Russia's having it's basically shametastic election today that'll put Dmitry Medvedev is the President's office, at which point Putin is supposed to become Prime Minister and keep running the country. I guess the only real question is whether or not that gambit of Putin's will work or if over time Medvedev will use his office's large de jure powers to endure that he's de facto running the country. It's worth recalling that when Putin first took office, he was seen as a cipher handpicked by Boris Yeltsin to do the Yeltsin clan's bidding.
Like Spencer Ackerman, I'm having trouble believing this was actually published -- it's a long argument by Charlotte Allen in The Washington Post in favor of the proposition that women are dumb. That's no exaggeration, that's what the piece is about. Plus: frenology:
Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size).
Presumably if we left Allen out of the sample, things might look different.
Thus far, I believe televised debates in the presidential campaign have all been happening on cable news channels and, thus, in low definition. General election debates will, by contrast, be shown on the networks and thus in high definition in those households with HDTVs. Given the age disparity between the candidates and McCain's history of skin cancer, I think one has to believe that more pixels-per-inch isn't going to serve McCain's cause very well. We'll be living in an era when only a minority of households have HD, but it's plausible to imagine that those who do and those who don't will come away with different impressions of the event, like the radio/TV contrast in the Nixon/Kennedy matchup of 1960.
UPDATE: It seems there's a CNNHD which had broadcast high-def debates. I just haven't seen it because Comcast doesn't carry it.
Call me crazy, but I found the latest Pew poll to be almost insanely good news for Barack Obama's prospects of beating John McCain. In particular, check out these results on the left. They don't, on the face of things, seem like very good news for Obama. But they come in the context of a poll that shows Obama beating McCain by a large 50-43 margin. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the best argument McCain has available to him is to try to persuade voters that Obama isn't tough enough on national security issues. Conversely, Obama's people will try to argue that McCain is too much of a warmonger. Given that a lot of what McCain is going to be looking to accomplish has been done already and he's still losing, this looks like trouble to me.
Similarly, Obama is winning even though he's doing unusually poorly among self-identified Democrats. In particular, older white working class Democrats seem drawn to McCain in pretty large numbers. But you've got to consider that at this point almost ever older white working class Democrat in America has been the target of a lot of messaging from Hillary Clinton arguing that Obama is too inexperienced and too dovish. They haven't, meanwhile, heard any messaging from anyone about how John McCain wants to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare benefits. Obama, in other words, is currently winning despite weakness with this demographic, and is also almost certain to look less weak among this demographic in November than he does today.
Meanwhile, in more good news for Democrats, in a Clinton-McCain matchup, Clinton wins too with a somewhat different pattern of support. Basically, even though 95 percent of Americans have never heard McCain criticized from the left, he's still behind against either candidate. I think it's a pretty bad position for him.
Michael Kazin argues, persuasively in my view, that effective rhetoric is a really important part of being an effective politician so it makes little sense to castigate a rival as offering rhetoric rather than results. Obviously, rhetoric alone won't make the country a better place (it could be effective rhetoric in pursuit of bad policies) but it's an important element of an effective politics.
On a recently concluded call with reporters, Susan Rice was pushing back vigorously on the Clinton campaign's assertions that she trumps Obama in the national security experience department. Her strong points where when she pointed out that Clinton's claims of experience often seem overblown. Rice referenced the fact that Clinton's surrogates couldn't site any examples of her crisis-management experience, said that Clinton "claims to have negotiated opening the border of Macedonia, but that opening preceeded the opening of that visit by a day," and said that Clinton's "claimed to have played a crucial independent role in the Northern Ireland negotiations, but George MItchell said she was 'not involved directly.'"
I think that's all about right. Rice and the rest of Team Obama is quite a bit less convincing when they try to talk up their own candidate's experience in these domains. They wind up winning this argument since they're not the ones who've been trying to fight the campaign on this issue, but the reality is that like most presidents either Clinton or Obama would be entering office without significant diplomatic or military experience even though these are the most important aspects of the job. I'll take "little experience plus good ideas" over "years of experience have committed me to crazy warmongering" in a heartbeat, but that's the basic shape of things.
There were some more interesting ideas put forth on the call on more interesting topics -- including ideas aimed squarely at John McCain -- but it'll probably take me until tomorrow to get my thoughts together on them.
It seems that the somewhat odd and definitely complicated compromise transit funding plan that Virginia finally adopted after a lot of legislative wrangling has been thrown out by the courts. The black hats here are really the dead-ender conservative faction of the Virginia GOP which seems to believe that the state's growing population just doesn't have any infrastructure needs whatsoever. It was their intransigence that forced more reasonable parties to adopt a byzantine approach.
That said, Virginia transportation policy debates tend to be a depressing thing to watch. Basically, you get a lot of arguments between anti-tax fanatics who think the government should have no revenue whatsoever and then people who want to build more roads. There's very, very little consideration given to smarter anti-congestion measures like congestion pricing, expansion of the state's very rudimentary commuter rail system, etc. It's a bit of a mess and with local governments all now seeing budget shortfalls thanks to the housing downturn, I don't imagine we'll see any more imaginative thinking in the near future.
Noam Scheiber responds to a bunch of critiques of his article on the Obama wonks. It seems to me that the strongest part of the response is the one that dealt with me. "After all, didn't Bill [Clinton] employ a lot of academic economists" just like Obama does now?:
Yes, there's no question he did, and that they were influential. But the composition of your inner circle matters quite a bit, more so than who's generally in your administration or in the next circle out. Clinton did hire people like Joe Stiglitz and Larry Summers. But there was never really a first-rate academic economist in his White House inner sanctum. The Clinton insiders most concerned with the nuts and bolts of economic policy were Robert Rubin, Gene Sperling, and Bruce Reed--all very smart, capable men, but none a trained economist.
This seems like an accurate enough characterization of the situation. In a boring sort of way, I think only time will tell the actual significance of this stuff. There's nothing better to do during campaign season than try one's best to figure out how people will govern based on the available information, but the reality is that there's a lot of intrinsic uncertainty in these things. Campaign promises and pre-assembled packages of advisors are probably the best guide to what future policymaking will look like, but it's a pretty imperfect guide.
Diagnoses of autism are unquestionably on the rise in the United States, and parents and other friends and family of autistic children are understandably looking for answers. At a time, there was some plausible speculation that thimerosal, an additive in some vaccines, might be a cause of autism. The claim was investigated, as it should have been, but it turns out not to be true. Nevertheless, as tends to be the case with these things, some people still believe in the autism-thimerosal link despite the debunking evidence. Some people including, it seems, John McCain who thinks "there's strong evidence" of the autism-thimerosal link even though there is, in fact, no such evidence.
Via Jim Henley, the National Security Archive acquires a collection of documents outlining the Dick Cheney vision for post-Cold War America in which the central priority would be to take advantage of the collapse of the USSR to assert unilateral U.S. military hegemony around the world. This was a minority point of view within the George H.W. Bush administration, then Bill Clinton became president, but then it really had its day in the sun under George W. Bush.
We're all currently enjoying the fruits of that policy -- a $3 trillion war, more intense nuclear proliferation, al-Qaeda leaders still at large, China stronger relative to the U.S. than ever, etc.
Robert Reich has a good post on NAFTA and the dilemmas of trade policy more generally. His main argument is a bit hard to summarize and not very long, so I'd suggest you read it yourself. I'll just quote the newsworthy bit where he offers his recollection of where Hillary Clinton stood on NAFTA during her husband's presidency:
The answer is HRC didn't want the Administration to move forward with NAFTA, but not because she was opposed to NAFTA as a policy. She opposed NAFTA because of its timing. She wanted her health-care plan to be voted on first. She feared that the fight over NAFTA would use up so much of the White House's political capital that there wouldn't be enough left when it came to pushing for health care. In retrospect, she was probably right.
That seems reasonable enough. Another way of looking at it that's less dependent on the precise issues of timing is simply that the Clinton administration got scandalously little from the business community in exchange for supporting things like NAFTA. Whatever the order of operations, you would hope that in the future if a Democratic administration winds up bucking its labor allies to pass a business priority on trade policy, that some kind of guarantees are forthcoming that groups that benefit from the deal will deliver some moderate Republicans to cast tough budget votes or to participate constructively in health care legislation.
The Wizards are now 4-1 over their past five games, despite Caron Butler and Gilbert Arenas both being out with injuries. This is a major improvement from the early days of the Butler injury when we were losing left and right. What accounts for the difference? Well, I notice that the team has ditched Kanye's "Stronger" as opening music in favor of quasi-local Clipse's "Roc Boys" which I think is worth about 2.6 points per game all on its own.
But Jews should be joining Catholics on this one. If McCain were as pro-Israel as Hagee says he is, the candidate would want nothing to do with Hagee. You don’t back a democracy by siding with someone who regards a handgun as the means to change policy. There is a certain dissonance between supporting a country and giving theological justifications for the murder of its elected leader. We don’t even have to talk about Hagee's earnest hopes for war on Israeli soil, or his classic theological delegitimization of Judaism.
I completely agree, but of course it doesn't seem like it's going to be in the cards. It was about a year ago today that I found myself wondering why AIPAC was putting Hagee on a panel described as "Two eloquent voices from diverse backgrounds explore the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and how Americans from all faiths can find common cause in supporting Israel." It's certainly true that Hagee's group, Christians United for Israel, shows that Americans can support Israel for all sorts of reasons, ranging from concern for the welfare of the Jewish people to a desire to see Israel conquered by a Russo-Arab alliance in order to hasten the End Times, but sometimes the whole "big tent" concept can go too far.
Presumably what's happening is that we have a lot of snobs among the leaders of American Jewry who figure they can use and manipulate rednecks like Hagee. And maybe so. Still, it seems to me that in a country where we're a tiny minority group, it makes a lot more sense for American Jews to build alliances with non-Jews who aren't aiming at our short-term destruction.
Reader C.M. writes "You need to end our long national nightmare and open a new Wire thread." Consider it done. This is definitely making me miss the compression of the season into ten episodes rather than twelve, as I feel like I would have liked to see some of the characters' decision-making explored in a bit more depth than we got in episode nine. If anyone's OnDemanded the finale, please avoid spoilers.
The best thing about David Ignatius hit on Barack Obama is that amidst his lengthy whine that Obama hasn't done enough to "anger any of the party's interest groups" he doesn't offer any examples of group-angering action that he wishes Obama would take. After all, once you reach a certain lofty peak of beltwayishness, you're above petty demands to think about policy. Rather, your role is to castigate interest groups, especially liberal ones, as the bane of all existence. After all, where do these people get off forming groups to advocate for their interests?
Maybe Obama should have become a global warming denialist? Advocated that we intensify legal discrimination against gays and lesbians? Steps like those sure would have socked it to the interest groups! I mean, I dunno . . . he's spoken in black churches about African-American homophobia, he's spoken to auto executives about the need for higher fuel efficiency standards, he likes charter schools, he tells Jewish leaders you don't need to "adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel", etc. What does Ignatius want? It hardly seems fair to penalize Obama for the fact that the base of his party isn't fanatically devoted to the virtues of torture, thus depriving him of a shot to gain base-bucking points for standing up for hundreds of years worth of conventional wisdom.
The whole thing seems a bit dubious. I think there's a very sound policy argument that we should have more experimentation with pedagogical techniques and I have no problem with the idea that experimentation with single-sex education should be part of that. But this guy Leonard Sax just sounds like a quack. I mean, here's a guy who's not a neurologist and has no policy experience, but he's decided to draw sweeping policy conclusions based on controversial neurological research? I have my doubts.
At any rate, you find much more along these lines from Sara herself at her new blog. Bottom line:
As a result, boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of lanugage and motor development when they enter school. Sax and Gurian see this as one argument for separate sex, gender-based schooling. That might be reasonable if gender were the only source of variance in young children's learning. But it's not: Young children's development is highly variable. Some 5-year-old girls might lag many boys in language skills, and some boys' motor skills might lag those of their female peers. If one is really concerned about adjusting education to variations in children's development, increased customization and multi-age groupings in early elementary school, which allow teachers to group children who are developmentally similar, regardless of age, and chidlren to progress at their own paces, are a far better solution than simply separating children by sex.
In mild defense of the article, it seems to me that if you read it all the way through it becomes clear that Sax is a quack. On the other hand, the whole framing of the piece around Sax and his ideas seems to suggest that he's not a quack and we all need to be wrestling with his fake neurology.
I recall that in the wake of the National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran had ceased work on its nuclear weapons program, a certain strain of counterintuitive punditry emerged to argue that this publicizing of accurate information constituted serious wrongdoing on the part of the Intelligence Community because Iran hardly had clean hands with regard to nuclear activities and the NIE might take the international pressure off.
I never really understood the logic there, and it doesn't seem to be happening. Yesterday, we got a new report from the IAEA about Iranian documents they've obtained which "strongly suggest that Iran was working on a nuclear weapons design as recently as four years ago." This is something Iran denied at the time and continues to deny today, because it violates various commitments they've made and they don't want to be punished for it. But the IAEA is evidently keeping up the heat and "the U.N. Security Council is expected to vote tomorrow on a third resolution imposing travel and financial sanctions on Iranian individuals and institutions."
This is all as it should be. What's needed in addition is a new administration that's able to make a new start with these things, say clearly that the United States erred in the past by failing to seize opportunities to improve our relationship with Iran and that we're eager to take steps in that direction now. But as part of that process we're going to need the Iranians to go beyond mothballing their program to actually disarming in a verifiable way. Alternatively we could elect the guy who's been agitating for the overthrow of the Iranian government since 1999 and who likes to joke about bombing their country
I love that The Washington Post's editorial response to people being pissed that they ran an article about how women are stupid was to slightly tweak the online teaser to make it a piece about why women "act so dumb." Also, it's now a tongue in cheek piece of woman-bashing by a professional anti-feminist. "Tongue in cheek," it seems, is newspeak for "poorly reasoned."
I know a number of readers have been perturbed by my predictions of an Obama win, figuring that since I'm always wrong I'd jinxed things and put Hillary Clinton in a commanding position. Well, I was reading Chris Bowers' analysis of the polls and it's clear that while Obama's done an impressive job of making up lost ground in Ohio, he's going to lose there. The Texas polling, meanwhile, is too close to call. Obama certainly might win it, but he really might lose.
Now under the circumstances, I see no real way for Clinton to make up the lost delegate lead, but at this point it does seem to me that she and her campaign staff are probably egomaniacal enough that if they pull out a narrow "win" they'll keep running anyway hoping for lightning to strike and seeing the damage it'll do to the party as a feature, rather than a bug, since a crippled Obama who loses to John McCain could set them up for another run in 2012.
Good has a neat graphic looking at enlistment rates in various wars. It seems that whereas 12.2 percent of the population served in World War II, and 4.3 percent of the population served in Vietnam, just 0.5 percent of Americans have served in our current conflicts. Of course if John "100 Years" McCain gets his way, that may wind up going up.
The Clinton campaign is pushing hard on the idea that the press has been kinder to Barack Obama than it's been to her, and I know a lot of her supporters are totally up in arms about this. I'd say it's definitely true that, on balance, Obama has gotten better press than Clinton. Still, I think Clinton fans are going more than a little overboard with this monocausal account of the campaign. For one thing, one important exception to this is that if Obama had lost eleven contests in a row, there's no way he'd still be treated as a viable candidate. Similarly, if Obama had reached a situation where nobody can mathematically see a way for Clinton to catch his lead without altering DNC rules, I seriously doubt the race would continue to be covered as a serious competition.
From another direction, even though the press has often been unfair to Clinton about petty stuff, they have been very willing to go along with the idea that she has a vast experience edge over Obama even though it's always been unclear what exactly that edge consisted of. On top of that, the country's most prominent liberal columnist has been pretty consistently attacking Obama for months now. Now, yes, I do think there's been more BS thrown in her direction and there's obviously been an "Obama swoon" factor that there's no equal of on the other side (even Krugman, for example, writes only about his loathing of Obama and his supporters and never says anything good about Clinton) and that's been a factor in the race. Still, on the central argument of her campaign, Clinton's been treated reasonably well and the press has actually bent over backwards to keep her in the race under circumstances when almost anyone else would have been written off.
Every couple of years I feel like I suddenly start reading articles about education in Finland in American newspapers. This makes me think there's some kind of Finland education policy junket that I want to be getting in on. On the merits, Finland seems to have approximately nothing to teach American educators except that education outcomes would be different if every aspect of American society were completely different from how they are in the real world.
Senator John McCain likes to present himself as the candidate of the “Straight Talk Express” who does not pander to voters or change his positions with the political breeze. But the fine print of his record in the Senate indicates that he has been a lot less consistent on some of his signature issues than he has presented himself to be so far in his presidential campaign.
Mr. McCain, who derided his onetime Republican competitor Mitt Romney for his political mutability, has himself meandered over the years from position to position on some topics, particularly as he has tried to court the conservatives who have long distrusted him. His most striking turnaround has been on the Bush tax cuts, which he voted against twice but now wants to make permanent. Mr. McCain has also expressed varying positions on immigration, torture, abortion and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
Mr. McCain’s advisers say that he has evolved rather than switched positions in his 25-year career in the House and Senate and that he has been remarkably consistent on his support for the war in Iraq and the American troop escalation there.
I think things go a bit downhill from there, but this captures the essence of the matter quite well. Since the late-1990s, John McCain has expressed a very clear and consistent preference for very aggressive use of unilateral American military force. He broke with the GOP leadership to support intervention in Kosovo, then he broke with the Clinton administration to argue for a land invasion and a more sweeping conception of victory. He called for a policy of "rogue state rollback" in 1999, and attacked Bush from the right on foreign policy in 2000. He supported invading Iraq in 2002, argued that more troops should be sent ever since 2003, and is basically a rock-ribbed hawk.
But on other issues, McCain's stances tend to meander. I think it's perhaps counterproductive to speculate as to precisely why this is. But precisely because he has broken with the GOP on a potpurri of issues, but rarely done so with a great deal of consistency, he's really quite a bit more flip-floppety than the average politician even as he relies on his image as a consistent "straight talker" quite a bit more than your average pol.
The Democrat who eventually faces Sen. McCain will require a set of skills and experiences that enables them to:
compete on a broad playing field;
confront and beat back a GOP attack machine waiting to tear them down;
put forth and defend core Democratic ideas - and ideals - such as universal health care;
build a solid coalition for victory;
and importantly, stand toe-to-toe with Sen. McCain on national security.
Hillary excels on each of these fronts. [On the last point, my blogosphere friends know that I spent most of 2004 in the Kerry-Edwards war room and gained some perspective on how national security -- an issue Democrats cannot and will not cede -- takes center stage in a general election.]
I think there's some merit to some of those points, but the point about national security is close to the theme of my book and I think Daou has this basically wrong. In 2004, John Kerry argued that the combination of him being more hawkish than Howard Dean and his personal story gave him a decisive edge vis-a-vis Dean. Even in retrospect, that's maybe correct. But if you control for the fact that Obama is a much more charismatic figure and effective orator than Dean, that Kerry's personal qualities where a decorated military career plus long service in the Senate rather than having been the president's wife, and that the war in Iraq is much less popular now than it was four years ago, the basic calculus seems very wrongheaded to me.
Now Kerry, for all his flaws, actually did come pretty close in 2004 so a Kerry-esque strategy plus economic distress just might work in 2008. And, of course, an attempt to draw a clear line of contrast on questions of doctrine might fail. But I, for one, would like to see it given a try. This is especially true because I think Obama is closer to correct on the merits of the underlying issue. But in political terms, a critique focused on implementation issues is going to be a lot less persuasive when directed at John McCain than it was at George W. Bush.
Obama will have a clear shot at making a simple argument that Bush's ideas have led to bad consequences, McCain shares Bush's ideas, and Obama has different ones. McCain will, of course, push back and say that Obama's ideas are wrongheaded and dangerous. But I actually have some faith in the power of liberal ideas and in the demonstration effect of the all-too-visible consequences of the alternative. Clinton, by contrast, continues to show a proclivity for either the politics of fear or else the politics of timidity.
Barack Obama picks up the crucial Gray's Papaya endorsement in Hillary Clinton's hometown (it's a great place to get a cheap hot-dog when it's late at night and you're drunk/high and in high school . . . under other circumstances your results may vary). The proprietor turns out to have a pretty typical "wine track" endorsement record, including Bill Bradley during the 2000 cycle.
UPDATE: That photo's by Flickr user Doobybrain used under a Creative Commons license. And, yes, ketchup on hot dogs is an abomination.
Gilbert Arenas cleared for practice but no schedule for returning to playing. I've got my fingers crossed that he won't have lost a step when he does get back.
Like everyone else, I sometimes wonder what conservatives are going to think about the Bush administration's headline executive power grabs when it's castrating harpy Hillary Clinton or Muslim black nationalist Barack Obama who's got the power to arbitrarily detain people, torture them, etc. In that context, you need to give some props to stuff like this:
House issued a new executive order effectively gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), “created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.”
Bush waited pretty late into his lame duck period to pull this particular stunt, so it seems this is mostly a favor to his successor. He wants John McCain, Clinton, or Obama to be in a position to commit widespread abuses and not just hog all the glory for himself.
A reader directs my attention to Mark Liberman's old dissection of fake neurologist and "gender education" advocate Leonard Sax. Why, it's almost as if major magazines shouldn't give the man's views a long and respectful hearing!
Spencer Ackerman reports on the Re-Up Gang's plea for party unity:
In an interview with Paul Rosenberg, the Re-Up Gang comes out for an Obama-Clinton ticket. "Personally," says Malice, "I wanna see them run together. Obama and Clinton. I think they're doing too much mudslinging right now." Sandman blames Clinton for "kick[ing]the dust up." Mal continues: "We're going to need, like, these sixteen years to rebuild."
I've been eagerly awaiting my opportunity to say something about Paul Krugman's Brookings paper on trade and inequality but it turns out to be the case that real economics involves a lot of math I can't follow. My best understanding is that his conclusion is that it's . . . complicated. Trade with China in the 21st century may be a much bigger driver of inequality than earlier studies done in an earlier period indicated, but then again it may not be.
I suppose the key question continues to be: Do we have inequality-reducing policy options that will not have negative impacts on economic growth? I believe that we do, and that we should exercise those options before we exercise the option of trying to curtail Chinese imports (making sure that imported Chinese goods are adequately safe is, I think, another matter).
Good column from Bob Herbert on Iraq's hefty price tag and, of course, there's Stiglitz's book as well. If you look at something like the economic problems in Ohio right now and consider how much better that situation would look had that kind of money been invested in productive infrastructure in the US, it's pretty infuriating. Spent directly, that money would have meant jobs. But spent on something more useful than a fruitless occupation of Iraq, it would have laid the groundwork for continued prosperity. Now at best it's down the drain.
This reminds me of something John Brennan, formerly of the CIA then director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and then the National Counterterrorism Center until retiring in 2005, said on Sunday, namely that in contrast to John McCain, Barack Obama "understands the direct correlation between tremendous expenditures of blood and treasury in Iraq and the US economy." Brennan points out that "al-Qaeda strategy has been to bleed the US into bankruptcy" and thus to do as McCain proposes and "continue with the same approach will have severe consequences for U.S. national security." Obviously this came out in the midst of a primary campaign, but it's hardly an Obama-specific point; rather it's one anti-war candidates of any stripe can (and should) make.
Few people seem to appreciate it, but it's quite literally true that al-Qaeda's strategy is to cripple the U.S. economy by dragging us into quagmires abroad. Osama bin Laden himself has said this, and it's the only strategy that makes sense. A smallish number of people with no base of resources can't possibly defeat us unless we shoot ourselves in the foot repeatedly as Bush and McCain propose.
NRO's Lisa Shiffren's not very happy about The Washington Post's "women are dumb" op-ed kick:
As far as I can tell, there is more than enough stupidity out there to go round. When it's a writer with a dumb idea for a column, the idea is that an editor will exercise better judgement. I'm not an oversensitive feminist. But as a rule, "women are really stupid" columns aren't funny even when written by women.
Note the requisite I'm not one of those feminists! disclaimer here. But this is just what it's about. Shiffren, like an awful lot of people, don't think that major newspaper op-ed pages should just be offering up random misogyny as their political commentary and then claiming they were just joking when people get pissed off. That's feminism.
That said, this is the kind of thing that public opinion is just poorly informed about. Here's the reality of the situation. If Wednesday morning the only shot Clinton has at winning the nomination involves getting the superdelegates to overrule a large Obama lead in pledged delegates and/or somehow getting the Michigan and Florida delegations seated, then Clinton's chances of winning the nomination will still be extremely low, and the prospects of either person winning the general election would get quite a bit lower. Basically, Clinton would be completely burning years worth of goodwill built up by her and her husband in the progressive community and ending her shot at playing a leadership role in the Senate in exchange for a very marginal increase in the odds of her becoming president in January 2009. A choice like that would be bad for the country, bad for the party, and bad for Hillary Clinton. It would be good, primarily, for her campaign's highest-paid operatives who would keep getting their checks, and it would be good for John McCain.
I've thought about it, and I don't think she'll do it. I don't think she and Bill are that out of touch with reality, and I don't think that most of her key supporters are either. If her results today are good enough to give her a realistic shot at winning the nomination through winning primaries, then of course she'll stay in. But if the delegate math isn't there, then I think she'll get out.
Folks like me have spent a good deal of energy over the past couple of years noting that a very large portion of the increase in income inequality in America can't be attributed to the rising "skill premium" for college graduates. Still, a large portion of growing inequality can be attributed to this skill premium. Why the premium should be growing is, as Brink Lindsey points out, actually something of a mystery -- growing demand for the skills of college graduates ought to lead to an increase in the proportion of people who graduate from college, but it hasn't. Lindsey rounds up the considerable evidence, meanwhile, that the price of college admission isn't really the crux of the problem; paying for college is a large burden on many families, but those with the ability to do college level work generally manage to shoulder the burden and it pays off in the long run. The problem is that a huge proportion of low-income young people are inadequately prepared.
Thus far, I'm all in agreement. Lindsey then attributes this gap mainly to differences in "parental culture." I think that's probably true, but on another level it's an odd thing to focus on since we really have very few policy levers on that front. That might mean that we just don't have any policy levers at all, but in the real world (as Lindsey acknowledges) we actually do have a variety of available options regarding early childhood education, better practices in our primary and secondary schooling, etc. I would add to this the simple thing of better information since I'd venture that relatively few working class families are at all aware that the skill premium has been growing so rapidly. Lindsey's final point is an interesting one:
Furthermore, progressives need to understand that the rise in skill-based inequality is not some populist morality play of capitalism run amok. On the contrary, in many ways it can be seen as a capitalist success story. For a generation now, our economy has been creating more opportunities for the productive use of highly developed cognitive skills than there are people able to take advantage of them. That is what the run-up in the college wage premium is telling us. Economic development has raced ahead of cultural development; as a result, culture is now acting as a brake on upward mobility. So, instead of railing against the economic system, we need to do a better job of helping people to adapt to it and rise to its challenges. The rules of the game aren't the problem--we just need more skillful players.
I think there's something to that, but the point of the morality play is that nothing is going to change policywise unless people think that reconciling ourselves to ever-growing inequality is wrong and, therefore, we ought to be interested in ways to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, I think it's not wrong to think of some of the aspects of our school system's poor treatment of low-income kids as precisely representing affluent people gaming the system (by, among other things, withdrawing across jurisdictional boundaries which they then zone with large lot requirements and "overcrowding" rules so as to prevent poor people from moving there) to preserve positions of privilege for their children.
The reality is less dramatic. Bill Clinton defeated a recession-weakened president with some help from a third-party spoiler, stopped the GOP from cutting highly popular social programs, won reelection during an economic boom and rallied his own party to thwart a wildly partisan impeachment crusade. None of these triumphs required unusual political skill. [...] Of course, if anybody beat the Republican attack machine, it was Bill. Hillary Clinton wasn't on any ballot in the 1990s. [...] In her November 2000 Senate race, she ran five points behind Democratic ticket-topper Al Gore in New York, and Gore himself was hardly a beloved figure at the time. [...] Clinton and her supporters gripe about Obama's charms -- the packed stadiums, the witty comebacks, the starry-eyed fans. Well, yes. It isn't cheating. This is what you get when you're an extremely good politician.
I do think discussion of the 1992 election has tended to get unreasonably polarized around implausible alternatives. You tend to either here that Bill Clinton's victory in that race marks him and his team the uniquely brilliant Only Democrats to Win In Decades or else maybe that he only won because Perot was in the race. Lost here is the excluded middle option that his victory wasn't fake or illegitimate, but simply not especially impressive. Given the circumstances -- foreign policy off the table, recession, a third-party candidate whose rhetoric mostly targeted Bush, 12 years of GOP rule -- the landscape was very favorable to the Democrats, just as the landscape was very favorable for Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate bid.
Neither of those elections were gimmes, and the Clintons certainly performed competently, but somehow Bill has acquired the reputation as a super-talented politician while John Kerry's considered a joke, even though Kerry clearly would have won if we'd had 1992-style economic conditions in 2004.
On Social Security, the Arizona senator says he still backs a system of private retirement accounts that President Bush pushed unsuccessfully, and disowned details of a Social Security proposal on his campaign Web site.
What's at issue here is whether McCain wants to just cut Social Security benefits or combine cuts with a stab at privatization. Neither is, in my view, a good idea at all. It's conceivable that at some future point reductions in the benefits growth rate will be necessary, but then again that might not happen. The responsible course of action for the short-term is to focus on the portions of the government balance sheet that face actual short-term budgetary problems rather than hypothetical long-term ones. That'll mean a tax reform aimed at increasing efficiency and simplicity but also revenue levels, and it'll mean rejecting McCain's costly imperial conception of American foreign policy.
Commenting on my post about single-sex education, RKU snarks:
Didn't Matt just do a posting yesterday strongly implying that any claim of an innate statistical difference in female/male mental/psychological behavior was "sexist"?
This seems to be a favorite tactic of the right. Apparently, if I'm going to favorably cite someone as saying that "boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of lanugage and motor development when they enter school" then I also can't object to writing op-eds that argue, without evidence, that women are stupider than men. Because, clearly, either you're a die-hard egalitarian blank slater or else it's no fair objecting to sexism. The flaw here should be clear. Yes "boys and girls are (on average) different," but, no, cutting-edge neuroscience does not back up all your long-held prejudices.
Experience in action. Watch in amazement as Hillary Clinton specifically cites her experience as First Lady as confirming her view that Saddam Hussein has links with al-Qaeda and active chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs (and no she didn't read the classified intelligence that might have cast some doubts on her Bush administration talking points) that we had to address through war:
I, for one, look forward to a general election campaign in which every time Clinton starts making a persuasive critique of the Bush-McCain approach to world affairs she winds up getting tagged as a flip-flopper. It's time to get our heads out of the sand and have a Democratic Party that can make a clean break from this nonsense.
[T]he way we house people today seems a bit out of sync with other demands of our highly mobile and flexible economy. The United States has long prided itself on being a nation of homeowners. We boast that more than 60 percent of Americans owns their homes. We encourage young people to save enough to buy one of their own. We provide all sorts of public incentives from tax write-offs on mortgage interest to public investments in infrastructure -- to encourage home ownership. It is, after all, the centerpiece of the American dream.
I can't help but wonder whether this dream doesn't belong to a bygone industrial era. A central element of the creative economy is its flexibility. People change jobs often. [....]
Let's put it this way. One major attraction of investing one's savings in a home rather than in a broad index fund of stocks is that you can live in your house whereas the stocks are useless. But this introduces some rigidities into the economy which make it harder for workers to leave the places where nobody wants to hire them (Ohio, Michigan, etc.) and go to the places where people are looking for more workers (Arizona, Florida). For one thing, the transaction costs involved in selling your house are much greater than what's involved in leaving a rental property. Similarly with buying a new one. But what's more, the "living in your retirement fund" duality comes into play.
If you're considering leaving Michigan because it's economically depressed, you're not alone. As a consequence, your house probably isn't very valuable. If your stock investments tank, there's nothing you can do about it. But if your home investment tanks, you can still live there! Unless, that is, you try to move. If you'd been living in a rental and investing in the stock market, you could liquidate some of your investments to help finance the move to a more vibrant area where housing costs and employment prospects are better. But if you spent your savings on your house, then you're basically stuck.
Now obviously homeownership has some real value, but when you consider factors like that it's not clear that we should be making it a policy priority to especially subsidize this one form of asset-building over all others. In particular, if you encourage people to live in their savings, the tendency is to acquire more house than they otherwise might (instead of a house plus some stock, you buy a bigger house) which compounds the economic rigidity issues and is bad for the environment to boot.
Florida suggests that residential leases might become more like commercial ones with longer-term leases and more flexibility for tenants in terms of altering the property.
I'd like to officially register my surprise that "Goolsbeegate" is turning out to have all these legs. It's a totally legitimate story, though I have trouble getting outraged about it since I agree with Goolsbee on the merits of NAFTA. That said, I'm mostly filled with bitterness and rage. Back during the 2004 campaign, I did a story full of on the record quotes from Laura Tyson, one of Kerry's top economic advisors, promising that Kerry's rhetoric about trade was bullshit:
"When people say, 'well, listen to what the Kerry campaign has said about trade in some of the primaries, we are concerned that Senator Kerry will move the US away from trade integration,'" she said, she tells them to "think about the issue of national campaigns in the US" and to "recognize that what might be said in one primary ... is not an indicator of the future."
Tyson further argued that Kerry would be able to liberalize trade more than Bush has, because Kerry would support policies that help compensate the inevitable losers in globalization -- a step that will allegedly drain the swamp of anti-trade sentiment. Lest it be thought that Tyson's commitment to the multilateral process and to continued trade integration leaves plenty of wriggle room to keep the process but add, say, environmental standards into the mix, she explicitly disavowed this option during a later exchange. Adding environmental issues to the WTO's brief might bog it down and impede progress on further integration.
"I want to assure you that a Kerry-Edwards administration will continue in the great American tradition of leading the way on global economic integration," she concluded.
I got exactly zero bounce from this article even though, in my opinion, it was much more solidly grounded than a story about a memo about something someone told a diplomat at a party*. Since that time, I've tried to eschew reporting.
Stepping away from my bitterness, you have two candidates, both of whose economic advisory teams are full of proponents of trade deals, both of whom are now campaigning in a state where trade deals are very unpopular, both talking the trade-skeptic talk while also trying to quietly reassure other key constituencies that the Washington Consensus is a alive and well. The larger irony here is that the multilateral trade process as a whole ran aground several years ago over agricultural issues and shows no signs of reviving no matter who wins the election. We're left to argue over deals with tiny countries like Peru and Costa Rica where the impact either way on a giant country like the USA isn't going to be noticeable.
* I can perhaps now reveal that also during the 2004 cycle I actually did get to talking to a Canadian diplomat at a party who relayed to me concerns that it would put NATO members in an awkward position if President Kerry offered to hand political authority in Iraq over to a UN body in exchange for securing an international peacekeeping force there, since nobody really wanted to contribute to such a force but they didn't have any good off-the-shelf excuses to say "no."
Reacting to the news that the U.S. government has been supplying arms to the Palestinian Authority (so they can fight Hamas), the Armchair Generalist wonders "why is it that the Bush administration's first answer to every regional conflict is to throw more weapons into the mix? You'd think that, by now, they'd have figured out that hard power doesn't solve these long-term conflicts."
I think they actually do understand this pretty well. After all, if the conflicts were "solved" that would reduce the need for American weapons, and htus reduce the opportunities for American influence. The essence of the approach is to create a series of standoffs where our proxies have the bulk of the guns, but their enemies of the bulk of the legitimacy (in part because they're not serving as our proxy), and thus the guns-without-legitimacy side is able to maintain a permanently tenuous grasp on power that leaves them ever-more-dependent on external American support. The identity or background of the proxy doesn't really matter, and can include ex-insurgents in Iraq, the same Fatah groups we were trying to freeze out of Palestinian politics a few years ago, Iranian-backed Shiite parties in Basra, sundry Somali factions, whatever.
Meanwhile, just as Barack Obama's more centrist economic advisors are telling people he wouldn't really withdraw from NAFTA, it seems that Hillary Clinton's more hawkish advisors are telling people she won't really withdraw from Iraq. It's hard to know what the truth is here. From 2002-2006 or so, Clinton went out of her way to cultivate an image as a hawk, forging relationships with the Michael O'Hanlons and Kenneth Pollacks of the world, hanging out at Peter Beinart's book party, getting herself labeled one of Jeffrey Goldberg's "national security Democrats," having Richard Holbrooke brag to reporters that "She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband," and so forth.
Peter Brimlow, one of the really really really hard-core anti-immigration conservatives, seems to pretty profoundly hate William F. Buckley in terms that certainly make it seem as if Buckley must have been doing something right.
Anecdotal evidence of substantial numbers of Republicans crossing party lines in Ohio. As in other states, the anecdotes have some voting for Hillary because they think she's easier to beat, and others voting for Obama because they hate Hillary and want to see her beaten. Interestingly, you rarely hear Republicans thinking it would be easier to beat Obama.
Obama wins Vermont, as expected. We need to see to what extent he's able to run up the delegate count. The trend of Obama doing very well in states with no black people continues.
No call on Ohio. That seems like good news for Obama, indicating that any delegate lead coming out of Ohio will be very small and making it extremely unlikely that Clinton will make any kind of meaningful dent in Obama's delegate lead. The bluster on television is that she's going to stay in even if it's mathematically impossible for her to make up the delegate gap but I don't see what kind of sense that makes. I mean, if she can't possibly win, she can't possibly win.
It seems that in both Texas and Ohio a majority of primary voters feel Hillary Clinton attacked Obama unfairly. Personally, I think Obama attacked her unfairly a little, too, but she attacked him unfairly a lot.
Relatedly, I don't understand why they're not calling Ohio for Clinton. The exit polls look unambiguous to me -- she's won it. Obama made up a lot of ground over the past two weeks, but she won the state and all that's left to do is figure out the delegate count.
John McCain's locked it up. No surprise, but now it's official. Apparently he's going to go to the White House for a laying-on of hands and then Bush can start working his fundraising mojo to help McCain fill up the coffers with special interest cash.
Clinton takes the nation's littlest state. I'm a bit surprised by how narrow the margin was since my sense of Rhode Island is that it's like Massachusetts only with a somewhat less Obama-friendly demographic. Maybe "MA meets CT" would be more accurate, though, which would jibe with the results.
Clinton takes the nation's littlest state. I'm a bit surprised by how narrow the margin was since my sense of Rhode Island is that it's like Massachusetts only with a somewhat less Obama-friendly demographic. Maybe "MA meets CT" would be more accurate, though, which would jibe with the results.
Okay, watching an extended dialogue on MSNBC about the Churchillesque awesomeness of John McCain serves as an excellent reminder that even though I have strong feelings about the Clinton-Obama matchup, I don't really have a serious problem with either contender. The ensuing months of watching the press kiss McCain's is going to be painful.
She finally gets the call. I was going to say that now it all comes down to Texas, but actually it's totally unclear exactly what's at stake in Texas. Naturally the spin now becomes that if HRC can win Ohio in the primary she can carry it in the general. In the real world, no such logic applies, and it's a good thing too because a Democrat would need to carry Obama-favoring swing states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missour and Clinton-favoring states like Ohio in order to win.
Chuck Todd is predicting a net win of delegates for Obama in Texas, possibly a net win large enough to overcome Clinton's net delegate pickup in Ohio. If that's even close to correct, then the bottom line is that it continues to be unclear how Clinton can actually win barring some catastrophic Obama meltdown.
UPDATE: Texas officially gets called for Clinton, raising the question of whether Todd's delegate calculus is right. Everyone on TV says it's onward to Pennsylvania, though it still seems that Clinton is drawing dead.
In the circles where I run, one theme that keeps coming back is the idea that even if Hillary Clinton doesn't really have more governing experience than Barack Obama, she does have more experience being attacked by Republicans. In that sense, she's "tested," we know what dirt there is. With Obama, by contrast, who knows? There's obviously something to that, but there's sort of less to it than a lot of people think. Amidst the media's self-abasing desire to show they can be hard on Barack Obama, they've managed not to remark on the Clintons' refusal to release their tax reforms. Or to disclose the donors to the Clinton Foundation.
The Obama campaign and Obama supporters have tended to play this kind of thing with kid gloves since nobody wants to ape the right-wing smear machine that tormented the Clintons during the 1990s. Still, the right-wing smear machine in question certainly isn't going to be that discrete. And they evidently think these kind of disclosures would be damaging. I mean, the candidate of economic populism and national security has a husband whose running around the world raising huge sums of cash from corporate titans and foreign dictators? Similarly, I think another run-through of the Marc Rich pardon isn't going to reflect well on anyone.
There's this typical mode of election analysis where you see that voters who said "change" is important voted for Obama, and voters who said "experience" is important voted for Clinton, so then Clinton won because more people were interested in experience, or else Clinton lost in another state because more people were interested in change. I can't quite prove it, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. It seems to me that people are drawn to one candidate or another for a murky series of reasons, and then they come to pick up their favorite candidate's themes. So people who like Clinton develop an appreciation for the importance of experience, whereas Obama supporters decide that the Iraq War is the most important issue.
Larry Bartels has a paper about this phenomenon that I recommend to one and all. Certainly, I think pundits ought to do a better job of at least keeping the possibility of this sort of thing happening. In general election terms, for example, Andrew Gelman has observed that the behavior of most voters is pretty consistent and predictable from year-to-year. But the candidates are always changing. So when George W. Bush is the nominee, the sort of people inclined to vote Republican claim that Bush's personal characteristics are really crucial, but when John McCain becomes the nominee the sort of people inclined to vote Republican like his personal characteristics.
K-Lo asks: "Is there any woman in America who doesn't want Cindy McCain's hair stylist and wardrober?" I certainly hope there are a few. I'm having a disturbing vision of a dystopian McCain Era in which the Ministry of Hair and Wardrobe forces all women to turn themselves into Cindy clones while muttering something about the need to transcend mere self-interest and individuality.
My sense of things had been that, demographically speaking, Pennsylvania was like Ohio but I thought I might look up the actual census data to see what we can see. Basically, Pennsylvania is like Ohio. The differences -- more old people, fewer black people, more Hispanics -- mostly cut in Clinton's favor, with only the larger number of college graduates helping Obama. The bad news for Obama, basically, is that he needs to fight a big, protracted battle in a state that's very demographically unfavorable to him.
The good news for Obama is that given how Clinton-friendly the state and, and the fact that Clinton can't overtake him in the delegate lead anyway, if he does manage to beat her here she'll have no excuses left to stay in the race.
I'm reading Ross talking about another first-person non-fiction narrative that turns out to be B.S. and it's making me think of how a lot of old-school novels involve this pretense to accuracy. Often they'll begin with a narrator telling the "true" story of how he heard the story that makes up the heart of the plot. Or else the manuscript will be discovered somewhere. For reasons that I'm sure are well known to people who were paying more attention in lecture, early audiences seem to have been incapable of digesting something like "this is a story I made up because I thought you would get something out of reading it -- enjoy!" Instead, prose had to be true.
Meanwhile, contemporary fiction is pretty sharply bifurcated between crappy "genre" fiction and literary fiction that often seems very artsy-fartsy. For a well-crafted but basically straightforward story of people doing things and interacting with each other in a moderately realistic way, you need to turn to narrative non-fiction. You can tell people you've just been reading Bill Buford's Heat and hold your head high in sophisticated circles, it's not like copping to owning Tom Clancy's Op-Center: State of Siege.
But if you sold the story as fiction, I think it would be deemed inadequately literary. And yet the facticity of the narrative has nothing to do with anything. Do I actually care if Buford really sliced his finger dicing carrots that one time? Or if Dario the butcher really yelled at some restaurant owner in some other Tuscan town? To me it seems basically irrelevant. The verisimilitude of a lot of the mise en scène really is integral to the book's appeal, but the same could be said about Moby Dick and any number of other straightforwardly fictional works. The literal accuracy of the whole thing, by contrast, contributes very little to the actual work. What it does instead is alter the marketing possibilities and likely critical approaches, opening up space for a certain kind of narrative to be taken seriously. Which isn't to say that people should lie in their memoirs, but maybe there's something to be learned from the fact that there's such an appetite for made-up stories of a certain kind.
It looks pretty clear that the NAFTA/Goolsbee/Canada imbroglio wound up hurting Barack Obama quite badly. And in many ways, deservedly so; it was an embarrassing and amateurish way for a campaign to behave. What's more, one has to suspect that the underlying reality is that an Obama administration's economic team really would be much more sympathetic to trade deals than Obama's rhetoric was suggesting.
That said, for the long haul isn't it a bit hard to imagine opposition to NAFTA continuing to be an issue that pays dividends for Hillary Clinton. NAFTA was, after all, a signature policy accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency, not of the Illinois State Senate. Whatever Obama's economic team may or may not think about NAFTA, it was Clinton's economic team who actually shepherded it into law. Indeed, that's how this whole thing got started was with Obama zeroing in on the basically bogus nature of Clinton's primary-time posturing as an anti-trade candidate. Then, thanks to Goolsbee, the charge wound up blowing up in their face. But the underlying reality is that advocacy of free trade deals was a major pillar of the Clinton administration economic policy (which is okay by me, but not to rust belt voters) and in a six week campaign it'll be hard to throw up enough dust to obscure that.
I understand perfectly well that the sort of congestion pricing I favor is very unpopular so in most jurisdictions it probably makes sense to focus first on funding alternative modes of transportation, rather than bringing in pricing first and using the revenue to fund transit later. But the other objection, much-mooted in comments, was that this would be bad on equity grounds.
I don't buy it.
Of course the costs of congestion pricing would fall hard on people of modest means, but that's because the cost of anything falls hard on people of modest means. But the whole crux of the argument for congestion pricing is that "free" roads come with real costs. They cost money to build (as would priced roads) but on top of that, they impose huge costs in terms of traffic and delays. That cost, is borne by everyone but, again, people of modest means tend to pay the most since in search of affordable housing they're pushed the furthest out onto the metropolitan fringe. Either way, it's better to be rich than non-rich. The difference is that when you have congestion pricing you have a lower overall social cost, and therefore more ability to provide services to people of modest means. Meanwhile, it's also worth noting that the poor families tend to own fewer cars (i.e., zero or one per family, rather than two or more) so in the final analysis charging for road use and funding transit is redistributive.
Brad Plumer examines the record. It's kind of puzzling. One would hope for something as simple as "he talks a good game, but it's all a huge lie!!!!!" but it's not all a huge lie. But there's little in the way of a coherent pattern. As on other domestic policy issues, a lot of McCain's thinking on these subjects doesn't look to me like thinking at all; more like a baseline conservatism-without-real-commitment plus sporadic pique-driven deviations. This is kind of distressing:
Trying to explain McCain's wildly erratic record on environmental issues is a maddening task. "We never know where he's going to come from," says Debbie Sease, the legislative director of the Sierra Club. "As a general rule, on land and conservation issues ... he tends to be pretty good. But he's a doctrinaire conservative on the role of government in protecting people from pollution."
That kind of fits the idea of trying to be a TR for the 21st century. But I think it stands the merits of these issues on their heads. I think even pretty serious libertarians would tell you that some kind of regulations aimed at preventing pollution make sense. On land issues, by contrast, the merits are often murky even from an environmental point of view. In theory you can take land and put it in the hands of benevolent regulators who protect it from over-logging, unsound mining, etc. More often, though, you put it into the hands of regulators who work for politicians who take bribes campaign contributions from logging and mining interests and wind up letting the companies have their way with the land at sub-market prices.
The overall picture of the domestic McCain continues to be of a kind of ignorant conservatism punctuated by bursts of thoughtless stabs at reform.
Jeff Van Gundy explains in a cool feature for the Play website. Given that defense is half of basketball, there's shockingly little discussion of it in the sports media. Everyone knows that Boston has put together a great defense this year, but you don't hear much about what makes it so great except for vague allusions to Kevin Garnett's "intensity." I'm sure he's intense, but there's more to it than that.
Obama campaign gets ready to play: "TAX RETURNS: What does Clinton have to hide?"
The Clinton campaign has said that they have released copious amounts of financial information but there are many questions about their private dealings that could be answered in their tax returns but not in the information that is currently available. For example, here are eight pieces of information that could be learned from her tax returns, the accompanying schedules, and attachments:
Effective tax rate – including whether or not any tax shelters were used to reduce it
Amount of income for spouses by source
Amount of stock gains and losses
Gross income for the couple
Amount earned from stock dividends
Amount of household employment taxes paid
Personal exemptions taken
Charitable contributions made
Senator Clinton has also claimed that she is too “busy” to release her tax returns. Given the fact she is able to loan her campaign $5 million, you would think the Clintons would be able to hire an accountant. The reality is that she wants to keep this information hidden from voters. The people of Wyoming, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and the rest of the country should wonder why.
More to the point, I would think, given that the campaign has self-financed to the tune of $5 million it would seem to me that we want to scrutinize Bill's various business partners and other income streams in much the way you would any other campaign finance documents. Surely the vetted, tested candidate can stand a little sunshine on her multimillionaire lifestyle.
I dismissed Rush Limbaugh's efforts to get conservatives to go vote for Hillary Clinton in order to make things easier for John McCain. Markos' efforts to do something similar on Mitt Romey's behalf didn't achieve anything. And, after all, why should it work -- the motive for voting is mostly expressive, so people are disinclined to do this kind of thing. But Dave Weigel rounds up some evidence that the Rush effect was real and put Clinton over the top in Texas.
And, of course, it worked. Clinton still won't win the nomination -- after Mississippi and Wyoming she'll be further behind in the delegate count than ever with fewer than ever delegates still up for grabs -- but for another couple of months McCain will have a high-profile anti-Obama surrogate in the field telling people the likely nominee is unfit for executive leadership.
Does the prospect of a long, drawn-out contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spell doom for the eventual nominee? A lot of people have a sinking feeling that it does. Kevin Drum makes the case for chilling out by reminding us that the internecine fighting could hardly get worse than it was in 1968:
If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. "Bitter" isn't even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost.
So I say: chill out. Like a lot of people, I'm not very happy about the direction the Democratic campaign has taken, but the idea that it's going to wreck the eventual winner's chances in the fall seems pretty far fetched. It takes more than a few nasty exchanges to do that. And who knows? By keeping Dems in the spotlight, it might even help them. Stranger things have happened.
Maybe. Although it is hard to draw conclusions based on races like 1968 in which you saw a very substantial third party vote (indeed it strikes me as a bit odd that we're not seeing such a vote; McCain winning the nomination seems tailor-made for Ron Paul to run an appeal to anti-immigrant and anti-war sentiment). It is true, however, that political outcomes are mostly explained by the fundamentals -- demographics and objective events in the world -- and not by the candidates or the campaigns. On the other hand, a presidential election is fundamentally a zero-sum, high-stakes competition, so at the end of the day marginal impacts are very important even if they're rather small.
At any rate, consider this. Yesterday Josh Marshall had a complaint:
Let's note that Sen. McCain has decided to hang tough with his embrace of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Pastor John Hagee. And the major papers and cable news outlets have decided to give him a pass.
I've been Hagee-bashing since before it was cool, so this pisses me off, too. But realistically it's not the press and the cable networks that gave McCain a pass, it was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They gave him a pass because, of course, they were arguing with each other. For a little while during the Wisconsin-Texas interregnum, Obama did pivot in the direction of McCain and it gave Clinton the opportunity to smack him over the head with a frying pan. I assume neither campaign is going to make that mistake again until this thing is actually wrapped up. But that means that there'll be nobody effectively pressing the media with anti-McCain talking points. It also means that Clinton will continue re-enforcing whatever good lines of attack McCain comes up with against Obama, and if McCain starts delivering good anti-Clinton lines, Obama will probably start re-enforcing those, too.
This kind of dynamic hardly guarantees defeat in November, but it's hard to see how it helps.
I was looking at ESPN.com's "Hollinger stats" page and was surprised to see that in terms of Hollinger's PER stat, Durant is the 26th best small forward in the league. Not great, by any means, but good enough to be a starter somewhere. And, indeed, by the formula Durant is just ever so slightly below average.
I'd been under the impression that Durant was actually playing terribly. So I looked up the breakdown. It seems that in terms of scoring efficiency, Durant is pretty bad -- 50th among small forwards in true shooting percentage. As a rebounder he's worse -- 55th best rate among small forwards in rebound rate. 52nd in turnover ratio, and 53rd in assist ratio. Basically, he seems to be a bit worse than the fiftieth-best small forward in the league. That's probably good enough to get some minutes as a backup, especially since in light of his age he may well improve if he gets a chance, but it's a far cry from 26th best as Hollinger's aggregate statistic makes him out to be. What accounts for the difference?
Well, it turns out that Durant does excel at one thing -- getting plays called for him. He's got the third-highest usage rate among small forwards. But does he really deserve to get the level of credit for this that Hollinger's giving him? I mean, if you're not a very good player, your usage rate ought to be low. Using tons of possessions isn't helpful if you're at Durant-like levels of effectiveness.
The "world in numbers" for our current print issue is a nifty map of the overtaxed highway infrastructure in our major urban areas. Under the circumstances, the case for more transportation infrastructure is compelling, but it's worth underscoring the fact that you're never going to have anything more than a very temporary solution to congestion problems until you start implementing congestion pricing.
Building a highway, after all, costs money. But it creates something of value -- the chance to drive on an uncrowded roadway. But if you just give this valuable opportunity away for free, then people wind up consuming too much of it and soon enough there's no uncrowded roadway left. It's just like overfishing or any other "tragedy of the commons" issue. When you see construction of a new, unpriced and it's not likely that it'll soon become overcrowded, you're looking at a porkalicious "bridge to nowhere" sort of phenomenon where people are constructing something that has a cost out of proportion to its value. Anything that's genuinely valuable and also given away for free is going to wind up overconsumed.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't build roads. Reasonably uncrowded highways really are valuable and we should want to have them near our major economic centers. But to get that we need to charge for access to them during peak travel periods. That will, when done appropriately, ease the overcrowding and create revenues that can subsidize activities with small-to-zero marginal costs like non-peak driving and rail travel.
Of course, with me as with everyone else, my election-season analysis may at times become tainted by self-interest. For example, the evidence from my traffic stats unambiguously indicates that a lengthy primary campaign is good for blog traffic. What's more, I have at least some hope that it'll be good for Heads in the Sand, too.
The economy also is playing a role [in declining private school enrollment]. School officials say more parents are complaining about the price of a private school education, and more are seeking financial aid at a time when the cost of kindergarten -- $26,790 at Sidwell Friends School in the District, for example -- can be higher than the yearly $20,805 out-of-state tuition at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Or as the head of the national association said: Tuition may have reached the "breaking point."
Of course this does raise the point that there's something odd about the conventional cost structure of American education. We generally spend more money on kids the older they get (i.e., more on college than on high school, more on high school than on elementary school, more on elementary school than on early education) but all the evidence suggests that the stuff that comes earlier is more important than the stuff that comes later. I suppose you see this most clearly with foreign languages where if we took all the people doing foreign language instruction for people aged 15-22 and had them work on kids aged 4-11 instead we'd get more results.
Chuck Schumer and Even Bayh explain that people vote for Hillary when they realize things are "serious." Because, after all, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, George Miller, SEIU, and Samantha Power are all unserious. I guess kind of like how entire states don't count. Maybe it's just inherently unserious to be troubled by the idea of continuing hawk hegemony inside the Democratic Party. We need some more "serious" "national security Democrats" to run things. An administration staffed by vapid careerists. Sounds great.
Overheard at a local coffee shop: "seventh street is the new eleventh street." I would have said that ninth street is the new fourteenth street, since eleventh is kind of nothing. Oh well.
One fact about the world that I'm not sure people appreciate is that the very same group who's hatched the past few years' worth of efforts to conquer the Middle East would also like to start a war with China or, barring an actual shooting war, then at least a new Cold War that would prove extremely costly to both sides and perhaps even more costly to the citizens of weak states around the world who might soon enough find themselves churned up in sundry proxy wars.
James Fallows offers up a long and a short take on this, both of which are recommended. I would also add that within the left-of-center camp I think the idea of embarking upon such a concept is regarded as so daft that people don't realize it's even a possibility. But one really ought to recognize that the future of the US-Chinese relationship is probably going to be the most important variable in 21st century international relations.
I knew all about John Hagee's views on Catholics and his belief that John McCain has the foreign policy vision necessary to bring about the end of the world, but I'm just now focusing on this business:
All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are -- were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.
This is the brand of Christianity that President McCain is going to be promoting?
I suspect the drawn-out Democratic primary campaign will help John McCain and he'd better hope it does because things look terrible for him in this WaPost/ABC poll:
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama leads McCain, who captured the delegates needed to claim the Republican nomination Tuesday night, by 12 percentage points among all adults in the poll.; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) enjoys a six-point lead over the presumptive GOP nominee. Both Democrats are buoyed by moderates and independents in the head-to-heads and benefit from sustained negative public assessments of President Bush and the war in Iraq.
Of course early polling is basically worthless but what you'd expect to see is, over time, early polling converging with the fundamentals. Like maybe big picture indicators make things look good for one party, but the other party nominates someone with a super-awesome reputation so he has the lead. Then comes campaigning, attacks, slime, and basically the fundamentals take over. But the fundamentals for McCain are terrible -- bad economy and an unpopular war.
For whatever it's worth, I think the considerable evidence (seen in this poll and elsewhere) that a larger number of people are open to voting for Barack Obama than are open to voting for Hillary Clinton is a better indicator of electability than is the fact that Clinton is more popular than Obama among Democratic loyalists in several large states, but I don't think either data point is worth very much.
Okay, looks like we won't be totally without televised attacks on John McCain while Hillary Clinton continues her efforts to draw a backdoor straight:
Good stuff. According to Greg Sargent the buyer is the Campaign to Defend America who'll be spending over $1,000,000 on ads from a perspective that Sargent judiciously describes as one that "appears to be pro-Democratic." I'd like to see some mention of Social Security in future ads -- that issue absolutely killed Bush back in 2005 when people liked Republicans, and McCain has said he's a supporter of Bush's efforts to dismantle the program.
When it turned out that The Washington Post's readers were kind of pissed that their newspaper ran an article whose thesis was that women are stupid (and what does it say about the paper that it assumed its readership to be mostly composed of rabid misogynists), the relevant editor argued that the piece was "tongue in cheek," a joke. But the woman in question, Charlotte Allen, wasn't joking at all: "I meant to be funny but with a serious point--that women want to be taken seriously but quite often don't act serious."
Of course in my experience men, like women, want to be taken seriously. And men, like women, sometimes don't act serious. Somehow the world gets on.
Ross explains the cost to progressive politics of Hillary Clinton's decision to unleash the kitchen sink in a likely-futile effort to overcome Barack Obama's delegate lead:
Rather, the problem is that the party is losing a golden opportunity to try to put the race away early, the way Bill Clinton more or less did with Bob Dole in 1996 - by using their enormous fundraising advantage to rebrand John McCain as a Dole-style loser while he's still struggling to get his money-raising operation up to par. As Patrick Ruffini suggested earlier this week, if Obama had finished off Hillary last night he could have been up with anti-McCain ads all over the country immediately, forcing the GOP to play defense in places it usually owns all through the summer. Whereas the longer the race goes on, the less leverage the Dems' fundraising edge gives them, and the lower the chances that they can make it get late early for McCain through sheer dollar-power alone.
That's bad because it increases the chance of losing in November, it decreases the likelihood of an impressive-looking mandate, and most of all because its bad for down-ballot races. Yes, the very same down ballot races Democrats need to win if people actually want health care reform (as we learned in 1994, merely having a president who proposes health care reform doesn't do anyone any good), global warming legislation, etc. to happen.
UPDATE: Note in this context that the NAFTA memo thing was a bum rap cooked up by Canadian rightwingers (who are very networked with U.S. rightwingers) to deliberately hurt Barack Obama's campaign and produce the sort of long, hard slog we're now looking at.
Election outcomes are mostly determined by the fundamentals rather than by the candidates or the campaigns. And as you can see in Gallup's polling data above the fundamentals are good. They further observe that "The Democratic advantage is even greater when taking into account the partisan leanings of independents . . . 11-point gap in partisan leaning is the largest Gallup has observed since it began regularly measuring partisan leanings in 1991, topping the previous high gap of 10.2 points from last year . . . Democrats not only maintained but increased their partisanship advantage over the Republicans in 2007, at a time when the ranks of independents were also swelling in the mid-phase of the two-year party ID cycle."
Justin Elliot does a nice run-down of the candidate's efforts to render himself kosher. At the end of the day, I think the more bigthink-oriented Israel hawk activists are never going to like Obama because his ideas about Iraq and Iran don't jibe with their broader regional vision. But he's shown know indication of being the sort of person who's interested in risking his political career over the Palestinian issue one way or another.
It seemed to me that Hillary Clinton's ability to finally blunt Barack Obama's momentum somewhere in the Ohio and Texas primaries meant that maybe Mark Penn isn't quite as inept as he seemed. Now comes a weird Washington Poststory about how Clinton staffers first celebrated their wins "And then Clinton's advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit." Peter Baker and Ann Kornblut further report:
The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination. Clinton now faces the challenge of exploiting this moment of opportunity while at the same time deciding whether the squabbling at her Arlington headquarters has become a distraction that requires her intervention.
It seems to me that the depth of hostility to Penn also illustrates something else -- the depth of Bill and Hillary Clinton's personal and professional allegiance to Mark Penn. He masterminded their re-election campaign in 1996, he was put in charge of steering Hillary Clinton into a New York Senate seat in 2000, they stood by him during 2001 when he was trashing Al Gore and economic populism to everyone who could hear, eagerly snapped him up to be the maestro of the 2008 election, and even though everyone on earth -- including her own staff and supporters -- wants her to ditch this guy, she won't do it. Because Penn's style of political skittishness is, fundamentally, what she and her husband think the lessons of the past few decades support. The strength of Barack Obama's campaign has forced her to shift to the left, but you can always tell that her campaign's at its most comfortable attacking from the right -- altering photographs of Obama, calling diplomacy "naive," getting "tough" on Iran, warning that terrorists will devour your children unless you elect the longest-serving Washington hack available, singing John McCain's praises, etc.
The people working for Clinton who don't like Penn, don't like the idea of a Penn-run campaign, and don't like the idea of a Penn-run administration, all have a simple option available to them -- stop working to elect Mark Penn's candidate.
Barack Obama's campaign wants Bill and Hillary Clinton to release their tax returns. The Clinton campaign responds by denouncing "Ken Starr" tactics. But this is the point, isn't it? Clinton's people want to say we need a "vetted" candidate, so we need a vetted candidate. It's not as if the Republicans have forgotten Ken Starr tactics, nor is it as if examining potential financial conflicts of interest is some kind of outlandish new development in dirty politics. I personally am a bit less interested in their tax returns than in seeing some financial disclosure around the Clinton Foundation (would it be so terrible to have a president who's not taking money from the government of Qatar?).
Eight years ago, when Hillary parachuted into NY to become our Senator, she and Howard Wolfson became completely obsessed with opponent Rick Lazio's tax returns, which he did not release until the end of August.
They talked about them at every opportunity. In early July, Hillary called it "frankly disturbing." A guy in an Uncle Sam outfit was dispatched to be a nuisance at various Lazio events in August. Howard himself showed up once to try to rattle Lazio by offering him a copy of some Chappaqua property tax receipt after Lazio said he'd release his state returns as soon as Hillary released hers (which didn't exist, because she had just moved up here).
First, Obama aside, mandates matter because, sometimes, folks have to be protected from their worst instincts. That's why we force everyone to pay into fire departments through taxes. Otherwise, some folks would opt out under the theory that they don't do much cooking, and we don't want their houses to burn down.
Second, single payer, which so many folks love, is a mandate by a different name. That name is taxes. Some people will feel they can't, or shouldn't, pay that level of taxes, and they will be angry, just as some will feel they can't afford insurance, or shouldn't have to buy it, and they will be angry. Now, maybe single payer is a better way to structure the mandate. But it's a mandate nevertheless.
But there's a clear difference between providing a universal public service (fire department / single-payer) financed through progressive taxation, and between setting up a bunch of private for-profit firefighting firms and then forcing everyone to buy their services (health care mandate / weird quasi-libertarian dystopia). We're obviously not going to run a government policy in any are without "mandating" that some people do some stuff, but that's hardly the same as saying that mandating that people buy specific kinds of products from for-profit firms is a close substitute for public provision of goods.
This is why, to me, it's unfortunate that the discussion initially kicked off by John Edwards' health care proposal has tended to focus so heavily on the mandate issue and touch so lightly on the idea of introducing a public sector health care alternative to compete with private plans. That's a very good idea in my view, but obviously there are a lot of important details to be worked out. What's more, unlike making people buy health insurance, this is an idea insurance companies will really hate -- propose a substantial reform and I'm sure the insurers will tack a mandate on. But it's an idea I'd like to see the next president really fight for. What I don't want to see happen is the president come in having promised so loudly to pass "a health care bill" that he or she then feels absolutely compelled to agree to whatever the 41st most conservative senator will agree to even if that means a bad bill.
In terms of a mandate's relationship to single-payer, the point is that in order to make a robust public sector option viable, you either need a mandate or else you need to finance the public sector option with tax dollars which, as Ezra says, is a kind of mandate. But that all depends on the public-private competition actually being there. Absent it, what you have isn't anything like single-payer, it's a kind of large subsidy to insurance companies.
*[let me now note that even though the primary campaign has tended to swallow everything and what follows dissents somewhat from the Clinton line on mandates, I still think she has the better proposal at the end of the day]
UPDATE: See also Brian Beutler on legislative dynamics. To be clear, though, this post is not aimed at boosting Obama's fortunes vis-a-vis Clinton since I think they both have a similar problem here. The crux of the matter is that we don't want the next president to head into negotiations in such a way that he or she can't say no to any kind of "health care bill" that emerges. Reform is important, but it needs to actually be reform that makes things better not reform for the sake of "doing something" about the problem.
In the wake of Boston's fairly comfortable win over the Detroit Pistons it's perhaps time to revisit the obvious point that this is a really good basketball team. Kevin Garnett has consistently been one of the top players in the league, and now for the first time ever he's playing alongside another legitimately great player in Paul Pierce. Ray Allen's not really the force he once was, but he's no slouch, either. And contrary to how things looked over the offseason, Boston's now got reasonable depth. Rajon Rondo is pretty good and Kendrick Perkins is good enough. Add on to that Glen Davis, Eddie House, James Posey and now P.J. Brown and Sam Cassell off the bench, and you've got a really great basketball team.
I kind of lost sight of the Celtics because they fell off their seventy win pace and then there were blockbuster trades out west, but the slip was driven by injuries. When healthy, I see every reason to think they'll win the championship.
Photo by Flickr user The Mike Lee used under a Creative Commons license
There are several gyms available for use by Harvard students. It seems that one of them is now a bit special:
Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.
I'd need to think a bit more about it before I was sure whether or not this was a reasonable accommodation to make to the needs of Muslim students, but I'm positive I'd think a bit more about it before I went and wrote something like Andrew's post titled "Sharia at Harvard":
They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What's next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.
Suppose I were to inform Andrew that Harvard, like all American institutions of higher education of which I'm aware, shuts down and creates a holiday in late December that just so happens to coincide with an important familial and religious observance for Christians whereas no such allowance is made for Passover visits. Christianism? Worse, it happens in public high schools and elementary schools all across the country, the very same country in which no mail can be delivered on Sunday! Meanwhile, when I was a student at Harvard there was a ban on having anything on fire in a dorm room and also a movement to create an exemption so that Jewish students could light Hanukkah candles. I don't recall whether or not the exemption was granted, but if it was that certainly wouldn't constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university. I know for a fact that they allow students to reschedule exams for religious reasons, like a Jewish or Muslim obligation to avoid taking an exam on a Saturday (no exams are scheduled on Sundays).
There's a range of things one can think about these policies. The preferential treatment granted by public institutions to Christmas rankles, but given the vast number of Christmas-celebrators in the country it's also inevitable and practical. The "no mail on Sundays" thing is poor public policy and obviously has religious origins of a sort, but it's hardly some intolerable burden on minorities, it's just bad public policy. Letting people reschedule exams for religious reasons, but not just because they happen to feel like taking them in some other order, seems like an eminently fair and practical way of dealing with the situation. New York City public schools make the Jewish High Holy Days a day off, due to the city's large Jewish population, most other jurisdictions don't do that but will look the other way if Jewish kids don't show up -- reasonable responses to the objective situation in both cases.
Finding a way to accommodate observant Muslims' concerns about co-ed workouts, in short, is hardly some per se outrageous violation of a strict U.S. tradition of secularism. Is the particular way they've done this unduly burdensome? I think to say whether or not it is you'd need to look at the situation and the available alternatives in some detail.
I often walk around town frustrated by how short all the buildings are. Letting people build taller and thereby increase density would be good in a whole number of ways. But even a hardened development advocate such as myself would have to concede that it's not reasonable to ask people all across the city to accept having huge swathes of their neighborhood suddenly bulldozed and rebuilt as something wildly different. Ryan Avent has a more practical proposal:
I believe the District should designate a few safe viewsheds, where heights cannot be raised. Then, it should auction off a set number of height allowances each year. Auctions should boost the revenue take, and a set number of annual allowances would prevent wholesale redevelopment of areas with tight supply.
It might even be a good idea to set it up so that a healthy share of the revenue would accrue directly to the local Advisory Neighborhood Councils so as to give them some incentive to encourage development rather than adopting their usual posture of obstructionism.
I'd been assuming that Hillary Clinton wasn't going to contest Wyoming, on the grounds that caucus states, red states, and all-white states normally don't count, but it seems she's in it to win it according to Politico:
Now she has five staffers on the ground in Wyoming, where caucuses take place Saturday and where 18 delegates are at stake. Bill Clinton will make three stops there Thursday, and local supporters are trying to arrange a visit from the candidate herself Friday, said Kathy Karpan, a former Democratic candidate for Wyoming governor who is one of Clinton’s leading supporters in the state.
“I think we can win,” Karpan said, citing “the connection that the Clintons have with people in our state,” a network of support built during their White House years, when they vacationed at Jackson Hole.
Interesting. I think everyone's mentally pencilled Wyoming in as an Obama state, but of course there's been no polling there nor was there in the other Wyoming-esque states that Obama won earlier in the cycle. Nobody really knows what such innovations as staff and candidate visits might be able to do for Clinton's fortunes.
Steve Chapman: "McCain's Consistent Folly on Iraq". There's a lot of folly in there and, in a lot of ways, Chapman's just scratching the surface. To really put McCain's thinking on Iraq in context, you need to recall his role in the 1990s in building up Ahmed Chalabi and other related antics. Almost all Republicans have been willing to say and do absurd things on behalf of the Iraq War since the Bush administration chose to take the party in that direction. But McCain is one of the handful of major actors in actively pushing the GOP in that direction.
Nick Beaudrot has your Texas primary results map. Basically, Clinton won the vast majority of the state's land area, but Obama did well in the more densely populated areas and kept it close. Clinton, meanwhile, absolutely crushed him in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley areas.
Nick sees evidence in this that Democrats ought to be taking Rick Noriega's chances against Rick Perry more seriously. I'll believe a Democrat's winning statewide in Texas when I see it, but I suppose crazier things have happened. Meanwhile, the growth of the Texas non-white population is kind of a looming timebomb for the GOP electoral college map. If Texas were to start voting like New Mexico, the Republicans would be in a world of pain.
I think Barack Obama has a much stronger chance of beating John McCain in the general election. I think Hillary is flawed in many ways, and particularly if you look at her husband's unwillingness to release the names of the people who contributed to his presidential library. And the reason that is important -- you know, are there favors attached to $500,000 or $1 million contributions? And what do I mean by favors? I mean, pardons that are granted; investigations that are squelched; contracts that are awarded; regulations that are delayed.
As I wrote in my Los Angeles Times op-ed on the subject, Hillary Clinton has, to her credit, recognized that George W. Bush's undisclosed library fundraising is a problem and sponsored a bill to ensure that the next President of the United States can't do what Bush and her husband are doing. And Bill says that if Hillary wins, then he'll disclose. But that's too late -- the election is happening now, and people deserve to know now. We do know that "Denise Rich. Ms. Rich gave the foundation $450,000 while her fugitive ex-husband, Marc Rich, was seeking a pardon on tax-evasion and racketeering charges" and that other donors as of 2004 include various Wal-Mart-linked individuals and foundations, Haim Saban, Qatar, Kuwait, the Saudi Royal family, etc.
53 killed in Baghdad bombings. I should say that no matter how badly U.S. tactics in Iraq fail, I don't think you'll ever see violence levels return to where they were at the late-06/early-07 peak when you had a lot of sectarian massacres. At this point, given the number of people who are already either dead or else displaced to somewhere safer than where they were before, things aren't going to get that bad again.
But that's essentially irrelevant to the main question we spent 2003, 2004, and 2005 debating -- namely whether or not it's in the capacity of 100,000+ U.S. Army and Marine Corps members to effectively bring an end to Iraqi political conflicts. The answer continues to appear to be no. Similarly, there's really nothing we can do to stop sporadic bombing attacks. It's not, after all, that you look at Italy and say "man, there's a country where they have great tactics to prevent suicide bombings -- Iraq should really implement those." Rather, you don't see suicide bombing where you don't see would-be suicide bombers and that's not the kind of outcome a foreign military force can produce in Iraq. So things will probably get worse again, but not as bad as they were at the very worst times.
Strolling through John McCain's policy proposals is a fascinating experience . . . lurking behind every link is a nearly-astounding level of vacuity. Take education where McCain promises that:
John McCain will place parents and children at the center of the education process, empowering parents by greatly expanding the ability of parents to choose among schools for their children. He believes all federal financial support must be predicated on providing parents the ability to move their children, and the dollars associated with them, from failing schools.
Now at first I thought this was McCain committing himself to the proposition that each and every state would need to choose between voucherizing its school system and losing all federal funding. But then I checked around and it turns out that on another reading, this is nothing more than what No Child Left Behind already requires. So basically on school choice McCain is either proposing the most extreme pro-vouchers proposal available to the federal government, or else he's proposing to continue the status quo absolutely. Or maybe something in between! You'd think that with 25 years in congress under his belt, McCain might have formed some kind of opinions about federal education policy, but it seems not.
Survey USA's aggregation of 50 independent state polls sure does lead to some interesting results. Here's Obama versus McCain:
And here's Clinton versus McCain:
Provocative, but I don't buy it. Each of these polls has a sample size of 600, so the margin of error will come into play. What's more, there are 100 separate polls being aggregate here, so the odds are that several of these are just bad samples. On top of that you have all the usual problems with early polling. Were I to inject some pro-Obama spin into this, I would note that there are Democratic Senate pickup opportunities this year in Oregon, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia where the polls show Obama winning and Hillary losing, but there are no such races in Arkansas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan or New Jersey where the map shows Hillary winning and Obama losing. But as I say, while I think this method is clever, I don't really see it as methodologically sound -- Clinton's not going to lose Washington, Obama's not going to lose New Jersey, and what happens in Michigan will have more to do with whether or not McCain runs demagogic attacks on the Democrats' global warming plans than on who the Democrats nominate.
Samantha Power is an Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, scholar, and author. She's an eloquent and brilliant voice for the idea that American power can, if skillfully used, build a more just and humane world. She's widely respected across a variety of domains and political points of view. She's also supporting Barack Obama. She also committed a gaffe, for which she promptly apologized and then resigned. And yet Hillary Clinton's campaign is still trying to run her name through the mud in hopes of keeping the story alive for a bit longer. Just as with Clinton's Liebermanesque praise of John McCain's commander-in-chiefiness we see a family that doesn't really care what people or causes they harm as long as it stands some vague chance of in some slight way helping their clique get back in power. I'd take their clique over McCain's clique in a heartbeat, but it's a pretty appalling approach, albeit in keeping with the Clinton camp's habit of insulting Obama's voters, whole states, etc. Basically, they're wreck whatever they need to wreck to keep hope alive.
Perversely, this is actually near the core of her appeal -- say what you will about her, but at least she's willing to fight dirty. The team that executed Ricky Ray Rector versus the guy who patiently built a coalition to protect the rights of the accused.
Admiral Fallon at CENTCOM long seems to have been lukewarm-at-best about the surge so, naturally, just like Petraeus' predecessors in Iraq he's going to be relieved of command. This is what's known in the Bush administration as shaping policy by military conditions on the ground rather than arbitrary dictates in Washington. First, you formulate a policy. Then you find some career military people who agree with it. Then you put them in charge. Then you hide behind them to avoid taking political heat for your own policies. And if they aren't good at serving as frontmen for your policies, or aren't willing to do it, you get some new ones.
And one thing I'd caution liberals of is letting the insurers loom too large in our minds. They are one of many impediments to reform, but for various reasons, we tend to think of them as the primary obstacle. They're not.
Well, there are reforms and then there are reforms. The cost of people relying on private, for-profit firms as their primary source of insurance for medical expenses is large. When you pay out-of-pocket for health care, your money is going to buy health care services. When a public sector programs pays for health care, your tax dollars are going to buy some administrative bureaucracy and health care services. When a private sector insurance firms pays for health care, your premiums are going to buy some administrative bureaucracy, plus some marketing, plus some risk analysis aimed at avoiding acquiring the "wrong" customers, plus some people whose job it is to find ways to deny legitimate claims, plus health care services.
Insofar as the aim of health care reformers is to increase the number of people buying insurance from insurance companies (or having it bought for them by their employer) then, naturally, insurance companies won't necessarily be the main locus of opposition. But when I hear about how Ron Wyden and AHIP are getting along marvelously I don't think "Oh, look, the prospects for reform are better than I thought" I think "Oh, look, we're going to get an expensive-and-crappy reform." It's worth keeping in mind that a lot of the liberal interest-group pressure on the health care front is aimed primarily at improving the competitive posture of unionized firms vis-à-vis non-union or foreign rivals, rather than at improving America's health outcomes.
John Hagee has some odd ideas about Jews that, as a Jewish person, make me uncomfortable. Jews, as most people know, have suffered a lot of persecution over the years. According to Hagee, we were getting what we deserved:
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.
Mark Kleiman points out that Abe Foxman didn't used to have much truck with this sort of thinking when it arrived in a different context, denouncing the "simplistic, counterproductive, biased and bigoted perception" as "blaming the victim" since "the cause of anti-Semitism is anti-Semites." But Hagee thinks anti-Semitism is God's justified punishment for the Jews. Thus when his organization succeeds in pressuring the U.S. and Israel to adopt a foreign policy that leads to Israel's destruction at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance, the plan will finally be fulfilled.
What does Foxman have to say about all this Hageean nuttiness? He thinks it's just fine since Hagee's pro-Israel. Obviously, we're not supposed to give too much scrutiny to the content of Hagee's "pro-Israel" views since in an ordinary sense deliberately seeking the destruction of the Jewish state and the deaths of all its citizens wouldn't be considered an especially pro-Israel stance. I believe that even Hamas has sometimes hinted at a desire for an accommodation.
While the horses keep raising, the economy keeps stumbling as we here of 63,000 job losses in February. Those numbers tend to get revised, but of course thanks to population growth even small positive numbers amount to a weakening labor market. Jared Bernstein says "I haven’t seen a job report this recessionary since the last recession." The Times article notes that the revisions accompanying the report aren't good either "The government also revised down its estimate for January to a loss of 22,000 jobs — the first decline in four years — and cut in half its estimate for job growth in December."
It's not 100 percent logical, but I get the sense that the worsening economic situation is going to cause people to focus more attention on the fact that "if we lavish an unlimited quantity of resources on Iraq for an indefinite period of time there's some chance that things will improve there" isn't really a policy idea that holds up to cost-benefit analysis. It's all fun and games for a certain establishment set, but I think the average American would rather see the government expend resources on improving his or her life than on trying to save the reputations of the people who got us into this war.
So as you've probably heard by now, Hillary Clinton thinks that you have to pass a "commander in chief threshold" if you want to be president. "I believe that I've done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you'll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy." This is outrage on several levels, both in terms of Clinton's not-so-thick resume, and in terms of the seriously poor form involved in bashing your opponent in ways that involve praising the other party's nominee. That said, like Kevin Drum I'm a bit skeptical that there's a practical problem here of Clinton handing McCain ammunition since politics, in practice, doesn't seem to work that way.
There is, however, a deeper worry that this expresses. Why does Hillary Clinton think McCain would be a better foreign policy leader than Obama? Now I expect millions of people around the country to agree with Clinton about that in November. Millions of people will, I think, decide that invading Iraq was a good idea, that staying in Iraq indefinitely is a good idea, that pushing the envelop of confrontation with North Korea and Iran is a good idea, that refusing to abide by any of our treaty commitments is a good idea, etc. Those people will, naturally, conclude that McCain would be the better commander in chief. That's inevitable. I expect those millions of Americans to be outnumbered by millions more who prefer Obama's approach and who want to see America pulled back from the brink and back toward something like the liberal internationalist tradition that's governed us at our best since the Second World War rather than to continue on the path of militarism and hegemonism that's been responsible for the bulk of our mistakes.
I had also taken it for granted that whatever Clinton did or said during the years 2002-2004 she wouldn't seriously be among the group of people who prefer McCain's approach. But is she? If not, why does she think he'll be such a good commander in chief? Now I certainly think that most of Clinton's supporters, including many of the people who work for her on national security issues, don't see her as the kind of person who prefers the McCain approach. But maybe she is? Surge architects Jack Keane seems to think so.
It's worth pointing out that John McCain's embrace of discredited autism-vaccine connection theories isn't just an odd display of ignorance, it's a positive public danger. As Arthur Allen spelled out in a September 2002 Atlantic article, communities where immunization rates dip below a critical threshold see the re-emergence of endemic diseases that modern public health techniques are perfectly capable of stamping out.
There are millions and millions of people in this country strongly predisposed to believe that John McCain wouldn't run around saying there was "strong evidence" that getting your kids vaccinated might put them at risk for autism unless there was, in fact, such evidence. Some of them will have their children avoid vaccination, and a price will be paid. Link via Jerry Taylor.
One consequence of the Iraq War is that a set of doctrines -- and in some ways more to the point, a clique of individuals -- associated with the concept of "counterinsurgency" has come very much into vogue across both political parties. At the moment, the counterinsurgents are still a minority faction in the military, but they're on the rise and seem to be the ones with the friends in the press and the political world. What's more, whatever doubts I have about them, they're certainly preferable to the "let's gear up for war with China!" crowd that forms their main opposition within the military.
With that by way of throat-clearing, Spencer Ackerman has decided to do a little new media venture where he writes "The Rise of the Vulcans" or "They Knew They Were Right" before the faction at hand rises to hegemony. Thus, his ongoing series "The Rise of the Counterinsurgents" of which you can read the first edition here.
Katha Pollitt does a great response essay to Charlotte Allen's "women are dumb" op-ed. I even learned a thing or two about traffic safety:
Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.
Men like risky behavior leading to more accident fatalities jibes with my general understanding, but I wonder why women get into more aggregate accidents. You'd think that the same skills and instincts that help you avoid a fatal crash would also help you avoid a minor one.
It seems that Samantha Power has resigned from the Obama campaign in the wake of a reference to Hillary Clinton as a "monster" in an interview with The Scotsman (and why was should doing an interview with The Scotsman anyway?) that she's since apologized for. I hadn't thought she had a formal position with the campaign to begin with so probably not a ton of substantive significance here.
UPDATE: Well, David Kurtz says "In the constellation of Obama advisers, the 37-year-old Irish-born Power has as high a profile and as close a relationship to the candidate as anyone."
I've always thought it was pretty obvious that a lot of the pressure aimed at pushing the US and China into a cycle of mutual hostility was driven by the narrow interests of defense contractors rather than anything to do with national security, but it's the kind of thing where you rarely get a clear demonstration of a quid pro quo. Kevin Drum, though, finds a really clear-cut example lurking in Thomas Barnett's Esquire profile of William Fallon.
Needless to say, anyone whose substantive thinking about international relations implies the need to build vast quantities of new weapons systems to fight China with is going to find his think tank has plenty of willing funders.
So thinking a bit more reflectively about this Samantha Power business, I'm pretty pissed off. Sure, you can rail against the perfidy of the Clintons, but this sort of ritualized calls for resignations is all in the game. Having her resign, by contrast, is just playing the game poorly. Remember when fresh strategic thinking and common sense were going to break with the conventional wisdom? I do. The "monster" business was a dumb thing to say, and certainly the kind of thing you apologize for, but no kind of indication that she was a bad person to get foreign policy advice from.
Brendan Nyhan has a bunch of interesting charts about the Democratic race of which this one, showing the negative correlation between Obama's level of white support and the size of the state's southern baptist population. If you ignore all the states with really small southern baptist populations and just focus on the South you see a correlation that holds up really well. Basically, if you think of the number of southern baptists as a proxy for how "southern" a given southern state is, you see that the more culturally Dixie states are the ones where whites are most hostile to Obama's message. They're not, however, necessarily bad states for Obama overall, since some (like Alabama and, soon, Mississippi) have African-Americans as such a large share of the Democratic vote that he wins anyway.
Nick Beaudrot redoes the Survey USA state-by-state polling maps to offer up some shading proportional to the level of support the candidates are drawing. It makes for a somewhat more nuanced picture of the landscape though, as before, I caution you that if you aggregate 100 separate polls, some of them are going to be those outliers (Obama-McCain tied in Texas?) they warned you about when they described the margin of error:
Nick also proffers the following Senate analysis: "in the states with the ten most competitive Senate races, Obama does better than Clinton in eight of them; only Kentucky and Louisiana are better for Clinton." I don't know how well this polling will hold up, but I think this is a crucial question. The issue is not so much coattails as it is anti-coattails. If this starts to shape up as a good year for Democrats, "let's not give Obama/Clinton a blank check" will be a persuasive argument to some voters in states where Obama or Clinton is unpopular. You want to minimize the number of states like that.
Archivists at the Clinton Library blocking access "of hundreds of pages of White House papers on pardons that the former president approved, including clemency for fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich." The risk with this kind of thing is that, basically, Democratic partisans don't want to hear about it and don't care. We know perfectly well that the right-wing dragged all this stuff up as part of a crazy and pernicious scandal net and only talks about it to use their nefarious agenda. Thus maybe it won't hurt Clinton much in a primary. But in a general election? In a country where her husband never secured a majority? It'll be damaging.
I also wrote a Current on the Wire's end. I also understand that the final episode has leaked on the web so some folks have seen it. I haven't. No spoilers, please.
UPDATE: Also, I agree with Ross about this: "The Wire's greatest story was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell, and nothing's matched it since." I almost wish the great stuff with the kids had just been part of a separate, excellent television series rather than an additional narrative arc of The Wire.
An Oklahoma State Legislator offers up some traditional values thinking on homosexuality: "I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam."
Republican nominee John McCain gets really pissed off when asked questions about his flirtations with running as John Kerry's VP:
Very strange for him to get so huffy. Everyone knows he was close to accepting the offer, everyone knows he was close to switching parties in 2001, and everyone knows that he spent a lot of time in between thinking about an independent bid for the White House. Heck, the essence of the guy's appeal is precisely that he's not much of a GOP loyalist.
I hope the current winning streaks by the San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets will throw the panicky trades of Dallas and Phoenix into some relief. Both the Mavs and the Suns seemed to have taken the attitude that if LA was going to make a blockbuster deal that improved the team, that, damnit, they had to make blockbuster deals of their own without giving adequate consideration to whether or not the deals were helping. Meanwhile, other West teams who chose to just tweak and improve are in good shape.
Maybe the Lakers will win in the end, especially if Bynum comes back at full strength. And if they do, they do. It's hard to compete when a good team gets to add a player as good as Gasol without giving anything up. But flailing is not the answer.
Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a brilliant and original thinker and advocate for the intelligent deployment of American power in order to build a more just and humane world. But she's supporting Barack Obama, she made a gaffe, she promptly and rightly apologized, and then she resigned. And now this afternoon, the Clinton campaign has continued to push out Power-bashing material in order to prove, I guess, that there's nothing and nobody they won't try to destroy if they think that will provide them with some slender additional shot at getting themselves and their clique back in power. It's a bit disgusting.
Also on this point, I join Kriston Capps in puzzlement over Dana Goldstein's view that "Power's comments promoted an awful stereotype of a female leader as someone who is inhumanly calculating, with no core beliefs." This strikes me as close to expressing the view that the feminist position is that criticism of Hillary Clinton is, as such, sexist. "Monster," as Kriston says, isn't a gendered term and accusing one's political opponent of a lack of principle is incredibly common. On top of that, the Clintons have actually spent a fair amount of time promoting the idea that they have a ruthless approach to politics. Democratic primary voters are supposed to want a ruthless leader to take on John McCain. But they turn that same ruthlessness against progressive leaders (and, indeed, principles if we recall Ricky Ray Rector and 1995-98), too, when it suits their purposes.
One of the strangest elements of this campaign has been that Hillary Clinton has put special emphasis on the idea that she's the candidate of experience with regard to foreign policy matters, even though most accounts of the Clinton administration seem to indicate that this was the part of her husband's administration she was least involved with. The one concrete example of involvement in foreign policymaking she's really given relates to the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, but she seems to be lying about this:
Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.
UPDATE:Chicago Tribune takes a broader look at Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience and finds it to be mostly flim-flam. It's not just that it's false, in general, that she has a lot of experience in this field, but her campaign actually puts out specific examples of things she did while First Lady that, upon examination, turn out not to hold up.
Josh Marshall says "she doesn't need to be a seasoned foreign policy hand. But she's setting herself up for a fall when she claims to be." Right. Clinton would, like Barack Obama, and most modern presidents (Ike, Nixon, and GHWB being the big counterexamples) have little experience with running foreign policy. But she feels compelled to lie about it.
A friend was half-joking to me the other day that you could do far more for public health by passing a carbon cap-and-trade bill than by pushing for universal health care. Maybe that's right (see also this recent study showing that increases in CO2 can worsen the adverse respiratory effects of ozone and other air pollutants.) Especially if a climate bill provided incentives for, say, people to move to urban areas and walk and take public transit.
Maybe I'm Brad's friend or maybe the friend reads my blog, but as I've written "if Hillary Clinton's entire agenda were enacted, her climate change proposals would wind up doing more to improve public health than would her health care proposals." My assumption here is, of course, that under an auctioned cap and trade regime it's basically inevitable that people would drive less and do more walking or bike riding.
Relatively small changes could make a big difference in this regard. Even though all us yuppies have our gym members, most Americans are almost entirely sedentary, neither exercising nor walking much. At the same time, tons of people just die in car wrecks directly. There are good reasons to reform the health care syste, beyond the direct public health benefits (it'd be fairer, give people peace of mind, probably enhance economic opportunities and efficiency, etc.) but public health is important too and lifestyle issues are of paramount importance there.
Via Ann Friedman, it seems that Rep. Rick Renzi's (R-AZ) web of corruption extended to his ideological allies, including Arizona Right-to-Life, the Hope Crisis Center, and the Wickenburg Pregnancy Resource Center.
David Leonhardt writes: "If history is a reliable guide, the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable."
If that's right and we do see a recession this year, would there be any historical precedent for the Republicans maintaining control of the White House? I know a couple of examples of incumbent parties losing despite a strong economy (1968, 2000) when special circumstances (Vietnam, Nader/Florida/electoral college) intervene, but has an incumbent party ever rode a recession to victory?
One absolutely fascinating element of political psychology is liberals are absolutely convinced that over the years Republican Party politicians have demonstrated more skill at the black arts of spin and PR and conservative have the exact same beliefs about Democrats.
I couldn't tell you why, but at some point years ago I developed the opinion that Kill the Moonlight was overrated and not really an album I liked. In fact, it is an excellent album. That is all.
When John McCain proposed a campaign finance reform bill that George W. Bush deemed unconstitutional, Bush tried to kill it behind the scenes in congress. But Bush failed, and the bill passed. Since the bill was popular, Bush signed it, thus giving us an early introduction to his casual contempt for constitutional government. Today, though, he's willing to break out the veto pen in order to try to prevent congress from reiterating the illegality of torture.
John McCain, in one of his mavericky moments, offered up some opposition to the Bush torture regime. Now, though, he's taken to urging Bush to keep a torture loophole open. Basically, Bush wants a ton of torture, McCain prefers a moderate level of torture. This is one of several reasons why I, unlike Hillary Clinton, don't think McCain passes the "commander in chief" threshold in a particularly impressive way. I'd like a commander-in-chief who's prepared to govern the country in a manner consistent with our laws and traditions, as well as sound interrogation practice, international law, and basic standards of human decency.
Third: since 1997 or so the link between expanded imports and wage inequality has become real, as our imports now embody a much larger amount of factors competing with our own lesser-skilled than they used to. How large? I don't think we know. Paul Krugman is now writing a paper for the Brookings Institution in which he essentially throws up his hands at the question. But there are two points worth noting: (a) the effects of trade on pre-tax wage inequality are much smaller than the effects over the past generation of changes in the tax system on after-tax income inequality; (b) the effects of trade on inequality of opportunity are much less than the effects of educational inequities on inequality of opportunity.
Fourth, to the extent that we in the United States begin thinking of trade restrictions as a way to fight inequality, we are setting ourselves up for extraordinary trouble late in this century--extraordinary damage to our long-run national security.
Now if the next progressive administration decides that in the total universe of tough political fights they want to take on, they'd rather have fights over withdrawal from Iraq, expanded access to health car, and curbing America's carbon emissions than have a tough fight over further lowering of trade barriers that would strike me as an eminently sensible way to proceed. In retrospect, it seems a bit perverse of the Clinton administration to have gone forward with NAFTA before health care and without even getting their allies-on-NAFTA in the business world to support them on health care. That, however, is about priorities and sound coalition-management, a different thing from saying that the opponents of trade liberalization are correct on the merits.
It seems that the final vote count in California is more favorable to Barack Obama than were the results on February 5. Sufficiently more favorable in delegate terms, it seems, to make up the lost ground from last week's primaries. Once Mississippi and Wyoming have voted, I expect Obama's delegate lead will be bigger than ever, with fewer-than-ever delegates left in play.
UPDATE: Early indications are of massive turnout and a big Obama win in Wyoming. It has, however, already been established that Idaho and North Dakota don't count, so why should Wyoming?
I often say to myself while watching NBA games, sure this is pretty interesting, but it would be so much better if we switched up tournament rules so as to minimize the odds chance of the best teams advancing while also massively degrading the talent-level of the athletes. After all, what kind of basketball fan would want to see the game played by the best basketball players out there? Not me! Far better to see competition where the average guy couldn't make it in the Spanish or Italian pro leagues. Three cheers for mediocrity.
What are the 3 things he would tell John McCain if he were his adviser?
“Let me just bluntly answer that. One, abandon the two-state solution statement that we have right now vis a vis the Palestinians. Two—Well, let me start with number one. Number one is an open, publicly expressed regime-change strategy in Iran. Two, an open expressed regime-change strategy in Syria. 3, abandoning the two-state solution policy we’ve had frankly since the 9/11 attacks…”
Fortunately, Wurmser's not the only person who thinks Bush has gotten a little soft since 2006 or so. John Bolton, since leaving office, has criticized Bush along Wurmserish lines for not starting enough new wars. He's also confident that John McCain can get the job done, so a McCain administration should be great.
Democrats pick up a House seat in a special election to fill the vacancy left by former speaker Dennis Hastert. This was a pretty solidly Republican district (not a lot of leadership figures coming from swing seats) so count it as further evidence that the GOP's in a ton of trouble.
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Heads in the Sand
