to vote.
Clinton Campaign Manager: HRC is Extremely Conservative
Here's James Bennett, now Supreme Leader at The Atlantic, interviewing new Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams for The New York Times Magazine back in 1999:
''The biggest mistake of the American press is thinking they know her,'' says Maggie Williams, Clinton's former chief of staff and one of her closest friends. ''You know, people think she's such a big lib. I think she's extremely conservative. I think she has more in common with people in upstate New York than in New York City, in a lot of ways.'' Williams calls Clinton ''patriotic and practical. She thinks it's important to spend money on social programs, but she wants to know that they work.''
Maybe so. But until she stands on her own politically, none of us can know. Morris says Hillary Clinton recognized long before her husband the effectiveness of a campaign based on bite-size ''values'' issues like school uniforms. She supports the death penalty, as the President does. She supports abortion rights, as he does, but she has not made the issue a priority as First Lady. For all her heated warnings about children, she has been ginger in using her influence to tilt the balance of power in their favor.
Now, obviously, it's not true that Clinton is an "extremely conservative" politician. Equally obviously, she hasn't been an "extremely conservative" figure throughout her entire adult life. I'm not really sure why Williams thought it made sense to describe her boss in those terms. But in the broader context, this a welcome reminder that Hillary Clinton, progressive champion and scourge of bipartisanship, is a relatively recent identity. Not only where there the Arkansas years and the Years of Triangulation in the White House, but in the years 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, Clinton's main political priority was trying to convince people that she was a moderate centrist and not the liberal in the closet of her husband's administration. Her April 2006 speech to the Economic Club of Chicago is all about her love of balanced budgets and working with Republicans on small-bore reforms. She talks about health care at great length, and the idea of an ambitious program for universal coverage never comes up.
Now I don't think one should begrudge Clinton the right to shift points of political emphasis over time. I recall back when I was a New Yorker not liking the fact that Clinton was going to be foisted on us as a Senator because it seemed to me to be a waste of a safe seat to give it to someone whose presidential ambitions were going to cause her to hew to a more moderate line than was locally necessary (and of course in retrospect those fears were borne out when in 2002 and 2003 Clinton chose to use her status as a party leader to help sell Democrats on the invasion of Iraq, rather than use her Senate perch to push back). But tailoring one's politics to suit the constituency is a common turn of events -- you see it, for example, with Obama and coal over the years. But it's a reminder that this whole idea of Clinton as the authentic true progressive is hogwash -- she's been challenged from the left in this primary, and so she's run to the left; at an earlier time her confidantes were telling people that she's "very conservative." Back in October 2007 when her campaign thought it had things all wrapped up, she was ready to play the Iran hawk as part of a shift to "general election mode" and who knows what she'd come up with in an actual general election.
Hip Hillary
I think Andrew's being too much of a hater about this Hillary video. It's pretty funny:
What's more, if I thought it was actually the case that Clinton would take action on college affordability, climate change, and ending the war that Obama wouldn't take, I would, like, totally be voting for her. But (fortunately) the candidates are in agreement on the first two issues, and (unfortunately) neither of them has really committed to ending the war in Iraq but Obama's larger record gives me somewhat more hope that he'd do the right thing. Mostly, though, it serves as a reminder that I'd be genuinely thrilled to vote for Clinton in a general election . . . the primary dynamics breed a lot of ill-will, but fundamentally there are two good choices on the table here.
The Age Thing
Atrios wrote yesterday:
I would have no problem casting a vote for a 72+ year old person. It might make me look a bit more closely at who their Veep is, but I'm just not all that concerned with the possibility that the president might get sick or die in office.
I agree, but it's worth underscoring this a bit more. The odds that a man in his seventies would die in office are really quite good. Not "I'd take an even odds bet on John McCain dying in office" good, but good enough that in McCain's case the boilerplate about picking a VP who could take over and do the job needs to be taken seriously. That's hardly an insurmountable challenge for McCain to meet, but it does at least somewhat limit his options. Something like a Dan Quayle pick isn't (and shouldn't) going to fly.
Going Deep in Afghanistan
Fred Kaplan points out that what Robert Gates is asking the Europeans to do in Afghanistan won't really make a big difference. What's needed, instead, is something much larger:
What is needed now goes well beyond Germany's reticence, goes well beyond NATO. What's needed is a full-blown initiative—military, economic, diplomatic—involving all the nations of the region. It requires imagination, tireless negotiations, heaps of money (in part to pay for other countries' troops, since we have so few to spare), and some unpleasant deal-making with some otherwise unpleasant nations.
I think this re-enforces what I was saying earlier about Afghanistan. On the one hand, it's not possible to imagine a global effort of this scale succeeding without stepped-up American involvement. And on the other hand, it's not possible to imagine Europeans committing in this way to Afghanistan unless the United States is committing itself as well. If we want the Europeans to treat this as a major priority, in other words, we need to act like it's a major priority rather than as if the idea is for Europe to hold our coat in Central Asia so we can keep throwing more resources into Iraq.
Speaking of which, I recommended Fred Kaplan's book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power back when I read it, rather than now when it's available in stores. Always a mistake. Kaplan is vital reading, as you can perhaps tell from my constant quoting of his Slate columns, and the book is no less vital. At this point, basically everyone can see that the Bush foreign policy has been a disaster. But what's still not well-understood is why it's been such a disaster. The book demonstrates that it's much more than a matter of Bush "blundering" or some such rather -- rather, as Kaplan lays out, Bush's policies have been driven by ideas that seemed right but are, in fact, wrong. Importantly, as Kaplan's recounting makes clear, the ideas, though wrong, tend to be at least somewhat plausible, raising the danger that the ideas themselves will continue to live in some form beyond Bush's presidency.
(Of course, my book, Heads in the Sand is also good.)
No Racists Here
Mickey Kaus' rejection of John McCain's effort to make nice on immigration is fascinating:
McCain said he had "respect" for opponents of his immigration plan (which he didn't renounce) "for I know that the vast majority of critics to the bill based their opposition in a principled defense of the rule of law." Not like those others who base their opposition on bigoted yahoo nativism! McCain's semi-conciliatory words aren't what you say when you really respect your opposition--then you say "I know we have honest disagreements." Not "I know most of you aren't really racists." Even his suckup betrayed how he really feels. Which I suspect is sneering contempt!
So he's holding out for McCain to make the extremely implausible claim that there's not a single bigoted yahoo in the anti-immigration movement? I thought Mickey schtick used to be that just because all his favorite causes are also the favorite cause of racists didn't necessarily mean people who agreed with him are racists. Now I guess it's all-or-nothing; either you think there's no racism in the United States, or else he's got no time for you. Weird.
Lightbulb Correction
Ooops. In an earlier post, I criticized congressional legislation to ban incandescent lightbulbs and mandate the use of Compact Fluorescent Lights. There is no such legislation. Instead, there's legislation that mandates bulbs meet energy efficiency standards that only CFLs and impractically expensive LEDs can meet. I apologize for the error.
That said, the point still stands. The sort of plans to curb carbon emissions that the Democratic Presidential candidates are both necessary and sufficient to meet the challenges of global warming. These plans place an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, auction permits to produce the allowed level of emissions, let emitters buy and sell permits on the open market, and will then rely on the price system to help individual consumers adjust their personal habits to the new low-emissions regime as they see fit. Domain-specific efficiency standards like this CFL business are, by contrast, neither necessary nor sufficient. I'm not going to take to the streets to protest against incandescent bulb bans or increased CAFE standards, but I do think the legislative battles over this stuff are fundamentally a waste of time.
Super Osama Kulfa Balls
It seems that this is a real candy available for sale in China:
These coconut-flavored (a bizarre choice in itself considering the available alternatives in Afghanistan: cardamom, raisin, almond, yak… ) balls are sold in purple boxes (not to be confused with Purple Heart boxes) and feature Bin Laden’s bearded mug preaching peace and enlightenment among tanks, warplanes and cruise missiles. Delicious, and now available for the Olympics, too. Get them while stocks last.
I don't personally go in for coconuts, but tastes differ.
Good Advice
Jason Rae is a 21 year-old superdelegate from Wisconsin. Naturally, he's now everyone's best friend. But Jason Zengerle observes that Barack Obama's campaign might be getting out-organized here:
P.S. While Hillary has Bill and Chelsea making her case to Rae, it looks like Obama has . . . John Kerry. Uh, two words of advice for the Obama people: Scarlett Johansson.
That sounds like good advice. And, of course, it's not an either/or proposition. Every vote counts, but Rae's vote counts a lot more than the rest of ours does.
Why Not Penn?
Noam Scheiber wonders why Patti Solis Doyle got the ax instead of Mark Penn and puts forward some plausible conjectures. Michelle Cottle ads some insight of her own. But let's try this on for size: Maybe Hillary Clinton believes Mark Penn is a brilliant political strategist who saved her husband's administration (and the Democratic Party) in the 1990s, put her in the US Senate, and knows the formula to put her in the White House.
Yes, I think that's ludicrous but then again I never would have made him chief strategist of my presidential campaign. Clinton obviously hired him because she admires his work, and there may well be nothing more machiavellian going on than that she continues to admire his work.
Clinton on the Sweep
Here's Hillary Clinton's take on getting shut out over the weekend:
She said she never expected to do well in any of those contests, even though she had been favored to win Maine. Clinton repeated her criticism that the caucus system is undemocratic and caters mostly to party activists.
As for Louisiana, "You had a very strong and very proud African- American electorate, which I totally respect and understand," Clinton said.
It's worth noting that there was a time -- a time called "2007" -- when Clinton was expecting to hold her own among African-Americans. Not necessarily win the black vote, but do well enough to get by. For a contrast, women were a majority of participants in every single Democratic primary and caucus, so every time Obama won he had to stay at least somewhat competitive within the women sub-sample. For Clinton, that kind of performance among African-Americans now seems out of reach, but it wasn't ever thus. Similarly, the idea that caucuses are unfairly disadvantaging the establishment candidate would have struck most people as very odd before the voting began. The truth seems to be that Clinton simply spent more money on consultants and less on organizers, and a paucity of organizers can hurt you badly in a caucus.
All About Texohio
Patrick Healy reports for The New York Times:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.
Fair enough. On the other hand, Texas and Ohio combined have just a bit fewer delegates than do the Obama Weekend Sweep States plus the Potomac Primary states, so it's not clear that even a Texas and Ohio win would put her over the top. Meanwhile, as I noted this morning we haven't seen any polls from Texas or Ohio and the idea that Clinton is leading in those places is best on pure conjecture.
February 12, 2008
Playing Dumb
As everyone knows, Hillary Clinton has lost a whole bunch of recent contests because their caucus format disenfranchises her core constituents. Thus, when you turn to a place like Washington, DC with its primary, she's in better shape. Indeed, when you consider that DC's median household income of $40,000 is below the national household median, 20 percent of our residents are below the poverty line, and that there are only 86 adult men here for every 100 adult women, one would expect a tribune of the working class like Clinton to do extremely well here. After all, those are citywide statistics, and one can expect the ranks of registered Democrats to have an even more downscale and female slant than this.
Off to Vote
It's electing time for me. Go Obama. And, if you live in PG County, go Donna Edwards. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is off to Texas despite the fact that her national campaign headquarters is in Virginia where some primarying is happening to today.
Beyond "Subprime"
In non-campaign news, it seems that people are waking up to the extent to which the crisis in asset values and credit markets goes way beyond the specific issue of subprime mortgages. Since mortgages are big, and subprime borrowers are the least creditworthy, problems struck in that particular sector in the fastest, largest way. But the issue is fairly general -- during a period of pretty stagnant incomes, people have been ratcheting up consumption based on increased wealth derived from their homes. People weren't, however, actually selling their homes to get money and buy stuff. Instead, they borrowed. But with home values plummeting, now there's big trouble.
White Candidate Can't Catch a Break
I was, of course, joking below about Hillary Clinton's good chances among DC's mostly female, mostly working class primary electorate. My working class neighbors and fellow Districters are, naturally, mostly black and, as such, don't count as "working class" for the purposes of the media's electoral analysis and the Clinton campaign has repeatedly emphasized that elections in states (or pseudo-state entities like DC and the Virgin Islands) with too many black people don't count.
Still, it's strange how wide this blackout net seems to have been cast. DC is one thing, but the Clinton campaign's conceit that a white person can't get ahead in the politics of Maryland and Virginia is just bizarre. Senator Ben Cardin, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Governor Martin O'Malley, Governor Tim Kaine, and Senator Jim Webb are all white Democrats who've had some success in the mid-Atlantic region. Cardin even had to run against a black guy in the primary. It's true that Maryland, in particular, has relatively few white people (only Texas, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii are less white) but plenty of white folks seem to be doing okay. The real truth of the matter is that Clinton seems doomed in these states just because she's chosen to not seriously contest them.
Fear of a Black Plurality
In addition to allocating delegates to the winner of the overall District vote, here in DC we also allocate some delegates on a ward-by-ward basis. In places like Ward 7 and Ward 8 east of the Anacostia River, Hillary Clinton is hopelessly doomed. But in diverse Ward 1 where I live, she ought to have a shot. We're not nearly as white as Ward 2 or Ward 3, but we are "the only ward where you’ll find no population group with a majority". In short, there are black people and white people plus a healthy dollop of Hispanics. Are City Council representative, Jim Graham, is of the caucasion persuasion, so it should be possible for a white politician to secure some support here. Indeed, Graham is a Clinton supporter.
What's more, while Precinct 22 (pictured above) where I vote was pretty heavily black during the 2004 cycle, when I voted there this morning it was about half and half. And yet, while Obama has a volunteer standing outside in the cold by a table full of campaign literature, urging passersby to vote for Obama, Clinton had nobody. Similarly, her campaign doesn't seem to have gotten any "HILLARY" signs into the hands of any of the residents of my neighborhood. Consequently, in what looks like a pretty decent turnout I imagine Obama's going to dominate:
What seems to be going on here is that Clinton feels that she can't maintain the pretense that Maryland and Washington and Virginia and The Other Washington and Maine and Nebraska and the US Virgin Islands and Louisiana "don't count" if she bothers to campaign in these places. But thanks to the way Democrats allocate delegates, there's a substantial difference between "losing" a jurisdiction and getting blown out in that jurisdiction. My guess is that Clinton's lackluster campaigning is creating a situation where she's leaving delegates on the table.
Writer's Strike
David Carr has an excellent analysis of the ambiguous nature of the resolution of the writer's the strike. The Guild wrung concessions out of the studios, which is definitely a win, and they secured the key points of principle, so it superficially looks like a big win, but when you bore down to the details the didn't acquire a great deal of concrete significance.
The McCain Enigma
Jon Chait notes that John McCain has engaged in some pretty astounding policy meandering over the years in a way that makes it absurdly hard to tell what he would actually do as president:
Determining how McCain would act as president has thus become a highly sophisticated exercise in figuring out whom he's misleading and why. Nearly everyone can find something to like in McCain. Liberals can admire his progressive instincts and hope that he is dishonestly pandering to the right in order to get through the primary. Conservatives can believe he will follow whatever course his conservative advisers set out for him and will feel bound by whatever promises he has made to them. Even the ideological tendency McCain is most strongly identified with--neoconservative foreign policy--is, as John B. Judis explained in The New Republic, a relatively recent development: McCain originally opposed intervention in Bosnia and worried about a bloody ground campaign before the first Gulf war (see "Neo-McCain," October 16, 2006). McCain's advisers include not only neoconservatives but also the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. It would hardly be unimaginable for McCain to revert to his old realism, especially if Iraq continues to fail at political reconciliation. He could easily be the president who ends the war.
The amazing thing about McCain is that his reputation for principled consistency has remained completely intact. It is his strongest cudgel against opponents. Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Kimberley Strassel recently gushed that McCain is "no flip-flopper." "Like or dislike Mr. McCain's views," she added, "Americans know what they are." Then, in the very next paragraph, she wrote that McCain will now be "as pure as the New Hampshire snow on the two core issues of taxes and judges" and that "[t]he key difference between Mr. McCain in 2000 and 2008 is that he...appears intent on making amends" to conservatives.
It seems to me that one's best bet under conditions of uncertainty is to assume that politicians will, in fact, implement the agendas they're campaigning on. So if John McCain says he'll resist the repeal of the Bush tax cuts he probably will, as president, resist the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. But what's really disturbing about McCain's many flip-flops is their often obscure motivation. His far-right swing on national security has wound up serving him well in the 2008 GOP primary, but it actually took place back in the mid-to-late 1990s, so it's not the result of straightforward political calculation. Similarly, his big veer to the left in 2002-3 didn't seem to have much of a root cause beyond personal pique -- he was pissed at George W. Bush and at the time Democrats were pushing a pretty modest, tepid agenda so McCain embraced large chunks of it to spite his rival.
And as Chait emphasize, McCain actually denies that any of this swaying to-and-fro ever took place, so he doesn't have any kind of story to explain what it's all about.
If you find the vague themes of nationalistic collectivism running through McCain's career to be appealing, maybe this meandering on substantive issues looks reassuring to you. If you don't see the appeal, then I think it looks frightening. But from a pure electoral perspective, the really dangerous thing is that it's hard to imagine McCain (or anyone) ever doing anything more brazenly flip-floppy and dishonest than his shifting story on taxes and yet it hasn't changed his reputation at all. All we can take from that, I think, is that McCain can say literally anything he wants and the press will still say his shit smells sweet. There's the old joke about Bush saying the earth is flat and the papers reporting at as "Flatness of Earth Disputed" but if McCain were to say it you'd just get a "New Study: Earth is Flat" headline.
Still, in terms of what McCain would actually do as president, the fact of the matter is that we just have very, very, very little evidence. Under the circumstances, the best thing to do is probably to assume he'll do what he says he's going to do -- cut taxes, curtail spending, and bomb Iran -- but there's sort of no telling.
Better Explanations Needed
The process by which the Democratic Party allocates delegates is complicated, so it's a good thing that CNN.com features this explainer. Unfortunately, their explanation is totally wrong. The Democrats only allocate 35 percent of the delegates based on the proportion of the statewide vote. The other 65 percent of the delegates are allocated to congressional districts, with the number of delegates per district varying (since congressional districts have the same population, I believe the variance has to do with how many people voted for John Kerry) from district to district. Then each congressional district has its delegates apportioned proportionately.
This is quite different from what CNN explained. Among other things, it impacts turnout strategy. If Congressional District Seven of State X is blanketed with snow and only 11 people turn out to vote, but all eleven vote for Candidate A, then Candidate A still gets all of CD7's delegates even if those eleven votes are the only votes A gets in a state where two million people vote.
CNN's system seems to me like one that would make more sense, but them's the breaks. You need to explain the real electoral system, not some more rational, easier-to-explain alternative system.
Getting Out the Vote
My colleague Marc Ambinder has been nominated for a Golden Dot Award in the best political coverage category. You should vote for the man, he does great work.
DNC vs. McCain
As Clinton and Obama continue to fight things out, it falls to the DNC to attack John McCain:
Ambinder says it's "a preview of how they'll run against him in the fall." If so, the good news is that they're going straight at his alleged strength on national security. The weakness, though, is that this attack really has nothing to do with the issue at hand. It's good as a side dish or an appetizer, but the point needs to rest at some point not on McCain's occasionally contradictory mumbling but on his ideas. The Bush years have seen repeated disasters in U.S. foreign policy, and those disasters have been the consequences of Bush's ideas about America's role in the world, ideas that John McCain seems to share.
This is inherently a bit difficult to do without a nominee, since making a meatier critique of McCain's ideas is probably going to require sketching out a bit more of an alternative set of ideas. At some point, though, it's going to have to be done. This kind of poking fun at McCain is a good way to try to take the guy down a peg or two, but at the end of the idea he's still going to be a war hero and Clinton or Obama won't be -- purely personal critiques aren't going to cut it for the long haul.
Polling Wisconsin
New poll has Obama up 50-39, but Wisconsin doesn't count because it's an open primary.
Shaheen Mania
I spent some chilly weekends in New Hampshire on behalf of Jeanne Shaheen to no avail back in 2002, so I'm glad to see her storming to a big lead over John Sununu this time around. That said, unless she's had a massive political instincts transplant in the past six years (she ran as a supporter of the Bush tax cuts, the war in Iraq, etc.), liberals can probably be looking forward to being disappointed by Senator Shaheen on a fairly frequent basis.
Calling JB
Spencer Ackerman wants you to get in touch regarding "Captain Amnesty."
Obama-Clinton, Lieberman-Lamont
More mapping from Nick Beaudrot. Above is his representation of the Obama-Clinton race in connecticut which, since Connecticut reports results on a town-by-town basis, provides us with some pretty fine-grained data. Nick observes that there's a strong similarity to the map of Lieberman-Lamont primary results:
The main difference would seem to be that Obama did better than Lamont in the neck of towns closest to New York in the southwest corner of the state. Overall, it's not a huge surprise -- Obama, like Lamont, had a lot of appeal to voters who took the war very seriously as an issue and probably have a self-conception of themselves as freethinkers eager to buck the establishment. The question for Obama has always been to what extent can he break out of that box, adding African-Americans of all classes and an adequate number of working-class hispanics and white men to the typical reformer coalition. He's passed a number of critical tests in that regard, but it's still an open issue.
The Wieseltier Factor
I'll admit that Marty Peretz's seeming affection for Barack Obama has given me some pause. But Spencer Ackerman points out that Leon Wieseltier is slamming Obama as insufficiently bloodthirsty. That's not quite as big as when Kenneth Pollack and Mike O'Hanlon came out in favor of Clinton, but I'd say it certainly counts as a stroke in Obama's favor.
Immunity Vote
Hillary Clinton skips vote on retroactive immunity for telecom firms. Criticizing people for missing votes because they were out on the campaign trail usually strikes me as unfair, but given that the vote happened in Washington DC on the day of primaries being held in DC, in Maryland, and in Virginia it does seem a little odd.
Ready to Lead?
Josh Green reports on the departure of Patti Solis Doyle from the Clinton campaign. On the second page, he speculates:
Rather than punish Solis Doyle or raise questions about her fitness to lead, Clinton chose her to manage the presidential campaign for reasons that should now be obvious: above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.
Meanwhile, Steven Ybarra, a Latino superdelegate who's been backing Hillary Clinton, seems pretty pissed off that Clinton fired her campaign's top Latina.
The Backlash Goatee
Time reports that the popularity of the goatee in the 1990s was "partof a backlash to feminism". Seems like an odd interpretation. Indeed, the timing doesn't even make sense. Time for a blogger ethics panel?
Get This Man a Copy of the Constitution
I'm happy to believe that the California legislature is dysfunction in some ways, but surely if Joel Kotkin wants to mount an argument for the state's irrelevance in presidential politics, he might want to at least mention the fact that its governor is constitutionally ineligible to serve. Meanwhile, surveying the states problems, he also manages to completely neglect the anti-tax ballot initiative that's decimated the state's public services.
Strikingly, though, I thought this was a better than average Kotkin op-ed since usually he simply reiterates the idea that you can tell nobody wants to live in big cities from the fact that it's so expensive to buy houses in them.
This is Radio Matt
I'm going to be on the Rachel Maddow Show on Air America at precisely 6:34 PM Eastern time tonight. If she's not on in your market, you can stream the broadcast online here.
Virginia!
Obama wins! Huckabee and McCain is too close to call. The humiliation factor for McCain has to be huge here. For Clinton, it's pretty big as well.
UDPATE: Exit polls are showing a huge win for Obama. Fifty-six percent of voters were women, and fifty-eight percent of them went for Obama. College graduates went for Obama. Non-graduates went for Obama. New voters went for Obama. People who'd voted previously voted for Obama. Basically, everyone voted for Obama.
UPDATE II: Obama even won Latinos, 55-45.
UPDATE III: "There's no solace anywhere in these numbers" says Olberman.
McCain and the War
Once again, John McCain wins voters who "strongly disapprove" of the war in Iraq. Voters who "strong approve," by contrast, were split evenly between McCain and Huckabee. What's going to happen when people figure out that McCain loves war?
Defining Marxism Down
Northern Virginia has, to be sure, been tilting left of late, but if Pat Buchanan really think Alexandria is "Marxist country" he probably needs to think a bit harder.
35 Years Ago
Tom Brokaw on television is pedantically correcting Hillary Clinton's claim in her El Paso speech that she came here "35 years ago, to work for the Democratic National Committee, registering voters." 1972, as Brokaw points out, was more like 36 years ago. But that's silly. Somewhat more substantively, what she came to Texas to do was work for George McGovern. If she wants credit for her experience and years of work she should probably say what she actually did.
McCain Pulls it Out
Captain Amnesty carries Virginia after all. But just imagine the fits Mike Huckabee would be giving him if he had more than zero dollars to spend. Oh well. Fun as it is to see the GOP frontrunner discomfitted, McCain would be a better president and deserves to win the nomination.
Maryland Exits
62 percent of the electorate in Maryland was female, and women went for Obama 59-38. Obama won Latinos 53-47. He won non-college Democrats 63-33 and college Democrats 62-36. In an inversion of the usual trajectory, Clinton did better among wealthier Democrats than among people of more modest means. People who make over $200,000 a year went for Clinton, with every less prosperous slice going for Obama. He won Protestants and he won Catholics. He won urban voters and suburban voters and rural voters.
Going Long
Obama's speech has a lot of the elements of his usual stump speech, but in a radical departure from normal habit he's . . . attacking Republicans at great length. Especially John McCain. It's pretty fun.
DC
Looks like Obama's got about seventy-five percent of the vote in Washington, DC.
February 13, 2008
Against Caucuses
I think Hillary Clinton's efforts to make excuses about losing all the caucuses are pretty lame. At the end of the day, if the establishment quasi-incumbent can't manage to pull of wins at these kind of undemocratic events, she has only herself to blame. But if Clinton and her supporters inside the party want to spearhead a nationwide drive to move to primaries, I'd certainly be all in favor of that.
I didn't like caucuses before Iowa, and I still don't like them now. In addition to the participation barriers, caucuses make outcomes overly dependent on "caucus math" rather than actual levels of support. For the purposes of the actual campaign, however, Hillary Clinton could have made her principled objections to the caucus method of delegate selection known back when she was first lady in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 or as an influential U.S. Senator in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007. Instead, though, she seems to have developed some outcome-driven objections after losing a series of caucuses. They're definitely a bad way to select nominees, but her complaints aren't very credible.
Don't Worry
John McCain says that "anyone who worries about how long we're in Iraq does not understand the military." On the contrary, it seems to me that McCain doesn't understand diplomacy, Iraq, foreign policy, strategy, the concept of limited resources, or just about anything else. In the short-term, the McCain plan for open-ended warfare in Iraq costs lives, money, and carries enormous political costs and opportunity costs in terms of what the United States can do around the world. In the long-term, McCainite visions for a perpetual US military presence in Iraq fuel skepticism of US motives in that country and are a key driving force behind anti-American violence.
McCain even goes so far as to directly compare his vision of Iraq to the current situation in Kuwait, where in exchange for basing rights and oil we help prop up an unaccountable and corrupt dictatorship. Fear that this is what we're aiming for in Iraq is precisely why many Iraqis are fighting so hard against our troops, and our habit of acting this way in other Gulf states is a major driving force of anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world. The Bush administration has at least had the good sense to pursue this agenda quietly and in secret, but hot-head McCain can't keep his mouth shut to avoid gaffes and can't stop digging now that he realizes he's in a hole.
Inevitable
I see a frequent email correspondent has accused me of being one of several pundits who are falling for an "inevitability of Barack schtick again." I plead innocent. I'm proud to say that I spent the days between Iowa and New Hampshire warning that Hillary was by no means dead, and one week ago I predicted that Hillary Clinton would win. My argument at that time was based on the idea that even though Obama was favored in each of the remaining February contests that it was likely he would suffer at least one momentum-breaking loss leading up to Clinton wins in Texas and Ohio that put her over the top.
Thus far, it looks like Obama really will pull off the sweep, which is good for him. But the most recent poll of Ohio shows Clinton with a big lead, and considering the convincing nature of Clinton's wins in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and California I think you need to assume she'll win there until we see some kind of poll offering clear evidence to the contrary. Obama's put together a string of impressive wins, but it's still the case that in the Democratic Party women outnumber men, whites outnumber blacks, working class people outnumber college educated professionals, and senior citizens outnumber under-thirties. Under the circumstances, Clinton continues to be in a strong position.
Edwards Wins
Donna Edwards takes the nomination from Al Wynn. The significance is three-fold. On the one hand, Wynn was a bad rep and now he's gone, which is good. On the other hand, this is a very safe seat for Democrats, so a talented, principled representative like Edwards has the opportunity to use it as a base of operations to be a major progressive leader. It's very desirable to get these seats into the hands of people who'll be more than just reliable votes, but actually go the extra mile to really advance important causes. There's no telling if Edwards will live up to that promise, but she's an extremely impressive individual who certainly has the potential.
Last, the tree of progressive politics must be watered with the metaphorical blood of sellouts ever now and again. Some people seem to me to walk around in their head with a model in which politicians are very principled ideologues who then divert from their default status due to electoral fears. In a more plausible schematic, they have a natural tendency to drift in the direction of utter corruption and only electoral fear keeps them doing their jobs in a somewhat responsible manner. The demonstration effect of even a narrow win is large, and that of a substantial defeat like the one Wynn suffered can be very big indeed. Elected officials across the country are taking note.
Flip-Flop Needed
The new studies showing that ethanol is even worse than we thought only actually proved that ethanol was exactly as bad as I'd previously thought. You see, it turns out that I'd been mis-informed about the state of research before this new study came out. Then I read the new study everyone's talking about and it turns out to say about what I'd thought the previous research had said. So let's give two cheers for misinformation. Kevin Drum sees an opportunity:
With the Iowa primaries safely over, surely it's safe for our brave presidential candidates to use these studies as an excuse to do an about-face and promise to kill corn ethanol subsidies in their first term. Right?
That seems wise to me. Meanwhile, every time every politician goes pandering on the corn business I feel like someone needs to smack them around a little bit and remind them that John McCain didn't win Iowa in 2008, Mike Dukakis didn't win Iowa in 1988, George HW Bush didn't win Iowa in 1988, Bill Clinton didn't win Iowa in 1992, etc., etc., etc. Iowa's obviously an important state, but it's not genuinely so central to American politics that people should be falling all over themselves to implement terrible Iowa-friendly policies.
The Criticizable Obama
So I guess the idea is out there that those of us who are backing Barack Obama at this point aren't just supporting him, but we're deranged lunatics who think he's completely above criticism and that any dissent is beyond the pale. Well, I dunno, maybe there are some people like that. For the record, though, I think the people who have been pointing out that his health care plan isn't really viable over anything other than the shortest of terms unless it's modified to include the sort of mandate that he's criticized are correct. I don't see this as nearly as big a deal as some other folks, but the criticism is accurate. Similarly, as I've said before he didn't cover himself with glory with his coal-related conduct in the Senate. And it's also true that he was basically MIA from some important war debates throughout 2005.
More broadly, though, while I definitely prefer Obama on foreign policy grounds, he's left himself open to a lot of legitimate criticism. The problem for Hillary Clinton is that she hasn't made those criticisms, instead she's made different criticisms I disagree with. But I warmed considerably to John Edwards before Iowa when he started talking about things like explicitly disavowing preventive war as a tool of non-proliferation policy and putting his critique of the "war on terror" conceptual framework front and center. Obama's recent promise to "end the mindset" that led to the war in Iraq is a tantalizing hint of a doctrinal dispute with Clinton that goes beyond "I was against authorizing the war and you weren't nyah nyah nyah" but I don't think it's really been fleshed out.
So there you have it. Nobody's perfect, not even Barack Obama. And, indeed, it must be extremely annoying for Hillary supporters to watch Obama get mostly-glowing press coverage while Clinton continues to be beseiged by the media's evident loathing of her. That said, the habit of arguing against Obama by knocking the least-sound arguments made on his behalf is pretty silly -- it's a giant country with hundreds of millions of citizens, and any widely known politician is going to be supported by some dumb people wielding silly arguments. It's the good arguments that you need to worry about.
Is Barack Obama a Fascist?
Early returns suggest the answer is yes. I found this tidbit from Jonah Goldberg particularly compelling:
Tellingly, "we are the ones we've been waiting for" is some Native American spiritualism warmed up for New Age audiences.
Telling, indeed. After all, Adolf Hitler loved dime-store Westerns....
Fire on the Right
Meanwhile, in an inverse move to Donna Edwards' primary win, Steve Clemons reminds us that Republicans are binding themselves ever-more-tightly to Iraq:
But in the Republican primary, Wayne Gilchrest whom I admired for voting against the Iraq War and for maintaining moderate sensibilities in a pretty conservative district lost to Maryland State Senator Andy Harris -- who is far more conservative.
This, incidentally, is why the predicted post-2006 wave of moderate Republicans abandoning Bush on Iraq never materialized. The couple of House members who mumbled dissent quickly found themselves faced with challengers.
The McCain Shift
After a generally conservative career, the John McCain who emerged in the 107th Senate really was a moderate Republican. According to the Poole-Rosenthal "optimal classification" algorithm, only Lincoln Chaffee, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins were less conservative among members of the GOP caucuses. But by the 108th Senate he'd decided not to run for Vice President on John Kerry's ticket, George W. Bush had been re-elected, and McCain decided to shift back far right en route to the nomination. Suddenly only Don Nickles, Jeff Sessions, and Jon Kyl were more conservative than McCain. And in the 109th Senate, only Kyl has been more conservative.
Beyond Electability
Megan McArdle, expressing some cynicism about Barack Obama:
I'm watching his speech now, and it's inspiring. But it's also saddening, because deep down, I don't believe that Obama is going to change Washington, eliminate lobbying, etc. I wish he wouldn't tell me things that I can't possibly believe--and moreover that I can't really understand anyone believing. He might be the best president; he might even make Washington work a little better, though I kind of doubt it. But he isn't going to transform American politics in the utopian way his speech implies. No one who has dried out behind the ears could reasonably believe that he has this power. So why is he saying he does?
Andrew has a good response, but another thing I like about Obama is that Megan's listening to this speech and she doesn't really agree with what he's saying, but she's not snorting with derision. She's listening. She thinks it's inspiring. Meanwhile, like anyone who writes about political and economic issues for a living, her opinions on these things are much more fixed and coherent than are the average American's. Most people, by contrast, are relatively open to persuasion -- if the argument is made by a persuasive figure.
And that's one of the things Obama has that Hillary Clinton doesn't. If instead of Clinton or Obama, I were the one sitting in the White House, and I had some kind of appealing-but-controversial initiative I wanted to propose and for some reason I had to pick a Senator to be the "public face" of the initiative I'd pick Obama in a heartbeat. He's the kind of person whose support for an idea makes the idea seem more compelling than it otherwise would have. You can imagine him getting people interested in things that didn't previously interest them, or convincing people that steps they used to think were too risky are, in fact, necessary. Clinton, like lots of perfectly admirable Senators from Carl Levin to Jim Jeffords and beyond, doesn't have that extra bit. It's the difference between a person who has to change his policies to become more popular, and a person who makes policies more popular by espousing them. Obviously, that's a quality that exists on a continuum, but Obama seems to me to be much further toward the "makes more popular by espousing" side of the spectrum.
Steroid Time
A reader observes:
I have the Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee congressional hearings on the radio in my office. Apparently, all the Democrats on the committee are going all-out against Clemens while all the Republicans on the committee are only attacking McNamee. Who knew this was such a partisan issue?
Oh, and in case it wasn't already obvious to all, Dan Burton is a freaking nutcase.
Apparently Rep. Clay eventually broke the pattern, going after both sides with equal vigor. For my part, I think congress ought to grow up and hold hearings on something important.
UPDATE: Another correspondent writes: "Waxman said he wanted to cancel the hearing but Clemens's attorney wanted it." Fair enough.
Doing Stuff
In a general, Obama won't be running against Clinton, he'll be running against McCain, a politician that has actually taken political risks and endured the wrath of party hacks in order to make progress on real issues: "What has Obama done? Show me a single issue or piece of legislation where Obama has done something politically unpopular in order to move forward toward a greater goal." I pointed out that this argument hasn't made much of a difference so far. Ah, replied the adviser, "That's because Clinton can't show that she's done it, either." What's more, he said, the press will stop giving Obama a free ride in the general. McCain will be out there, holding court on his bus or his plane, providing unfettered access to both reporters and voters, and journalists will no longer be able to ignore Obama's lack of access and lack of interaction with real people. In fact, it'll be the only thing they talk about.
Both Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat seem to me to be unduly impressed by this argument. It's true that the press corps will jizz all over itself for John McCain, but that kind of thing will only take him so far. In terms of getting things done, what's John McCain ever accomplished? Beyond a minor, years-old procedural reform to the campaign finance system -- nothing. And he's had much more time in Washington in which to get something done. But in McCain's past 25 years in congress he's managed to author not a single piece of legislation that's been signed into law that helps any real people with any real problems. He's spent a lot of time posturing on the Sunday shows, and affiliated himself with a few pieces of modestly progressive legislation that didn't get passed, and then disavowed all those bills.
More broadly, though McCain is a formidable candidate in some respects, "experience" is the time-honored election argument of losers. If voters really valued experience, then veteran senators would be getting elected president all the time. Instead, it almost never happens because normal people don't think that long duration in congress -- an institution that's invariably incredibly unpopular -- is an appealing character trait.
Clinton's Ad
Hillary Clinton's going on the air in Wisconsin:
The mandates issue has been talked to death, but this ad raises another difference between Clinton and Obama -- the fact that her plan includes measures aimed at directly targeting issues in the housing market. Specifically:
Senator Clinton is the only candidate with a comprehensive plan to keep families in their homes and keep the housing crisis from dragging down the economy. More than 2 million foreclosure notices went out last year, devastating families and communities. The foreclosure crisis is also contributing to the decline in home prices which has already cost families an estimated $1.3 trillion. Many experts believe the worst is yet to come. To stem this crisis, Senator Clinton has called for a 90-day moratorium on subprime foreclosures and an automatic rate freeze on subprime mortgages of at least five years or until servicers have converted the unworkable mortgages into loans families can afford. In addition, Senator Clinton proposed to temporarily empower state housing financing agencies to help families refinance unworkable mortgages and temporarily increasing the portfolio caps at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and enabling them to purchase larger loans in high-cost areas. These steps would immediately increase the availability of mortgages for responsible borrowers.
Now one thing to note about this is that a bit contrary to campaign stereotypes, if you take this literally it betrays a certain naiveté about the way Washington works. Were a president to submit a stimulus plan with these kind of provisions in it to congress, it'd be bad news. You'd end up delaying legislative action on the overall package, and delays are a big problem with fiscal stimulus. You'd also open the door to all kinds of not-strictly-stimulus measures that various members of congress want to tack on. What Barack Obama proposed -- a much cleaner, more streamlined stimulus package that really just focuses on juicing short-term aggregate demand -- is a much better idea.
But that's if you take it literally. Things being what they are, both campaigns stimulus plans were really just smoke and mirrors, with Obama signaling that he can play grown-up technocrat and Clinton signaling that she's got a solution for every problem in her swiss army knife-like arsenal of policy measures. And while it's probably not a good idea to link the foreclosure freeze proposal to a stimulus package per se the underlying idea does seem like a pretty good one. As I wrote in my article on foreclosures there are a lot of neighborhood externalities associated with foreclosures, so it's really worth taking action to minimize them.
A Surge of Podcasts
Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress and Ilan Goldenberg from the National Security Network talk with some members of the press about the risks that the "Awakening" movement in Iraq will undermine the prospects for political consensus and national unity there. Here's a paper by Goldenberg and another one by Katulis going into greater depth about the issues they're discussing.
To boil it down, though, what we're basically seeing is an increasing fragmentation of political power and weapons and thus a multiplication of the real and potential lines of conflict.
Clash of the Professors
I'd say I'm fundamentally in agreement with William Julius Wilson's rejoinder to Paul Krugman on the NYT letter page, but of course Professor Wilson is black so he doesn't count.
Superdelegates
I don't think I buy the argument that the Democratic Party's superdelegates have some kind of categorical ethical obligation to obey the dictates of the pledged delegate count. Indeed, one of the best things you can say about superdelegates is that it's fairly easy to imagine scenarios in which giving the nomination to the pledged delegates leader would have a perverse result. For example, suppose Candidate A cleans up in early primaries and jumps out to a big lead. But just when the pundits were ready to declare it "essentially impossible" for Candidate B to catch up, he unveils a very appealing new message and sweeps the remainder of the states. Thanks to the proportional allocation rules, though, it's not enough to catch Candidate A, who winds up with 52 percent of pledged delegates. But since many of those delegates came from states that voted months ago, and lots of former Candidate A supporters feel buyer's remorse; national polling shows convincingly that 59 percent of registered Democrats prefer Candidate B, who also has a lead in head-to-head polling matchups with the GOP nominee and a fundraising advantage.
Would it really be so absurd for the superdelegates to overrule the "will of the people" and instead give the people what they tell pollsters they want? I don't think so. The superdelegates have both an opportunity and an obligation to take seriously their obligation to do the best thing for the party and the country.
But part of taking that obligation seriously is recognizing that an extremely drawn-out primary campaign that's ultimately decided by superdelegate wrangling probably doesn't serve the best interests of the party and the country. If, on the morning of March 5, Hillary Clinton did poorly enough the previous day that she's facing a choice between dropping out of the race and pursuing a strategy that involves two months of vicious campaigning and integrally requires her to secure the support of the superdelegates, then I think it would make sense for the superdelegates (probably represented behind-closed-doors by neutral party leaders like Gore, Pelosi, Reid, etc.) to tell her campaign that it's not going to happen, and they're going to endorse Obama and seal the nomination for him.
If he's clearly winning, it would be preferable for the party to just make him the winner, rather than get into endless mucking around about Michigan and superdelegates. But if the delegate count genuinely just stays super-narrow, that's another matter, and I don't see it as intrinsically illegitimate for the SDs to put Clinton over the top if Obama's beating her by a half-dozen pledged delegates or something. On the other hand, there's no real reason to think that the bulk of the currently unpledged superdelegates have a secret preference for Hillary. An early Clinton endorsement was an essentially zero cost move for people to make, so non-endorsers are probably either genuinely undecided or else closet Obama fans.
Edwards Endorsement
It seems to me that if it's really true that John Edwards is torn about who he would endorse were he to endorse that the most reasonable course of action is to not endorse. I mean, if he feels torn because there are things he likes about Clinton, but then there are other things he likes about Obama, then he should probably just say that.
Panic in the West
I don't think this Jason Kidd trade is a very smart move for Dallas. Kidd is still a better point guard than Harris, but at this point in their careers the margin doesn't justify giving up so much additional stuff in order to get him. In particular, when you swap Kidd for Harris you're getting better rebounding and defense in exchange for worse shooting. That's fair enough, but the other players Dallas is sending to the Garden State are going to cost them defense and rebounding. On top of that, trading young for old and giving away picks and expiring contracts in the process hurts your team's future.
Basically, like Phoenix, Dallas seems to be responding with panic to the Lakers' acquisition of Pau Gasol. But just because a conference rival improves doesn't mean that a trade that didn't make sense a month ago suddenly does make sense today. If Andrew Bynum returns healthy, then the Lakers will be a very difficult team to beat. There's nothing written into the fabric of the universe that guarantees there are any possible trades San Antonio or Dallas or Phoenix can make to become better than LA. Oftentimes, teams become very good because other teams agree to make stupid trades with them -- that's what happened with Boston, and that's what happened with LA. Teams in that situation can only hope that some other team wants to come along and make a one-sided desperation deal. But instead of waiting cautiously and hoping for a sweetheart deal, Phoenix and now Dallas are making panicky moves.
It seems to me, though, that the one thing you never want to do in the NBA personnel market is put yourself in a position where you feel like you "have" to do something. You "have" to move Kevin Garnett, so you accept cents on the dollar. You "have" to sign a big-ticket free agent so you give Larry Hughes a huge deal. You "have" to respond to recent big trades, so you give away draft picks and depth in exchange for a smallish upgrade at the point.
Unreal
Spencer Ackerman offered a gentle critique of his friend George Packer's essay on Iraq in the premiere issue of the new World Affairs journal. I'd go a bit further -- I think this very much represents the worst of Packer's writing on Iraq rather than the best. It opens with some striking on-the-ground reporting from Iraq, then shifts to a discussion of how un-visceral these events are to most Americans, who are far more distanced from the conflict than we were from Vietnam and earlier wars. Eventually, though, it shifts into a kind of lame plea for open-mindedness:
So the lines were drawn from the start. To the pro-war side, criticism was animated by partisanship and defeatism, if not treason. This view, amplified on cable news, talk radio, and right-wing blogs, was tacitly encouraged by the White House. It kept a disastrous defense secretary in office long after it was obvious that he was losing the war, ensured that no senior officer was held accountable for military setbacks, and contributed to the repetition of disastrous errors by the war’s political architects. Meanwhile, the fact that the best and brightest Iraqis were being slaughtered by a ruthless insurgency never aroused much interest or sympathy among the war’s opponents. The kind of people who would ordinarily inspire solidarity campaigns among Western progressives—trade unionists, journalists, human rights advocates, women's rights activists, independent politicians, doctors, professors—were being systematically exterminated. But since the war shouldn’t have been fought in the first place, what began badly must also end badly.
Note that even in Packer's somewhat tendentious accounting, there's no actual parallelism here. War supporters, invested in the idea that they were right when they were, in fact, wrong blinded themselves to actual developments on the ground in Iraq. War opponents were, by contrast, what? It's hard to say. Not blinded by denial that terrible things were happening in Iraq. But, I guess, not affected by these terrible happenings in the way Packer thinks would have been appropriate? Insufficiently surprised that a war they'd always regarded as ill-advised turned out to be ill-advised? It's not clear.
As we go deeper, this continues to be the pattern. Packer sees a very schematic United States of America. One where "Pro-war journalists and bloggers deride the piece as fraudulent and anti-military" even before evidence is in on the Scott Beauchamp case. Similarly, when "two center-left think tank analysts return from a trip to Iraq and declare in an op-ed that the surge has produced military successes" the response is that "by the next morning, anti-war journalists and bloggers are in full cry, deriding the piece as credulous, dishonest, and self-serving." This did happen, but it's curious that Packer doesn't name the think tank analysts. Well, their names are "Kenneth Pollack" and "Michael O'Hanlon." And whatever else one might say about Pollack and O'Hanlon, it's certainly not the case that left of center people have been blindly ignoring their views throughout the course of the Iraq debate. Quite the reverse -- Pollack's The Threatening Storm was hugely influential and O'Hanlon was, for years, one of the most prominent national security analysts in America.
Similarly, given Packer's dystopian vision of American discourse, it's hard to understand how Packer's book, The Assassin's Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country -- a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.
The reality is that the American political debate from 9/11/01 to today has been enormously complex. A once-popular war has become highly unpopular. A great many people, myself included, have not only changed our minds about the war but changed our minds about a larger set of concerns. The market for the sort of serious, thoughtful reporting and analysis Packer has brought us from the region has actually been very large. People from differing political perspectives came together to contribute essays to a new journal called World Affairs. Howard Dean rose and fell then kinda sorta rose again to become DNC Chair. Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination, but secured election as an Independent. The distance between America and Iraq that Packer writes about is real enough, and it's quite true that the war exists as a kind of abstraction -- a faint presence. But the dumb and indifferent public senselessly processing information through fixed partisan blinders just isn't there -- the country wasn't evenly split on the war in the summer of 2003, and it's not evenly split today, either; a lot of debate has happened and a lot of people have changed their minds. Indeed, that changing of minds has in many ways been the central fact of American politics in recent years.
McCain for Torture
It seems John McCain just voted against a bill that would have banned waterboarding. Straight talk you can use!
Fair Warning
I try to keep a very light hand with the comments section on this blog, but if I see folks (and, yes, SLC, this means you) persisting in using the term "raghead" or other ethnic slurs I may need to do something about it. Please knock it off.
Retaliation Coming
Spencer Ackerman reports that intelligence experts are worried about retaliatory Hezbollah strikes against American targets in the wake of the mysterious car bomb killing of Imad Mugniyeh, a longtime Hezbollah operative responsible for the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon. At the same time, it remains totally unclear who actually killed the guy.
February 14, 2008
The O'Hanlon Primary
Your favorite think tanker and mine turns to Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, to channel his amped-up attacks on Barack Obama:
Michael O'Hanlon, a Democratic defense and national-security adviser at the Brookings Institution, also finds Obama's approach dangerous and sophomoric.
The freshman senator's eagerness for one-on-one talks with tin-pot dictators "would cheapen the value of presidential summits," O'Hanlon told me.
"You don't want a president using his time being lied to by foreign leaders. Hillary would be much more pragmatic. She has suggested midlevel talks with Iran, for example," he said. "Obama would look weak, and Hillary would not look weak."
Anyone who's pissed O'Hanlon off this much is okay in my book. However, as the correspondent who brought this article to my attention observed, this seems like an odd time and place to go after Obama so severely if the intention is really to earn Clinton's admiration. It looks in some ways more like pre-positioning for pro-McCain orientation in the general election.
Meat and Nudity
Reacting to a story on the opening of a vegan strip club in Portland, Oregon Ann Friedman remarks:
This is definitely part of a trend -- starting with PETA ads -- in which women's bodies are used as a way of promoting veganism and vegetarianism. There's also L.A.'s Vegan Vixens, "sexy, trendy and fun loving women whose goal is to inspire men to live a longer and happier life, by making healthier decisions on what they consume." And now the vegan strip club.
One common thread here is that all of these efforts are aimed at making veganism appealing to men. The Maxim-like PETA ads, the Vegan Vixens, the strip club: All are saying it's okay to buck the stereotype of Real Men Eat Red Meat, because here are some naked ladies to reassure you that you're still a superhetero manly man! Almost as if they're saying, you won't even miss eating meat, because you'll get to look at so much of it! Or as Diablo puts it, “We put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.” It's a substitution. This trend seems to confirm much of what Carol Adams observed in the Sexual Politics of Meat -- and then turn it on its head.
I think this misreads the vegan strip club concept. Strip clubs in general aren't in the business of using sex to sell booze and food, they're using sex to sell sex. The vegan strip club isn't using strippers to sell veganism, it's using veganism to sell stripping to Portland-area guys with self-conceptions as liberal nice guys. After all, food quality is probably not a significant factor in strip club marketing.
No Guarantees
Ezra Klein says sure Obama could be an extraordinarily effective advocate of progressive ideas, but then again he might not actually use is powers on behalf of ideas like that. Kevin Drum concurs. For my own part, I don't disagree. But I think the problem with this whole line of concerns is well-expressed by the fact that Kevin titles his post "Obama mindreading."
Ultimately, though, the question of whether or not deep down in his heart Obama is really the liberal Reagan or not is neither here nor there. Ezra says "Obama may tout the politics of hope, but when it comes to getting presidents to govern in the way they'd like them to, progressives should remember that hope is not a plan." I completely agree. But that some dilemma would exist for any potential candidate. The extent to which Obama or Clinton or anyone else governs as a progressive will have more to do with the objective circumstances in which he or she finds himself or herself -- the congressional balance of power, the strength of interest groups, the quality of organizing on the ground -- than it will with what lurks in the deepest recesses of his or her brain.
That's why I try not to be an Obama groupie. But still, there are two candidates in the field right now. Either one will probably only take risks if they're pushed to take them. But if Obama is pushed to take risks, I think those risks are more likely to pay off -- he more skills of persuasion and inspiration.
Getting Specific
It's a bit odd that John McCain would decide that now's a good time to criticize Barack Obama for lacking specifics in his proposals. On the one hand, Obama has all these detailed proposals. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has been trying this attack for a while now and it's not working. It's probably not working because Obama does, in fact, have detailed proposals but his speeches are relatively light on them because that's how you put an effective speech together. The third thing that makes it a strange decision on McCain's part is what Jon Chait observes here:
McCain is like Obama in that he's appealed to voters largely on the basis of broad themes and his personal charisma and history. The difference is that Obama is a former law professor who's actually done his homework on the policy, and McCain is still winging it.
Chait supplies the following video as illustration:
This sort of thing happens all the time to McCain who, by his own admission, doesn't know much about economics and as you can tell from his ideological meandering, he doesn't really care about it either. He liked war, and he liked getting attention for bucking Bush, and then more recently he liked hewing to the orthodox line, but he doesn't know anything about the subject and certainly can't answer questions in detail. Check out, for example, his vague as hell detailed Social Security proposals:
John McCain will fight to save the future of Social Security and believes that we may meet our obligations to the retirees of today and the future without raising taxes. John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts -- but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. John McCain will reach across the aisle, but if the Democrats do not act, he will. No problem is in more need of honesty than the looming financial challenges of entitlement programs. Americans have the right to know the truth and John McCain will not leave office without fixing the problems that threatens our future prosperity and power.
That's right -- Americans have the right to know the truth and the truth is that on retirement security, McCain is the only candidate with the courage to vaguely allude to unspecified benefit cuts, to be applied to unknown persons at an unknown time. Because after all, no problem is more in need of honesty, and nothing is more important in a candidate then specifics. McCain will hope Democrats agree to go along with his Mystery Plan, and if they don't act, he will . . . to do something . . . to someone's benefits . . . at some point.
Enthusiasm
This finding from Gallup provides an interesting look at the enthusiasm gap between the parties. Even with the Clinton-Obama race reaching a new level of heatedness in blog comment threads and email lists everywhere, it remains the case that each contender is seen as an unusually high-quality candidate over sixty percent of Democrats. By contrast, fewer than ten percent of Democrats see either contender as unusually weak. Consequently, you mostly have a primary in which two well-liked candidates are trying to secure the support of voters who like them both.
And even though I've got a clear preference in the race, I'd very much put myself in the category of people who's happy with both his options. Especially in domestic policy terms, the Clinton 2008 agenda is far, far better than Kerry 2004, Gore 2000, or Clinton 1996. In large part, of course, that reflects not the intrinsic attributes of Clinton and Obama, but the changing nature of our times and the leftward gravitational pull exercised by the Edwards campaign, but it's still the field we've got and it's a very strong one.
Penn: None of You Count!
I know some people are annoyed by the constant re-invocations of the "doesn't count" joke, but the Clinton campaign really keeps saying this stuff. To wit, Josh Marshall flags "A quote from Mark Penn that should go over extremely well: 'Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.'"
An awful lot of us live in the states that Penn has just flagged as insignificant. It kind of rankles. I'm just saying.
Getting Too Close
Offering up a dose of humility before reminding us that he correctly predicted a John McCain win some time ago, Tom Schaller reflects:
Given how much more closely I’ve followed Democratic politics the past four years, I’ve been embarrassed at times by my assessments or predictions of the race for the Democratic nomination.
I think following politics closely may actually be an impediment to forecasting. People who don't follow politics at all can make mistakes because they wind up lacking awareness of relevant facts about the candidates (Giuliani is pro-choice) or general principles (the GOP is the pro-life party) that you need to know in order to predict with a healthy measure of accuracy. But beyond some general level of awareness of who's who and what usually happens, paying close attention tends to overly bias one toward the view that something surprising and interesting will happen. Now it may prove to be the case that 2008 is, on the Democratic side, that unusual year in which something surprising and interesting does happen. But even if Obama wins, it'll still be the case that every cycle some group of clever people is making the case for why this year is the year and it almost never is.
Not Done Yet
Rasmussen has it very close in Wisconsin and and a huge Clinton lead in Ohio that features a seven point lead among men.
Ricochet
Via Brian Beutler, a pretty odd story from the heart of the McCain campaign:
McKinnon was a Texas Democrat who started working for George W. Bush in the late-1990s before becoming one of the early wave of Bush-affiliated political hacks to sign on with McCain 2008 before the campaign's temporary collapse. He's also been talkingup Obama for some time. Here he is in December 2006:
Mark McKinnon, who was a top adviser to President Bush in his two White House runs and who is a senior adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, said, “I think Barack Obama is the most interesting persona to appear on the political radar screen in decades.” He added, “He’s a walking, talking hope machine, and he may reshape American politics.”
A walking, talking hope machine sounds a bit frightening to me, but I think that was meant as praise.
How MLK Saved Star Trek
Via Julian Sanchez, Nichelle Nichols explains how Martin Luther King convinced her to stay on Star Trek:
It sounds bizarre at first glance, but as she lays the story out it makes perfect sense.
George Saves Dallas
Looks live Devean George is vetoing the ill-advised Kidd-to-Dallas trade. The Nets and Mavericks are still trying to work things out, but Mark Cuban ought to take the opportunity to listen to reason and cancel the deal. Did you know that Dallas' two most effective five man units involve Harris and Diop, both of whom would be shipped out in the trade? Listen to Hollinger, don't do the deal.
Fear Factor
Max Boot exhorts us to "ask yourself which presidential candidate an Ahmadinejad, Assad or Kim would fear the most" before observing that "the leading candidate to scare the snot out of our enemies is a certain former aviator who has been noted for his pugnacity and his unwavering support of the American war effort in Iraq." Kevin Drum remarks:
Now, you might think that after seven years of trying exactly this, with only the current collapse in our fortunes to show for it, the neocon establishment might at least pause for a moment to wonder if there's more to foreign policy than scaring the snot out of our enemies. But no. The real problem, apparently, is simply that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration wasn't good enough at it. Not bellicose enough. Not unilateral enough. Not warlike enough. What America needs is someone even more bloodthirsty than the crew that got us into this mess. Time to double down, folks.
The Boot view does provide a window into a fundamental mistake made by the right in its approach to foreign policy. He sees this domain as fundamentally zero sum. Syria, Iran, and North Korea are our enemies. Therefore, what's bad for them is good for us. Therefore, if they're frightened, we must be win. Therefore, if foreigners find John McCain frightening, he's a good president.
The real world doesn't work this way. If Saddam Hussein wasn't frightened of George W. Bush and the United States of America in 2002, then he was making a big mistake. He had good reason to fear Bush, just as Iranians would have good reason to fear John McCain. The trouble is that international relations isn't zero sum. Even America's relationship with someone as odious as Saddam wasn't zero sum. We were able to take action that was incredibly harmful to Saddam personally, and to the cause of his followers in Iraq, but it was also incredibly harmful to the United States. Another couple of rounds of conflict with enemies like Syria, Iran, and North Korea (and, hey, why not Venezuela, too) and we may not have any enemies left but we'll still be weaker than we were before.
And If Obama Were A Giraffe, He'd Have a Really Short Neck
When I read Michael O'Hanlon's ornery remarks in The Washington Times this morning, I suppose I took it for granted that he didn't also have a Wall Street Journal op-ed. I mean, I know the guy's prolific, but how many conservative media outlets can he be in simultaneously? Well, I was wrong. The essence of the argument is that if Obama thinks that face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders will single-handedly solve all of America's policy problems, then he's sorely mistaken. This is, of course, true but O'Hanlon can't be bothered to adduce any evidence that Obama does think this. After all, you'd have to be extraordinarily dumb to adopt the straw-man view that O'Hanlon's attacking here.
McCain and Choice
Naturally, Democrats campaign against Republicans who want to scrap Roe v. Wade all the time. But one curious thing about McCain is that since pro-choicers and pro-lifers alike seem confused about the fact that he's pro-life he's had to be unusually explicit about his intentions in this regard. Normally, candidates kind of dance around the issue and offer vague formulations about "strict constructionists" that are understood by people who care about politics but go over the heads of most people. McCain, by contrast, is really pinned down.
Day One
Jon Chait wonders if John McCain is deliberately echoing Hillary Clinton's campaign themes in an effort to face her in the primary: "Every poll now shows Obama performing better than Clinton against McCain. On average, he does five and a half points better than her, which is a very significant margin." Chait has in mind McCain's rather implausible efforts to cast himself as the candidate of policy details, but I clicked over to McCain's website today and was surprised to see that the slogan reproduced above.
This raises the possibility that McCain's campaign team is just lazy. After all, they can't be bothered to out-organized Mike Huckabee even though he's got no money and no machine support. Maybe all they do all day is hang back, look at which Democrat is leading in the polls, and rip off the other one's campaign themes. Mac is Back, in ur base rippin off ur narrativz.
Obama on the Economy
Since I know a lot of people claim to be perturbed by Obama's alleged lack of detailed, specific talk about policy issues, I'm sure all those people took the time to read his speech in Jamesville, Wisconsin on the economy but perhaps not everyone got the chance to take a look at the policy white paper (PDF) associated with the speech. The credit card bill of rights has a lot of appeal:
- Ban Unilateral Changes: Currently, credit card companies can unilaterally change the terms of a credit card agreement at any time for any reason with only a 15-day notice to the consumer. Barack Obama will ban these unilateral changes in credit card agreements unless companies have obtained written consent from consumers and have followed the rules and terms of the agreement.
- Apply Interest Rate Increases Only to Future Debt: Credit card companies often apply increased interest rates to both new debt incurred by the cardholder, as well as previously incurred debt. Barack Obama will require increased interest rates to apply only to future credit card debt, and not to debt incurred prior to the increase.
- Prohibit Interest on Fees: Credit card companies often charge interest on transaction fees, such as late fees or paying a bill by telephone. Barack Obama will prohibit credit card issuers from charging interest on transaction fees.
- Prohibit “Universal Defaults”: “Universal defaults” are a practice in which a credit card company raises an individual’s interest rate based on failure to pay a different creditor on time. Barack Obama will prohibit this practice.
- Require Prompt and Fair Crediting of Cardholder Payments: Barack Obama will require credit card issuers to apply payments first to the credit card balance with the highest rate of interest and to minimize finance charges.
But the most substantial proposal from the speech was probably the call for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, which I believe is based on a proposal Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel made back in August 2007. It's a good issue for Obama, since on one level it's a kind of goo-goo process reform question about changing the way the budget works, but on another level it's a very bread-and-butter question of sustaining the demand for workers in the construction sector and building infrastructure to keep America plugging along. Basically, it meshes well with his existing political persona but reaches out to a broader set of concerns than the ones his campaign's usually been associated with.
Obama, the War, and the Opportunity
Michael Crowley, author of the best dissection of Hillary Clinton's support for the 2002 Iraq AUMF (one of about a million TNR articles that seem to be missing from their web archives [UPDATE: here it is]), has a great new piece up about Barack Obama's record on the war. Here's the bottom line:
Many of the Clintons' specific attacks on Obama are unfair distortions. But it's also true that a close look at his Iraq record reveals more nuance than the Obama campaign acknowledges. It shows that Obama is cautious and pragmatic, hardly immune from political pressures, and sometimes prone to shading his rhetoric for convenience. But, ultimately, in substantive policy terms, he is also open to intellectual reexamination based on changing events. This may not be quite the Obama of the popular imagination, and it is certainly not the Obama of his own campaign ads. Nor is it, after 2002, substantially different from Hillary Clinton's own course on Iraq. But it is no "fairy tale," either.
I'm less interested, however, in the past for its own sake than I am in the past for what it makes possible in the future. I don't know if you've heard, but I wrote a book, Heads in the Sand that will be out in April. It's about the causes and consequences of the Democratic Party's failure to present a coherent strategic alternative to the Bush foreign policy in the post-9/11 world.
One observation I make is that a record of support for the war resolution makes it difficult to present such an alternative. John Kerry, for example, would now and again start making a very compelling argument about Iraq as strategic distraction that undermined our ability to combat al-Qaeda. I remember watching the first Bush-Kerry debate with friends and the thrill that overtook the room at what I think was Kerry's best moment of the entire campaign:
Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."
Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist.
Unfortunately, this line of argument couldn't really be made central to Kerry's campaign because, after all, Kerry had voted for the war resolution and Kerry was so determined to rebut the flip-flopper charge that he didn't dare just say he'd made a mistake. So he switched back over time to less compelling arguments about implementation, nitpicking about the details of the inspections process, etc.
Now of course there's more to an alternative strategy than just that. There are several different questions in play -- unilateral preventive war or multilateral arms control as the preferred method of pursuing non-proliferation policy, an ever-expanding "war on terror" or a narrowly focused campaign against al-Qaeda, an effort to coercively reshape political institutions throughout the Muslim world or an effort to distance ourselves somewhat from unpopular regimes, a full-throttle assertion of US military hegemony or an effort to use our power to build and sustain a liberal world order. But Iraq stands at the intersection of a lot of these issues, and it's a lot easier to make the case for a different approach if you can credibly put distance between yourself and Iraq and, of course, having reached a different conclusion about Iraq is at least imperfect evidence that the person in question actually believes in a different strategy.
To tie this back to the campaign, Obama hasn't yet said or done everything that I'd like to see him do by any means. He has, however, done some things. And he's repeatedly suggested a desire to wage that kind of campaign against John McCain. Clinton, by contrast, has shown a real fondness for opportunistic digs and indicated that her view is that she'll do better at arguing with McCain about security because she's more hawkish. But both candidates have given some positive indications and some negative ones, and both of them can and should do more -- the competition between them has been disappointingly free of anything even resembling an argument about doctrine. Thus far, though, Obama's approach shows more promise, and their different stances are an important reason why.
BloggingChefs 2
It's Spencer Ackerman versus Megan McArdle in the ultimate vlog cooking face-off. Ezra Klein and Will Wilkinson assist with the cooking. Tyler Cowen, Amanda Mattos, Catherine Andrews, and Kriston Capps make special guest appearances as do Marissa Long and Lindsay Gibson neither of whom even have blogs (oh noes!), which tells you how super-awesome this matchup is.
The Shutout
Courtesy of Adam Bailey at DCist, a precinct-by-precinct map of the DC primary results. As you can see, Obama did best in the eastern half of the city (where there are no white people), Clinton did best west of Rock Creek park (where there are few black people). In the middle, things were in the middle. But Clinton lost all areas of the city. Indeed, out of the city's 142 precincts, Clinton won zero. In my precinct, the rapidly gentrifying 22nd, Clinton managed to secure 32 percent of the vote. I'd been taking the fact that I didn't see any Clinton signs in my area as an indication that her people really just weren't putting any kind of DC campaign together, but some others hypothesized that maybe there just weren't any Clinton supporters in the neighborhood. Evidently, though, about a third of my neighbors voted for Clinton, so perhaps if her team had put more of an operation together she might have managed to carry a precinct or two.
Clinton did best in Precinct 3, "the neighborhood including the Watergate, some G.W. housing, and the Foggy Bottom Historic District; but she still lost to Obama in a 275-243 vote." Nobody ever goes there, but fortunately my office is located in the Watergate (fortunate for the purposes of this post, unfortunate in the sense that my office is in an inconvenient location where nobody goes) so I took an illustrative photo:
That's some tiny Foggy Bottom Historic District-protected houses in the foreground, a slice of the Watergate complex in the back. The GW students must have put Obama over the top.
FISA
It is fascinating that the Republican Party would rather allow what they believe to be a critical national security law lapse than allow it to be extended without the extension containing a rider immunizing large telecommunications firms from the consequences of prior illegal activity. It's almost as if the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of large business enterprises and very wealthy individuals, and tends to use national security and cultural anxieties as a kind of political theater aimed at securing votes so that they can better pursue their real agenda of enriching the wealthy and powerful.
UFCW Endorsement
Barack Obama wins the endorsement of the United Food and Commercial Workers. They're one of the youngest unions around in terms of membership, and have a substantial presence in Ohio. There's an interesting subtext in this race whereby Change to Win unions have tended to be sympathetic to Obama, while Clinton's key pillar of support has been the public sector unions. This hasn't really spilled over into any incredibly concrete policy controversy on the campaign trail, but probably has some implications as to how they would govern in that you naturally take the concerns of the unions who supported you a bit more seriously than those of the unions who tried to beat you.
UPDATE: I had initially intended to make a joke about "impressionable elites" showing up at the most unlikely places, working in supermarkets and slaughterhouses and such but I'd forgotten that unions with four-letter acronyms don't count. AFT! NEA! AFSCME! Those are unions. HERE, UFCW, SEIU and so forth don't make the cut.
February 15, 2008
Onward to Damascus
On Monday, General Petraeus -- the unfailing font of wisdom who Must Be Listened To At All Times -- praised Syria for its enhanced cooperation with our forces in Iraq. Naturally, yesterday Bush issued some new anti-Syrian sanctions tied to Syria's lack of cooperation with our efforts in Iraq.
Lewis Flips
Rep. John Lewis, one of several longtime African-American political leaders who'd offered Hillary Clinton early endorsements, is switching sides and joining the Obama camp. Don't miss Noam Scheiber's TNR article on second-thoughts among pro-Clinton African-Americans more generally.
This kind of thing is probably a leading indicator of what I expect will be a looming collapse in her superdelegate lead if she doesn't start making a quick recovery in the ranks of pledged delegates (something I think she may well do, I don't really understand the atmosphere of writing her off that seems to be in the air in DC this week).
McCain: Friend or Foe of BS?
One striking thing about John McCain's 20+ year career in the Senate, is that he's gotten an extraordinarily little amount done. One reason may be that, as Brendan Nyhan points out, he seems to have a curiously unsophisticated view of how to build coalitions. How to break the FISA deadlock? Well, "people that are patriotic Americans need to sit down together and work this out." How to achieve national reconciliation in Iraq? Simple, "One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'"
Souled Out
I mentioned E.J. Dionne's new book, Souled Out when I got my copy, but let me recommend the ongoing discussion of the book over at TPM Cafe. It's one of the most interesting "faith and politics" discussions I've seen. Read Alexia Kelley here and you'll see a side of the "religious left" that strikes me as a bit creepy and illiberal ("It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real") but also extraordinarily powerful in its vision. But you've also got your brass-tacks election analysis about the relevance of religion to people's voting patterns, and the need for any viable political coalition to engage with that aspect of people's lives.
Penn's Bad Spin
Mark Penn's latest memo:
Change Begins March 4th. Hillary leads in the three largest, delegate rich states remaining: Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These three states have 492 delegates - 64 percent of the remaining delegates Hillary Clinton needs to win the nomination.
Chris Orr notes that this only works "If Clinton wins all three states by margins of 100-0." Penn doesn't seem to really understand spin. The point of spin is to make the person on whose behalf the spinning is happening look better, not worse. There's no point in just saying any old thing. What's more, it's not really surprising that he's bad at spin -- he's a pollster. Spinning is a distinct skill-set. But for some reason he seems to be doing an awful lot of it, and not very well.
More FISA, Less Sarcasm
For a more substantive take on the whole FISA/telecom immunity issue than I've been able to muster, check out my friend libertarian tech policy analyst Tim Lee's Slate article from a few days ago which runs down most of the relevant information. It is, however, worth dwelling here a bit on the precedent. If the executive branch comes to a private company and asks it to do something illegal, the executive branch has powerful ways of making the company see things its way. Being on the good side of the incumbent administration is a good place to be.
But still, companies will think twice about cooperating with illegal requests if they're sure that doing so will come around and bite them in the ass in the long run. But if you create the situation the Bush administration is proposing -- where failure to comply with illegal requests has negative consequences, but agreeing to comply with illegal requests lets you off scot free -- then no company going forward is going to have any reason to refuse to comply with any sort of illegal requests. In essence, the immunity provision would gut whatever other restrictions the new FISA law might contain. Meanwhile, it's good to see Steny Hoyer standing tall:
Now, the president asserts that the expiration of the protect America act will pose a danger to our country. The former National Security Council advisor on terrorism says that's not true. Former assistant attorney general says that's not true. Numerous others, and the chairman, has asserted that's not true. Why is that not true? Because FISA will remain in effect. The authority given under the protect America act remains in effect. And if there are new targets, the FISA court has full authority to give every authority to the administration to act. So i tell my friends, we are pursuing the politics of fear. Unfounded fear. 435 members of this house and every one of us, every one of us wants to keep America and Americans safe. Not one of us -- not one of us wants to subject America or Americans to danger. The president's assertion is wrong. I say it categorically. The president's assertion is wrong.
As I argue in Heads in the Sand, it's important to approach these things from a self-confident point-of-view rather than a defensive one. When Bush says something outrageous, you have to act like you're outraged not like you're frightened that his outrageous statements will cause the voters to punish you. Confidence alone, obviously, isn't nearly enough to win political fights but it is a necessary precondition of doing so.
Know-Nothings
I'm shocked, shocked to learn that the right has no idea what they're talking about when it comes to FISA. These people should really try to wrap their minds about the fact that the country is very likely to put a "liberal fascist" in the White House in a few months and maybe -- just maybe! -- it's not a great idea to have this child-like faith that the essence of good government is utterly untrammeled domestic surveillance.
Over There
On Noam Scheiber's recommendation, I checked out Dexter Filkins' article about George Packer's new play "Betrayed" and it sounds like a fascinating piece of theater. I wasn't happy with Packer's complaints about stateside reactions to Iraq, but it's unquestionably true that actual events in Iraq feel very emotionally distant here in the Western Hemisphere and everything that helps break that distance down is important.
The Pushback
Steve Clemons and my colleague Josh Green both insist that, as per common sense, Patti Solis Doyle was fired from her spot as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. It seems, however, that yesterday the Clinton campaign put out some more details on the "stepped down" theory:
Ms. Solis Doyle recently returned home after two months on the road to find a family accustomed to her absence, she told colleagues. When her 6-year-old son cried out one night recently, he rebuffed his mom, saying, "I want Daddy." Ms. Solis Doyle flew out of the room in tears and told her husband: "Joey doesn't want me. S- this campaign, I'm quitting."
This is probably something every parent of young children could sympathize with, but at the same time it almost seems calculated to send the message that you can't put mothers in positions of responsibility, doesn't it? After all, if it's really true that Solis Doyle wasn't fired, then quitting a top job in the Clinton campaign at a moment of crisis would have been an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. In the real world, of course, it doesn't make any sense as anything other than a firing, but inside the fiction Solis Doyle just switched from a campaign manager who arguably made some mistakes to being a campaign manager who really screwed over her boss and all her employees and millions of Clinton supporters across the country.
Roid Rage
Josh Green reports from the Roger Clemens hearings.
Department of Priorities
According to Walter Pincus, the US government is paying less attention to the safety and security of our nuclear arsenals. That doesn't seem very smart to me at all. Robert Farley points out that in addition to the direct costs "the presence of weak safety procedures in the U.S. makes it harder to get other nations to take such procedures seriously, especially those (such as Russia, India, and Pakistan) which run a much more serious risk of a nuclear accident."
It's really pretty hard for me to think of things more worth paying attention to than the safety and security of our own nuclear weapons. This shouldn't be a difficult problem for a rich country with a lavishly-financed defense establishment.
Crystal Skull
It's hard to know for sure, but from the look of this preview, the forthcoming India Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems like a worthy edition to the franchise rather than something like Sylvester Stallone's cringe-inducing efforts to revisit his classic characters.
No Policy Here
I know this blog has gotten pretty horseracy as this race keeps on going, but I've still got a lot to learn if I want to be a bigtime media player. Yesterday, for example, Peter Slevin and Shailagh Murray did an article for The Washington Post on Barack Obama's economic plan. Well, it was sort of an article about Obama's economic plan. The headline was "Obama's Economic Plan Is A Pitch to the Working Class". Basically, it referred to Obama's economic plan, but didn't say anything about it. "Obama's Economic Plan Calls for Infrastructure Bank"? No. "Obama's Economic Plan Calls for Credit Card Reform?" No.
But that's just the headline. Journalists don't write our own headlines. Maybe if you decide to scan the article you can a taste of what sort of measures were included in Obama's plan. Here's the lede:
Sen. Barack Obama offered a detailed prescription for the ailing U.S. economy Wednesday, answering skeptics who contend he has not matched his inspirational talk with a mastery of policy and targeting voters in crucial primaries in Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas.
Up until the comma, we're doing well here. We learn that Obama offered a detailed plan. But after the comma, we don't learn any of the details. The next six grafs are all about the political context -- Obama's momentum, the looming primaries, Obama's need to expand his appeal to working class voters. In graf eight, John McCain accuses Obama of offering "platitudes." In grafs nine and ten, Obama fires back accusing McCain of flip-flopping on taxes. In graf eleven, Clinton echoes McCain's attacks. In graf twelve, the fact that Obama delivered a speech on the economy gets re-iterated. In graf thirteen, we learn that Obama says he'll pay for the plan by ending the war in Iraq and rolling back tax cuts. In graf fourteen, the Clinton campaign quotes a McCain advisor as calling the plan "plagiarism." Finally, in the fifteenth graf of an article about Obama's economic plan we get something resembling a description of the content of the plan:
The newest element of his proposal was the establishment of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would spend $60 billion over a decade to rebuild deteriorating roads, bridges and waterways. Obama said the spending would generate 2 million new jobs, many of them in a construction industry that has been hard hit by the housing market downturn.
I don't know whether Obama's campaign was helped or hindered by this strange way of covering the plan. Maybe his efforts to make inroads are being stymied since the ideas he was hoping to help him make them are being muffled by focus on the political context. Or maybe his efforts are being boosted, because the details wouldn't really sway people but random chatter about Obama doing detailed, working class stuff is sends the right message. My guess is probably the latter; this is more helpful to Obama than a straightforward description of the infrastructure bank proposals (it would allow the government to account for infrastructure spending as a kind of investment rather than an expense on continuing operations; it's the kind of distinction companies usually make between capital spending and operating expenses) but it's really no good for the country.
Against King of Kong
I absolutely loved The King of Kong, a documentary about high-stakes competitive arcade gaming, but via Ezra Klein it seems there's some concern that the film makes a number of material factual errors and omissions.
SEIU for Obama
It's official, SEIU is endorsing Barack Obama, a move that supersedes any state-level endorsements of other candidates. I'm given to understand that the move was less about any particular SEIU-related policy issue than about the idea that an Obama endorsement and an Obama win is the best possibility for building the sort of broad, powerful progressive coalition that SEIU seeks.
The F-22 Boondoggle
The Air Force wants more of these extremely expensive planes, but the whole thing is totally unnecessary. But, hey, it's not like we have any kind of security-related missions ongoing that require large numbers of a completely different kind of military and diplomatic resources so why worry about this stuff? And of course beyond the pure waste of funds, there's the risk of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The more we give in to defense contractors and build pointless weapons systems while yelling "China threat! China threat!" the more likely it becomes that people in Beijing are going to start saying "holy crap, look at this giant anti-Chinese defense build-up the Americans are undertaking" then you've got arms races, mutual suspicion, regional conflict, etc. It's all bad news.
Unless you make very expensive military aircraft for a living, that is, in which case it's great.
The Re-Up
The second edition of The American Prospect's Wire dialogue is up.
New Clinton Ad
This is negative advertising at its best:
It's an attack, it's negative, but it's reasonably fair. I'm just not sure I totally grasp why the contrasts on the issues have been been wrapped up in this silly debate argument.
Grumpy Old Men
Looks like John McCain is poised to secure the George H.W. Bush endorsement. It's hard to see what kind of reassurance this is supposed to give the Mac-hating conservatives since these are generally these folks hate Papa Bush, too.
The Conservation of Virtues
I'd like to associate myself with Mike Lux's puzzlement over this line of argument from Hillary Clinton:
Speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches don't fill up your tank, or fill up your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night. My opponent gives speeches. I offer solutions.
And, clearly, speeches don't put food on the table. But it's not as if Hillary Clinton doesn't give speeches. Giving speeches is part of being a presidential candidate. Indeed, it's also part of being president. And, again, both candidates deliver speeches. So it would seem that Clinton is accusing Obama of giving speeches well. I've written previously about this implicit appeal to a conservation of virtues principle from the Clinton campaign -- the smart girl must be ugly, the guy who gives good speeches must not have policy proposals -- and it doesn't makes less sense, rather than more sense, when Clinton makes the argument more directly.
Obama does, after all, have an energy plan and a jobs plan and a health care plan. It's true that he doesn't have much experience as a legislator, but he has more experience in that role than Hillary Clinton has. Now obviously she's free to argue that his health care plan is worse than hers (I think it is) or that her environment/energy plan is better than his (I think it isn't), but the fact that he's a better orator just doesn't count as evidence for the inferiority of his proposals.
February 16, 2008
Generic Ballot
The numbers don't have any real predictive value this far in advance, but with generic congressional ballot polling tilting this sharply against the GOP you can see that Republicans really need something to change fairly drastically if they want to avoid serious problems. Whatever improvements one may think have taken place in Iraq clearly haven't turned public opinion around. Meanwhile, I'd say the odds strongly favor the Iraq violence situation and the economic situation both looking worse in six months
Incentives Work
I've always thought there was something a little funny about No Child Left Behind's efforts to use standards and accountability to get teachers and schools to perform better. Why not just go right to the source and given students direct financial incentives to do well in school? Decent people find the idea abhorrent, I know, but there are clear theoretical reasons to think it would work and the empirical evidence suggests that it works.
Now naturally every individual actually has strong incentives to do well in school anyway. But children tend to exhibit a very high rate of pure time preference. Short-term financial incentives (or, indeed, non-financial incentives like the gold stars my elementary school teachers used to hand out) help align the short- and long-run incentive picture. Meanwhile, educational attainment has positive externalities, so it's worth spending money on.
For Love of Famous People
Hollywood is a funny business. There's lots of money sloshing about, the big stars see huge paydays, and some movies make a tremendous amount of cash. But it always seems like an extraordinarily bad business to invest in -- tons of uncertainty without the level of reward that normally comes with accepting that level of risk. And yet, there's invariably some new wave of capital pouring in even though every previous wave has eventually walked away bitter and disappointed. The latest wave has come from hedge funds and The Los Angeles Times reports that their experience has been no better than anyone else's.
At the end of the day what none of these hard-headed businessmen -- from the heads of Japanese conglomerates to the high-flying hedge funders to whomever else -- is that the attraction of the business isn't the business, but the fact that people like movies and know that owning a piece of a production or a studio will give them a chance to hang out with movie stars. Everyone, after all, likes hanging out with movie stars. And I suppose there's no reason very rich people shouldn't plow their savings into an enterprise like that, but oftentimes the people making these decisions aren't just playing with their own money, they're also managing assets for someone else.
Spreading Democracy
"U.S. Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law". Maybe that's because the modern-day Republican Party has had trouble explaining how concepts like "if the president says 'terrorism' a lot it's not really a crime" and "if the companies that broke the law contribute a lot of money to my campaign they should be let off the hook" and "when executive branch officials don't respond to subpoenas you should back them if they're Republicans" translate over into the Iraqi context. it is, after all, a very different culture and society so it's hard to know what the exact parallel would be so some of the wacky adventures in Xtreme Rule of Law the GOP has been experimenting with lately.
Obama NYC
It appears that the initial reported vote total for Barack Obama in New York City were substantially too low and "a swing of even a couple of hundred votes in New York might help Mr. Obama gain a few additional delegates."
Senator Hothead
I'm not sure I think the fact that John McCain likes to curse at his colleagues or say things like "thanks for the question, you little jerk" when he doesn't like a question at a town hall meeting is, as such, a problem. But it seems to me to be of a piece with potential diplomatic fiascos like his 100 years in Iraq gambit.
Part of being President is that it's important for you to not suddenly and accidentally alter the declared policies of the United States of America just because you didn't eat your prunes in the morning and you're feeling a bit grumpy. The Bush administration has, for years, pursued what its critics (myself included) have characterized as an Iraq agenda focused on the desirability of securing a permanent military foothold in that country. To its credit, however, the Bush administration always recognized the sensitivity of the issue to the point where they would shy away from coming out and saying this. That there was the diplomacy, and part of being president is knowing how to do it. On the Senate floor, straight talk like "Only an asshole would put together a budget like this" (McCain to Senator Pete Domenici, 1999 or "Fuck you. I know more about this than anyone else in the room" (McCain to Senator John Cornyn during negotiations over immigration reform) is a faux pas that can be overcome with an apology after the fact. Those same instincts could, however, be a major problem if applied to the DMZ in Korea or the Taiwan Straits.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, what do we think Domenici did with the '99 budget?
In Context
I'm reading some sentiment that maybe the Democrat's large lead in generic congressional balloting doesn't matter, because Democrats always lead in generic balloting. Here's Gallup's table of historical context for the numbers:
Long story short, the fourteen point lead is a big lead by historical standards. It's February right now and the election's in November. That's plenty of time for things to change so in that sense it's not necessarily very significant. But the size of the lead is genuinely large.
Walking the Streets
An interesting observation from Ilan Goldenberg: When Ahmadenijad is planning to visit Iraq, he announces his trip well in advance much in the way that leaders normally do before visiting foreign countries. But when George Bush goes to Iraq, security concerns dictate that the visit take place in secret with no advance notice. This even though the country in question is currently under US military occupation. Or perhaps rather than "even though" we should say because.
Sebelius: We Count!
The governor of Kansas fired back against the Clinton campaign's habit of deriding entire states where they happen to lose elections:
Senator Clinton and her campaign surrogates keep deriding Senator Obama's wins in red states by saying that her victories in the 'big states' are the ones that matter," Governor Sebelius said. " The right Democrat, like Barack Obama, can carry red states, just like the 14 Democratic governors elected in states won by George Bush in 2004. We can't tell people their votes don't matter and then expect their support against John McCain in November. Senator Obama is reaching to Independents and Republicans because they desperately want to change our politics. I hope Senator Clinton will follow his lead and stop dismissing Democrats that don't live in New York or California.
Of course it's not just red states -- those of us in DC, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Washington, Minnesota, etc. don't like to be told we don't count either.
Socialized Medicine
Apparently we've reached a point where the term "socialized medicine" actually polls well. See Ezra Klein for further discussion. I would only note that the leading Democratic candidates are not, in fact, proposing to deliver medical services on a socialized (i.e., public sector) basis. Nor are they really proposing to deliver health insurance on a public sector basis (the way Medicare works).
Which is all too bad, because socialized medicine is, in my view, a good idea. Democrats have various reasons for not putting actual socialized medicine proposals on the table, but at least one reason is a desire to rebut the charge that they favor "socialized medicine." But if "socialized medicine" sounds good to people, then they may as well propose it.
Feeling Better
Man, I was really worried that the Bush administration's determination to engineer a crisis that it could then try to pin on House Democrats would leave the country's security services dangerous lacking in legal tools necessary to subject people to electronic surveillance. It seems, though, that breaking the law has just become routine so we can all breath easy I guess.
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Heads in the Sand
