Ms. Pac-Man as Feminist Icon
Via Jessica Valenti:
I think that's more-or-less the last word on that subject. The bit about the etymology of "Pac-Man" is fascinating.
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February 24, 2008 - March 1, 2008 Archives
February 24, 2008
The Four Percent Fallacy
Sure the defense budget is large, the saying goes, but in percentage of GDP terms it's lower than it has been for much of the 20th century, so what's the problem? Cato's Benjamin Friedman has a good response to this line of argument:
Percentage of GDP is useful for historical comparisons of defense’s economic burden. Carafano substitutes the question of what we can afford for what we ought to spend. The United States can afford to spend four percent of its GDP on defense; indeed we can afford to spend far more. That doesn’t mean we should. Whatever your politics, money spent on defense means money not spent on something else: private investment, deficit reduction, infrastructure, a car, etc. The problem is opportunity cost, not economic malaise.
And, indeed, there you have it. We could spend much more on the Pentagon if the objective circumstances merited doing so. But they don't. The opportunity costs are large, the need lacking, and the benefits of ever-growing military spending are small compared to the benefits of spending that money on productive investments (both private and public sector) or consumption goods.
Tweedlesomething
Ralph Nader to hop into the race. After all, there's not a dime's worth of a difference between a candidate promising tax cuts, pushing more health risk onto individuals, a re-invigoration of George Bush's campaign to dominate the world through military force, and an industry-friendly approach to environmental issues and his rival who's promising substantial socialization of medical risk, a 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions, and end to the war in Iraq (and to the mindset that led to war!), universal preschool, etc. Well, sure, there's judicial appointments -- abortion, gay rights, etc. -- and some small fry stuff about whether or not the NSA will have unrestrained surveillance powers. But basically it's just the same two corporate clones running on virtually identical platforms.
Thank God for Ralph Nader.
Are You Experienced?
Scott Lemieux further elaborates on the trouble with the Hillary Clinton experience argument:
[I]f Clinton's rather marginal and contestable experiential advantages over Obama should be decisive any of the other major Democratic candidates would be unquestionably preferable to either. (And, even worse, the same would be true of McCain in the general.)
I think the point in the parenthesis is key. If you win a primary on an "experience" argument, then you'd damn well better be more experienced than your general election opponent. McCain would make an experience argument against either opponent, so it's much better to be the opponent with a record of statements aimed at rebutting such arguments (I don't think the American people judge your qualification based on duration of service in a broken Washington system...) than to be the opponent who's been making the argument that voters need to stick with the more seasoned Washington hand.
Plan of Attack
Michael Crowley says an alleged lack of patriotism will be the main line of argument against Barack Obama. I agree. I would only add that I've heard the term "post-American" tossed around a lot. On the low road, Obama's black and foreign. On the middle road, he's unpatriotic. And on the high-road he's one of those post-American tranzies. Which is, of course, a fancy way of saying he's black and foreign. And thus the loop is closed.
Word to the Wise
Every so often Steve Sailer pops up in comments here to claim that neither I nor anyone else in the press has read Barack Obama's first book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance because obviously if more people read it, more people would share the Sailer interpretation of Obama (I'd say Mike Tomasky's much closer to the mark). Well, I read it some time ago. Was encouraged to do so, in fact, by someone on staff with his campaign.
Like most writers who've read it, the main thing that comes across is that Obama's a good writer -- a politician capable of producing a pretty good book without an army of ghostwriters at his disposal. It's a pretty impressive achievement and also probably helps give him some of his heir of authenticity. One knows that he know more writes his own lines at this point than does any other major presidential candidate, but he seems like someone who could.
Tax and Deregulate
To offer some further thoughts on Iceland, I should say I don't particularly disagree with Will Wilkinson and others who think that the economic success of countries like Iceland and Denmark should be chalked up in part to the relatively light hand of the regulatory state in those places. In many respects, generous spending on public services and deregulation go together like a horse and carriage -- a lightly-regulated market economy generates the wealth that facilitates the social spending, and the availability of public services makes the vicissitudes of the marketplace much more tolerable.
When people are counting on their job to provide them with such a high proportion of what they need to get by in life (not in an objective subsistence sense, but in an intersubjective social sense) the risk of losing that becomes intolerable, and rises the demand to treat one's relationship to other market actors as an entitlement. Thus, labor market rigidities, price controls, subsidies, etc. Alternatively, one could simply be entitled to a basket of publicly provided stuff (education for oneself and one's kids, safe and well-maintained streets, adequate health care and transit, continuing education and job placement, etc., etc., etc.) but then let the ups-and-downs of economic life operate as they will.
The movement, started under Jimmy Carter then of course continued by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to deregulate important aspects of the American economy was basically a good thing in my view. Indeed, as I've blogged before there are a lot of areas -- especially at this point those under the purview of state and local governments -- where we would do well to deregulate substantially further in terms of occupational licensing, land use, what's involved in starting a new business, etc. Unfortunately, what we haven't done is built the strong welfare state and generous public services to go along with it. Here I part ways with a lot of people (Will, for example) who appear to believe that it's impossible to do in a large, diverse country what's been done in several small, homogenous countries. More challenging politically? Of course. And that's why we don't have it today. But doable? Hopefully some day in my lifetime? I think so.
Photo by me, available under a Creative Commons license
DNA and Insurance
Kevin Drum had an interesting post up yesterday about the problematic interaction between genetic testing of various sorts and the vagaries of the health insurance industry. It's worth emphasizing that this issue is almost certainly going to grow more intense over time as our understanding of genetics increases. Basically, you'll have a situation where unless we can substantially reduce private health insurance's role in the financing and delivery of health care, everyone's going to be going around deliberately ignorant of tons of medically useful information.
Meanwhile, I should add that though I understand the political rationale for trying to basically regulate insurance firms out of the discrimination business rather than simply killing the firms off, I wouldn't be optimistic about success over the long run. Risk assessment and risk screening is the raison d'être of the insurance firm -- it's what the business, fundamentally, is all about. We ought to have faith that market capitalism will quickly enough find ways to de facto achieve whatever risk screening is de jure prohibited. It becomes essentially a question of savvy marketing and product design to make sure that your particular insurance package is mostly bought be a disproportionately young and healthy customers.
The One And Only
"I'm the only one the special interests don't give any money to," said John McCain in what I guess was a lie designed to be so ridiculous that he's supposed to get away with it. Or something. Anyway, Brave New Films has a nifty video on the fact that an awful lot of McCain's best friends, campaign managers, major donors, etc. seem to work for the special interests full time:
Intriguing stuff, though of course lies don't count as lies when they're told by John McCain.
Election News
Raul Castro pulls out surprise a win to secure election as dictator of Cuba.
Oscars Thread
I don't really have anything of interest to say about the Academy Awards, though I guess it's somewhat unusual to see my favorite movie of the year -- There Will Be Blood -- so much as nominated, but consider this an oscars thread.
Taxi Wins
Okay, well, let me say that I'm very glad to see Alex Gibney's brilliant Taxi to the Dark Side win Best Documentary. I've recommended it twice before, but perhaps you didn't trust me. Now you know: It won an Oscar. Go see it.
February 25, 2008
The Foreign Policy Failure
Michael Signer, who worked on foreign policy and national security issues for John Edwards, has a great piece in The Washington Post about the difficulty of getting any coverage of the foreign policy distinctions between the presidential candidates. He (rightly) cites Michael Gordon's series of interview/analysis articles for The New York Times as an important exception, along with some of the stuff Jason Horowitz did for The New York Observer, but "mostly you had to look to the blogs -- places such as the Atlantic Online, the American Prospect, TPMCafe and Democracy Arsenal -- for serious, sustained foreign policy reporting."
He observes, in what I think is a telling moment, that "there were few deep contrast articles -- the sort of thing we'd see from columnists such as Paul Krugman on domestic policy." I think a large part of the issue here is simply that we don't really have a Krugmanesque figure who primarily focuses on foreign policy issues. Instead, we have a couple of other important progressive columnists (E.J. Dionne, Harold Meyerson) who don't focus mainly on foreign policy, and we have a few foreign policy focused columnists (Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan) who aren't interested in trying to follow Democratic Party primary policy arguments in a sympathetic and engaged way.
That said, it's clearly a problem. Not on are foreign policy issues very important, but the president's level of control over them is much, much, much higher. A president who wants to implement sweeping change of the country's national security policies can snap his finger and get it done, whereas domestic policymaking is a complicated interplay between administration, congress, interest groups, etc.
Cluster Bombs
Via Natasha Chart, the case against cluster bombs -- a form of explosive that's unusually likely to wind up killing and maiming children. Senator Dianne Feinstein authored some anti-cluster bomb legislation that attracted 30 yea votes. Obama was among those voting "yes," Clinton among those voting "no" which I take as another sign that Obama is willing to think further outside the box than is Clinton on national security issues.
The Shaq Era
It was striking to me that during the pregame coverage of the Pistons-Suns matchup yesterday none of the commentators seemed to be acknowledging the basic point that the Marion-Shaq deal was a risky and controversial move. Instead, it was being covered in a totally rah-rah as if it were a Gasol-style no-brainer. Obviously, many people do think it was a smart move for Phoenix to make, but surely the commentary ought to reflect the fact that a lot of people think it was a blunder.
The upshot, naturally enough, was that Phoenix got blown out. Sample size is obviously far too small to make big hay out of the team going 1-2 since the trade and those were all good teams, but still. It's certainly strange, though, that the Phoenix defense is so up and down bracketing that great performance against Boston by giving up 130 points to LA and 116 to Detroit.
The Assassination Factor
Jeff Zeleny does a piece for The New York Times on anecdotal evidence of widespread fear that Barack Obama is likely to be assassinated if nominated for (or elected to) the presidency. I've heard this worry before, and it's something that I have to say never occurred to me until I started hearing other people talk about it. You're looking, really, at two different interpretations of what went on in the 1960s. From one point of view, this is a time in which two very prominent black leaders (Martin Luther King and Malcolm X) were assassinated, as were two very prominent pro-civil rights white politicians (John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy) that should make us worry that the assassin's bullet is unusually likely to meet figures identified with racial progress.
Another way of looking at it is that there was just a kind of assassination fad in the "long sixties." Its victims included not only progressive racial leaders, but also George Wallace. Meanwhile, nothing in the pre-assassination JFK record singled him out as an especially noteworthy civil rights leader and there's no real indication that this is what Lee Harvey Oswald had in mind when he shot him. Basically during the sixties people were getting assassinated irrespective of race, while since the sixties people haven't been getting assassinated even though we've had several noteworthy black politicians.
There was, I would note, a similar assassination fad around the turn of the previous century associated with anarchism, but eventually extending out of any particular ideological niche. That's how William McKinley got killed, along with Jean Jaurès in France and a whole bunch of other political leaders. It seems plausible that one or two high-profile assassinations helps spawn copycats without there necessarily being any deep "cause" behind the whole thing. Long story short, while this account should leave us less concerned than many that Barack Obama would be shot, but more concerned that a single assassination could turn into a wave.
Going Long
John Judis goes long -- and brilliantly -- on the subject of Barack Obama, putting him not just in the recent tradition of reformist political figures, but a much older "long cycle" American tradition of a search for Adam-like figures who promise to start things over anew. Judis captures the promise of Obama, but also a lot of his peril.
Stenography: Or, Real Journalism at Last
Just like a real fake journalist, I spent some time on a conference call this morning with some of Barack Obama's people and can now faithfully recount to you, the audience, what they told me. One, by way of prebuttal to a foreign policy speech Hillary Clinton will deliver today, Susan Rice outlined three key missteps of judgment she said Clinton had made:
- Supporting the invasion of Iraq, support that Rice emphasized was not limited to 2002 but extended for several additional years.
- "Voting to give the president the benefit of the doubt on Iran by voting for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment"
- Agreeing with Bush and McCain on a Musharraf-centric approach to Pakistan "that short-cited point of view which underplayed the importance of the democracy movement in Pakistan backfired and has left us scrambling to convince the Pakistani people that our interests in Pakistan extend beyond one man."
Scott Gration then said a bunch of stuff that I didn't think was very interesting. Then Richard Danzig emphasized that the Obama campaign's theme of change "extends not just to the domestic world but also very strikingly to the foreign policy world." He alleged that "Senator Clinton is trapped within an establishment view of the world" at a time when "we hugely need to present a new face to the world." But not just a new face in the superficial sense, Danzig said we need to present a new face to the world through some dramatic new substantive policies. He highlighted, in particular, Obama's focus on non-proliferation issues and willingness to support dramatic multi-lateral arsenal cuts and specifically commit to a long-range goal of zero nuclear weapons.
This last bit had resonance for me because I think it's been one of the big under-reported issue arguments of the campaign. Barack Obama and John Edwards both specifically endorsed the Kissinger/Nunn/Perry/Shultz call for a zero nukes policy. Clinton neither embraced nor rejected that view, instead choosing to mischaracterize the issue by writing that "former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn have called on the United States to 'rekindle the vision,' shared by every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons." That's just not what they called on us to do, and I'd sort of like to know what Clinton thinks about the issue at hand. And, yes, it's weird to cite agreeing with these four very establishmentarian figures as an example of Obama being willing to buck the establishment.
In other news, I felt that Rice was using a sarcastic tone of voice to convey frustration with the fact that Clinton's campaign has been allowed to get away with waiting until very late in the game to deliver her Major Foreign Policy Address while also billing herself the candidate of substance. Rice also emphasized the idea that Clinton is trying to have it both ways on the experience issue, claiming full partnership in her husband's presidency as a sign of readiness to be commander in chief while also wanting to distance herself from things like NAFTA that may be unpopular today. I thought the hypocrisy allegation sort of lacked bite. Rice and several other Obama advisors worked in the Clinton administration. If they want to say that, in their experience, Clinton didn't play the sort of substantive role she's now saying she played, they ought to come out and say so directly. They were there and we weren't and there's no contradiction between having been involved and sometimes losing a policy argument.
Nota Bene: This sort of big time journalism talking to important people on the phone can be done while wearing pajamas from the privacy of your own home.
Gang of 14
It's probably not my place to judge, but of all things for conservatives to distrust about John McCain surely this "gang of fourteen" business is the silliest. This was a disagreement over tactics not any grand questions of principle. There's never been any indication that McCain doesn't favor conservative judicial nominees. Indeed, the upshot of the compromise McCain helped broker was the confirmation of a bunch of conservative judges. It seems to me that McCain's tactics were pretty smart and effective. But even if you disagree and think his tactical judgment was wrong, it was just that -- a question of tactics.
Parking Reform
From the annals of underappreciated phenomena comes . . . parking regulations! Pretty much nobody has any idea what the parking regulations in their town/county/etc. are and nobody gives any real thought to the impact of parking rules on the world. But suffice it to say that, as with any regulatory scheme, a regulatory scheme designed to produce a world where parking is both ubiquitous and extremely cheap actually has enormous costs associated with it.
It seems that a professor named Donald Shoup has written a book called The High Cost of Free Parking spelling these costs out. Rob Goodspeed has an excellent precis.
Pollack vs. Power
Spencer Ackerman flags a Shmuel Rosner article on Samantha Power in which she responds to allegations that she hates Jews, etc., etc. The article's not terrible, but anything that refers to Noah Pollack, who's been peddling these smears, as a "yound and talented writer," is bound to be at least somewhat problematic. To make a long story short, though, first Obama was an anti-semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to Pollack it's Power who who's tainted by Jew-hatred.
In part, you're just seeing tawdry political smears against a popular and charismatic progressive politician. But in large part we're just seeing Episode 7,000 of one of the longest-running shows in the U.S. foreign policy debate in which nobody is allowed to say that any Israeli actions have caused anyone to suffer, have been responsible for any problems for the United States, have in any way contributed to the inability to reach a peaceful settlement of the conflict, etc.
It'd be nice to see the Obama campaign actually punch back on this kind of thing. To note that if Commentary's out to get you, it's probably because you're doing something right. Something like, perhaps, dissenting from the maniacal Commentary worldview that's done so little over the past seven years to make the United States or Israel more secure. Instead, they're kind of slinking away apologetically lest they offend the broad middle of American (and Jewish) opinion on Israel which certainly wants the U.S. to take a "pro-Israel" posture but certainly doesn't define that posture in a Commentaryish way as involving a limitless commitment to securing West Bank settlements and avoiding diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran. It's a pretty a disappointing lack of vision on Obama's part, though I'm hardly seeing a better alternative.
Working for the Clampdown
Clifford Levy had a fantastic piece in yesterday's New York Times, giving a granular, micro-level account of Vladimir Putin's takeover of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly the political home base of Boris Nemtsov who's now a leading figure in the anti-Putin opposition.
This was of particular interest to me because I spent the summer of 1998 living in the city in question. And here's the one area where I feel a lot of this kind of reporting on Putin's authoritarianism falls down. I never met anyone in 1998-vintage Nizhny Novgorod who was really excited about the state of Russian politics. The general feeling was that rather than democracy, they were suffering from a regime of chaos and corruption. People would talk openly about their yearning for a strong leader who could restore order and prosperity -- Singapore, Pinochet's Chile, postwar South Korea -- those were the models on people's lips. And this, I think, is more-or-less what most people think they've gotten from Putin. In reality, it's almost certainly the case that Russian prosperity is founded on the current high price of fossile fuels (the oil crisis years were very kind to the Soviet consumer) rather than on anything Putin's done, but that's how it's seen.
I think that's the context you need for Levy's stories. The kind of tactics Putin used to consolidate control would never have worked if Russia had featured real liberal political parties with meaningful mass support. But by the time Boris Yeltsin put him in power, the screw-ups, deprivation, and corruption of the previous years combined with the sense that Russia's position on the world stage was slipping had badly hollowed out support for liberalism at non-elite levels.
Bitter Harvest
My colleague Graeme Wood makes the case that we ought to harvest the organs of convicts slated for execution. There turn out to actually be two separate issues here. One, though we do sentence people to be executed, we never force them to give up their organs. But more interestingly, it turns out that those sentenced to death aren't even able to volunteer to serve as organ donors post-execution.
This last bit doesn't seem defensible to me. On the other hand, it's just very hard for me to know how to conduct moral reasoning about what is and isn't a permissible modification of a practice that should not be permitted. In other words, given that we shouldn't be executing prisoners at all, I don't really know how to respond to ideas about what things it is or isn't a good idea to do with their organs.
Lessons Learned
I was intrigued by the idea of a New Republic masthead editorial purporting to apply the lessons of Kosovo to the situation in Darfur. That, I thought, might provide a respite from the magazine's usual bomb repeat bomb take on the issue. But no:
But the biggest, and most important, parallel is this: We asked Milosevic to stop killing. He did not. We have asked Sudan to stop killing. And still it kills. Yes, it occasionally appears willing to bargain. But, while Sudan bargains, the aircraft continue to roam over Darfur. The paltry U.N. forces on the ground can do nothing to stop them. And that is probably how things will continue to unfold, until this president or the next one remembers the example of Kosovo, puts together a credible NATO force, and finally says enough is enough.
It seems to me that any serious look at Kosovo has to carry with it the lesson that there's nothing nearly as simple as a "say enough is enough" option. Coercive military intervention raises a lot of thorny issues. Do we really want to commit ourselves to a Kosovo-style mission in which we wind up administering Darfur for an indefinite period of time? Not that Darfur is 196,555 square miles to Kosovo's 10,887 square miles. Similarly, what about the wider consequences for Sudan of getting into the partition business? Meanwhile, though they acknowledge that the Darfur rebel groups on whose behalf they want us to go to war are "unsavory" they don't think through any of the implications of this.
Before a country currently engaged in two wars, plus several peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, starts a new war these are the kind of questions that need to be answered. The good news for TNR is that everyone knows their preferred policy has no chance of being implemented. Which means that there's no need to think it through, and also that there's every reason to adopt a maximalist posture. While efforts like the Enough Project to find constructive, practical ways to improve the situation like Darfur necessarily involve awkward compromises with reality, the maximalist gets to ignore details and practical problems and hold the moral high ground for his trouble.
A Very Serious, Thoughtful, Etc.
My old boss Mike Tomasky has an excellent review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that does a good job of getting to the book's main salient qualities -- it's tediousness, it's habit of announcing widely-known facts as if they were shocking discoveries, and Goldberg's failure to argue from any identifiably coherent perspective ("Why isn't he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn't fascist?"), etc.
Stimulating
Is anyone going to take note at some point that the thing on John McCain's website under the heading "Economic Stimulus Plan" is not an economic stimulus plan? It's a tax reform plan. The merits of the plan aside, it would have no short-term impact whatsoever. Basically, McCain doesn't believe there should be a stimulus package. That's something many economists believe and obviously he's free to adopt that view. But he shouldn't be allowed to get with just doing a labeling trick and some mumbo-jumbo to pretend he favors a stimulus package when, in fact, he doesn't. Certainly you'd think a man with that kind of approach would lose his reputation as a straight-talker.
Is Our College Students Learning?
Everyone in Washington says they want to bring down the cost of college. But as Kevin Carey writes, throwing more money into tuition subsidies isn't going to make college affordable over the long run as long as we keep in place structural incentives for ever-higher costs, most notably the total absence of any measure of quality. Unfortunately, America's colleges and universities are very good at creating a situation where nobody can get any real sense of which schools are doing a good job of educating people and which aren't. Under the circumstances, it's no wonder you don't see any institutions trying to find innovative and more efficient ways to deliver services. After all, nobody knows what the numerator is in the productivity equation, so a cheaper school just looks less fancy and prestigious.
For further reading on this issue I'd recommend Ben Adler's Washington Monthly article on the higher ed lobby and any of the many writeups of Alan Kruger's research indicating that professional success of graduates of highly selective colleges is almost all selection effect with little value-added.
Failed Hit
I sometimes think journalists should write more about the stories we wind up not writing. In a slow moment, for example, I thought I'd click over to The Nation to see if they'd published something embarrassing about Castro that I could flag to try to regain my mainstream credibility. Instead, I wound up reading this:
Conversely, if [Hugo] Chávez is such a democrat, why has he embraced Fidel Castro--a full-fledged authoritarian who, for decades, imprisoned his critics and quashed internal dissent--as his mentor and model? Why has he aggressively undermined the independence of the Venezuelan judiciary and concentrated power so heavily in the president's office? And why, most recently, did he use the referendum to seek sweeping powers to suspend due process rights in times of emergency?
What follows is a long and nuanced discussion of the situation in Venezuela that puts the whole thing into much more context than I'd seen previous in a magazine article.
Over Soon But Then Lasting Forever
I find this new John McCain take on his remarks about staying in Iraq for 100 years pretty confusing. Formerly, we weren't supposed to worry about his commitment to a war of indefinite duration because, you see, the 100 years was tacked on with the proviso that no Americans would be killed. How this kind of open-ended commitment was supposed to get us to that zero-casualty point was unclear. But now we learn that "the war for all intents and purposes, although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it will be handled by the Iraqis, not by us, and then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis."
This, to me, is baffling. If the insurgency is still going on "for years and years and years" then either the insurgency is taking place but U.S. troops have left Iraq (which McCain opposes) or else the war is continuing. I guess the McCain alternative is that the insurgency keeps fighting, and our troops stay in Iraq, but the insurgents forget we're there and generously decide not to attack us. Or something.
Today in Fake Scandals
First off, it seems that when Hillary Clinton was a practicing lawyer she took a job as a court-appointed attorney for an indigent client and she sought to advance her client's interests zealously. Newsday wants us to find that sleazy, but it's the nature of the American legal system. It would have been irresponsible for her to do otherwise.
Second, a photo surfaced of Barack Obama wearing some funny-looking (to American eyes) clothing while on a trip to Africa. This led to a bewildering series of charges and countercharges from the Obama and Clinton campaigns, even though the whole thing was likely trumped up out of little or nothing by Matt Drudge to drive traffic.
Politics is Political
Matt Stoller brings an important perspective to the issue of the media under-covering foreign policy issues in the campaign, namely that the liberal wonk community needs to share some of the blame for this since part of the problem derives from Democrats' reluctance to engage politically with these issues. That seems right to me. Any Democratic campaign worth its salt can provide for you a wonky discussion of its health care plan or its trade policy. But it can also generate TV spots, quips from surrogates, somewhat unfair mailers, etc. that don't at all sound like a seminar on trade policy.
Historically, they've been much worse at doing this on national security issues. A presidential campaign knows it needs to check the national security box, so they organize one or more Major Foreign Policy Addresses and then kind of play duck-and-cover hoping that Republicans won't attack them and when Republicans do attack them whining that you shouldn't play politics with national security. But if we all take for granted that politics will be played with basic questions of economic growth and fairness, then why not play it with national security, too? And beyond that, "ought" implies "can" and there's just no way to hermetically seal foreign policy off from politics -- one needs to learn how to play the game well. I even wrote an article about this once that became part of the backdrop for Heads in the Sand.
I do think things are changing on this front to some extent, though mostly in a sense of Democrats either getting smarter about playing defense or else the ones who are really bad at defense got killed off in 2002 and 2004. Most Democratic political operations still seem to me to primarily look at national security issues as an area where you might lose points, and not as an area in which to be on the lookout for potential lines of attack.
McCain's Empire
I'm not sure the point can be made forcefully enough that John McCain is, among practical politicians, perhaps the single most committed advocate of an imperial vision of American foreign policy out there. This case can (and will!) be made at great length, but one quick way of getting at the point is through Teddy Roosevelt. It's well known that McCain is a huge Roosevelt admirer, and sees himself as a kind of TR for the 21st century. At the same time, TR is a complicated, multi-faceted figure. Among other things, however, he was an arch-imperialist at a time when imperialism was undertaken with much less of a velvet glove. Things like McCain's March 25, 2002 speech at USC make it clear that he doesn't see Roosevelt's imperialism as somehow incidental to his hero's vision:
Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The “strenuous life” was T.R.’s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America’s pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. “We cannot sit huddled within our borders,” he warned, “and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.”
His Americanism was not fidelity to a tribal identity. Nor was it limited to a sentimental attachment to our “amber waves of grain” or “purple mountains majesty.” Roosevelt’s Americanism exalted the political values of a nation where the people were sovereign, recognizing not only the inherent justice of self-determination, not only that freedom empowered individuals to decide their destiny for themselves, but that it empowered them to choose a common destiny. And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept “that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither.”
Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt’s patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.
There are a couple of things to note about this. The sentiment that American patriotism is a higher calling than some tawdry blood-and-soil nationalism is a fairly banal one in the US and serves as an umbrella under which different kinds of ideas can hide. But McCain brings it up and specifically ascribes this view to Roosevelt, apostle of empire. To McCain, a commitment to universalism requires American expansionism. Indeed, to McCain it is precisely commitment to this imperial vision that makes American patriotism superior to other brands of nationalism. Our own patriotism would become compromised by stinginess and selfishness were we to show more restraint in world affairs.
February 26, 2008
Iraq/Recession
This sounds like an interesting initiative:
The multi-million-dollar Iraq/Recession Campaign, which launches Monday, seeks to remind voters, in the words of organizers, that, "As economic concerns weigh heavily on the minds of Americans, opposition to President Bush's reckless war in Iraq continues to grow. The massive cost of the war in Iraq – hurtling toward one trillion dollars – has increased demand for a strategy to bring U.S. troops home. The Iraq/Recession Campaign will highlight the majority of Americans who want to see leadership on investing in critical priorities at home and establishing real security throughout the world."
In addition to John and Elizabeth Edwards, those involved in launching the campaign included Service Employees International Union secretary-treasurer Anna Burger, MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser, VetsVote chairman Jon Soltz, USAction executive director Jeff Blum, Center for American Progress president John Podesta and Americans United for Change president Brad Woodhouse.
The trouble is that, as Paul Krugman has pointed out a few times, the short-term impact of the war is to serve as a form of economic stimulus. Perversely, it might be good for the economy for the war to take a turn for the worse -- an uptick in the quantity of vehicles and other military equipment destroyed in Iraq could stimulate orders for replacements.
Which isn't to say that war is good for the economy. If we could go back in time and invest the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq on something more productive, we'd be in better economic shape today. Alternatively, if we could take the vast sums we're currently spending in Iraq and somehow frictionlessly transmute that into some kind of better-designed domestic stimulus, that would help the economy over the short run. But in terms of actually available policy options (the time machine would be handy, though) bringing the war to an end, though strategically vital and good for America's long-term economic outlook, doesn't seem to me to be something likely to help the country with our short-term economic challenges.
Adderall
Molly Young has a worthwhile essay on n + 1's website about her use of Adderral as a performance enhancing study drug in college. It's something I tried a few times, both as she describes and as a recreational drug, back in the day but I found its effects to be pretty mild. The big plus side is that if I tried to pull all nighters based on drinking coffee or Diet Coke, I would eventually get shaky and feel a bit ill, whereas on Adderral I could really keep plugging along. It's not, however, something I really ever had great occasion to use.
Some people, though, clearly experience great effects and it does raise some questions. Do we really want to create a situation where some students may feel that they have to abuse prescription drugs to stay competitive in school? Then again, if there's a pill out there that's safe to take and helps kids learn a bunch of stuff, doesn't it seem like we should be prescribing more of it? I'd want to know more about what the real medical affects of taking the stuff before I made any kind of judgment. I will say that I was a bit shocked to hear about some of the younger faculty using it to help get their work done, but even though at the moment Adderral seems to mainly be a vice of college students there's no particular reason it couldn't be useful (in good ways or bad) for a much wider range of people.
The Strong Claim
As I've said before, the most noteworthy thing about the recent Vicki Iseman story was the cataclysmically overbroad nature of John McCain's denials, which got him into saying not only that he'd never done a favor for a company he clearly had done a favor for, but that he'd never done a favor for any lobbyist at all. You see something similar in today's David Brooks column where Brooks not only wants to defend the proposition that McCain is less lobbyist-tained than your average pol, but actually heap scorn on the notion that a rival campaign might suggest that "He’s more tainted than his reputation suggests."
This is nutty. McCain's pre-existing reputation in this regard was as a kind of George Washington meets Paul Bunyan figure. Of course McCain's more tainted than his reputation suggests and of course his opponent is going to try to point that out. But Brooks' column, like an angry McCain denial, doesn't have so much as a to-be-sure graf. At times McCain has "failed and fallen short" in his quest to make American politics utterly free of the special interests, but he's never once actually done anything for special interests.
Meanwhile, on the specific point that "If this is the record of a candidate with lobbyists on his campaign bus, then every candidate should have lobbyists on the bus" it's worth saying that putting the lobbyists on the bus is the favor. Which lobbyist would you hire, after all, the one sitting in his office somewhere promising to make some phone calls, or the one sitting on a major party nominee's campaign bus? It's the guy on the bus. That's the favor.
Clinton's Speech
I think Hillary Clinton's major foreign policy address from yesterday is pretty good. The key implicit critique of Obama:
The symbol of our presidency – the American Eagle – holds arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other. Both are symbolic tools of what we need to keep our democracy strong and our nation safe— tools that a President must know how to use in the daily course of events, but also when that 3 a.m. phone call comes to the White House because an unforeseen crisis has erupted without warning. In that split second the president has to respond and make a decision that could affect the safety and lives of millions of people here in our country and around the world. Whoever sits at that desk in the Oval Office on January 20th, 2009 needs all the tools available, all the resources at our disposal, and the wisdom to know how to use them.
This sometimes gets lost in the heat of a campaign, but I really do think Barack Obama's lack of administrative or executive experience is problematic. I don't find Hillary Clinton's claims on her own behalf in this regard nearly as convincing as she does, but it is a real problem with his candidacy. Still, as we get down to a choice of two people I do think this line of argument runs smack into the brick wall of the 2002 Iraq vote. Do I worry that Obama might screw up? Yes. Does voting for the woman who got the single most important call of her legislative career wrong seem like a reasonable alternative course of action? Not really.
This sort of hangs like a cloud over a lot of the speech's best moments:
On my first day in office, I will announce, as I have repeatedly in this campaign, that the era of cowboy diplomacy is over. That includes the doctrine of pre-emptive war. I have been against that for many years.I like these words. I'm against the doctrine of pre-emptive war, too. But this is the woman who, when casting a vote to authorize a preemptive (really preventive) military invasion of Iraq said "my vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose." Under the circumstances, it's hard to know what her opposition is supposed to amount to. It -- especially in combination with a refusal to deal with the issue directly and clearly -- leaves me confused, not understanding who I'm supposed to be voting for.
But all that is, at it were, external to the text at hand. What's on the page here is very good, including a very thoughtful take on the diplomacy with adversaries issue and a strong statement about the need to avoid the many false choices with which the Bush administration has sought to present people.
CSW
Jessica Valenti reports on the 52nd session of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women (CSW):
In the session's opening address, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke out against violence against women, noting that "at least one out of every three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime." Ban also announced the launch of a new campaign to battle global violence against women, which will run until 2015.
How long do we think it'll take Heather MacDonald to come up with an op-ed on how those numbers are inflated and insofar as it happens the real blame lies with college girls these days being drunken sluts? Actually, I was disappointed to see nothing whatsoever on the event from the professional anti-feminists at the Independent Women's Forum, but they are taking on crucial issues like why unskilled workers on campus should get paid less.
The Clothing of His Country
Clinton surrogate Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones repeatedly suggests that Barack Obama is a native of Somalia:
In fact, Obama is a native born citizen of the United States of America.
Superdelegates: Pay Attention!
Campaign season is getting to people:
Authorities said brother-in-laws Jose Ortiz and Sean Shurelds were involved in a verbal altercation over Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton when the argument escalated into a stabbing inside their family home on Honey Locust Court in Upper Providence.
My extended family, too, is a house divide. Thus the urgent need for the primaries to get wrapped up before Passover lest this tragedy repeat itself. In all seriousness, though, Marc Ambinder has a bunch of reporting to suggest that the race is unlikely to drag on into April. My predictions are always wrong, but it looks like Obama will win Texas and Clinton will be forced to drop out.
Dodd for Obama
Chris Dodd endorses Barack Obama.
Getting Bolder
Via Spencer Ackerman, this is considerably more forward-leaning than I'd heard previously from Obama:
"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud ap-proach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.
"If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress," he said.
He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than "just crushing the opposition" is being "soft or anti-Israel."
This is music to my ears and, frankly, very much the attitude that's Israel's long-term future requires. Still, in some quarters the man may as well have just festooned himself with swastikas.
Varieties of Regulation
My weekend post on regulation prompted interesting followups from Tim Lee and Mark Kleiman and I basically agree with what they have to say. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that my original post shouldn't have just thrown around the term "regulation" since, obviously, regulations come in different sorts and some regulations I very much favor.
Most notably, pollution -- especially air pollution while the prospect for alternative policies centered around establishing defined property rights seems very dim -- has to be controlled through a regulatory framework. Similarly, I'm a believer in a healthy dose of paternalism, product safety, and public health regulations. But the midcentury effort to transform vast sectors of the economy into tightly regulated monopolies -- the era in which nobody could own a phone, you had to rent one from AT&T -- was ill-advised. Today, on a smaller scale you see a profusion of occupational licensing regulations whose function is simply to arbitrarily make it more difficult for people to start new businesses and compete with incumbents. You also frequently see politicians wanting to find regulatory solutions to what are basically distributional issues. The appeal here is that trying to make businesses behave in such-and-such a way rather than just straightforwardly spending the money necessary to get the thing done allows you to avoid tax increases.
The trouble is that the distorting effect tends to be much larger than what you could have gotten by just spending money. Or you'll have regulations at cross-purposes like in DC where there are all kinds of impediments to building more housing units (maximum lot occupancy rules, maximum height rules, restrictions on your ability to subdivide, etc.) combined with regulations designed to ensure the availability of affordable housing.
A Big "If"
Tony Cordesman is a brilliant analyst, so I don't take issue with him lightly, but I think he ought to have re-read this sentence a few times before framing his op-ed the way he did:
Meaningful victory can come only if tactical military victories end in ideological and political victories and in successful governance and development.
That's, like, hard to do, man. And more to the point, if you start out with a grain of sand, then add another, then another, then another, etc. eventually you have yourself a heap of sand. The relationship between "tactical military victories" and "ideological and political victories [and] successful governance and development" isn't like that. We're not a dozen tactical military victories away from bringing successful governance to Iraq. I'd say we have no idea how to bring successful governance to Iraq. This isn't what our troops are trained and equipped to do, and it seems cruel to toss them into the theater for an indefinite period of time based on the vague hope that a formula for achieving this other stuff will emerge.
Blame the Blogger
I thought I might quote John Quiggin's witticism: "In the February edition of Prospect, William Skidelsky has a piece on the decline of book reviewing. As is standard for any adverse trend in the early 21st century, blogs get a fair bit of the blame."
Indeed. In particular, in recent months I've noticed a tendency on the part of certain fogies to try to accuse me personally, or else bloggers more generally, for the structural decline of the newspaper and, in particular, of the uniquely American model of a professionalized objective press. This as if the newspaper business were in tip-top shape as of mid-2002 and really only went into sharp decline when the Great Orange Satan moved to his community-based format and started seeing skyrocketing traffic. In truth almost every trend that people seem inclined to blame on blogs was under way long before there were any blogs. The internet has, in many instances, provided the first glimmer of hope in decades that long-dwindling media forms may be replaced by something.
Bad Omen?
The Obama campaign sent out an email yesterday bragging about this, but I'm not so sure it's a good thing. Greg Oden says:
Like a lot of young people, I’ve been drawn to Senator Obama’s campaign and the potential he has for our country. Obama gives Americans, especially young voters like me, a sense of hope in politics. He makes us feel like we can come together for the good of our country. Topics like education, and healthcare are very important to me and I agree with Senator Obama's views on these issues.
For those of you who normally ignore my NBA posts, Oden was one of the most highly-touted draft picks ever. In part, this is because he graduated from high school as part of the very first class of high school graduates who weren't allowed to leap straight to the NBA. Thus the guy who, by acclamation, would have been the number one pick in the 2006 draft instead had to play a year in college granting us a second whole year of being treated to talk of what a phenomenal prospect he was. Then the Portland Trailblazers won the draft lottery, took Oden with the number one pick, and Oden promptly suffered a season-ending injury. So is Obama like the much-hyped prospect who wins up letting your team down? A disturbing thought. Oden is, however, prepared to vouch for Obama's ability to talk about basketball from day one:
The conversation was quick - like two minutes but I got to talk to him like a real person. What I got from talking to him is that he is a real sports fan and he knew about the Blazers. He said that when I come back Brandon, LaMarcus and I will be a force next year. He also asked me about my knee, and he said he wasn't feeling my mohawk - lol. I laughed and explained to him that it's just a haircut to me and he told me he liked how I handle myself as a young man - "Thanks Mom."
This seems astute. The West very, very tough but you have to think the Blazers are well-positioned for the future. All that said, at this point I feel like the campaign comes down to Texas, and it's really Kevin Durant's endorsement that one wants. Or LeBron James. And of course Obama's international mystique is reminiscent of the San Antonio Spurs. At the end of the day, the NBA -- full of rich young black men -- seems like endlessly promising territory for Obama endorsements.
New New Media
Ross and I embarked on this exciting new adventure in web video punditry mostly to try to make sure it would actually work from a technical standpoint. I'm not sure the ideas we're expressing are really all that coherent, but the good news is that it's short and should lay the groundwork for a bold new world of timely, reasonably brief web video punditry. But here goes:
Jenny, who does the hard work of putting The Atlantic multimedia stuff together, says "Way better than either 'Hey Jealousy' or 'I Found Out About You'" thus setting a new standard for faint praise throughout the galaxy.
The Forever War
Kevin Drum snarks that "the surge is working so well that we have to keep it up forever."
What this highlights is the gap in strategic vision between proponents and opponents of the war. To opponents, the deep U.S. military involvement in Iraq has become a problem. The problem needs to be solved. That doesn't mean we need to start sprinting for the exists in a mad dash tomorrow, but it does mean that we need to be taking troops out as rapidly as can be done in a safe and responsible way. On another view, though, an indefinite military presence in Iraq isn't a problem, it's the goal of the policy. Under the circumstances, a policy is "working" not if it contributes to solving the problem, but just if it makes the continued presence of U.S. troops somewhat less costly.
U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Timothy Kingston
Tuesday Immaturity Blogging
Unlike Chris Hayes I don't see anything even remotely amusing about the idea of a "rock-solid conservative" House candidate named Manlove.
Fox News Porn
Very amusing, though Kay Steiger rightly wonders "is CNN or MSNBC any better?"
Texas Doesn't Count
Apparently the pre-spinning has begun as to why Texas doesn't count. Probably not a good sign for Clinton's fortunes in the Lone Star State.
Dude, Where My Real Wages?
Shrinking, that's where they are, as you can see in this nifty chart I stole from The New York Times. Felix Salmon remarks:
The chart doesn't mention the main reason for the fall: unusually high inflation. Since inflation is running at a 4% clip right now, you'd need wages to be rising at the same rate in nominal terms just to stay at zero on this chart. If food and energy prices stop rising at some point, real wages will start looking much healthier.
Of course by the same token, if prices started falling dramatically, then even a small pay cut would really be a pay raise. But what we have is the inflation uptick, and with it falling real wages for everyone who doesn't get at least a 4 percent raise this year, a problem that we hope won't be afflicting the all-important political blogging sector.
Inside/Outside
Christopher Maag does an interesting piece for Time magazine on the contrast between the Clinton campaign organization in Ohio -- dominated by the patronage networks of state and local officials -- and the Obama organization, which is an impressive quasi-spontaneous grassroots phenomenon carefully cultivated by the Obama campaign. The basic frame of the piece is that Obama's approach is better, but since the voting's not done yet, Maag's careful to include a hedge:
"I only started calling my people last week," said State Senator Dale Miller, a Democratic stalwart on Cleveland's west side. "In retrospect, if I had started a week or two earlier, we would be better off now."
Miller's organization remains formidable, however. He spent the last few months calling hundreds of supporters, asking them to volunteer for Clinton and tracking those who seemed responsive. He visited every neighborhood Democratic club in his district at least once, filling his clipboard with new volunteers. "The people I know may not be huge in number, but they are the people who are the most active in their neighborhoods," says Miller.
Clearly, I think, either approach could work. But what I think is interesting is the different implications for governing. If a President Clinton wants to pressure some Ohio members of congress into casting a tough vote they don't really want to cast, she has a lot of tools at her disposal for bringing them to heel. One thing she can't do, however, is generate pressure based on her local political organization in Ohio. After all, it's not her organization, it belongs to the state and local elected officials and she just borrows it from them. Obama, by contrast, may have that option. And what's more, it's a technique that can work "behind enemies lines" as it were, against Republican members of congress whose districts don't include any entrenched incumbent Democrats with their own organizations.
Will Obama in fact find a way to extend his campaign tools to the art of governing and political pressure? There's no way to tell. But he might. And much like his approach to campaign, it'd be a huge game-changer. On some level, after all, it's sort of irrelevant whether or not Obama's outsider organizing methods are actually superior. He didn't have the option of being the establishment candidate. What we know is that his organizing methods were effective enough and, at the end of the day, much more effective than the organizing methods of any previous presidential candidate.
401(k)
It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it was odd of Hillary Clinton to say that you're automatically enrolled in a 401(k) when you sign on with a 401(k)-providing insurer. This isn't the case, but it ought to be the case, and making the change has been proposed by many people.
Debate Wrapup
I'll admit to not having paid very close attention to this one. I don't think the mandates argument broke any new ground -- Clinton has me convinced that she's right on the policy, but doesn't have me convinced that this is significant enough to make up for the other problems with her candidacy. The way Russert handled the Louis Farrakhan issue was, I thought, pretty egregious but about what I expect from him. Clinton's classless handling of the aftermath was also about what I expect from her at this point. Beyond that, I just don't know. Through my own eyes, i.e. those of a person who's watched about a million Democratic primary debates at this point, the whole thing seems tedious. How does it seem to voters in Ohio and Texas who are watching these two go at it for a first or a second time? I don't know.
I will give props to the moderators for the what can you tell me about Russia's new leader question. I thought that was a good one. Out of left field questions are fun because the candidates don't have canned responses, but you need to find one that's legitimate and substantive and I think that one was. It reminded me, actually, that there are a whole host of things -- our relationship with India, for example -- I wish I'd seen the candidates debate in more detail during this long process.
February 27, 2008
The NAFTA Thing
I should also say that as someone who thinks NAFTA was a smart policy and an important-though-oversold policy achievement of Bill Clinton's administration, I find it kind of painful to watch. Hillary Clinton's husband's administration had a perfectly defensible record on trade policy and that is why she defended it in the past -- she ought to keep defending it now. Instead, we get these weird contortions from her and Obama pressing a very dubious line of attack that Clinton won't challenge on the merits.
Obama's Economic Team
Noam Scheiber, via Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw:
Like Bill Clinton in 1992, Obama's campaign boasts a cadre of credentialed achievers. Intellectually, however, the Obamanauts couldn't be more different. Clinton delighted in surrounding himself with big-think public intellectuals--like economics commentator Robert Reich and political philosopher Bill Galston. You'd be hard-pressed to find a political philosopher in Obama's inner wonk-dom. His is dominated by a group of first-rate economists, beginning with Goolsbee, one of the profession's most respected tax experts. A Harvard economist named Jeff Liebman has been influential in helping Obama think through budget and retirement issues; another, David Cutler, helped shape his views on health care. Goolsbee, in particular, is an almost unprecedented figure in Democratic politics: an academic economist with a top campaign position and the candidate's ear.
Offhand, the Goolsbee situation doesn't sound wildly dissimilar from Clinton administration figures like Lawrence Summers, though those guys weren't necessarily with the campaign from day one.
Gilbert and the Max
Chad Ford, previewing the 2008 free agent class, says this about Gilbert Arenas:
Arenas has turned himself into a max player the past few years, and despite recent knee troubles, will likely opt out of his contract to cash in on his newfound celebrity status. While he continues to maintain publicly that his first choice is to re-sign with Washington, it's not inconceivable that, given his eccentricity, he could change his mind. The biggest issue for Arenas is the same that plagues all the other free agents: Who else really has the money to pay him?
I'd like to see Agent Zero stay in Washington, but I hope the team drives a hard bargain. A "max player" is, in my, a player who somebody wants to offer a max deal to. As Ford notes, the only two teams likely to have significant cap space are Philadelphia and Memphis. He reports that "Grizzlies GM Chris Wallace has sent signals that the team might not spend its estimated $12 million in cap room this summer" and that "the Sixers will have around $10 million in cap space." Currently, Arenas makes $12 million. By opting out of the last year of his deal, he's made it clear that he wants a raise, but I don't see how he could get one unless the Wizards make an unforced error and pay him more than he can command on an open market.
If I were Ernie Grunfeld, I'd let Gilbert test the market waters to his heart's content and then unless wildly unexpected happens just beat the best offer he gets. The odds of being able to resign him for what he's making now -- or, indeed, somewhat less -- seem pretty good.
Flashback
Tim Russert asked, "Senator McCain, realistically, how long will American troops be in Iraq, and how much is it going to cost us?" John McCain replied:
I don't know the answer to that, but I'm telling you what the question is, and the critical aspect of this is: What happens in the next few months? Time is not on our side. People in 125-degree heat with no electricity and no fuel are going to become angry in a big hurry. The sophistication of the attacks on U.S. and allied troops have increased. And what we do in the next several months will determine whether we're in a very difficult situation or not, and there's still time, but we've got to act quickly.
That happened four and a half years ago on August 24, 2003. But what the country needs is strategic patience.
Up North
Since I last checked on developments in Iraq, it seems that Turkey's invaded and folks aren't so happy about it:
In Baghdad, the Iraqi government demanded that Turkish forces withdraw from northern Iraq, where they have been fighting Kurdish guerrillas who use the area as a base to mount attacks in Turkey. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq's cabinet condemned the incursion and called it a "violation of Iraq's sovereignty."
"The cabinet calls on Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately and stop the military interventions, and stresses that the military action by one side is unacceptable and threatens the good relations between the two neighboring countries," Dabbagh said.
But of course these protests are going to be ineffectual. Given the Iraqi government's dependence on the U.S. military, a Turkish invasion of Iraq that the United States approves of isn't something the Iraqi government can or will do anything about. Thus this incident becomes one more case where U.S.-supported Iraqi leaders see their credibility as national leaders leeched away. If you think of the goal in Iraq as helping to prop up a government that'll be able to stand up on its own, this sort of thing is a disaster. If, by contrast, the idea is to ensure that the authorities governing Iraq are permanently dependent on external American support to maintain their grip on power, it's actually pretty good. But once again, it all comes down to a question of what do you think the right strategic priority are for the United States, not to any question as simplistic as whether or not green-lighting a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq is "working."
NAFTA on the Merits
It's been objected that I should actually make an argument about NAFTA on the merits rather than simply assert that I think it was a good idea. I didn't do it because this is one of the most well-trod-over subjects in our political debate and I don't think I have a ton of original contributions to make. This paper makes some important points that go beyond a simplistic analysis of economic trends in Mexico, and I largely follow Brad DeLong on such matters.
As I said in the original post, I think it's clear that NAFTA was oversold during the initial debate when both sides started making wildly overblown claims about the likely impact of the deal on the United States. I'm not, moreover, one to run around going "oh noes, politicians are trying to secure votes by appealing to manufacturing workers' interests!" since I don't really know what else they're supposed to do. That said, it's simply not the case that U.S. trade policy is the cause of the structural decline of American manufacturing. It's mostly been driven by other factors, and lowered trade barriers have made most Americans better off. What's more, insofar as NAFTA was intended to improve the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical relationship and help consolidate moves toward political reform in Mexico, it seems to have been a success. The correct solution to the inequality-boosting elements of lowering trade barriers with low wage countries is higher taxes and better public services -- these proposals from Dean Baker for freer trade in high-end professional services are also a good idea.
Quality
Kevin Carey on the trouble with good colleges only being good because they select the best students. As he says, there are a lot of good reasons to want to go to a selective college from the standpoint of rational self-interest "they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of education those colleges provide." This, in turn, is a significant policy problem. We should want our higher education system as a whole to be adding value and not just sorting people. After all we could find much cheaper ways of sorting people than providing them with a four-year college education.
Ooops!
Clinton campaign urging undecided superdelegates to hold off from making commitments. It seems they've finally realized that as long as Clinton's in the middle of a massive primary losing streak, that only in fantasy-land are superdelegates going to break in her direction.
Question of the Day
Will John McCain be asked to specifically denounce each and every white supremacist leader in America who urges his followers to back McCain over Obama?
UPDATE: It seems that America's white supremacists aren't as uniformly anti-Obama as I'd thought. David Duke, at least, sees Obama as no worse than the alternatives, though some white supremacists do seem to be sticking to the traditional "black people bad, white people good" approach to politics.
Maybe I Should Be More Trusting
City Council member Phil Mendelson says he's concerned that DCPD detectives are carrying too many cases:
Police officials said that caseloads are manageable. Most detectives who work such crimes have about 10 cases at a time, they said, although some who work east of the Anacostia River have slightly higher caseloads. Those detectives tend to have more domestic violence cases, which are often easier to close, they said.
It couldn't possibly be that people who live east of the Anacostia River are much poorer and thus have less political clout and therefore enjoy inferior city serbices of all kinds, right?
The Denver Nuggets
There's a piece up on Hoopsworld arguing that the Denver Nuggets have a ton of talent but can't break into the elite because of a pick-up game mentality. I'm not so sure. One piece of alleged evidence in favor of this is the idea that Denver puts forth a "poor overall defensive effort." But according to Basketball Reference their defense is seventh in the league. That's pretty good. Certainly it's better than their offense, which is only thirteenth in the league.
I think people misunderstand Denver because, once again, of the pace illusion. Denver plays at the highest pace in the league, so if you look at points per game their offense looks better than it is, and their defense looks worse than it is. The fact of the matter, however, is that despite the fact that Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony are both alleged to be elite superstar scorers, their offense is distinctly mediocre because neither of them are actually very efficient scorers.
My Schemes Ruined
I was telling friends while playing poker yesterday that I had a brilliant plan to break new ground in the Obama-analysis sweepstakes: "He's not the liberal Reagan," I was going to say, "he's the American Pierre Trudeau." Shockingly, though, The Weekly Standard actually beat me to the punch on this. Of course they see it as a bad thing, whereas I meant it in a good way. Note that Trudeau is the dominant figure of 20th century Canada, governing the country almost unbroken from 1968 to 1984 so whatever the Standard may tell you about the problems with the Trudeau era, the reality is that Canadians liked him fine.
The subtext here, of course, is that post-Trudeau Canada is so inhospital to right-wingery that Canada's best and brightest conservative pundits have had to migrate south to ply their trade where folks like David Frum and Charles Krauthammer have become leading lights of the current wave of neoconservative thinking. Naturally, they fear and loathe Obama much as their comrades-in-arms up north feared and loathed Trudeau.
Dorgan for Obama
Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota is endorsing Barack Obama, on a call with reporters he's specifically citing trade-related issues as important to his thinking. Dorgan was a NAFTA opponent, and is a leading congressional skeptic of centrist consensus trade policies. He's also talking about Obama's greater ability to help build the party in "red" areas in the plains and the mountain states.
Stats Tell
The same Chad Ford article I mentioned early says that Andris Biedrins "falls somewhat into the Anderson Varejao category: energetic big man whose stats don't tell the whole story in terms of on-court contributions." But the story the stats tell is that Biedrins is a pretty good basketball player. Unless, that is, by "stats" you just mean "per game scoring average." But my stats say that Biedrins' ten points per game come on just seven field goal attempts. They tell me that he's also averaging ten rebounds and one block per game, and he's doing all this in 27.5 minutes as a young center who's coach likes to play small ball.
Ford's not wrong about Biedrins, the numbers say exactly what he's trying to say, namely that Biedrins is a good player and that especially given his age your team would be glad to have him. But for some reason he thinks these attributes are intangible when, in fact, they're right there in the numbers.
The Russert Factor
As long as everyone's hating on Tim Russert today, I thought I should to my Washington Monthly article on how much damage Russert and Russertism are doing to the country.
Tennessee GOP Goes for Smears
This is pretty disgusting -- we've got the whole thing, the use of "Barack Hussein Obama" accompanied by the photo of Obama wearing Somali clothing and the text all about Louis Farrakhan and how Obama hates the Jews. All courtesy of the Tennessee Republican Party, long-time friends of religious tolerance.
Early Ed Watch
I have a sneaking suspicion that Sara Mead's new Early Ed Watch blog at the New America Foundation is going to become this site's go-to source for early education news and analysis.
Obama Endorses Spurs
Barack Obama offers his endorsement to the San Antonio Spurs, terming them his "second-favorite team" after his hometown Chicago Bulls:
It seems a bit non-credible to me for Obama to cite the Spurs' no-flash, play-the-right-way image as the decisive factor. The Obama-esque element of San Antonio's team is the unlikely cosmopolitanism of the roster. In current NBA terms, though, Obama may be most like the Lakers -- a juggernaut that came out of nowhere.
William F. Buckley, RIP
National Review's founder has passed away. I think anyone in the ideological journalism business has to give the man his props. What's more, Robert Farley is certainly right that he seems preferable to his co-ideologues in some respects:
"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him that Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War One, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we are winning."
The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.
Of course the Buckley-era National Review was also an apologist for violent, anti-democratic, populist nationalist movements of the right in Spain, the Old Confederacy, and elsewhere though one wouldn't want to call those people fascists since, after all, they weren't liberals.
Little Captains
Chris Muir is rarely funny, but he's also rarely this bizarre.
Childless and Happy
A wave of pretty odd demographic hysteria seems to me to be sweeping across certain precincts of the country lately, a wave whose prophesies of economic doom in particular strike me as curiously unsupported by any kind of vaguely rigorous models or anything. So I appreciate all efforts to calm people down. That said, Ron Bailey's article on how being childless doesn't make people unhappy seemed to me to be a bit wide of the mark insofar as it didn't take into account the perspective of old people at all.
Whatever else raising children may be, it's also an expensive and time consuming pain in the ass that sharply limits your flexibility to do a variety of things for a large number of years. One can easily imagine the joys of parenthood being roughly offset by the burdens. But later in life, having a solid relationship with grownup kids and their children seems low-cost and hard-to-replace. Loneliness is very hard on people. To acknowledge that reality isn't to say we need to get all freaked out if the norm moves from 2-3 kids per family to 1-2 kids per family.
Ah, Reform
I have to say, I think it's pretty pathetic for Fred Wertheimer, erstwhile campaign finance reform advocate, to be punting like this on the issue of John McCain's public financing shenanigans. Pleading lack of legal expertise in this front would make sense if we'd taken the issue to a lawyer who was begging off and saying it's outside his area of competence. But Wertheimer is a reform advocate. Surely he ought to come up with an opinion as to whether or not the precedent McCain is trying to set is one we should welcome or one we should regret.
As a refresher, here's what McCain thinks should be allowable. Candidate enters the race. Candidate experiences fundraising difficulties. Candidate signs up to receive primary campaign public funds, knowing full well that this will commit him to abide by spending limits during the pre-convention period. Candidate uses promise of public funding to help secure a loan for his campaign. Candidate uses loaned funds to help wrap up the nomination well before the convention. Having become his party's nominee, the candidate's fundraising woes are gone. Candidate notes that he hasn't yet spent any public funds (merely used the promise that they would be forthcoming to secure a loan and spent the loaned funds) so asserts that he can decline to accept them, decline to abide by spending limits, and repay the loan and finance the rest of the campaign with the now-forthcoming special interest cash.
Now whether or not that procedure conforms to the law as written is clearly an issue for legal experts. But whether or not, as a policy matter, the reform community favors the creation of the kind of loophole McCain wants to create is not. I have a hard time imagining how any reform advocate could favor the McCain loophole. But maybe some reformers do favor it. If so, they should say so and give their reasons. If not, they should say so and give their reasons. But this mum's the word game, this effort to cover McCain's ass while keeping their own asses covered, is just pathetic. What do they think, that if they carry McCain's water for him and prove to all the world that he can thumb his nose at them and pay no price for it, and then McCain becomes president, then they're going to have the leverage and access they want? That's preposterous.
February 28, 2008
Ohio and NAFTA
Via Brad DeLong, a David Leonhart column on how little NAFTA has to do with Ohio's economic woes. Still, I think hearing that the "more important cause of Ohio's jobs exodus is the rise of China, India and the old Soviet bloc" rather than trade with Mexico as such is going to do relatively little to cause Ohions to reverse their skepticism about trade policy. With trade as with every other policy area, most people's understanding of the details is very fuzzy.
"NAFTA" means "recent trade phenomena" and there's no denying that recent trends in international trade have caused economic dislocation in the rust belt. Still, responsible politicians wouldn't be promising to help Ohioans out by renegotiating NAFTA when renegotiating NAFTA won't actually deliver much help to the state. It's a bit of a cynical ploy -- by thundering loudly and pounding the table about the need to renegotiate the deal, you set yourself up for a situation where very minor modifications that barely impact anyone (for good or for ill) count as fulfilling the promise.
Paxson and UHF
It seemed a bit mysterious as to why "Bud" Paxson would go on the record as contradicting John McCain about his involvement in the Pittsburgh TV station sale matter, but Mark Kleiman flags the relevant story. Basically, Paxson (among others) also wanted a much bigger favor related to a spectrum giveaway to owners of UHF spectrum and McCain led the congressional charge against Paxson. Under the circumstances, you can both see why Paxson would be out for revenge and why McCain would be super-outraged that people would cast aspersions upon his integrity.
That said, it seems typically McCainian to decide that that outrage gives him a license to lie. He could defend his actions with regard to Pittsburgh on the merits. Or he could admit that he did a favor for Paxson with regard to Pittsburgh, but argue that this is more than counterbalanced out by his later actions. But the "I'm a good person so I'll deny having had meetings I actually had" line doesn't really wash.
NY State Senate
It seems that a couple of days ago the Republican Party's majority in the New York State Senate got cut to just one seat. The significance of this may escape non-locals, but the basic deal is that the New York legislature is horribly gerrymandered so as to make it very, very, very difficult for Democrats to get a majority in the State Senate even though it's a very Democratic state. This state of affairs is part of a tawdry implicit bargain between the Democratic Assembly leader and the Republican Senate leader, whereby the two of them essentially rule the state through backdoor deals irrespective of public opinion and the outcome of gubernatorial elections.
Meanwhile, it has the effect of giving the Republicans a big say in the congressional districting process in a heavily Democratic state. Given the underlying distribution of actual voters in the state, were the Democrats to seize control of the Senate district boundaries would be drawn to produce a couple of new House Democrats plus the State Senate lines would be redone in such a way as to make a GOP comeback unlikely.
Credibility
Michael Cohen seems to me to be quite right to be skeptical that cultural exchanges of the sort typified by the New York Philharmonic's recent visit to Pyongyang could play a constructive role in "opening things up" in North Korea. The DPRK is just too despotic and locked-down for whatever you might want to communicate to the North Korean people to get through. But that said, I also don't understand the worry that a visit of this sort will "provide international credibility to a terrible regime (probably the worst in the world)." I mean, how so?
Someone says to you "North Korea, that's gotta the worst regime in the world." Then you reply, "no, no, the New York Philharmonic played there, it can't be so bad." And then what -- he's supposed to say back "man, you're right, I suddenly find Kim Jong-Il very credible!" I mean, it is what it is; the DPRK is an incredibly horrible regime and I never hear anyone say otherwise. I oftentimes detect a disturbing level of subjectivism in foreign policy circles, as if people are seriously at risk of forgetting that the US is a mighty superpower and North Korea is ruled by awful despots and thus a top priority to be to find symbolic ways of endlessly reiterating those facts.
Mandates: Eh
Jacob Hacker says Obamacare's lack of a mandate is no big deal. To be fair, I think the main concern wasn't so much with Obama's initial lack of a mandate. His plan, as written, might or might not leave a hard-to-guesstimate number of people without health insurance depending on various details that will, necessarily, need to be worked out by congress. It's possible that once such a plan went into effect, that it would work in some problematic way that could be fixed by a mandate, and then a mandate could be added.
The trouble is that having put out the sort of nasty anti-mandate mailers his campaign has sent around, he's now arguably closed that door, and committed himself to a policy vision that's likely to prove unworkable. I think people are probably overstating the extent to which it would be problematic to pirouette on this topic in the future, but the concern is about the future not the short-run significance of the mandate.
The Hagee Factor
John McCain picks up the endorsement of Christian for war John Hagee. The article describes him thusly:
Hagee, who heads a 19,000-member church in San Antonio, is best known for his outspoken support of Israel and writings on the Middle East, where he envisions a blood-soaked clash between East and West leading to the return of Jesus Christ.
Israel, as you may have heard, is actually located in the Middle East and populated by Jews. Thus, it's not obviously in which sense envisioning a blood-soaked Middle East clash that leads to the return of Jesus Christ constitutes support for Israel. AIPAC has decided to embrace the guy, but what he stands for is the destruction of Israel:
He argues that a strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russia's leadership, as outlined in chapters 38 and 39 of the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” During his appearance on Hinn's program at the end of last March, for example, the host enthused, “We are living in the last days. These are the most exciting days in church history,” but then went on to add, “We are facing now [the] most dangerous moment for America.” At one point, Hinn clapped his hands in delight and shouted, “Yes! Glory!” and then urged his viewers to donate money faster because he is running out of time to preach the gospel.
Ask yourself if uniting the Arab nations in an anti-Israel alliance under the Russian banner sounds like supporting Israel? To me, it sounds like a disaster.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald sensibly wonders why it is that an African-American politician is expected to deliver thirty lashes to a black Muslim leader with despicable views like Louis Farrakhan, while it's completely acceptable for a white politician to actively and successfully cour the support of a white Christian leader with despicable views like Hagee.
Thought of the Day
It's been pretty widely observed that Barack Obama's relatively brief career in elective office hasn't actually included any tough races against Democrats. Less noted, but also true, is that John McCain's rather long career in electoral politics hasn't included any tough races either. Like Obama, McCain's toughest fights have come in primaries -- specifically his successful 1982 congressional primary, his unsuccessful 2000 primary, and his successful 2008 primary.
In part as a consequence of these realities, and in part as a consequence of the particular dynamics of the 2008 primaries, very few people have heard McCain criticized from the left or heard Obama criticized from the right. That's an unusual situation, and it means that public perceptions of both men could prove quite fragile and prone to shifting once the battle is joined in earnest.
Designing Barack Obama
Newsweek's Andrew Romano inteviews graphic design guru Michael Bierut to learn the typographical secrets to Obama's success. If that leaves you hungry for more, don't miss this (non-political) web video featuring Bierut that The Atlantic did back in January:
And here's Virginia Postrel's great article on fonts.
Criticizing Obama
Lanny Davis' claim that it's hard to criticize Barack Obama without being accused of playing the race card seems to me to be pretty typical of the myopia of the Clinton campaign. I've never heard anyone allege that Hillary Clinton's criticisms of Obama's health care plan involved a "race card." Nor have I heard her criticisms of his support for the 2005 energy bill describe in such a way. Nor have I heard the general idea that she has more political experience dealing with the right-wing attack machine described that way. What's more, in the campaign I watched Clinton's campaign was actually doing pretty well with those criticisms and then wound up running off the rails later.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other things the Clinton campaign could have said that would have been totally nonracial. Their problem is that on a lot of important issues where there seems to be a contrast, they didn't really want to defend their position. Clinton could have said that Obama's opposition to the 2002 AUMF for Iraq illustrated that he has dangerous left-wing opinions about national security issues. She could have said that, yes, the Clinton administration backed NAFTA and rightly so. But they didn't want to do that stuff, because they thought it would have left them on the wrong side of public opinion. Rather than try to persuade people of the merits of their case, they tried to deny that there was a disagreement. But that is what made it hard for Clinton to attack Obama -- outside of health care, she didn't really want to draw issue contrasts, and that left her without a great deal to say.
Heer on Buckley
Jeet Heer has a kind and thoughtful appreciation of William F. Buckley's life and career that people should definitely check out.
Trudeaumania
To revisit yesterday's Pierre Trudeau post, I should say that I don't actually think an Obama/Trudeau analogy sheds any light on anything in particular. Canadian politics is very different from U.S. politics. The Canadian language issue and the American racial issue are both important and longstanding sources of division, but they're not actually similar in any of their particulars. So you can make an analogy, but it's necessarily going to be very superficial and not really enhance anyone's understanding of anything.
We Got It For Cheap
House Republicans pissed that standing up for telecom immunity hasn't been the fundraising bonanza they were hoping for. But, of course, it's all about keeping the country safe with them.
Something a Bit Different
It seems that the world's largest pliosaur fossil has been discovered off the coast of Norway. It's fifteen meters long, which is a full five meters longer than the previous record holder. The media sensationalists are calling it a "sea monster" but the classic mythical Scandinavian sea monster is squid- or octopus-like in nature and, indeed, the non-extinct giant squid seems more monstrous than this pliosaur who doesn't really deserve to be slandered.
Listening to Sageman
David Ignatius says that "politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman." The good news, from my point of view, is that based on Ignatius' writeup, Sageman's new book doesn't sound all that different from his previous book, Understanding Terror Networks. Bottom line:
[W]e are not facing what President Bush called "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation," but something that is more limited and manageable -- if we make good decisions.
The trouble is that ever since 9/11, we've adopted a set of incredibly harmful and counterproductive policies (the war in Iraq has, of course, been considerably more costly in terms of lives lost, people crippled, and stuff destroyed than was 9/11). Rather than taking a focused, disciplined approach to a dangerous-but-manageable situation, the Bush administration has engaged in a series of flailing overreactions that have, improbably, actually made it possible for a relatively small group of people to dramatically alter the course of the world without expending any vast resources. The whole thing's been a disaster. James Fallows points out that you can find much material along these lines in his great 2006 cover story on the need to back off from the idea of a "war on terror."
In my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand I observe that there's a substantial political problem here as well. Given how firmly entrenched the wrongheaded framework is, it's generally not worth any particular politician's while on any particular day to stick his or her neck out and try to prick the conceptual bubble Bush has erected around these questions. It's risky. It makes more sense to try to just come up with ideas that make sense within the Massive Ideological Struggle framework. But as long as that framework goes unchallenged, it's incredibly difficult to make the case for liberal alternatives to the policies we've been implementing.
That's where outside pressure and things like primary campaigns can make a difference -- they create situations in which the balance of incentives can flip and people have reason to start trying to dismantle the sort of grandiose vision that Bush and now John McCain have been propounding. However it gets done in the end, however, the main point is that it's absolutely vital to do it over the long run. Trying to cram good policies into a framework that was designed to support bad policies is a thankless and ultimately futile task.
Reform Institute
At the time, I found the great McCain-Feingold dispute of 199X-2001 incredibly baffling. On the one hand, you had a lot of reformers and liberals lining up behind a law that pretty plainly wasn't going to make any kind of meaningful difference in the casual corruption of the political process. On the other hand, you had a bunch of conservatives treating John McCain's heresy on the misguided-but-meaningless piece of legislation as if he were personally performing abortions for married lesbian couples on the Senate floor. George Will, in particular, was just vicious and, as you can see with today's column, still harbors an immense distaste for McCain that I find hard to square with the two men's respective ideological positioning. That said, Will does us all a service in reminding the world of an under-covered aspect of McCain's career:
In 2001, McCain, a situational ethicist regarding "big money" in politics, founded the Reform Institute to lobby for his agenda of campaign restrictions. It accepted large contributions, some of six figures, from corporations with business before the Commerce Committee (e.g., Echosphere, DISH Network, Cablevision Systems Corp., a charity funded by the head of Univision).
Unlike his efforts to manipulate the public financing system, this particular McCainite gambit is pretty unambiguously legal, but that very legality and McCain's eagerness to exploit it mostly seems to me to underscore the hollowness of commitment to political reform. Now who knows, maybe Cablevision just felt really strongly about "soft money" contributions to political parties, but it sure seems pretty unlikely.
Poor Form
Doesn't it seem like Harold Ickes should wait until the primary campaign is actually finished before dishing like this on the record about his complaints with Mark Penn? This is what anonymous sources are for. You talk on the record after you lose.
Tunnel Vision
Andrew writes that "McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq." Instead, "He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work."
I'm by no means sure it will fail. A certain notion of can-do pragmatism is deep in American political culture, and that kind of forget the problems of the past let's roll up our sleeves and talk about what's working now attitude has a certain appeal. But it shouldn't work. And the reason it shouldn't work is that a given military strategy doesn't just "succeed" or "fail" in a vacuum, it needs to be understood in some kind of strategic context. If you understand the war as a giant mistake which created a large problem that's now in need of a solution, that creates one set of ideas about what counts as a solution. If you understand the war as an opening salvo in a campaign to use the U.S. military to remake the Persian Gulf, then working becomes a very different matter.
That said, the politics of the war will depend, crucially, on the actual situation. Surge proponents presumably think things will get better and better, whereas skeptics are inclined to see these stormclouds on the horizon and wonder if it's about to start pouring again. Thus you have two different political strategies built in large part out of different substantive ideas about how events are likely to play out. There's just no way to do the political analysis without adding a substantive analysis.
Butler Even More Injured Than Before
The Wizards' injury situation gets worse and worse as it seems Caron Butler has a "labral tear" which is worse than what they though he had. He's out indefinitely. Arenas is out indefinitely. And there are so many bad teams in the East that there's no guarantee the Wizards can even manage to sink low enough to snag a high lottery pick for the trouble of our ruined season.
Kitty Hawk to India
The Navy denies it but it seems that rumors are circulating that the United States will step into the breach of stalled India-Russia negotiations about getting India an aircraft carrier by having us give them the USS Kitty Hawk, which is slated to be decommissioned. Robert Farley explains why this is a good idea.
There's a substantial "international public good" aspect to much of what the US military does, and I think that's particularly true of the Navy. That's good for us, as far as it goes, but it makes sense for us to find ways to do that stuff in ways that allows for cooperation and burden-sharing. Helping friendly countries improve their naval capabilities in ways that both brings our countries closer together and save us money would seem like a big step in the right direction.
February 29, 2008
McCain's Radical Preacher
Here's some of Pastor John Hagee's thoughts on the Jews:
It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.
Basically, we got what was coming to us. Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Hagee might look favorably on a foreign policy aimed at prompting the destruction of Israel at the hands of a Russo-Arab coalition, though it is a bit odd that he's named his pressure group designed to advance this agenda "Christians United for Israel." Even odder, many of the erstwhile leaders of the American Jewish community have chosen to embrace the person in question.
John McCain, naturally, is "very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support." Meanwhile, Hagee seems to hate Catholics about as much as Jews, and Muslims quite a bit more so. McCain has a lot to be proud of.
Friday Prank Time
Funny stuff. That's via Tim Lee and Julian Sanchez. Of course it's mostly funny in a sad kind of way.
The Case for Immunity
Watch in amazement as George W. Bush, President of the United States, explains that we must refrain from punishing lawbreaking telecom firms because if they get punished for breaking the law, they might not be willing to break it again in the future. There's certainly a part of that analysis I'm prepared to endorse.
Talking to David Simon
The Wire's creator was in DC earlier this week and did some press and events, prompting reports from Kay Steiger and Peter Bryce. At this point, I'm just eager to see how things end . . . I've found substantial elements of season five to be disappointing, but there are substantial elements of brilliance and it is quite possible that the end will wind up vindicating much of what I've thus far found unsatisfactory.
Leap Day
It's February 29! Weird!
Oh Noes!
Ezra's certainly right to say that it's bizarre for George W. Bush to criticize Barack Obama on the grounds that "it'll send the wrong message" for Obama to hold a meeting with "a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs" considering that Bush does exactly that on a regular basis. Is it a good thing that the people of China and Russia and Saudi Arabia are, like the people of Cuba and Syria and Iran, ruled by dictators? Of course not. And if the lessons of history indicated that some kind of "no meetings ever" policy caused those regimes to melt and transform into wholesome democracies, then we wouldn't be having this debate.
But things don't work like that, and in the world as it is it's hardly practical to eschew all meetings with everyone whose political system you don't approve on. The question is, thus, whether or not this posture of creating a mostly arbitrary class of "bad guy" that we're going to take down with our awesome powers of snubbing accomplishes anything meaningful. Obama's contention is "no." Bush's contention is "yes" but he has absolutely nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile, I think being attacked by the president helps Obama. These kind of criticisms may carry some weight when delivered by Hillary Clinton or John McCain, but having Bush give voice to the same concerns merely underscores the extent to which Clinton and McCain are arguing from a position that's deeply continuous with the mindset of the Bush years. How many people are surveying the mess Bush has made of things and thinking "we need more of the same?"
They Make Music Videos
Funny stuff:
On a less amusing, but more substantive note, it's worth understanding that these out-of-context snatches of McCainiana really do fit into the broader context of his career. They're not random gaffes and they're not primary season rhetoric aimed at ingratiating himself to the GOP base. McCain was arguing in favor of a much more aggressive American military posture when it was unfashionable from 1999-2001, he was in favor of it when it was wildly popular in 2003, and he continued to argue for it when it became a narrowcast message appealing only to hardcore Republicans by 2006-2007. This is more-or-less what he thinks.
Back in 1999, for example, he broke with much of his party's leadership not to support the Clinton administration's policy in the Balkans, but to criticize it as both insufficiently forceful and insufficiently ambitious. Rather than a bombing campaign against Serbia with limited objectives, McCain wanted a full-scale ground invasion, arguing on hardball that we ought to "do everything necessary to gain victory" and heartily assenting to Chris Matthews' invitation to define "victory" as "not to go to the negotiating table with some guy and beg him for a deal, but to tell him what to do." I think it was clear then and continues to be clear now that launching a land war aimed at Slobodan Milosevic's unconditional surrender would have shattered NATO, stripped the war of its tenuous international legal legitimacy, and likely gotten us bogged down in a very messy post-war situation in Serbia proper. But McCain wasn't chastened by the success of a more limited venture in the former Yugoslavia and he wasn't chastened by the failure of a more grandiose venture in Iraq. This is just what he thinks.
Good for Metro
WMATA comes to its senses and commits to transit-oriented development in the vicinity of Metro stations rather than just unloading parcels for cash. Meanwhile, for a week now I've been obsessed with these two (one, two) bits of Capital Region transit porn.
Credit Cards
It's the ultimate credit card infographic over at Foreign Policy magazine. South Korea's surge of credit card debt is intriguing, I'd like to know more about what the deal is with that.
Ethics Come to Louisiana
Rising conservative star and now-governor of Louisiana seems to be on the side of the angels with this successful ethics reform package that should clean up some of the bayou muck off the state's legendarily shady politics.
It does seem to me, though, that the condition of a jurisdiction's formal policies on government ethics are more likely to be a symptom than a cause of the actual state of play. If you have the relevant social conditions to support good government -- competent media, engaged citizenry, civil society groups that can form the basis of electoral coalitions, a political culture that values honesty -- then a politician who engages in a lot of shady behavior is likely to find himself voted out of office whether or not the shadiness in question is formally illegal. Conversely, absent adequate social conditions even the most admirable legal framework becomes a dead letter -- nobody investigates violations and/or nobody cares. At the end of the day there are always going to be loopholes in whatever scheme you create. You see good government when and where the citizens want it and are able to punish those who don't give it to them.
Whose Identity? Which Politics?
Ann Friedman has a great column on the subject of identity and solidarity in politics, pivoting off the Clinton-Obama race:
After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power.
Well said. Given that most people don't have particularly fine-grained or coherent opinions about political issues, questions of identity and solidarity are destined to play a large role in voting behavior. But certain efforts to mobilize concepts of identity are stigmatized, while others are treated as just plain ol' politics.
I'm Confused
I don't understand this Clinton campaign memo at all. Key excerpt:
The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.
Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.
If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.
So if the candidate who's leading in delegates, national polls, fundraising, and states won can't sweep the March 4 primaries, then Clinton is the real winner? Maybe they should just go back to arguing that Texas doesn't count.
Demographic Hysteria
People who didn't get my reference the other day to a "wave of pretty odd demographic hysteria" sweeping the country should definitely check out Johann Hari's review of Mark Steyn's America Alone. Alternative, you could read Steyn's book and experience the hysteria first hand. For a much less hysterical (and less racialist) take that still sees falling birthrates as a huge problem, pick up Philip Longman's The Empty Cradle.
It seems to me that the Longman version of the thesis, where population decline creates serious economic problems, at least could be true. To be convinced, though, I'd want to see more in the way of models that explicate the argument. Also relevant in this regard is Megan McArdle's non-alarmist take on the aging of the baby boom generation. In the greater scheme of things, replacing "maybe a proxy war will spin out of control and Soviet ICBMs will destroy major American cities" with "maybe a rising dependency ratio will lead to flat GDP per capita" as a problem scenario seems like a change for the better.
The Proverbial Tank
One occupational hazard of punditry and blogging is being accused of being "in the tank" for someone or other. Another, of course, is actually being in the tank in question. But where does that phrase come from? What kind of tank? Julian Sanchez explores.
The Current
Yesterday, The Atlantic debuted a new feature available on the homepage and also at its own URL called "the Current." The idea is to take several of the day's most interesting stories, every day, and combine a brief take by a member of the Atlantic family with a curated guide to the best opinions available on the subject around the web.
McCain the Sellout
Having heard this, I think it seems somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I met a smart conservative thinker last night who explained to me the conservative base's fear about John McCain in understandable terms for the first time. Basically, McCain or no McCain this still looks like a bad year for the GOP. If he wins, it's likely to be a personal win based on his persona and tarnishing Obama's persona, in which the Democrats still pick up some House and Senate seats. Next up, it's governing time. McCain's not someone who enjoys a strong personal or professional relationship with John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, and he doesn't owe any great debt to the GOP activist base. Under the circumstances, it's plausible to imagine him striking a bunch of compromises with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on domestic issue in order to get a freer hand with which to conduct foreign policy.
That does seem plausible to me. On the other hand, it strikes me as an equally plausible story about Mitt Romney who had a much more substantial record of reaching compromises with a Democratic legislature. But if you put a lot of weight on purely personality-driven factors, I can see the particular fear of McCain since by all accounts he just doesn't like the Republican congressional leaders.
That said, a plausible story is just that, a plausible one. Campaign promises are a very imperfect guide to governing, but they're still one of the best guides we've got. The safest thing seems to me to assume that McCain more-or-less means what he says, and that if he wins he'll govern on the platform he just ran and won on.
Pick Up the Phone
This seems like a pretty effective and well-made ad to me:
That said, the question becomes who do I want picking up the phone -- the candidate who voted for invading Iraq, or the other one? The candidate willing to take some controversial stands on national security issues or the one who's addicted to the politics of fear as a weapon and timidity as a defense mechanism? Most of all, the ultimate upshot of this sort of "are you experienced?" politics is that John McCain ought to be the next president. But while I'd like to have experienced hands at the levers of power, what I'd really like is a president who has good ideas and the courage to stand up for them.
As someone interested in spearheading the looming nineties alt-rock renaissance, however, I'm pleased to see Matchbox 20 references entering our punditry.
The Dated John Rawls
Yesterday, Tyler Cowen asked "Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?" Ezra Klein decided to turn it around on the liberals, noting that "Rawls would seem an obvious contender, as would Susan Moller Okin." As it happens, I finished Samuel Freedman's excellent newish book Rawls -- an extended explication of the man's body of work -- recently and among other things it served to me as a reminder of how dated A Theory of Justice seems some respects.
Now don't get me wrong, I think it "holds up" perfectly well in the sense of continuing to be a vital work of political philosophy. But in another sense of "holding up" it has pretty little to say about our contemporary political debates. The main antagonist of Rawls' egalitarian liberalism is, in the book, some form of utilitarianism which just isn't at all the structure of our political arguments at all. That's not really a failing on Rawls' part as his project is his project, and not some other thing, but it is a noteworthy aspect of the situation.
Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family by contrast seems to me to have a much more clear and direct relevance to things people argue about today. The premise that women and men deserve political and social equality is something few people would disagree with these days, but Okin shows that some surprisingly radical conclusions about the status quo can follow from that in a way that's relevant in some obvious ways to arguments that you see in the cut-and-thrust of contemporary practical political debates. Rawls has created something vastly more theoretically ambitious, but in part in virtue of that ambition it's much less clear what the actual implications are. Arguments about what sorts of policies do or do not maximize the well-being of the worst-off turn out to be extremely controversial in ways that make it extremely difficult to say what a Rawlsian take on this or that would be.
NAFTA Crosstalk
Yesterday, Canadian television reported that Obama advisors were telling Canada's ambassador in Washington not to take the candidate's NAFTA rhetoric too seriously. Now what really seems to have happened is that Austan Goolsbee tried to get someone from the Canadian consulate in Chicago to be a bit less worried about Obama. Whatever the details, this kind of ambiguous messaging is likely to recur time and again.
I recall being at a meeting in Cambridge, MA around the time of the 2004 Democratic Convention where John Kerry's top economic and foreign policy advisors were essentially promising a group of assembled ambassadors that all of his anti-trade rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. This seemed like a typically Kerryish thing to have happen, but it would serve Obama may to try to avoid the same kind of thing repeating.
Jews for Obama
An effort to push back on some of the anti-Obama smears circulating in Jewish circles.
Amateur Hour
Slate's John Dickerson asks an obvious question on a conference call with Hillary Clinton's campaign: "What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" After an uncomfortably long moment during which neither Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein have anything to say, and then Lee Feinstein tries to step in with a save and starts talking about Clinton's endorsement by high-level military officials. Give it a listen:
That's a hat tip to Jennifer Skalka. Feinstein, the campaign's foreign policy guy, is making the best of a bad situation here. But the more strictly political people walked into a debacle. How could they go forward with that ad without having a good answer to the question on hand? It's inept in the extreme.
March 1, 2008
Am I a Neocon?
Jacob Heilbrun and Eli Lake moot the issue:
I'll certainly cop to a sarcastic style of argumentation, but I sort of thought that was just because we're all Jews -- not just the neocons and me and Ackerman, but writers I look up to like Josh Marshall and Eric Alterman, etc., etc.
The Dean Legacy
Ari Berman has a great piece in The Nation about Howard Dean's legacy inside the Democratic Party. He argues, among other things, that we can understand Barack Obama's success in part as due to the fact that he looked at the promise of Deanism and decided to try to build and improve upon it whereas Hillary Clinton looked at its failures and decided to try to turn her back on the whole enterprise. Noam Scheiber did a piece on some similar themes back in late January.
The Nineties
I saw the amusing Definitely, Maybe last night and was eager to proclaim it our world's first nineties period film. Obviously, we have a lot of movies set in the nineties, but I thought this was the first movie made in a distinctly post-nineties time about the nineties. This morning, though, I'm remembering Primary Colors as an earlier example. Are there others? Any that don't involve Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign? I can't remember if the film version of About a Boy follow the book in using Kurt Cobain's death as a plot point?
McCain on Hagee
Initially, John McCain had an admirably straight-talking like on John Hagee -- he was proud to be supported by the anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, "pro-Israel" Christian leader who hopes to see the Middle East plunged into massive war that will result in the end of the world. Now he's getting flip-floppety:
"Yesterday, Pastor John Hagee endorsed my candidacy for president in San Antonio, Texas. However, in no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which I obviously do not.
"I am hopeful that Catholics, Protestants and all people of faith who share my vision for the future of America will respond to our message of defending innocent life, traditional marriage, and compassion for the most vulnerable in our society."
That's some weak tea. When Byron Dorgan endorses Barack Obama, we take it for granted that Obama doesn't agree with Dorgan about every single issue out there. Similarly when Rudy Giuliani endorses McCain that doesn't mean they agree about everything. The issue here has to do with the role of extremists in public life. Barack Obama never sought support from Louis Farrakhan, never appeared on stage with Farrakhan, never pronounced himself proud to be backed by Farrakhan, but was nonetheless asked on national television to specifically disavow the man. People don't want to put a political coalition that includes Farrakhan in office.
McCain and his staff actively sought out Hagee's endorsement, he appeared and campaigned with Hagee, he said he was proud to be backed by Hagee. Hagee is, in short, part of McCain's political strategy. Now he tells us he doesn't agree with Hagee about everything. Well, which things? Are we supposed to believe that McCain's not into the bigotry, or the foreign policy aimed at apocalypse, but just likes Hagee because of their shared opposition to gay marriage? Is McCain going to be courting Osama bin Laden's endorsement? It's reminiscent of McCain's on-again, off-again quest for the support of "agents of intolerance" like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. McCain's trying to wink with one eye to a segment of the electorate, wink with his other eye at his fans in the media, and somehow maintain a reputation for straight talk throughout all this.
Throwing in the Towel
It seems to me that Bill Clinton must have concluded that Hillary Clinton can't possibly win the nomination at this point, or else it's hard to see why he would be holding a high-profile event with Frank Giustra at this time. Giustra, the Times reported, is a businessman who Clinton helped get a lucrative contract in Kazakhstan in exchange for a large donation to the Clinton Foundation.
The Truth About Kriston Capps
Kriston Capps, University of Texas alumn, takes the student newspaper to task for its petty decision to endorse Hillary Clinton on the apparent grounds that Barack Obama wouldn't get them extra debate tickets. What Capps isn't telling you is his own shameful record of Texas ticket shenanigans when, as a member of the Liberal Arts Council, he sold his fellow students down the river and supported enhanced science requirements in exchange for access to the Dean's box at Texas football games. Shocking stuff, but true. Or at least truthy.
Sausage Being Made
Kevin Drum shows us a slice of farcical congressional involvement in the defense procurement process. Basically, everyone agrees that it's absolutely vital to the nation's defense that the Air Force's next generation of aerial tankers be made by whichever company has production facilities in the senator in question's state. To say something nice about John McCain, he may be soft on bigotry and the apocalypse but my impression is that he's done more than most to try to precent procurement from becoming a complete and total sham.
Clinton Country
Whatever else is happening, Hillary Clinton seems to have a clear lead in Rhode Island. Crucially, only heavily Catholic northeastern states that hold primaries count, so she's in good shape.
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Heads in the Sand
