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