I thought there were plenty of congenial ideas in David Brook's latest stab at formulating a reformist conservative agenda, but I wonder a bit about his math. Brooks writes that "Income taxes are not going to be coming down, but they need to stay where they are."
Things being what they are in the modern conservative movement, Brooks might as well admit that he worships a shrine of Karl Marx as offer this oblique criticism of the Supply Side Gospel. After all, if lower tax rates bring more revenue, why not cut cut cut forever? Meanwhile, what Brooks is offering is inadequate to the scale of his agenda. He wants:
"A new working class tax credit applied against the payroll tax"
"a larger child tax credit"
"increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit"
"nurse-home visits for children in chaotic homes"
"Preschool should be radically expanded"
"copy the models — like KIPP Academies — that actually work"
This is all fine, but it would cost a lot of money. Brooks sort of elides this with the observation that "per-pupil expenditures [. . .] are not sufficient to produce superb information-economy workers" which is true. But it's also true that KIPP teachers "typically earn 15 to 20 percent more in salary than traditional public school teachers." These reform proposals are good idea, but they're not an alternative to the traditional liberal notion that if you want better outcomes for kids you're going to have to spend more money on kids. But higher taxes are off the table. So where does that leave us? You'd need to pare entitlements pretty severely just to stop the costs from rising. Are we cutting the defense budget instead of continuing on the path of large annual increases? I don't want to dismiss the possibility out of hand; I'd certainly favor something like that. But does Brooks?
It seems that contrary to the wishes of Kosovo's Serbian minority, Serbia, and Russia Kosovo has declared independence from Serbia and various western countries will recognize their declaration. Given the status quo as it existed last week, this is the right thing to do, but that the situation reached the present impasse was a pretty serious failing. It seems likely that the main price will be paid by people in Georgia (former Soviet Georgia, that is) where Russia will retaliate by recognizing the independent of Abkhazia and possibly touching off some intensified conflict there.
Jeff Zeleny writes an article for The New York Times about how Barack Obama is attempting to respond to critics by offering more detailed, policy oriented speeches these days. It doesn't, however, mention any of the details. If you're interested in detailed discussion of health care mandates the internet will, however, oblige at any number of locations. And for policy matters beyond the mandate, you could check out Sara Mead's analysis of the Obama education agenda, for example. Or Dave Roberts on Obama's energy and climate proposals.
I liked Francis Fukuyama's review of Samantha Power's new book very much, but something at the end of it reminded me of a complaint I frequently have with commentary on the future of international institutions:
In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the United States and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers or trust it with large sums of money.
I'm not sure people truly grasp the force of a claim that involves the statement that something won't "ever" happen. Human civilization might go on for a very long time. Think of a person sitting around in 1808 speculating on what might or might not "ever" come to pass in the world. It wouldn't have even occurred to him to predict that Germany and France could never reconcile because there would have been no such country as Germany. Things would need to be very different from how they are now for major countries to be putting soldiers under the direct control of UN authorities, but if you consider how much things have changed from 1938 to 2008, it doesn't seem at all implausible that things might, indeed, be very different in 2078.
When I was in the Netherlands, a leading Dutch pundit argued to me that the Netherlands would never put its soldiers under the command of a German officer. I told him this exact scenario in fact already exists. He insisted I was wrong, but fortunately Bert Koenders, Minister for Development and Cooperation, was on hand to back me up. Things change, stuff happens, people will be surprised.
Spencer Ackerman travels the world, assembling apropos anecdotes. For example, when he was in Mosul he saw a Provincial Reconstruction Team helping to oversee a terrorism trial and teach the Iraqis a thing or two about the rule of law:
Then at the end, as people are milling about and chatting on their way out the door, one of the PRT officials tells a judge how important it is to stand up against terrorism and promote equality and fairness before an impartial system of law. The judge nods at the platitude. "Tell me," he says through a translator, "is it true that in America, Bush can fire prosecutors he doesn't like?"
The story of JFK winning the black vote and the election because of the decision to call Coretta Scott King on the occasion of MLK's unjustified arrest could use a little complication. Northern blacks started voting Democratic during FDR's time and were an important source of support for Harry Truman's re-election bid in 1948. But in 1952, the Democrats put Alabama's John Sparkman on the bottom of the ticket, and Ike picked up a bigger share of the black vote than Republicans had been getting recently. In 1956, Eisenhower got Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.'s endorsement and his share of the black vote went up further still to something in the neighborhood of parity.
The second Eisenhower administration featured a couple of high-profile fights on civil rights in which Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were all playing slightly murky roles with everyone trying to play to incompatible audiences all simultaneously. But the stage had, in essence, been set for the GOP to make a strong play for regaining the loyalty of black voters -- they'd been making electoral inroads, the Eisenhower years had witnessed more progress on civil rights than any administration since LIncoln, and the Democrats were once again "ticket balancing" with a southern vice president. The 1960 election wound up not playing out that way, and then by 1964-65 the Johnson administration secured a civil rights record that left anything the Republicans had ever done in the dust.
I'm happy to defer to Mark Schmitt who used to work on this dreary subject full-time on all issues related to campaign finance, so check out his take here. Basically, Obama has not, in fact, pledged himself to take public funds in the general election and McCain is pulling some shady stunts regarding the primary.
House Minority Leader John Boehner says that "Because of the Democrats’ inaction, the Protect America Act expired last night at midnight, forcing our intelligence officials to revert to the same terror surveillance laws that failed to protect America from the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on 9/11."
As Tim Lee points out this is just an extravagantly false claim. Back in October of 2001, President Bush gave a radio address about how "The bill I signed yesterday gives intelligence and law enforcement officials additional tools they need to hunt and capture and punish terrorists." The FISA was revised again in 2002. Then FISA was revised again in 2004. Then FISA was revised again in 2006. Protect America Act aside, there have been four separate post-9/11 sets of modifications to the law in question. Most people don't know this, fair enough. But Boehner's been in congress throughout all of this -- he voted on the revisions -- and now he's pretending they don't exist.
I'll be the first to admit that the math by which the Democratic Party turns support in a state into delegates to the national convention are pretty complicated and more than a little obscure. The process used in Texas is, meanwhile, especially complicated and obscure. Still this is the kind of thing you would think a presidential campaign would take a strong interest in. But it's seemed for a while now that some of the Clinton campaign's moves only make sense if you assume the Clinton campaign didn't really understand the rules, something that appears to be the case according to The Washington Post's latest reporting where we read things like this:
What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa's heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts in Dallas and Houston -- where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support -- could yield three or four times as many delegates.
When did they make these crucial discoveries? Just "this month" according to the article. But understanding the rules would have been a big help in designing a strategy for Super Tuesday and the rest of February. Hilzoy correctly notes that this sort of thing cast some doubt on the notion that Clinton's veteran savvy makes her the ideal choice to go up against the GOP.
To me, John McCain's habit of switching positions on many issues over the years makes it difficult to tell what, if anything, he really thinks about these matters. It seems, though, that a superior journalist like Nicholas Kristof gets to write for The New York Times op-ed page because he does have a solid read on what McCain really believes. What reportorial technique did he use to ferret out the truth? Telepathy! Thus, Kristof is sure that "With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is." Basically, "McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste." How does Kristof know this? Telepathy! Then Kristof runs down the considerable evidence that McCain is an enormous jerk and concludes that:
McCain himself would probably acknowledge every one of these flaws, and he is a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it. It is refreshing to see that courage rewarded by voters.
McCain himself would acknowledge these flaws if what? If he wasn't running for President? What kind of courage is that? I have know idea under which circumstances, if ever, McCain would acknowledge flaws that he has not, in fact, acknowledged. But the overwhelmingly relevant fact about McCain's flaws would seem to me to be their existence. Acknowledging flaws, after all, doesn't make them go away. And of course McCain hasn't even acknowledged them! But if things were different, he would, which would be courageous, so we should be glad McCain is getting close to the White House.
The fact of the matter is that my origin story is tweaked, but only slightly. The major difference in the Ultimate Yglesias continuity concerns my rogue's gallery. Ultimate Jonah Goldberg, for example, isn't a nepotism hire at all, but rather a 100,000 mile long swarm of robotic drones that threatens to destroy all life on earth. It's true to the spirit of the original, but also a pretty bold re-imagining that keeps things interesting even for old-time fans.
Policy contrasts between the Democratic contenders have sometimes seemed rare, but here's a couple:
Clinton was more enthusiastic than Obama about human space travel and domestic oil production when the Democratic presidential candidates conducted separate telephone conferences with the Houston Chronicle editorial board.
Advantage, Obama! Though Clinton is clearly taking the more Texas-friendly line here.
My initial response to the idea that women should pay lower tax rates than men was skeptical. But Sara liked it, so I read more. It's certainly intriguing. Some responses to critics are available here. Download the paper (PDF) by Alberto Alesio et. al. to learn more. The abstract:
Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey’s optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. But in this paper we also explore differences in gender elasticities which emerge endogenously in a model in which spouses bargain over the allocation of home duties. GBT changes spouses’ implicit bargaining power and induces a more balanced allocation of house work and working opportunities between males and females. Because of decreasing returns to specialization in home and market work, social welfare improves by taxing conditional on gender. When income sharing within the family is substantial, both spouses may gain from GBT.
It continues to be a bit baffling that John McCain decided last week that specific mastery of policy was the grounds on which he wants to pick a fight with Barack Obama. Check this out from Dave Roberts:
Speaking of Obama, he went after McCain on climate change, and he did so specifically on the basis of supporting 100% permit auctions. That's a somewhat subtle marker to those who don't know much about the issue, and it's going to take time to massage it into the body media. It is fantastic that Obama's getting started.
Speaking of McCain, he said he hadn't seen Obama's climate plan (clearly an issue he cares deeply about) and continued to deny that his cap-and-trade program included a mandatory cap. He could be lying or he could be confused about the policy; it's hard to think of what the third option might be.
That's right. John McCain doesn't know whether or not his own global warming plan puts a cap on carbon emissions. It's almost as if he signed on to a climate bill just because he's a camera hog and it seemed like a sexy topic, and he in fact has no understanding of or commitment to the issue.
Why has no candidate or national leader called for dramatic improvement in the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill? All our commissioned officers have college degrees (bet you didn't know that), but the non-coms need scholarships, and the officers should get the same for graduate and professional school. I'm sure David will agree. And the candidates should, too. If we really "support our troops," this is a fine way to do well for our society by doing good for our heroes.
That reminds me of this wacky incident from Bush's State of the Union address:
President Bush drew great applause during his State of the Union address last month when he called on Congress to allow U.S. troops to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. "Our military families serve our nation, they inspire our nation, and tonight our nation honors them," he said.
A week later, however, when Bush submitted his $3.1 trillion federal budget to Congress, he included no funding for such an initiative, which government analysts calculate could cost $1 billion to $2 billion annually.
Hillary will enact a GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century that will resurrect the spirit of the original 1944 GI Bill and offer service members, veterans and their families with expanded education, housing and entrepreneurial benefits. Her plan will guarantee equal access for all components of the Armed Forces - Active, Guard and Reserve - that have deployed overseas in support of a combat operation since September 11 or served two years of active duty since September 11. She will fund undergraduate education for service members, as well as education for specialized trade or technical training, and certification and licensing programs.
And then of course who could forget about the time when the administration was saving money by having National Guard units deploy for precisely 729 days so as to avoid giving them the education benefits to which they would be entitled were they to stay for 730 days.
Via Patrick Appel, who's doing a great job filling in for Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Ferguson takes a look at John McCain's economic advisors for The Weekly Standard:
What makes it odd is [McCain's economics advisers] aren't like each other at all, at least when it comes to their economic views. A couple of them, if you put them in the same room, would set off an intergalactic explosion like the collision of matter and antimatter.
One adviser, Jack Kemp, is the man who talked Ronald Reagan into embracing supply side economics in the 1970s, which launched the Reagan boom of the 1980s. He's the world's bubbliest advocate of tax cuts, dismissing the traditional Republican fixation on balanced budgets as "root canal" economics. Another adviser, Peter Peterson, is root canal economics. He's a dour Jeremiah who called the Reagan boom a "mad, drunken bash" and thinks steep tax increases on income, gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol, on top of a 5 percent consumption tax, are necessary to put the government's finances in order. He and Rudman run the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group that regards the federal government's budget deficit as the country's foundational economic problem.
Under the right circumstances, having advisors from competing schools of thought would probably be an asset. I would like to see the next president hear a take from the labor-liberal side of things and the neoliberal Bob Rubin school before making a major decision. Indeed, it would probably be smart to run things by some smart people from all the way on the other side of the political spectrum. The best policies can often secure support from a variety of different perspectives, and certainly complicated undertakings tend to be improved by accepting some critical input. The trouble is that to make something like this work you need the person in charge to actually be capable of assessing different kinds of advice and ironing them into something resembling a coherent policy and there's little in McCain's background to suggest that he has any idea of how to season a policy with a touch of Kemp and a dollop of Peterson.
Under the circumstances, someone or other is likely to emerge as the main driving force behind a McCain administration, just as George W. Bush turned out to be 98 percent Cheney/Rumsfeld and only 2 percent Powell/Armitage, but there's no way for we the voters to predict in advance. Just as with McCain's general ideological meandering, we're left to take on faith that his personal powers of Straight Talkiness should give us reassurance that he'll do the right thing even though he can't communicate any kind of remotely clear vision of what the right thing is.
I'll admit that literature's never really been my thing, but this entire article seems premised on a bizarre misreading of The Great Gatsby:
She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.
“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”
Insofar as Harvard is, as I can attest, actually not that great I suppose there's a sort of ironic aptness here. At any rate, others have gotten at the main issue here, but the part where it gets really weird is as some kids get that the book is a critique of the American dream but then don't evince any understanding of what the critique is:
One of Will’s classmates, Ashley Waters, 16, who helps her father with his antique consignment business, agreed. “The American dream is possible, but it’s just really hard,” she said. “Everything is so expensive — the price of college, housing. Look at the price of gas. The economy is going down.”
As if Fitzgerald were writing a DCCC press release or Hillary Clinton's stump speech. Oy.
Of course in terms of bizarre literary readings, the troubled New York Times article on The Great Gatsby mentioned below has absolutely nothing on Bill Kristol's column about how George Orwell's take on Kipling shows that Republicans, like Kipling, are awesome.
One argument I make in my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand, is that we shouldn't understand Bush-style neoconservative foreign policy as some kind of tremendously innovative new thing. Rather, it's very much a part of the same tradition as 19th century imperialism -- a tradition that had mostly gone into eclipse for good reasons after WWII and whose post-Cold War resurgence has brought us little of merit. It's by no means a wholly original argument, I'm following John Judis' underappreciated The Folly of Empire among other works, but I did think it was still a provocative one. At a minimum, I thought it was something most neocon types would deny. But here's Kristol, proudly waving the banner of Kipling and empire, and with nothing to say about the whole sorry business other than that Kipling is "politically incorrect" as if the whole "should we seek to subjugate the entire world with our military might" issue boils down to liberals being fussy.
The CBO's latest projections see an economic slowdown that doesn't become a recession. The letter accompanying the projections also nicely encapsulates why you won't see me doing any macroeconomic forecasting (emphasis added):
CBO’s previous forecast, which was embodied in budget projections released in January, was finalized in early December 2007. However, data released since then––especially regarding the labor market––indicate that economic conditions are weaker than previously projected, and conditions in some segments of financial markets remain worrisome. Other indicators––such as production indices and information on retail sales and sales of new homes––also suggest a slowing in economic activity.
At the same time, changes in monetary policy have been more substantial than CBO assumed in December, and fiscal policy stimulus has been enacted. The Federal Reserve reduced the target for the federal funds rate by 125 basis points in January, and financial markets anticipate further easing in the near future. In addition, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 will provide about $150 billion in tax rebates and business tax deductions in fiscal year 2008. CBO anticipates that the recent monetary and fiscal policy actions will provide significant support to the economy in 2008.
Basically, one of the biggest determinants of whether or not there's going to be a recession is whether or not the Fed thinks there's going to be a recession. If they think it's likely, they'll act aggressively to avoid one and there likely won't be one. If they don't think there's going to be one, then there just might be a recession. At that point, though, in terms of accurate forecasting we're talking about mind-reading rather than economics.
Hendrick Hertzberg's latest "talk of the town" item opens with a hilarious meditation on the changing nature of presidential drug disclosures as witnesses by a New York Times article that appeared to have been accusing Obama of having done less drugs back in the day than his autobiography implied. Then, the pivot:
Voters, rightly, don’t much seem to care. But there is a glaring discontinuity between the lived experience of Americans and the drug policies of their governments. Nearly a hundred million of us—forty per cent of the adult population, including pillars of the nation’s political, financial, academic, and media élites—have smoked (and, therefore, possessed) marijuana at some point, thereby committing an offense that, with a bit of bad luck, could have resulted in humiliation, the loss of benefits such as college loans and scholarships, or worse. More than forty thousand people are in jail for marijuana offenses, and some seven hundred thousand are arrested annually merely for possession. Meanwhile, the percentage of high-school seniors who have used pot has remained steady, between forty and fifty per cent.
That's what always seems to me to go missing in these "politicians behaving badly" stories. Do I think that having smoked pot should disqualify a person from being a U.S. Senator? Of course not. But a minority of people who smoke pot in this country do wind up facing rather severe penalties for having done so. The question for formerly drug using politicians who (rightly) expect to be forgiven is how they can continue to support a legal regime that has these consequences.
[The official Yglesias line on the issue is that there's good reason to keep adequate legal restrictions on marijuana in place so as to prevent the emergence of large marijuana firms with lobbying arms and sophisticated marketing and advertising arms. This, obviously, would still leave the door open for substantial liberalization of policy from its current status quo.]
I caught some of this movie on cable last night before The Wire and it's funny, I don't recall anyone watching it back in the day and saying "you know what, maybe the NSA should have totally unchecked surveillance power! That's be really useful, and by no means open to abuse!"
Throughout the bulk of the campaign season, Hillary Clinton's been full of tough talk about cracking down on the oil companies. She's also repeatedly, and correctly, criticized Barack Obama's vote in favor of a pretty bad industry-friendly 2005 energy bill. But now that the campaign's shifted to Texas, it seems she wants us to know that she "recognizes the continuing vital role of the oil and gas industry".
I'm not sure he's the most effective conservative, though the "every time I hear the word 'conservative' it makes me sick to my stomach" line has a certain appeal, and the "fake Christians" stuff sounds accurate to this non-Christian. But he starts out talking about how Barack Obama is a good role model -- since when does Barkley believe in role models.
Chris Bowers makes the case for the space program. I don't necessarily disagree that space exploration is a reasonable mission for the US government. But what was specifically at issue was manned space flight. There's nothing categorically wrong with manned space flight -- if we find something out there such that there's reason to believe a manned visit would bring enormous benefits, why not send someone? -- but at the moment manned space flight serves mostly as a costly distraction from more useful space missions.
Unmanned missions are, at the moment, the ones really pushing the frontiers of our knowledge and that's going to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. That's where we ought to be focusing our energies. Meanwhile, we might want to offer encouragement and assistance to rising powers who haven't yet undertaken substantial manned missions and for whom the "yes we can" factor still looms large. There's nothing special about being the nth American in space, but the first Brazilian or Chinese or Indian mission to the Moon might be a big deal if one of those countries was so inclined.
Important Developments I'm Not Really Qualified to Comment On
Elections in Pakistan have turned into a huge defeat for the pro-Musharraf PML-Q party and a substantial victory for the Bhutto family's Pakistan People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's PML-N party. Beyond what's in the newspapers, I don't have much to add at the moment except the observation that once again the much-hyped fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan seems like a very remote possibility, when people get a chance to register their preferences, PPP and PML-N consistently come out on top.
Fidel Castro, having long outlasted all his rivals in the West and all his colleagues in the world of Communist dictatoring, is stepping down as leader of Cuba. Steve Clemons rightly asks who in American politics will have the courage and good sense to seize the opportunity for an opening in US-Cuban relations. Based on the past, the edge goes to Obama, but he needs to actually step up to the plate now.
One of Patrick Appel's readers writes in to explain how McCain will square the circle in dealing with his confused and contradictory economic policies:
I think the way that McCain may well be able to connect the two schools of economic thought, supply side and budget balancing, is to look at what he has said would be his primary priority: restraining federal spending. He has acknowledged that he was wrong to believe that the Bush tax cuts (and previous tax cuts) led to reduced revenues for the Federal government. Clearly, at least in the past 50 or so years, the U.S. has been on the side of the curve where cutting taxes results in increased economic activity which results in greater tax receipts for the Federal government.
This if true would, indeed, be a solution of sorts. But the "if true" part of the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight it can't bear. Tax cuts don't increase revenue under anything resembling prevailing conditions in the United States. But, yes, I agree with the general spirit of the idea that dishonesty and flim-flam will be McCain's ticket out of the cesspool of ignorance and contradiction in which his economic thinking tends to wallow.
This is all very true. What's more, it points toward a serious objective difficulty with our understanding of electoral politics. The "the major party nominee who lost was obviously deeply flawed" school of election analysis is clearly flawed, but fundamentally the n for presidential elections is so tiny that unless you overinterpret the available data, you wind up not being able to say anything at all.
That, in turn, might be a good idea except I have the traffic stats to prove that nothing gets you, the audience, interested in political commentary like a good ol' fashioned presidential campaign. Thus, there will be election-related commentary. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" works well if you were "born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire" but some of us need to work blog for a living.
Reihan is absolute right, if a bit longwinded, to observe that you need to run out and get Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. Comic book fans will love it, but I suspect non-fans will, too. Superheroes aren't involved. All men on earth (except this one guy) mysteriously and suddenly die and we get the story of the consequences.
Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.
From that, I concluded that Clinton had said that Barack Obama was all hat and no cattle at some point. In fact (via Nyhan and Somerby) what happened was:
"There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and lot more cattle."
I tend to agree that an Obama media backlash is probably looming, but it hasn't built up enough steam yet to prevent him from snagging the endorsement of The Houston Chronicle despite Hillary Clinton's efforts to woo them with her love of manned space flight and domestic oil production.
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell ordered a special extension of the deadline to help Hillary Clinton have the time she needed to put together a full slate of delegates for th state, but despite that she still fell short by about ten people. Marc Ambinder calls it "more evidence that the Clinton campaign simply did not envision a delegate hunt until it was much too late." But why didn't they plan for this? Sam Boyd, an unusually bright college student, figured it out so one would think an entire campaign full of veteran political professionals might have noticed what was happening.
If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring the Americans together.
You would think that this formula would be the very height of cautious, go-it-slowism with regard to Cuba. If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo? And yet, our policies are so screwed up that this counts as a progressive measure. Our stated, exil-driven policy regards getting back the property exiles and US corporations lost decades ago as an "essential condition for the full resumption of economic and diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba."
Ryan Lizza has an excellent article sketching out the lines of debate over the future of the Republican Party, and where John McCain fits into the whole thing -- apparently, he sees himself as leading a struggle against resurgent forces of isolationism. Ross Douthat's not too happy:
But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn't you? And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn't that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please?
Ross seems a bit confused. As anyone familiar with George W. Bush's 2006 State of the Union Address knows, "isolationist" means "anyone who doesn't favor repeating the enormous blunders of the past six years." In that sense, the forces of isolationism really are growing, and one could even have imagined a President Romney or a President Huckabee turning out to be a closet "isolationist" once in office. But John McCain wanted a pointless and counterproductive policy of rogue state rollback before it was cool.
Via Ezra Klein, a useful online briefing book from the earnest wonks at the Tax Policy Center. They've got the best brief explanation of why the tax system is so complicated I've ever seen (hint: shifting to a single tax bracket wouldn't fix the problem), among other useful tidbits.
Right at the intersection of the horse race and my interest in foreign policy comes this dispatch from Obama, Japan where, it seems, they like Barack Obama.
Ah, Kurdistan, model of democracy, where Leila Fadel reports that a pass system has been put in place to restrict the movement of Arabs:
Every three months, Munawer Fayeq Rashid goes to the Asayech, an intelligence security agency in Irbil, and hands over his identification. The Shiite Muslim Arab never goes alone. He has to bring a Kurdish sponsor to vouch for him. [...] After a battery of questions and the testimony of a Kurd to vouch for them, would-be residents are issued special ID cards that allow them to live in the city. The card must be renewed every three months. If a person wants to visit another city in the Kurdish region, he or she must have a Kurdish sponsor in that city, too.
This seems to be about half "draconian measure necessary to keep Kurdistan relatively safe" and half "discrimination against Arabs for its own sake" but whichever way you look at it, it takes some of the sheen off Kurdistan-as-shining-model. Meanwhile, bloody fighting around a Kirkuk referendum remains just around the corner.
This Clinton campaign scheme to add wooing Barack Obama's pledged delegates to vote for her is a pretty sleazy and absurd addition to their earlier "let's count the states that don't count" gambit. On the superdelegates front, I have more sympathy for their view since, as I've blogged before, there really are situations where I think it might make sense for the superdelegates to override the caucus/primary outcomes.
The problem for Clinton is that all of this is wishful thinking. Look at the Gallup national tracking poll above. If Obama is winning in terms of pledged delegates, and he's leading in the national polls, and he's leading in fundraising, and he's doing better than Clinton in head-to-head matchups with McCain it's simply inconceivable that superdelegates (much less Obama's delegates!) are going to swing to her banner. All signs point to movement in the opposite direction from elites and the rank-and-file alike. Given the national polling trends, you have to think that some states Clinton won on February 5 -- Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California in particular -- are now more sympathetic to Obama than they were two weeks ago, not less so.
The only scenario in which the superdelegates might decide the election is precisely the scenario in which they should come into play -- a situation where what "the will of the people" is is genuinely unclear. Right now, Obama is unambiguously winning. But Wisconsin votes today, then Texas and Ohio on March 4. What Clinton needs to do is get good results in those states. Everything else both campaigns are talking about right now is somewhere between bluster and a waste of time. This vision of her somehow winning the nomination without securing some solid primary wins is a bizarre fantasy.
Identical twins are not, of course, literally identical, but now it seems that they aren't genetically identical either thanks to "tiny differences" that are "relatively common" and "could have a major impact on our understanding of genetically determined disorders." I suppose, then, that we ought to just call them "very similar twins" which somehow or other reminds me that I haven't had a look at Reasons and Persons in a while.
Well, looks like Jason Kidd is getting traded to Dallas after all. The deal that eventually wound up getting made is worse for Mark Cuban's pocketbook, but better for the Mavericks, in that it winds up depriving Dallas of less depth than did the original conception of the trade. I still don't like this deal very much for Dallas, but merits aside it's worth considering the impact on Dallas' style of play.
The team still has, to some extent, the reputation it acquired during the Don Nelson / Steve Nash years of being an up-tempo run-and-gun team. In reality, under Avery Johnson the Mavs have become a sluggish, isolation-dependent team. This year they're 26th in the league in pace and 19th in terms of the proportion of baskets that come from assists. Last year's version of the team was 28th in pace. The year before they were 26th. These kinds of numbers are normally associated with an offense being "bad" since slow pace isn't amenable to high point totals and slow, isolation-oriented offenses can get kind of boring to watch. But Dallas has consistently put together a very effective offense using this style of play.
It's not, however, the kind of style you normally associate with Kidd, who's a poor shooter but an excellent passer. His Nets teams have always run a middling pace and featured many assisted baskets. Is Johnson going to try to fit Kidd into his style, and count on him mostly to provide defense and rebounding while running plays for Dallas' other scorers, or is he going to try to put together a dynamic offense more focused on Kidd's passing skills?
Ryan Avent makes a pretty persuasive case that cities ought to either "directly subsidize neighborhood-serving retail" like grocery stores or else "they should foster the creation of neighborhood organizations empowered to do the same thing on a local level." In a more free markety vein, though, I would note that the particular city in which Ryan and I live erects an enormous quantity of regulatory barriers to the opening of retail establishments. It's almost as if people were always walking around town saying to each other "you know what I don't like about this city -- there are just way too many opportunities to buy goods and services in a convenient manner at a reasonable price."
When you see a slice of retail-friendly zoning like the "Arts / C-3-A" zone on 14th street from Rhode Island Avenue to U Street then -- like magic -- there are stores to shop in. But most places aren't zoned for retail, and even streets like 9th and 11th where there are some patches of retail permitted also have these odd zoning-mandated dead zones that prevent them from developing into real retail corridors. This is nice for people who own the privileged patches of real estate, but obviously has the effect of making rents for retail space in non-depressed parts of the city substantially higher than they might otherwise be. That, in turn, gives us fewer grocery stores (and, indeed, other kinds of stores) than we might otherwise have.
In general, I think relaxing the regulatory restrictions around what kinds of things you're allowed to build and what kinds of business you're allowed to run in America's urban areas has a ton of potential to make life in this country much, much better.
It's not a red state, and it's not a caucus, so it might count. But it's an open primary, so it's suspect. Basically that means that if Obama wins it doesn't count, but if Clinton wins it counts double. My prediction: Surprise Clinton win as complacent Obama supporters don't bother to turn out in the cold. This will pave the way to the ultimate vindication of my "Clinton will win" prediction of a week or so ago.
He seems to me to be echoing Hillary Clinton's campaign themes, warning of an "eloquent but empty call for change that promises a holiday from history" though one of my more Clinton-friendly friends insists there's a significant difference.
UPDATE: It's also a bit odd of the candidate of perpetual war to also be the fiscal tightwide candidate. A 100 year occupation of Iraq is going to be a good deal more expensive, and a good deal less useful, than any number of bridges.
UPDATE II: McCain says "I know how congress works and how to make it work for the country." I've mentioned this before and I'll obviously have to say it again, but the reality of McCain's career is that for a man who's been in congress 25 years his legislative record is incredibly thin. This is what comes from being the kind of guy who curses at his colleagues, spends 80 percent of his time mugging for the cameras, and has little interest in or knowledge of domestic policy issues.
UPDATE: Exits show that Obama crushed Clinton among men, lost women narrowly. Whites are for Obama, as are every age bracket under 65.
UPDATE II: Obama wins college graduates and non-graduates; Obama wins liberals, wins moderates, and wins conservatives; Obama wins Protestants and "no religion," Catholics are split.
In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.
The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.
My incessant predictions of Clinton victory have been Barack Obama's key good luck charm (have you noticed that I never predict anything correctly?) so even in her hour of seeming darkness I'm going to hold to the faith. There are two weeks between now and the crucial Texas/Ohio matchups. During that period, all signs point to John McCain focusing his fire on Obama rather than Mike Huckabee or Clinton. Consequently, Obama's real and potential general election vulnerabilities are going to be front-and-center in the minds of Democrats, whereas Clinton's equally real potential vulnerabilities will be invisible.
Fundamentally, meanwhile, many people -- especially including Democrats and not by any means excluding African-Americans -- deep down can't really imagine that the black guy could also be the electable guy. Watching Obama take fire from McCain there may be a Great Freakout as people decide that the fundamentals basically favor the Democrats so why not settle for Hillary Clinton and a reasonable shot at a 50%+1 victory rather than playing to win with Obama.
Polls have been closed for 20 minutes, but it seems nobody did an exit poll so there's no way to tell what happened except to actually wait for the results to come in. How terrible.
In his comments on Kosovo's declaration of independence, Barack Obama said: "Kosovo's independence is a unique situation resulting from the irreparable rupture Slobodan Milosevic's actions caused; it is in no way a precedent for anyone else in the region or around the world." In response came a sneering and ignorantNew York Sun editorial:
Among the lessons we've gained from a life of foreign corresponding are that wars have consequences —and that history has its ironies. As Kosovars danced in the streets in joy and kissed the nearest Americans and the United Nations wrung its hands, the son of the president who delivered the Chicken Kiev speech embraced change in the Balkans. And the echoes of the words of the 41st president against independence for the so-called Soviet so-called Socialist so-called Republics are coming from a Democratic presidential candidate aquiver at the prospect that some other downtrodden countries might take hope from Kosovo's example and seek to follow suit.
As Jonathan Kulick points out the "no precedent" line is the standard declarative policy of the United States and its purpose is to protect America's ally, Georgia, from the threat of Russian-backed secessionist groups in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Is it really the Sun's view that the embrace of freedom requires responsible presidential candidates to sign on for Vladimir Putin's geopolitical schemes? I assume not; most likely they were just going for a cheap hit and couldn't be bothered to check what was going on. Meanwhile do Palestinians count among the world's "downtrodden countries"?
This poll result flagged by Kevin Drum really is depressing. Only 22 percent of 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above support the idea of allowing openly gay or lesbian Americans to serve in the military as a means of boosting recruitment. Fifty-eight percent support lowering education standard, 78 percent supporting offering citizenship to foreigners willing to serve (this sounds like a terrible fall of the Roman Empire idea to me), 38 percent support a draft. This suggests that even if shifts in public opinion have taken some of the sting out of the gays in the military question as an issue of electoral politics, a President Obama or a President Clinton would still face significant resistance from within the armed forces to implementing a changed policy.
Alternatively, and more optimistically, support for a change may be so anemic because officers simply don't think that lifting the "don't ask, don't tell" policy would, in practice, generate a substantial number of new recruits. Insofar as that's what people are thinking, I'm inclined to agree -- lower educational standards is a far more practical way of generating additional bodies. Meanwhile, the current downturn in the labor market is likely to produce an uptick in recruiting. Fundamentally, though, the gays in the military issue is a question of justice and equity and not really an issue about recruiting.
Obama wins Hawaii by a crushing 76 to 24 margin. Here for once the "doesn't count" concept does carry some real weight since Obama grew up there. Of course Hillary Clinton grew up in Illinois where Obama got 65 percent of the vote, and Obama did manage to pull a 40 percent in New York which, though pretty bad, is at least better than Clinton could do in either of Obama two home states.
County-by-country results, courtesy of the Journal-Sentinel. Click over to their site for the interactive features and so forth. Basically, Obama had a very broad win here and looks likely to carry all of the state's congressional districts.
What Mark Schmitt said about this. It's astounding that the Clinton campaign has, in essence, wasted an enormous amount of senior staff time on trying to spin reporters and bloggers about superdelegates. The only way they could possibly persuade superdelegates to rally around the Clinton cause would be to start putting some convincing wins together. Having lost 187 primaries and caucuses in a row, at this point that means very solid wins in Texas and Ohio -- not more bluster about Michigan.
UPDATE: See, for example, this sort of bullshit isn't the kind of thing they need to be wasting their time on. Persuade some people to vote for you!
There seem to maybe be too many aides over there who enjoy talking to reporters and want to come up with some interesting debater's points about whether or not there was a campaign in Florida and the metaphysical status of DNC at-large members when they need to be talking to voters.
Just got off a conference call with Susan Rice talking about the contrasts between her boy Barack Obama and John McCain on national security policy. One key point of emphasis was the strange notion coming from the McCain campaign that talking about focused counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan is irresponsible, whereas randomly threatening to start new wars is the height of good sense. As she put it "it's a strange contrast -- he says that somehow it's naive for a presidential candidate to outline how he would deal with that crucial national security challenge, but it's appropriate for him to joke about starting another war." A reporter from the Washington Times challenged her on the "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" business saying McCain was joking. Rice responds that "if he wants to say that he was joking and that's the kind of joke he thinks is funny, that's his perogative."
I see McCain as basically losing on this round. It's bizarre of his campaign to be trotting out talking points that didn't work for Hillary Clinton, and already before the Obama campaign's official counterspin got underway we have Spencer Ackerman kicking McCain's ass and, indeed, Joe Klein calling McCain soft on al-Qaeda in the MSM.
More broadly, on experience there's a three-pronged attack. First, Obama does have experience, with Rice citing the fact that he authored "crucial legislation to secure the United States from the threat of loose nuclear materials" and serves on committees and subcommittees dealing with foreign relations, veterans affairs, and homeland security. Second, this means that Obama has actually "acquired more traditional washington foreign policy experience" than most presidents including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter (Carter in fact served on a nuclear sub and I'm told this gave him a better understanding of nuclear issues than presidents before or after).
Third, there's more to life than being a prisoner of DC conventional wisdom -- "McCain, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney may have years of Washington experience" but they've all made "flawed judgments and as a consequence we're less safe." In a crucial point, Rice observed (emphasis added) that a McCain administration would be "very much a continuation and intensification of the failed Bush policy, remaining in Iraq indefinitely not investing adequately in Afghanistan." According to Rice we need to "show that we have learned from our mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere and are prepared to cooperate and collaborate on the challenges we face," namely al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.
I know Steve Clemons has expressed some concerns that Team Obama may have a problematic unwillingness to set priorities in foreign policy, but I thought Rice was admirably clear here. The question of cooperation and the question of priorities goes hand-in-hand. When you're willing to define what it is you think is really important, then the stage has been set for other countries to work with you. The kind of deterioration in America's ability to cooperate with other countries that we've seen over the past seven years stems not just from "cowboy diplomacy" but from Bush's grandiosity and lack of focus.
I'm looking forward to Paul Krugman's condemnation of this. More generally, one thing Hillary Clinton's supporters need to consider at this moment is the extent to which she and John McCain are reading from the same sheet of talking points.
If you genuinely believe in your heart that Obama is too green to be president, and that the person with more Beltway experience belongs in the White House, then by all means keep saying that stuff but if you would prefer Obama over McCain if Clinton can't get the nomination then you do need to consider what the impact of having high-profile Democrats going on record claiming that the likely Democratic nominee can't do the job is going to be. That's a different kind of thing than hitting him on his health care plan, or pointing to his sometimes off-base environmental record in the Senate.
Let me join Steve Clemons in congratulating Joseph Cirincione on his new gig as the president of the Ploughshares Fund. Joe's been doing vital work at the Carnegie Endowment, the Center for American Progress, and the New American Foundation on nuclear proliferation issues and and will doubtless continue to do so in his new role. Cirincione's January 2006 article on the absence of a viable military option as a tool of non-proliferation policy is, in my view, one of the very most important things that's been published thus far this century.
Daniel Drezner is not only a blogger, but also the author of such works as The Sanctions Paradox, thus making him an ideal choice for a Megan McArdle podcast about the Cuba embargo and the possibilities for change in a post-Castro era.
Spencer Ackerman takes note of reports indicating that al-Qaeda is encouraging would-be jihadis to ease off on Iraq (where John McCain wants to keep troops for 100-10,000 years) and instead focus on Pakistan where McCain thinks it would be naive to try to kill them.
Campaign and Heads in the Sand-related business has left me about eleventeen decades behind the pop culture curve, but I was trying to catch up today by listening to some Vampire Weekend. Consequently, having obtained the tunes, I put "vampire" into the search box on iTunes and started listening. Suddenly, I'm thinking to myself "this one song sounds awfully derivative of the Arctic Monkeys." Then I clicked over to find myself listening to "Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But..." by, of course, the Arctic Monkeys.
Long story short -- Vampire Weekend is pretty good (Arctic Monkeys, too).
Gallup takes a look at the "marriage gap" in American politics. I'm always waiting for analysts to dig a bit deeper into this issue. Marriage would seem to be a trait that's correlated with a lot of other politically important elements of personal identity. For example, a white person is more likely to be married than is a black person and there is, of course, a large "race gap" in voting patterns. Similarly, one assumes that more religious people are more likely to be married than are less religious people. Twentysomething secular college-educated urbanites tend to be Democrats, and tend to be unmarried, but my strong sense is that married twentysomething secular college-educated urbanites are Democrats just like those of us who are unmarried.
What's really needed, in short, is a bigger sample and some multivariate regression to try to see if there's any reason to think that marriage is exercising a large independent influence on American political behavior.
Call me crazy, but I think every time the Clinton campaign holds a conference call and and journalists start reporting things like Dana Goldstein's "they said superdelegates will, indeed, decide the Democratic nominee, regardless of the pledged delegate count in June after all the states and territories have had their say" that they shoot themselves in the foot. To most party activists (from either of Chris Bowers' two classes of activist) this sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Adopting a Belicik-esque "one primary at a time" line might create the scenario they're sketching out to Dana. Talking about this scenario, however, only builds the sense that the Clintons care more about their personal fortunes than about the fortunes of progressive politics, and encourages things like this raft of endorsements from New Jersey Democrats including two superdelegates, one of whom had previously been supporting Clinton. Rep Ron Kind from Wisconsin (like all members of congress, a superdelegate) also endorsed Obama today.
I normally don't trust other "Matt"s, but Matt Wright took one of my favorite pictures of me, so in my view his relaunched photo blog definitely deserves a link. But more important than any of that, he's also the man who took the most politically relevant photo of the month:
Robert Farley's making new allies in his war on the air force, as the service's top brass decides that this particular historical moment in which the U.S. is fighting two simultaneous wars in which F-22s aren't useful would be a good opportunity to insist that it needs more money to buy F-22s.
Specifically, they'd like "an extra $20 billion each year over the next five" even though it would be exceedingly odd to make that kind of financial commitment to the service least impacted by current action.
In the Air Force's defense, I would say that both the point about the aging of the F-15s and the point about the number of F-22s currently on order looking a bit small have some merit to them. But this is an entirely self-generated problem. Instead of finding a cost-effective solution to the problem of aging F-15s -- like building new, somewhat upgraded F-15s -- the Air Force decided to design an impractically expensive new air superiority fighter. Having done so, the country now can't afford these planes in the quantity the Air Force deems desirable. It'd be as if the NYPD first insisted that in the future it would only buy cars from Lexus and then wound up puzzled as to why they didn't have enough cars.
James Wimberly notes the debut of AVE service from Madrid to Barcelona and describes the joys of high-speed rail in France. Building some in the United States would, of course, cost a lot of money but the benefits could be large and it'd certainly be a better deal than building a ton of F-22s.
Does John McCain's campaign really want to go on record with the idea that he has "never done favors for special interests or lobbyists"? I would, personally, find it shocking if there were truly zero instances in the man's 25 year congressional career in which he did something for a special interest. What about Charles Keating? This seems like an invitation for trouble down the road.
Hillary Clinton's campaign is in a weird situation -- over $7.5 million in debt (not including the campaign's debt to Clinton personally) but they had $29 million on hand at the end of January. Is she just a deadbeat? Hilzoy looks into it and the answer is no, the problem is just that too much of her money is general election cash. Basically, having maxed-out her big dollar donors, Terry McAuliffe's gone back to that crowd and got them to pony up even more money to make her fundraising figures look more impressive than they really are even though that money can't be spent yet.
Meanwhile, it is worth zeroing in on the weird case of Clinton's $5 million self-loan. Right now, there are no campaign supporters who feel strongly enough about Clinton's fortunes that they want to give her that money. But if she wins the election, special interest groups will now be allowed to, in essence, but $2,300 bribes directly into her pocket in order to help her repay the loan. That's gonna be an ugly situation. Keep in mind that even if she had to just eat the $5 million loss, she and Bill would still be a wealthy couple, so it's not as if giving them money would make sense as an act of charity. And they're already be in the White House, already raising money for the re-election, so it wouldn't be much of an act of political activism. It'd just be a way to do a financial favor for the woman who happens to be president.
Well, The New York Times's article on John McCain's relationship with Vicky Iseman sure did make Mark Salter mad. It's often unclear at times, however, what exactly Salter is trying to say. The Times story is a bit odd and innuendo-y, hinting at a sexual relationship between McCain and Iseman but they clearly don't have the goods. Salter says McCain spoke to New York Times editor Bill Keller and "denied any personal 'romantic' involvement with Iseman, and said that he did not 'betray the public trust.'"
Obviously, I don't know whether or not McCain had sex with Iseman. I suppose by "what the meaning of the word 'is' is" standards, he didn't even deny having had sex with Iseman. Certainly it'd be a bit rich of McCain to get outraged that anyone would even suggest that he might engage in sexual improprieties. After all, it's well known that he repeatedly cheated on his first wife Carol, of a number of years, with a variety of women, before eventually dumping her for a much-younger heiress whose family fortune was able to help finance his political career. That's well known, I should say, except to the electorate, who would probably find that this sort of behavior detracts from McCain's "character" appeal.
Meanwhile, there's all this stuff Salter doesn't deny (because, again, it's true) about McCain's questionable ethics. He wrote "letters to government regulators on behalf of the [Iseman's] client," he "often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support," he resigned as head of a non-profit when "news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor," his Senate office and his campaign are run by corporate lobbyists, etc.
Meanwhile, there's a storm of speculation surrounding the Iseman story, which continues to be a weird lede for the piece, and we'll have to see what else comes out.
On the whole issue of whether or not Hillary Clinton's run a bad campaign, I think it's necessary to draw some distinctions. I think the Obama campaign made a variety of errors during 2007, while Clinton's campaign made very few. What's more, Clinton's team did a great job of reading the issue landscape well and developing smart policies that were well-suited to the political and objective circumstances. She did what I thought was a surprisingly good job of largely defusing the war issue in the minds of the voters. What's more, they made an excellent recovery after losing Iowa. Consequently, they woke up on the morning of February 6, 2008 in pretty good position -- up in delegates, up in national polls.
Then things fell apart. The campaign made two weird decisions. First, they essentially decide to throw ten primaries and caucuses in a row and that as part of the throwing strategy they were going to repeatedly insult the residents of the states in question. Second, they decided to respond to losses with panicky moves -- amping up the decibel level on their attacks, shifting the message, etc. These both struck me as mistakes independently, but they've truly made for a bizarre combination.
Thus, to add it all up we need to consider different possible interpretations of "Hillary Clinton's campaign." It's a big operation, a lot of people work there, and as best anyone can tell most of them have done an excellent job. The policy people have mostly come up with excellent policies and the communications people who worked with them have done an excellent job of rolling those policies out, providing surrogates, etc. The new media people have done a good job of handling an objectively difficult situation. Her speechwriters haven't produced any classics that'll go into collected volumes, but the candidate's not well-suited to soaring oratory and the speechwriters have done good work producing speeches that work well for her. One could go on like this. Lots and lots of people involved with the campaign, and the vast majority seems to have done a very good job. But a few key strategy architects have made a couple of bad mistakes, and the candidate herself has chosen poorly in terms of whose advise to take. It appears likely that those mistakes will be fatal, but that shouldn't cast aspersions on all the other good work that lots of people have done over the past 18 months (or more).
Julian Sanchez interviews Larry Lessig, intellectual property reform apostle and potential member of congress. Not knowing the ins-and-outs of the situation, I can't really say whether or not Lessig would serve the district better than Jackie Speier. From a national interest point of view, however, Lessig's key issues are precisely the kind of thing that are structurally off-kiler in congress. The concentrated benefits of ever-stronger IP laws mean that for members of congress there's a clear downside to bucking Big Content but no clear upside. Having a member who just so happens to be personally passionate about these issues could make a big difference.
The definitive accounting of Barack Obama's legislative accomplishments. It's not a Ted Kennedy-esque list of things, but it shows that Obama's career in the Illinois State Senate and then the US Senate has been brief, but action-packed. I think it stands up perfectly well to Hillary Clinton's record (unless you accept the view that she deserves credit for everything Bill Clinton did that you like, but didn't agree with any of the stuff you don't like) or John McCain's. Remember -- don't go on TV as an Obama surrogate without it!
Mark Kleiman points out that the AP's version of the of the Vicky Iseman story has less innuendo, but a clearer explanation of actual misconduct:
In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson's chief executive, Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign.
McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain's request "comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process" and "could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission's deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties."
McCain wrote the letters after he received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson executives and lobbyists. Paxson also lent McCain his company's jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.
Basically, in exchange for money and freebies, McCain sought to intervene in a federal regulatory process in favor of a company that had provided him with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services. He could try to plead naiveté, but in light of the hot water he got into with the Keating Five affair, which had the exactly same structure, he clearly knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Now whether or not some guy gets to buy some TV station in Pittsburgh or not isn't a big deal as such, but it's an example of how dubious McCain's "straight talk" persona is. What's more, I think we can all agree that the subversion of the basic functioning of the federal government (see, e.g., US Attorneys scandal, FEMA, etc.) has been a major problem during the Bush years and we see here that McCain takes a Bush-like attitude to the integrity of these processes.
UPDATE: NB, thinking more clearly past my loathing of John McCain, the Times's effort to substitute innuendo for making a straightforward true or false assertion is seems like a pretty shameful attempt to set up a Kaus-like presumption of guilt. If they have reporting they're willing to stand behind of a McCain-Iseman affair, they should publish it. And if, as seems to be the case, they don't have the reporting, then they shouldn't write the story.
Jason Rae, the 21 year-old superdelegate, is endorsing Obama. His statement cites Obama's tremendous appeal to young people and the potential that he can mobilize a new generation of activists. No word on whether or not the Obama campaign listened to the pundits and deployed Scarlett Johansson as a surrogate.
The Air Force, stung by my attacks, is ready to launch a new campaign, doubling its advertising budget at a moment when "service leaders think the stakes are high." Not the stakes in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the budgetary stakes, where the Air Force is hoping to mount a propaganda campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the American people away the other services:
The proposed advertising campaign’s goals are laid out like the strategic targeting plan of an air war. The targets are 220 million adults. The goal is that each adult over a year’s span will see 30 Air Force advertisements, from ads on Web sites to full-page newspaper ads to prime-time television ads.
What they really need to worry about, though, is John McCain. A naval aviator in the White House could be the end of them.
After a brief period of Democratic dominance, McCain returned to become chairman of the committee in 2003 and 2004. During that period, he took crucial legislative action that saved Paxson Communications from a bill that would have, in the words of CEO Lowell “Bud” Paxson, finally ruined his company.
Even more ironically, McCain took this action for Paxson in spite of his long-standing position that television broadcasters had inappropriately used the transition to digital television (DTV) to benefit themselves financially at the expense of the American public.
McCain initially supported legislation that would have forced Paxson and handful of broadcasters – but not the great bulk of television stations – off the air by December 31, 2006. Bud Paxson himself personally testified about this bill with “fear and trepidation” at a hearing on September 8, 2004.
Two weeks later, McCain had reversed himself. He now supported legislation that would grant two-year reprieve for Paxson – and instead force all broadcasters to stop transmitting analog television by December 31, 2008. Paxson and his lobbyists, including Iseman, were working at this time for just such a change.
This looks like a basic Bush-style policy for sale kind of situation, a far cry from McCain's self-righteous insistence that he's never done favors for lobbyists or special interests, but also something rather different from the sex scandal The New York Times kinda sorta wants you to believe in.
Two important posts from Ezra Klein, one on the enormous environmental benefits of even modest increases in residential density, and one the enormous happiness benefits of shorter commutes. Shorter commutes are, of course, facilitated by greater levels of residential density.
What's particularly astounding about this stuff, in my view, is that fixing the problem would hardly require some totalitarian density police to come around and force us to all live closer together. Instead, the main step we would need to take would simply be to allow people to build more densely if they want to. As a secondary measure, scrapping or limiting the tax code's weird and destructive subsidy of big houses would do some good. Everything Ezra mentions aside, I would also note that it's my observation that people (at least in the heavily-populated bad weather regions around the great lakes and the northeast) seem to systematically overestimate the amount of time they're going to spend in their yard.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, and former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs State Amb. Karl "Rick" Inderfurth discussion the situation in Pakistan on streaming audio or downloadable MP3, courtesy of the National Security Network.
The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in today’s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital status a significant predictor of the vote, independent of the effects of age, race, income, education or gender. Marital status had a significant
effect on the way in which these voters performed, whereas a voter’s gender did not. This was true of all age groups. Younger unmarried women supported Kerry while younger married women supported President Bush. Unmarried 18- 29 year olds gave Kerry a 25 point margin, while younger married women, like their older counterparts, gave President Bush an 11 point margin.
As you can see over on the left, this suggests that the hypothesis that unmarrieds vote Democratic because the unmarried population skews younger and young people support Democrats is wrong. On the contrary, being 18-29 seemed to have a weak independent correlation with voting for Bush while being unmarried had a strong correlation with voting for Kerry. Thus, that hypothesis actually has it backwards and suggests that Kerry had an advantage with the 18-29 crowd in large part because it contains so many single people.
It does seem worth saying, however, that "unmarried" is an awful heterogenous situation. Of course, any binary categorization is going to produce diverse groups of people in both categories. But in particular treating divorced people and never-married people as part of the same category seems like the kind of thing that could easily create misleading results.
Check out Brad DeLong on how, yes indeed Communism produced economic disaster in Cuba just as it did everywhere else. But leaven Brad's righteous anti-Communism with a dose of Tony Karon's take on why Castro remained a compelling figure to many third world political leaders who knew perfectly well that emulating his policies would produce disaster.
I think there's probably a lesson to be learned with regard to current issues with Islamist political movements around the world. For good reasons and for bad ones, the romance of thumbing one's nose at the USA has powerful and important resonance for a lot of people around the world. Under the circumstances, it rarely serves our interests to get into dramatic confrontations with leaders who are far too puny to objectively threaten our interests. After all, what significance would Castro have without his superpower adversary? US persecution of the Communist regime in Havana is really the only thing it has going for it.
Blake Hounshell finds the man bold enough to proclaim the Cuban embargo a success -- Commentary's Gordon Chang:
An embargo helped kill communism in Europe, and it can also end it in the Caribbean. One day we will establish normal trading relations with Cuba, but that should not be before the people there govern themselves. “The post-Fidel era is clearly at hand, and the Bush administration has done almost nothing to prepare for it,” the New York Times said. Prepare for what? The embargo has been working all along, and it is up to the Cuban dictators to relax their grip, not us.
The United States is providing massive quantities of aid to Pakistan—as much as $20 billion since 9/11. This has enabled Pakistan to go through a period of lavish military spending, but there have nonetheless been serious reverses both in the military battle against the radical Islamists and in the transition to democracy. It is tempting for US policymakers to react to these developments by switching support from the army to civilian politicians. The United States, however, should not forget that whatever form of government exists in Pakistan, the army, for good or ill, will continue to be a major force in Pakistani society for many years to come. Given the widespread agreement that the war on terror is going to last at least 20 years, the United States should think about longer-term policies. With that perspective in mind, the goal of persuading Pakistanis to turn their backs on radical Islam, alongside democracy promotion, can best be achieved by spending the bulk of the US aid on education and promotion of the rule of law.
This seems reasonable enough. But as I've observed in other contexts, the big problem with focusing efforts on promoting the rule of law is that our toolkit on this subject is really crappy. If the developed countries had rule of law promoting methods at our disposal, the world would be a much better place since Pakistan is hardly the only country that could use the rule of law most of all. Thomas Carothers made some key points about this in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article on "The Rule of Law Revival" and he has a book called Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge.
Which isn't to say that a focus on the rule of law is the wrong idea, but merely that one should be cautious about one's prospects for success here rather than simply assuming a can opener. For better or for worse, we can't control Pakistan's destiny.
Alyssa Rosenberg is a staff correspondent at Government Executive, one of The Atlantic's sister brands, and she was on the conference call at which the Change to Win labor federation endorsed Barack Obama. She offers the following dispatch:
Anna Burger, the chair of Change to Win, said repeatedly that the federation’s unions felt that Obama was building a significant movement that would persist beyond the elections and help bring important policy changes. “He is building an election coalition that will turn into an action coalition that will restore the American dream,” she said.
The vision of that movement seemed to swamp differences on policy, even on core issues like health care, where Obama has attacked the mandates in Clinton’s proposal. “We believe that Barack Obama is absolutely determined to win health care for every man, woman and child in America. Does he have a different approach? Yes,” Burger said, emphasizing that she thought Obama would be best suited to achieve sweeping health care reform as president.
In fact, Burger seemed reluctant to draw policy distinctions between Obama and Clinton at all, saying that Change to Win appreciated Obama’s stance on the war in Iraq and on trade, but refusing to say whether she thought the federation’s members and leaders associated Clinton with NAFTA and its impacts.
But Burger clearly indicated that Change to Win thought the movement-building stakes were high enough to warrant the federation getting into the race at a point at which they thought they could be a decisive force. Change to Win has 175,000 members in Ohio and expects 110,000 of them to make it to the polls, Burger said. The federation has 60,000 members in Texas, but also has strong ties to the Latino and immigrant communities there.
Burger was blunt about what she hoped the endorsement would achieve. “We think it’s time to bring this nomination process to a close, and we think we can make a difference and get this done,” she said.
Now I'm told independently that Change to Win (unlike the AFL-CIO) doesn't really have any resources as an entity separate from whatever its composite unions bring to the table. Thus, this doesn't necessarily add much that's concrete on top of what the SEIU, UNITE-HERE, Teamsters, and UFCW endorsements already bring Obama. The main point is a PR one, and in that regard the sentiments Burger expressed about a desire to bring the nominating process to an expeditious conclusion seems to be the main point.
John McCain strongly supports the development and deployment of theater and national missile defenses. Effective missile defenses are critical to protect America from rogue regimes like North Korea that possess the capability to target America with intercontinental ballistic missiles, from outlaw states like Iran that threaten American forces and American allies with ballistic missiles, and to hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China. Effective missile defenses are also necessary to allow American military forces to operate overseas without being deterred by the threat of missile attack from a regional adversary.
For starters, north Korea doesn't possess ICBM capabilities. Second, it's hard to see how national missile defense will protect our forces from Iranian missile attacks when our forces are right next door in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, it's unclear why we'd be particularly worried about any sort of ballistic missile attack given the close quarters situation at hand. But while this is a bit dishonest and ignorant, the business about hedging against "potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China." Simply put, a scenario in which the United States possesses an effective ability to shoot down a Russian or Chinese ICBM threat would be completely intolerable in Moscow or Beijing. It would, in effect, give the United States a viable a threat of a nuclear first strike.
Neither Russia nor China is going to let that happen. Instead, they'll spend money on building up their nuclear arsenals in order to maintain their deterrent capacity. Thus, at great cost to the Unites States, to Russia, and to China we'll be back at the status quo. But beyond the monetary cost, the large buildup in Chinese nuclear capabilities that would result from this situation would force India to engage in a nuclear build-up of its own. And that, in turn, would force Pakistan to follow suit. This large increase in the global stock of nuclear weapons would, of course, imply an increase in the odds of a nuclear accident or the loss or theft of nuclear material. At the same time, a nuclear buildup of this sort might create incentives for Iran to reinitiate its nuclear weapons research program. And even if it didn't, revitalizing the Non-Proliferation Treaty desperately requires the status quo nuclear powers to be working together on nuclear issues, and fulfilling our treat obligations to move toward reduced arsenals.
In short, what McCain has on tap here is a recipe for disaster -- a breakdown in great power relations, new arms races, massive nuclear proliferation, etc. And why? I suspect the last bit is the real reason. He wants "to allow American military forces to operate overseas without being deterred." Basically, we need to spend huge sums of money and encourage an enormous amount of nuclear proliferation because that would facilitate the launching of new aggressive wars. Probably the proliferation McCain's policies helped induce would become the rationale for a new round of warfighting.
Increasingly, my friends and I are old men. For example, I hurt my back on Monday. Also, Spencer Ackerman and I got into a dispute about the Gin Blossoms. I say that "Hey Jealousy" is their best song:
Ackerman, by contrast, is a partisan of "Found Out About You"
I say only the collective wisdom of the internet can decide an issue like this.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, Gin Blossoms suck. I understand. Still, there's a question to be answered.
This Houston-Hornets-Grizzlies trade seems remarkably pointless. None of the players involved are any good, and what does New Orleans want with a point guard? Meanwhile, the huge Cleveland-Seattle-Chicago three-way is a bit confusing as well. Wally Sczerbiak's three point shooting would be a very effective weapon alongside LeBron James, but they play the same position. Still, all things considered this deal seems helpful to Cleveland.
Meanwhile it's pathetic that given the assets Chicago at one point seemed to have lined up to acquire Kevin Garnett or Pau Gasol or Kobe Bryant that they're instead picking up Larry Hughes and Drew Gooden. Don't miss Josh Levin on how crazy NBA trades have gotten thanks to the intricacies of the salary cap.
On the occasion of Kosovo's independent, I take the opportunity to take a look at the humanitarian hawk movement the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia spawned and contrast it a bit to the rather messy realities on the ground there.
At any rate, I wrote the column before this shitstorm hit Belgrade, though I don't think it materially affects the argument.
ABC/WaPost has Clinton and Obama tied in Texas with Clinton's lead in Ohio at a substantial-but-shrinking 50-43. Given the general tendency of Obama to gain over time, this means Clinton really has to kick his ass in tonight's debate.
Meanwhile, years ago I was an intern at Rolling Stone alongside much-more-adept intern Conor Bezane. He, in turn, stuck more closely to the music-themed-journalism concept and works at MTV News where he's got a story on Obama's creative class mobilization that quotes yours truly.
It's interesting, but over time Barack Obama has come to have a much more sophisticatedly outlined notion of how he'll bring about change. We used to get some pretty vague talk about bringing people together. That's still in there, but now he's laying out a much more concrete vision in which organization and mobilization of the public allow us to overcome the special interest stranglehold in Washington.
Obama's policy isn't as far-reaching as I'd like to see, but this is still night and day between him and Clinton. I have no idea what she's even trying to say about Cuba. Obama is talking sense, directly labeling our policy a failure, and then drawing at least a few of the correct implications from them with regard to remittances and travel.
Barack Obama says that immigration policy needs to prevent "people with Spanish surnames from being discriminated against." Quite so. Nobody should discriminate against me!
I thought this was a mostly dull debate, and under the circumstances that's good for Obama. Overall, though, this is a good format for Hillary Clinton and she, as usual, did well on the health care debate whereas I thought he was more impressive on the diplomatic and foreign policy issues. Everyone seems to agree that her effort to press the bogus plagiarism issue didn't work out well.
Bottom line, if she was still the front-runner, this would have counted as a clear Clinton win -- Obama had some good moments, but her ability to rattle off policy details on the fly really comes through whereas Obama needs to pause to think. But she's not the front-runner anymore, and it's hard to see anything she did to make up lost ground.
This little GOP web video about Democratic unwillingness to agree to the gutting of the constitution is really pretty striking stuff. In essence, the Republicans are placing a heavy political bet on the idea of a terrorist attack happening some time while their "danger" clock is running. If Americans die, they'll be in a position to clean up. Conversely, if we still have some semblance of legal protections against government surveillance months from now and that clock's still ticking even though al-Qaeda hasn't slaughtered any innocents here in the U.S., they're going to look mighty silly.
That's the dynamics of this specific fight but, of course, it's also a microcosm for 21st century politics as a whole. And it's part of what makes the Republican Party, as currently conceived, so incredibly dangerous. Democracy is a highly imperfect method of getting good government. One thing that makes it work better is the general sense that if good things happen to a country, incumbent politicians will benefit from that whereas if bad things happen, incumbents will suffer. That often leads to election results that aren't really "deserved" since Jimmy Carter didn't cause the 70s oil crisis and Bill Clinton didn't cause the 90s tech boom. But it does keep the incentives where they belong -- insofar as things are under the control of politicians, the politicians try to make good things happen.
But not the post-9/11 GOP. Their political meal ticket is a population terrified of terrorism, and nothing whips that terror up quite like actual terrorism in London, Madrid, wherever. The result is a political party that simply can't adopt policies designed to ratchet-down the level of danger and anxiety.
I think Barack Obama and his campaign have a lot of promise to do some of the things I argue are necessary in Heads in the Sand in terms of mounting a meaningful challenge to the big ideas that have dominated policymaking in the United States since 9/11. And beyond showing promise, he's taken a number of very worthwhile concrete steps. But there have also been disappointments. Michael Hirsch, for example, has a good column about how Obama ought to ditch the "war on terror." The argument that this conceptual framework needs to be done away with has been made very persuasively by my colleague James Fallows before his exile to China, among others. And as Hirsch says at this point it's Obama or nobody:
It is a debate that only Obama can start. McCain won't bring it up. Nor will Hillary Clinton. Apart from being on the verge of oblivion politically, she is too fully vested in the war on terror, having voted in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq as part of it. And if that debate doesn't start, we as a country will be effectively doomed to a "war" that has no prospect of ending. Bush has gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic "extremists"—among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and other radical political groups that have no ties to Al Qaeda, ideological or otherwise. In doing so the president has plainly condemned us to a permanent war, for the simple reason that we will never be rid of all the terrorists. It is also a war that we will wage by ourselves, since no other nation agrees on such a broadly defined enemy. As Princeton scholar G. John Ikenberry has written, "It is perhaps a paradox—and one that is fitting for the strangeness of our current age—that we will need to end the war against terrorism because we cannot end terrorism."
The trouble is that months ago, all the Democratic candidates were given an opportunity to launch this debate and only John Edwards was willing to "go there." If Obama didn't want to do it when facing pressure from his left, it's hard to imagine him doing it now.
"Iceland is known as the Nordic Tiger because of rapid economic growth," writes Cato's Daniel Mitchell, "much of the nation’s prosperity is the result of free-market policies." When I visited Iceland it struck me as more a Scandinavian social democracy than a free market paradise. And indeed the OECD stats back me up. Here's a few countries compared by how big a share of their economy is taken in as tax revenue:
Iceland features somewhat lower levels of social spending than do the other Scandinavian countries, but it's still a really high level especially when you consider that pretty much none of that tax revenue is going to the country's non-existent military. I would love to see the US become more like Iceland -- flexible labor market, high taxes, and generous public services sounds good to me. But I'm pretty sure Cato would freak out if I proposed a 50 percent increase in the tax share of the American economy. Meanwhile, in the vein of promoting free market policies for Iceland, let me observe that their agricultural policies are absolutely insane -- trying to create a viable agricultural sector on a sub-arctic island with no soil and high wages is ridiculous.
The rioting in Serbia complete with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade is the headline news out of the Balkans. The real action, though, is a bit further afield. In particular, now that majority-Albanian Kosovo is formally getting out of Serbia, the majority-Serbian part of Kosovo centered around Mitrovica wants out of Kosovo and back into Serbia. On one level, that sounds eminently reasonable. On another level, people I've talked to explain that the problem here is that region contains its own Albanian minority. Similarly, there are Serbs in the majority-Albanian parts of Kosovo.
This is, of course, the general problem with partition as the solution to ethnic conflicts. Like those little Russian dolls you can almost always bore down one level deeper. French Canadians want independent for Québec? Sure. But then what about those parts of Québec that are majority Anglophone? And then what about the Francophones living in those Anglophone enclaves?
At the end of the day, the only just solution for Canada, or for the former Yugoslavia, or for Iraq or Lebanon or anyone else necessarily involves the creation of tolerably liberal rights-respecting governments or else intolerably illiberal population transfers and ethnic cleansing. There's no administrative fix whereby simply drawing the boundaries in just such a way solves the problem. To create really adequate solutions, the international community will have to find a way to create liberal regimes. And this, of course, is precisely what we don't know how to do. This is the point I was trying to make in my Kosovo article from yesterday -- the 1999 bombing campaign made accomplished some important things at a reasonable cost, but while some took our success there as opening a new chapter of a grand new era of military humanitarianism, a more sober look at Kosovo actually highlights rather sharp limits to what we can achieve even under favorable circumstances.
However, I was told that I couldn’t use the lede I originally wrote for my column following the 2007 State of the Union address, in which Bush made ethanol the centerpiece of his energy strategy: “Before the State of the Union address, there had been hints and hopes that President Bush would offer a serious plan to reduce our dependence on imported oil. Instead, however, he took refuge in alcohol.”
Similarly, when I was in Chuck Schumer's office we were putting together some anti-ethanol talking points for Schumer to use in a committee hearing or on the senate floor or something and I wanted to include something about how "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of corn" but that was deemed (correctly) to be over the top. Still, this is what happens when an uncontroversially correct policy argument, widely agreed to by experts from all ideological points of view, runs headlong into a deadly mix of special interest politics and America's idiosyncratic corn-boosting political institutions.
Photo by Flickr user edcrowle used under a Creative Commons license
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz complains about a double standard:
The Boston Globe is sure that the Kosovans are not ready for independence. But its editors, favored columnists and biased news writers are absolutely certain the Palestinians are.
Now, I'm for Kosovo independence. But at the same time, I really don't think it's viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don't have them? The answer is pretty simple -- the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don't have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens -- as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently -- that's a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.
It's clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is "transfer" and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?
Steven Dubner asks the question. I don't think a categorical answer can be given. Rather, I think the point is that cheating may facilitate certain kinds of things -- the setting of new home run records, or aging star players making amazing comebacks from injury rather than fading to black -- that we like to watch. What's more, some cheating plays as a kind of clever "gamesmanship" that attracts at least some admirers.
On the other hand, it's well-known that many sports restrict the quality of the equipment that can be used by high-level athletes in order to prevent the sport from becoming impossibly dull to watch. Cheaters who break those kinds of rules are almost certainly going to detract from the public's enjoyment of the sport. Somewhat similarly, it seems to me that many people actively prefer the inferior level of skill, strength, and athleticism on display in college basketball. Competitions deficient in top-notch basketball playing draw in fans who like to see lots of passing and jump shots. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that performance-enhancing drugs would probably make the NBA less popular (though not to me personally or others who find the college game stultifying) as the players get even stronger and faster.
Mark Kleiman has a provocative post question the conventional wisdom about why John McCain gets such good press coverage. McCain, Kleiman points out, is a longtime member of the Senate Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over media issues, chaired the Senate Commerce Committee during the bulk of the 1990s wave of media consolidation, and has always been sure to steer the campaign finance reform agenda in media-friendly ways rather than take up causes like free airtime.
Basically, McCain getting good coverage from the corporate media is in part something just along the lines of James Inhof being well-liked by the energy industry. If Exxon-Mobile owned a television network, he'd be a superstar.
Just hours after the Times' story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff--and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," the campaign said in a statement emailed to reporters.
But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the September 25, 2002 deposition obtained by Newsweek. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."
At this point, it's worth observing something about the general McCain-press dynamic. One thing reporters like about McCain is that he offers shoot-from-the-hip statements on topics that come up in discussions. Reporters like this for good reason -- the carefully worded, artfully hedged statements in which the vast majority of politicians speak nowadays is really annoying. That said, politicians don't talk like that because they're all douchebags, they talk like that because that's how you have to talk. If you make the slightest slip-up or misstatement, the press will pounce all over you.
Unless, that is, you're John McCain. If you're John McCain you can make an obviously false statement like claiming you've "never done favors for special interests or lobbyists" or saying that "no representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC" when you yourself said in the past that you'd been contacted by Paxson and the press just lets it slide. Why? Because they like him. But they like him because he's spontaneous. But he's spontaneous because they let him get away with this stuff. And they let him get away with it because they like him. It's what makes him such a formidable political figure -- he can run around doing things no other politicians could get away with and actually attract praise for it.
Unless, of course, it all comes crashing down. If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he'll have to turn himself into just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who's a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven't started enough wars, and one who doesn't even care about the economic challenges facing the country.
Hillary Clinton's "change you can xerox" crack from last night got me wondering how the people at the Xerox Corporation feel about the use of their corporate name as a generic verb. It turns out they don't like it at all:
Xerox is a famous trademark and trade name. Xerox as a trademark is properly used only as a brand name to identify the company's products and services. The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb. The trade name Xerox is an abbreviation for the company's full legal name: Xerox Corporation.
Apparently the concern is that if too many people start talking about how Brother's multifunction printers not only print and fax, but make xeroxes, too, that the Xerox trademark becomes diluted. Thus, in public at least, they need to vigorously contest the little-x "xerox" usages. In private, you've got to imagine that this is good PR.
I just found the Greater Greater Washington blog yesterday. It's about development and transit issues here in the DC area, but most of the issues the site is dealing with pertain all over the country.
Conservatives have been all over Barack Obama (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) for telling the following anecdote during last night's debate:
You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon -- supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon," he said. "Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.
Basically, as you can see if you check the conservative blogs above, that story can't possibly be true, and the fact that Obama would say it reflects either his dishonesty or else his gross ignorance of military matters. Alternatively, you can read Jake Tapper who got in touch with the Captain in question: "Short answer: He backs up Obama's story." The story itself is, as Tapper says, pretty interesting and worth checking out on its own merits. Obama's conservative critics will, I'm sure, be taking note of this additional reporting.
UPDATE: Phil Carter has an excellent post following up on some of these issues. Bottom line:
In light of my experience in Iraq, Sen. Obama’s comments last night are eminently believable. Sen. Obama is also absolutely right to use this anecdote as a critique of the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. It is incontrovertible that the war in Iraq diverted scarce military resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) from Afghanistan to Iraq. The cost for that diversion was paid by America's sons and daughters, and our Afghan brethren, who continue to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We owe our troops better.
I would further note that looking at what legislation a Senator has or hasn't cosponsored can get pretty misleading. Cosponsoring a piece of legislation that's not going anywhere is the ultimate in congressional cheap talk. What's more, Senators sometimes sign on to legislation they don't actually favor (see the Republican co-sponsors of Ron Wyden's bill) in order to be able to change things around. And sometimes taking a position in favor of something actually means the reverse -- I recall a noteworthy moment at YearlyKos last summer where Clinton was trying to brush off worries about her commitment to political reform by noting that she's on record in favor of full public financing of federal campaigns. Well, I favor that, too, but it's not going to happen and Clinton's never done anything to try to lay the groundwork for making it happen. In effect, her support for public financing is a beard to give cover to her opposition to smaller-scale, more realistic political reform proposals.
Which isn't to say that she's uniquely duplicitous in these regards, I just happen to be familiar with that particular issue. You see something similar with John Dingell and the carbon tax, and, indeed, with tons and tons of other legislators. If you want to understand people's records, you have two decent options. One is to go totally "dumb" and use something like DW-NOMINATE which soaks up every single vote cast. There the size of the data set helps iron out the flaws in the individual data points and gives you a crude big-picture sense of where things stand (both are liberal, and Obama somewhat more so). The other way to go is to go "smart" in which case you need to actually speak to people who work with congress on some issue you're concerned with and ask them how helpful or not some Senator or other has been on some issue. That'll involve voting records, cosponsored legislation, media appearances, floor statements, timing, committee antics, secret promises, friends of friends, etc.
Going for the middle ground seems appealing, but the odds are that it's just going to wind up misleading.
As I've said, I'm a bit skeptical of some of these "Clinton campaign is full of screwups" stories. An election is a tough, zero-sum competition and you can do the overwhelming majority of things right and still lose. In other words, I have a lot of sympathy for what Jim Jordan says at the end of this article on people second-guessing the Clinton campaign's spending decisions:
“Obviously, some campaigns are more careful and wise with their money than others,” Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant who ran John Kerry’s presidential campaign until November 2003. “But these budgetary post-mortems tend to follow a familiar pattern; winners are by definition smart, and losers are dumb and wasteful. In truth, campaign budgeting is hard and complicated and three-dimensional and just impossible to understand without the full time-and-place context of the whole race.”
That said, some of this stuff simply isn't a question of mistakes or not mistakes:
Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. [...] The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.
That just sounds like self-dealing by the people running the campaign. Obviously, once the money's been handed over to them, they're allowed to spend it however they see fit. But if you're a working person thinking of sending $50 or $150 over to her campaign, you've got to wonder if that's just going to wind up going to rooms at the Four Seasons or as part of some kind of million dollar payday for Mark Penn.
Patrick Appel writes that "The Iseman scandal coverage has been dizzying. The left jumped at the opportunity to skewer McCain, while the right equally cherished the chance to condemn the Times." This strikes me as a pretty lazy equivalence. In a nation of 300 million people, I'm sure some people on the left have jumped at the opportunity to skewer McCain, but just about every liberal I read has taken the time to note that the Times' sexual innuendos were a pretty inappropriate way to frame a news story.
Have I (and others) "skewered" McCain's interventions in the regulatory process on behalf of Paxson communications and habit of accepting free plane rides from lobbyists? Sure. Meanwhile the right, it seems to me, has basically pointed at the smear and completely ignored these more substantive elements of the case against McCain's self-righteousness. It's a particularly odd trend since conservatives have spent a lot of time over the past ten years complaining precisely about McCain's self-righteousness.
It shouldn't really come as a surprise that Russ Feingold would vote for his fellow anti-war midwestern reformist Senator but since he didn't offer a formal endorsement the fact that he's gone public with this after the fact seems at least somewhat significant. Among other things, I think you see an increasing number of Democratic elites who don't have super-strong feelings on the merits between Clinton and Obama now hoping to push Clinton out of the race ASAP before the HRC dead-enders throw too much slime in the direction of the guy who's likely to win anyway.
Since Charles Krauthammer is citing Anthony Cordesman's report on the situation in Iraq to make the point that the surge has worked, I trust nobody on the right will be upset if I quote from a different part of the same report. He says, basically, a lot of good things have happened but a lot more needs to be done. We need, he says, strategic patience. Under the circumstances, it's worth taking a look at what he says we need to do going forward to succeed.
His report is full of things like "consolidate progress in Iraq forces: Independent for internal security by 2012; create ability to defend against foreign threats by 2018." He outlines goals like "Create effective criminal justice system and local rule of law (2008-2010)" and "revive national infrastructure in terms of water, power, roads, rail, petroleum exports, financial institutions, communications, etc (2009-2011)." On the security front, we're also supposed to "resolve the problem of National Police, local forces, ethnic and sectarian militias and integrate into ISF or civil economy (2009-2011)." We also need to "revise constitution to meet needs of all major factions (2008-2009)."
To me, rather than an endless continuation of the debate over whether (or in what sense) the "surge" has or hasn't "worked" it would be highly preferable to focus instead on whether or not strategic patience of the sort Cordesman is talking about is a reasonable policy going forward. My view is that it isn't. If you look at these kind of agenda items that lurk near the back of the report, you'll see a bunch of things where the prospects for success aren't particularly good, the costs are high, the time frame is both vague and long, and the benefits don't seem particularly clear. I'm also fairly confident that if Charles Krauthammer and John McCain just put the choice between Cordesman's approach and leaving expeditiously on the table, that most people would agree with me. Thus you've seen a consistent effort starting in 2002, then continuing into 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and now 2008 to mislead people about the question at hand into thinking that "success" is something that might come soon and thus that the cut-and-run crowd should be ignored. But if Bush had told people in 2004 that four years in the future his Iraq policy would be so successful that people would be talking about Iraq taking responsibility for its own internal security in 2012 then he never would have been re-elected.
As an intellectual exercise, this sort of thing Cordesman has done strikes me as pretty useful and interesting. I'd like to see more of it. What would Cordesman do to fix Haiti's deeply entrenched problem if we were willing to commit 120,000+ U.S. troops and $100 billion a year to the problem for an indefinite period of time? Or maybe the federal government wants to dedicate that kind of personnel (though not active duty soldiers) and money to reducing the crime rate in Washington, DC? I'm not at all sure that a forward-looking agenda that has "deal with the issue of federalism in ways that resolve Kurd-Arab-Turcoman tensions; Shi’ite power struggle in south, Sunni concerns in west, mixed areas in center, and create a stable Baghdad and Basra (2008-2010)" can possibly succeed, but I am pretty sure that I'd rather not find out.
Reason editor Matt Welch is also the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick and probably knows the details of John McCain's record better than anyone in journalism. Here he is talking about The New York Times's weird attempted takedown:
I think this is about right -- non-reporting of a non-scandalous non-affair aside, the Times story manages to reproduce some not-new information about McCain that most people nonetheless don't know and should.
Tying together yesterday's post on the economy of Iceland with Thursday's musings on the difficulty of promoting the rule of law, I thought I might lay down my general theory that I think the basic ideological debate between the partisans of the free market and the partisans of social democracy actually has relatively little to tell us about macroeconomic growth issues.
The biggest difference you see around the world is, by far, not one of government policy but of government efficacy. Less important than the differences in what the rules say, in other words, is the question of how the rules relate to the real world. In some places, you have highly-functioning states where the rule of law is effectively enforced. In other places, the formal state has almost no capacity, so in practice people are under the thumb of warlords or criminal gangs or what have you. Macroeconomic policy advice that's perfectly reasonable for a large, resource-rich, ethnically diverse country like Canada is going to be completely useless in a large, resource-rich ethnically diverse country like Congo and that's true no matter what your perspective on what Canada ought to do.
At the end of the day, even a very market-oriented state is being given an awful lot of powers. It has police, prisons, an army, navy, air force, along with a central bank, rules about broadcast media, where roads and airplanes go, some subsistence provision for the poor, etc. That all on its own is perfectly adequate power to ensure that if the state is administered incompetently, corruptly, or abusively that there'll be all kinds of terrible consequences. Conversely, you see in Iceland or Denmark that when you do have a well-governed state all kinds of additional public services can be provided in a very helpful and constructive way. The main independent variable in the success (or lack thereof) of different kinds of polities, in other words, probably isn't the policies so much as the presence or absence (or scope) of a certain quality of "good government" that we don't understand much about.
It's weird to think of something so random as a ten year-old purchase of a television station in Pittsburgh as posing a major political problem for John McCain, but much more so than other politicians he's made the myth of some kind of preternatural powers of honestness central to his persona. At the same time, he's told a series of whoppers in the past few days. First we heard that he'd literally never done favors for lobbyists or special interests when, clearly, he did try to intervene with the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications. Then he said he'd never met with Bud Paxson himself about this, even though in a 2002 deposition he said he had met Paxson.
Now the Washington Post reports that Paxson, too, is contradicting McCain's story and also contradicting the desperate spin McCain tried to put on his earlier deposition. Paxson also says McCain is wrong about never having met with Vicki Iseman on this issue. Which of course makes sense. We know that McCain tried to help Paxson out on this. We know that Iseman's job at the time was to get legislators to help Paxson out. And we know that McCain and Iseman were friends at the time. It would be pretty weird if she'd never mentioned the whole thing to him, and he was just inspired to go write the letter by coincidence.
NYT takes a look at Texas' wind power boom. One oddity of American geography is that most of the most promising locations for this form of clean energy generation are in the stack of red states running up from Texas through the plains up to Canada rather than in the kind of places where default political conditions would suggest a lot of wind enthusiasm. In the short run, that's an impediment to developing green energy sources, but in the long run it could make for a much more politically sustainable green coalition once places like Texas and Kansas find themselves invested in the idea of building a more ecologically sustainable electrical power infrastructure.
Given that I've never heard of anyone who believes that political parties face zero-sum choices between base-mobilization and persuasion strategies, nor have I ever heard of anyone who denies that both are part of political success, I'm a bit puzzled as to why The Democratic Strategist would bother to host a "debate" on this issue in which we'll discover that liberals and centrists alike agree that both are important and both sides just claim that adopting policies they prefer on the merits is also the key to electoral success. That said, it is worth pointing out that DLC honcho Al From is trying to trick you with this chart:
From would clearly like you to believe that the combination of increased margin and higher turnout among self-identified Democrats in 2006 relative to 2004 was a smaller factor in the Democratic Party's superior election outcome than was the even larger increase in margin combined with lower turnout among self-identified independents. If you check the math, though, you'll see that this isn't true.
In 2004, 37 percent of the electorate were Democrats, and Kerry got 89 percent of their votes. Thus 32.9 percent of the electorate was Dems voting Dem. Independents were 26 percent of the electorate and 49 percent of them voted for Kerry, so 12.7 percent of the electorate was indies voting Dem. In 2006, 38 percent of the electorate were Democrats, and 93 percent of them voted Democratic. Thus 35.3 percent of the electorate was Democrats voting Democratic, an improved performance of 2.4 percentage points. Independents were 26 percent of the electorate, and 57 percent of them voted Democratic, making 14.8 percent of the electorate indies voting Democratic, an improved performance of 1.1 percentage points.
In short, contrary to From's chart, it's simply false to say that "the difference" between 2004 was that "centrist voters with loose party attachments voted Democratic in much higher numbers." The Democrats improved their performance among both groups, but the combination of turnout and vote-share factors clearly indicates that improved performance among self-IDed Dems was a more important factor than was improved performance among self-IDed Republicans. What's more, note that the numbers I used were identical to the exit polls From is using in his chart. But he presents the numbers in a such a way (using the change in margin of victory rather than showing actual vote shares) as to make it difficult to do a quick calculation of the change in performance.
I don't personally have a huge dog in this fight. As everyone agrees, both groups are important and it's not an either/or choice. But it's nice to have reviews of exit poll be done accurately.
Here Robert Wright talks a bit about the problems with our recognition of Kosovo independence:
Meanwhile, whatever one thinks this all says about the liberal hawk movement, it just reflects a staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. At the end of the day, recognizing Kosovo independent was probably the best choice to make, but it's a very problematic path. It's the kind of thing that, before you do it, you need to lay the most groundwork possible and also have plans in place for dealing with the fallout. Instead, the administration seems to have kind of wandered into it as a kind of afterthought. In part it just illustrates that Bush is a crappy president, but it also highlights one of the highest prices of the Iraq War -- it's an enormous drain on the attention of senior policymakers. Many aspects of US foreign policy, however, can't be left on autopilot. Senior political leaders need to be involved and engaged or else nobody's around to keep things on track.
I think the NAFTA mailing that comes in for secondary discussion in this article is harsh but well within the bounds of basic politics. The health care flier is, however, pretty seriously dishonest as other Obama fans have noted in earlier incarnations. It's simply not the case that Hillary Clinton's health care plan would force people to buy insurance irrespective of ability to pay. What's more, Clinton and Obama have essentially identical measures in their plans to increase the affordability of insurance.
In interviews with 15 aides and advisers to Mrs. Clinton, not a single one expressed any regrets that they were not working for Mr. Obama. Indeed, some aides said they were baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton.
Whether or not you think the more "seasoned" candidate ought to win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer who could be genuinely "baffled" by experience not proving to be a winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work. Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn't win the nomination?
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Heads in the Sand
