« March 2, 2008 - March 8, 2008 | Main | March 16, 2008 - March 22, 2008 » March 9, 2008 - March 15, 2008 ArchivesMarch 9, 2008LautenbergA correspondent raises the question of why Frank Lautenberg is running for re-election in New Jersey. He retired in 2001, citing old age, and only wound up coming out of retirement because Bob Toricelli had to drop out of the race under a hail of corruption charges. Having a too-old Democratic nominee running in a Democratic state in a Democratic-trending year seems to needlessly jeopardize what ought to be a safe seat. Bob Andrews, a lonely nation turns its eyes to you. Look at Me!
You can tell that I've officially jumped the shark, since there's an article in The New York Times Style section about how my roommates and I all have blogs and are friends with other political bloggers. The good news is that while I was afraid intrepid reporter Ashley Parker would try to compensate for the fact that we're not very interesting by being really mean, she seems to have resisted the temptation. Plus, I really like the photo Michael Temchine took that I stole above and they used with the article. Do people care about this stuff? Probably someone does, and whoever that is probably isn't you, the kind of person who's reading blogs on a Sunday. Instead, you, my readers, are going to make fun of me. And that's fine. Mock all you like. But if you don't pre-order a copy of Heads in the Sand, I'll cry. More EconomyFrom the very end of David Leonhardt's article yesterday: The median household earned $48,201 in 2006, down from $49,244 in 1999, according to the Census Bureau. It now looks as if a full decade may pass before most Americans receive a raise. That's pretty striking stuff. And of course since the economy never really re-reached its 1999 peak before the current downturn, there's really no particular reason to think that median household earnings will top $48,000 by 2009. For much of this period, steadily rising housing prices would have kept more people accruing wealth, but at a minimum it seems likely that values will stagnate for a while now as we wait for inventory to get sold off. The YouTube CampaignReihan Salam lays out your options: Meanwhile, Metric's "Monster Hospital" is batting leadoff on my forthcoming Samantha Power mixtape: Last this John McCain ad is bizarre on any number of levels: I mean, if al-Qaeda wanted to come out into the streets and fight us, I'm confident we'd win easily. The whole crux of the matter is that they're not eager to engage us in direct battle. And, yes, we're not meant to take it literally. But there's the rub -- McCain's entire worldview is founded on delusions of grandeur and wildly inapt metaphors. Messing With TexasIf I were a Houston Rockets fan, I wouldn't be very happy to hear Yao Ming assuring Chinese fans he'll be ready for the olympics. Yao's become a fantastic player, but also clearly a pretty fragile one. Meanwhile, eighteen in a row! I'll be rooting for whoever comes out of the West (probably Lakers or Spurs) against the evil Celtics, but Houston's definitely my sentimental favorite in the Western. What's more, a schedule of New Jersey at home, Atlanta on the road, and Charlotte at home with no back-to-backs makes a 21 game streak seem plausible. Tea LeavesIt's often hard to know the real significance of things, this NRCC spin on the Illinois special election leaves us with only two options: The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend. In fact, there has been no national trend this entire election season. The presidential election is evidence of that. The Democratic candidates are trading election victories from week to week and the nomination could hinge on a few news cycles. The one message coming out of 2008 so far is that what happens today is not a bellwether of what happens this fall. Either the NRCC desperately needs to fire the buffoon who wrote this and hire someone who can make some sense, or else GOP congressional candidates are just doomed and there's nothing even highly competent spinsters can come up with to obscure that fact. South JerusalemA new blog that'll be well-worth reading launches today South Jerusalem by Gershom Gorenberg & Haim Watzman. They're promising "A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature." Wire FinaleWow. The newspaper plot was still hokie, but in essence all is forgiven and season five delivered in the end. Best show ever. O'Hanlon Quality AnalysisAh, excellent, just what I needed. Some fresh Michael O'Hanlon commentary on Iraq: The most intriguing area of late is the sphere of politics. To track progress, we have established “Brookings benchmarks” — a set of goals on the political front similar to the broader benchmarks set for Baghdad by Congress last year. Our 11 benchmarks include establishing provincial election laws, reaching an oil-revenue sharing accord, enacting pension and amnesty laws, passing annual federal budgets, hiring Sunni volunteers into the security forces, holding a fair referendum on the disputed northern oil city of Kirkuk, and purging extremists from government ministries and security forces. I think Brookings Benchmarks are kind of like Disney Dollars, i.e. funny money. We get no sense of where this five out of eleven comes from or what it's really supposed to signify. The general thrust of the exercise seems to be to cast "failure" as such an extreme scenario that it can never actually happen. O'Hanlon will always be wisely positioned between the over-optimists and the over-pessimists, always urging us to hang on for a couple more Friedman Units, and so the war will continue, forever and ever just as John McCain wants. March 10, 2008Mapping "Area Codes"
StrangeMaps has a fantastic graphic by Stephanie Gray outlining the area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes in his 2001 hit "Area Codes." He's very popular in the northeast corridor and also select West Coast metropolises, plus a significant swathe of the south. Rapture ReadyI had only managed to read a few pages of my advance copy of Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture before it turned out that my girlfriend, the lovely and talented Sara Mead, had snagged it for myself. Fair enough, I thought, she can have it, but only if she agrees to write a review for my blog! The nefarious plot worked: The Cost of EgotismWere Hillary Clinton not determined to drag out the Democratic primary despite considerable evidence that she stands no realistic chance of closing Barack Obama's delegate lead, John McCain would, right now, be groaning under the yoke of a massive advertising campaign designed to define him and Obama in the public eye for the first time. Instead, McCain has what the New York Times rightly deems " a valuable commodity: time he can use to unite a fractured Republican Party, ramp up his lackluster fund-raising and transform his shoestring primary operation into a general election machine." The landscape still strongly favors the Democrats, but it's much less favorable than it would have been were the Clintons willing to set their own interests aside in favor of those of the party and the progressive movement. The Turnout MythYou sometimes hear that something or other (these days likely involving Barack Obama) will boost black turnout in the South and put heavily black states like Mississippi into play. I used to think something like this was possible until I read Tom Schaller's book which convincingly argues that black turnout in the South is actually already quite high and that the blacker a southern state gets the more fanatically Republican the state's white population becomes so this is basically hopeless. At any rate, go read the dime store version of his argument. I'd like it to be true that winning Mississippi was a good reason to back Obama in the primary, but it's not. Obama's PragmatismWarren Strobel takes a look at Barack Obama's foreign policy team and views. The term "pragmatic" comes up a lot, which can mean a lot of things. I think it's important to see that Obama and his inner circle not only have their catch-phrases, but also like to illustrate what they mean by them by referring back to Iraq. When they talk about pragmatism, they see the march to war in Iraq as the reverse; as a deeply ideological movement determined to ignore contrary evidence, plus a Democratic establishment too rigidly wedded to a set of verbal formulae, catch-phrases, and narrowly political thinking to recognize what was happening and respond appropriately. I'm not really sure pragmatism is sufficient to the challenges we're facing as a country and I think there's more to be said for doctrine-driven thinking than some of this rhetoric implies. Still, pragmatism would be more welcome than the alternatives that seem to be on the table. ¡Viva Zapatero!
In honor of PSOE's successful re-election campaign, I thought I might revisit my April 2006 revisiting of Spain's nightmare of appeasement: The pro-war left had a more sophisticated take, with The New York Times's Tom Friedman saying he understood “that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office.” Nonetheless, Friedman said, for the new Zapatero government to follow through on its wildly popular commitment to withdraw from Iraq -- a commitment made long before the bombings -- would be a mistake. Spain “should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq -- to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis' attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement.” Two years on, the satire still holds up. Photo by me available under a Creative Commons license The Phone CallMegan Hustan bemoans the decline of the phone call as a tool of business. Apparently she learned vital skills while eavesdropping and first made a mark for herself as a placer-of-phone-calls for her boss. Personally, I couldn't be more thrilled with the phone's decline. I used to be painfully shy as a person, and while I've largely gotten over that IRL I still find it incredibly stressful to talk to people on the phone. Instead, I email. I SMS. I blog. I Twitter. I write on Facebook wall pages. I use IM and GChat constantly. Anything but the phone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, and in the years to come we phone-haters will inherit the earth. I call it progress. Transit Maps of the World
I picked up Transit Maps of the World yesterday and have been enjoying browsing through it. Basically, it's a book of transit maps from all around the world! The book goes city-by-city and covers both large and small systems and mixes maps with text which describes both the history of the system and the history of efforts to graphically depict the system. Normally people will probably find this book extremely dull and weird, but it makes an ideal gift for the transit enthusiast in your life. Obviously, buying copies of Heads in the Sand for everyone you know should be a higher priority, but the right kind of person (i.e., me) will love Transit Maps. Ah, Sprawl
Washington Post reports on Virginia's treeless towns, stripped bear by the rapid pace of new development. Avoiding this kind of things is one of many reasons to favor dense development of parcels that do get developed, the better to leave more space adequately undeveloped. Photo courtesy of the World Resources Institute So Much For ThatI used to think Elliot Spitzer was going to be our first Jewish president, but that scenario's seeming less likely: "Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning." Against Local Control
As I've previously recommended Matt Miller's Atlantic article "First, Kill All the School Boards" I feel I should also note the longer version of his argument, "Nationalize the Schools (...A Little)!" for the Center for American Progress. It's mostly the same stuff, but at greater length and in the dry, wonky form we expect from a think tank-sponsored PDF. That said, he's correct. In a large and diverse country, there's a case for some level of local control. But fundamentally most of what a kid in New Mexico needs to know is the same as what a kid in North Dakota or Vermont or Virginia needs to know, and intense localization creates tons and tons of problems for no real reason other than blind tradition. Walzer on MercenariesLet me join Daniel Davies in expressing disappointment in Michael Walzer's badly underreasoned article on mercenaries in The New Republic. The whole crux of the argument comes here: Whatever Blackwater’s motives, I won’t join the “moral giants” who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too. Look. Of course if you make the alternative to "do nothing" sending in Comintern (or whomever) to "stop the killing" then sending in Comintern looks good. But when you're considering the wisdom of sending a Stalin-directed military force into the situation you don't get to stipulate that doing so is going to work. Similarly with Blackwater. There aren't people sitting around saying "wow, the situation in Sudan sure is terrible and for a reasonable fee Blackwater could make it all better but I'm against that because it's, like, wrong man." Rather, I highly doubt that introducing a bunch of heavily armed unaccountable mercenaries into the situation would actually make things better. I do think it's worth asking if we can come up with mechanisms of control and accountability that would make dispatching mercenaries into situations where troops are needed but nation-states are unwilling to send their national militaries into an attractive option. It's clear, however, that we do not in fact have any such mechanisms in place. Under the circumstances, you don't just unleash a plague of mercenaries somewhere in order to demonstrate your good intentions. Thinking About ProstitutionWhenever a politician gets caught up in a prostitution scandal, I do need to return to the fact that at the end of the day I don't really think the exchange of sex for money is serious wrongdoing in the sense that justifies criminal sanctions. Obviously, in most cases such conduct will be a form of private wrongdoing against one's spouse, etc., but that's not a matter of public concern. For a public official, however, there's an unusually large dose of hypocrisy involved here. It would be within the power of Elliot Spitzer to propose changes to New York State's prostitution laws and, indeed, Spitzer probably ought to propose such changes. But insofar as a politician isn't going to take that kind of stand, it's only right and proper that he be punished for violating laws whose justice he himself has, in his public role, proclaimed faith in.
Endless Wire CommentaryIn a special "culture" edition of The Table (also a special Yglesias-free edition), Ross Douthat, Mark Bowden, and Jeffrey Goldberg talk about Season Five of The Wire: A chance to mock someone else's physical appearance for a change. Campaign ImplicationsOf course these days everything reduces to the Democratic presidential primary. Thus, what are the implications of the "Client Nine" scandal for the race? Rosa Brooks wonders what Hillary Clinton will say: Quick reaction: I think this is actually a complicated one for Hillary. Spitzer isn't just any prominent Democrat who happens to support her; he's a close ally from her adopted home state of New York. And prominent men caught in sex scandals isn't a new one for Hillary. How she handles this will tell us something, perhaps, not just about Spitzer, but about how's she's come to define herself ... as a woman in a world where a few too many of the prominent men around still think it's OK to do this kind of thing. In the real world, I'm pretty sure Clinton's just going to try to avoid commenting publicly. I wonder, though, if this won't make people worry about the fact that putting Bill Clinton back in the White House seems to raise the possibility of once again having a Democratic administration derailed by a sex scandal. No CommentHillary Clinton, as I would have expected, says she has no comment on her governor's hooker problem. March 11, 2008By Voice AloneThere's a lot of buzz about whether or not Elliot Spitzer will resign, but I'm not sure I understand how he can avoid arrest. They've got him on a wiretap, don't they? Surely there's no "it's not a crime if you're a high-profile governor" exemption to the Mann Act. I like Elliot Spitzer, and his high-stakes brinksmanship with Joseph Bruno seems to be paying some dividends, but the law's the law, isn't it? Meanwhile, I can't say I know much about David Paterson but he seems solid enough -- there's no particular reason liberals need to defend Spitzer's hold on office. UPDATE: Also why did Spitzer need a New York hooker to come down to DC? If he'd just thought to call Andray Blatche (or, perhaps, Duke Cunningham) for a recommendation, the whole thing could have been avoided. Guest CommentaryA special guest post from Sara: According to the official complaint: Client-9 asked LEWIS to remind him what "Kristen" looked like, and LEWIS said that she was an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds. Since when is 5'5" petite? It's taller than the average height for American women. As a truly petite woman (5'2") I am deeply offended by this defining petiteness upward. Brookings Benchmarks
The Cowen ChallengeTyler Cowen asks: "Here is my question for the left-wing bloggers: How good would The Wire be, if it had to appeal to 300 million plus viewers? While it is obvious that politics is a form of mass culture, this point is not made with sufficient frequency for my taste." Obviously, under those circumstances The Wire would suck, just as the rhetoric engaged in by presidential campaign is incredibly dumb if evaluated as serious analysis of public policy or the structure of American political institutions. That said, the libertarianish line of reasoning that goes "politics is tawdry and often corrupt and therefore you liberals should go home and just let things become even more dominated by the corrupt interests of the wealthy and large business enterprises" doesn't make sense to me. Experience GapI've been waiting for the moment when one of the many former Clinton administration national security officials now working for Barack Obama would come out and call Hillary Clinton a liar for exaggerating her level of experience with these issues. Greg Craig who used to direct the State Department's Policy Planning staff comes close in a new memo: When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton’s argument that she has passed “the Commander- in-Chief test” is simply not supported by her record. The memo goes on to debunk some specific assertions she's made about Northern Ireland, Macedonia, etc., but the general point is clear enough. It's not a slam on Clinton to observe that she, like Barack Obama and most presidential contenders, doesn't have much foreign policy experience. But she's been running around the country talking as if she was Madeleine Albright rather than a former First Lady. Transit on the Rise
Via Ryan Avent, Reuters reports that mass transit is gaining in popularity: "Mass transit use increased by more than 2 percent in 2007 to the highest level in 50 years, with Americans taking more than 10 billion trips on public transport while the number of vehicle miles traveled was flat in the first 10 months of the year." Light rail (including street cars) led the way, followed by commuter rail and then subways. Oh!Michael O'Hanlon, like some mythic monster, has emerged again in a major newspaper to once again offer us the Wise Middle Ground of Endless War as an appealing policy option in Iraq. Check the Spack for more commentary, but I'll give you this. O'Hanlon, by way of criticizing the Democratic position on Iraq, says that "only those who have concluded that the war is already lost tend to back such a position." I mean, this is a majority of the public and just amounts to observing that only people who agree with the Democrats agree with the Democrats. But who else is supposed to agree? Meanwhile note that the larger framing here is about the need for Democrats to act as a "loyal opposition." Because apparently now disagreeing with Michael O'Hanlon is a form of treason. Or something. Good work, Brookings! The Need for AccountabilityEzra Klein did a post yesterday channeling Alan Enthoven's list of "cons" about a single-payer health care system. We get the following:
To me what's striking about this list is how few of the objections are answered by the currently-in-vogue mandate/regulate/subsidize alternative. After all, you can't just mandate that people get "health insurance" and then provide subsidies for them to purchase it. You need to legislatively define a benefits package spelling out what constitutes "health insurance." Once you're there, most of these concerns about undue politicization and bad political incentives already get built in. What's more, on top of all the stuff on the list right there, you'll have various insurers "competing" against each other by competing to hire lobbyists to pressure congress into re-writing rules to give them a competitive advantage over their adversaries. One way or another, in other words, if we aren't going to try to have a free market in health insurance then we're going to be relying on the idea that we can have an adequate level of accountability through the political system. There's reason to be skeptical about politics' ability to deliver in the right ways, but the whole case for universal health care programs is founded on solid evidence that market accountability doesn't deliver socially desirable outcomes on the health care front. Having politicians create a pseudo-market that's highly distorted by mandates, regulations, and subsidies is counting on politics to deliver the good every bit as much as a single-payer system would. In that regard, a couple of constructive solutions about the hypothetical social democratic single-payer promised land. One is that there's a good case for a system in which the federal government provides most of the money but allows states to administer systems with some autonomy and some financial responsibility. That sets up a certain level of political competition so that if the Delaware system is delivering poor results but the Rhode Island system is excellent, ambitious Delaware politicians can run election campaigns saying "our system is 47th out of 50 while Rhode Island is getting great results, let's copy them!" The other is that you can hybridize single-payer and market elements. Make preventive medicine free. Make it less than free -- have nurse practitioners kicking down doors and immunizing children. But for other things, you can implement cost-sharing that's scaled to the recipient's income. You guarantee that lack of funds never forces anyone to go without care, but you also ensure that everyone has an incentive to at least think a little about whether or not he really needs treatment. See Jason Furman's paper on cost-sharing and then imagine that all costs not borne by the individual would be picked up by the government. That gives you some market pressure, but also substantial equity because price-to-consumer is determined by ability to pay in a way that ensures that struggling families aren't left out in the cold. Spitzer and LimbaughMark Kleiman notes that the "structuring" charges that appear to be Elliot Spitzer's main legal vulnerability were also a problem for Rush Limbaugh back when he was trying to conceal his illegal prescription drug purchases: But this is a case where consistency is a virtue. Either both Limbaugh and Spitzer should have been prosecuted, or neither. I'd hate to think that politics might intrude into law enforcement decisions made but Bush appointees at DoJ. Wouldn't you? Good thing the Bush administration The False Promise of Restrictionism
Dave Weigel has a solid column out on the trajectory of the Ron Paul revolution, highlighting the ultimate failure of Paul's decision to run as more of an immigration-hating paleocon than a government-limiting libertarian: The Contingency of CandidacyGeraldine Ferraro, a Hillary Clinton supporter, wants the world to know that in her view: If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept. Hillary Clinton's campaign is disavowing this sort of thing, with Howard Wolfson telling Ben Smith "We disagree with her" (via Dana Goldstein). Wolfson seems to be tackling this from the wrong perspective. It really is hard to imagine Obama being where he is today if he weren't black. But the point is that everyone who has success in presidential politics does so, in part, because of contingent personal attributes that aren't a strict form of merit. Being white has, after all, been an important part of the political success of all our previous presidents. Certainly Bill Clinton's southern accent was an important part of his package, as it was for Jimmy Carter and of course Lyndon Johnson was made VP to do regional ticket balancing. John Kennedy had a rich dad. Franklin Roosevelt was named "Roosevelt." That's just political reality, not some vast black conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton down. UPDATE: And, of course, there's no way Hillary Clinton would be where she is if she weren't a certain ex-president's wife. Prostitution Policy BriefBrad Plumer offers up the comprehensive, thoughtful prostitution policy rundown you've been craving. In essence, none of the different policy options seem to work very well. Given that legalize-and-regulate, even with a clear-eyed look at the problems involved, seems no worse in its overall impact than criminalization, I think it makes sense to err on the side of liberty. Over ThereMichael O'Hanlon and John McCain may be bullish about America's prospects in Iraq, but Carl Levin and John Warner want to know why so much of Iraq's oil money is in offshore banks rather than being invested in the costly business of running the country. Swopa offers one obvious possibility -- they're stashing billions in foreign banks to prepare to go back into exile when things collapse over there. Wire WomenThe weakness of The Wire's portrayal of woman characters, driven most likely by a lack of women on the writing staff, has been widely noted but it's worth being clear on how this gives a distorted view of the entire ghetto. It was a particular failing, I think, in season four which was all about putting the cops-and-robbers stuff in a broader sociological context but also seemed to rely heavily on Demon Mothers rather than real people to drive the plot. The Truth Comes OutAfter my remarks on the evils of the telephone it started to seem that everyone who's anyone in the blogosphere hates phone calls. But now we learn the truth -- Ezra Klein loves talking on the phone. He, in short, is the person who keeps this horrible advice in business. If we could just kill him off, then we'd all live happily ever after with SMS-sending devices in our pockets. Maybe he's got Skype shares or something? The Sinbad FactorSinbad, who accompanied Hillary Clinton on a trip to Bosnia with Sheryl Crow that the former first lady has cited as an example of her foreign policy experience, isn't buying it. Campaign DiavlogJon Chait and I talk about the presidential campaign. For two guys who agree that Obama > Clinton > McCain, I think we wind up disagreeing about a surprising amount: I feel like basic principles of post composition require a sentence to go here at the bottom. Fallon Out
Admiral William Fallon, sometimes said to be standing between George W. Bush and the "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" policy, is resigning amidst a storm of controversy surrounding suggestions that he's been standing between Bush and war with Iran. More insta-analysis here at The Washington Independent. Basically, there seems to be a mobius-strip like quality where it's awkward for people to think Fallon is dissenting from the administration's Iran policy, so he's on his way out, though the administration and Fallon both deny that there is any such dissent or that any Iran policy changes are in the works. Got that? Choirs for HillaryDisturbing stuff: Everytime I see something painfully lame done on Clinton's behalf, I think she just might ultimately win this thing. At the end of the day, the United States is a pretty tacky middlebrow kind of country. Long BrewingOne interesting aspect of a McCain-Obama race is that considering how briefly Obama's been in the Senate, he has a surprisingly longstanding and totally genuine feud with McCain. Michael Crowley reviews the history. I'm ShockedWhat's that you say, there's no Saddam/al-Qaeda connection? But Steve Hayes promised! And Doug Feith! Dick Cheney! Um. March 12, 2008MississippiObama wins a crushing victory in Mississippi based on overwhelming support in the African-American community. Men go 61-38 for Obama. Women go 58-39 for Obama. Basically, Mississippi loves Obama. On March 1, everyone thought Clinton was going to lose this race for the nomination. With no further contests left in March there's been no net change in pledged delegates but there are 400+ fewer pledged delegates still at stake. Clinton was drawing dead on March 1, and she's drawing dead on March 12. Even the 12 point win Clinton's probably looking at in Pennsylvania can't genuinely turn this around for her. Too Black for 3AM?I think it's obvious that if you look at the Clinton-Obama primary, race has been an important determinant of voting behavior. Working class blacks and working class whites have voted in such radically different ways that it's clear that both candidates are securing a substantial racial solidarity vote. Since there are more whites than blacks in most Democratic primaries, racial tensions are, on balance, an advantage for Clinton. But Orlando Patterson's suggestion that the Clinton campaign's 3 AM ad was part of a crypto-racist ploy seems beneath the dignity of an important scholar. This was run of the mill fearmongering, reflecting Clinton's ideas about the politics of foreign policy. Frankly, I think a lot of the charges of racism against the Clinton campaign have been overstated. Where they've been guilty, I think, is that in their characterization of primary results they've tended to act as if black people just don't exist in the United States so Obama supporters are all highly-educated latte-sipping intellectuals or rich caucus-goers and states with too many black residents "don't count." Speaking merely even as a white person living in a majority black jurisdiction, this is an absurd and offensive way of looking at the world. But the ad's a pretty banal, if disreputable, attack on Obama's liberal approach to foreign policy and not really anything to do with race. UPDATE: Anti-Clinton charges that I think are overstated, I should say, do not include charges that Geraldine Ferraro is being an ass and wrecking her reputation. The Introvert FactorTalk of bloggers who don't like to use the phone naturally brings to mind Jonathan Rauch's article on introverts, which is a perennial Atlantic web hit since there are so damn many introverts on the internet. Still, I don't really understand why being somewhat introverted would make me especially adverse to talking to people on the phone -- I think I'm really pretty outgoing face-to-face at this point. PMCs and DarfurMichael Cohen adds some nuance to my skepticism about the utility of introducing private military contractors ("mercenaries," as we used to call them) into a crisis situation like Darfur: In Kenya, ArmorGroup guards protect UNHCR refugee camps; PAE and AYR Aviation are working with the UN and African Union in Sudan; in Liberia, Dyncorp is training that country's new military. Moreover, no one, including the contractors themselves, are advocating that Blackwater or any other private group should go into Darfur with guns blazing. I have yet to come across any serious player in the industry who is advocating a combat role for private contractors. In fact, quite the opposite. Fair enough. I was responding to a Michael Walzer piece that I took to be making the case for "with guns blazing." Insofar as that's not what we're talking about, there may be a reasonable role for contractors to play. Reform on the MarchHouse of Representatives passes tough new ethics package. I think the quantity of good legislation that Nancy Pelosi's been able to move through the House of Representatives has tended to go underappreciated by liberals. "The new congress" elected in 2006 has in many ways been a disappointment, but those disappointments have overwhelmingly taken place in the Senate where the rules and the numbers simply aren't on the side of progressive change. With Friends Like These
House Democrats believe they have a decent shot at endangering the seats of a troika of South Florida Cuban American Republicans, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, his brother Mario, and the evil Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. But one problem. Representative Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, a Florida Democrat who co-chairs the "red to blue" program aimed at picking up seats won't get involved because she's pals with the Republicans in question. Which is nice for her, but obviously the role of someone in her position is to try to beat Republican incumbents, not protect them. To be fair, though, it's not just personal ties that bring all these hyphenated Floridians together, it's also a passion for continuing decades-old foreign policy failures: Wasserman Schultz has also played a leading role in persuading the new Democratic majority to sustain the economic embargo against Cuba and has established close ties to the staunchly pro-embargo U.S.-Cuba Democracy political action committee, which has contributed thousands to Wasserman Schultz and Meek's campaigns. After all, the first fifty years of the embargo have done wonders for Cuban democracy, so just give it another 150 or so, democracy will break out, and then tourists can visit Havana in flying cars. I don't see anything wrong with that. Oops!A great point from Brian Beutler yesterday: Americans, to some great extent, have internalized this cartoonish idea that politicians ought to be policy-making and policy-enforcing robots, but they almost never seem to bring the hammer down unless a politician errs in some extremely frivolous way. Some senators and congressmen, it's worth pointing out, take legislative action to settle personal vendettas as a matter of routine. Some take bribes, both real and de facto. Others see prostitutes. If I had to pick, I know which "oops" I'd rather catch my elected official in--the only one, it turns out, that's likely to put an entire career in public service at risk. In some way, the best example of this was the Lincoln Bedroom fundraising scandal of the Clinton years. Appearing to auction off that kind of treat for campaign cash was tawdry as all hell, but Bill Clinton wound up catching more shit for it than his successor did for auctioning off vast swathes of national policy, even though the latter is clearly a more important sin in terms of its impact on people's lives. It all goes back to the fundamental frivolity of the Guardians of our discourse -- the whole political media is dominated by people who can't think about policy without getting queasy. Snaring SpitzerGiven the Bush administration's record, it's natural to wonder about foul play in the investigation that wound up with Elliot Spitzer's penchant for hookers all over the front pages. And this does indeed seem pretty fishy to me -- investigators, knowing that Spitzer was an Emperor's Club client, seem to have kept their wiretap running even after they had all the evidence they needed to bust the prostitution ring, waiting until they could catch a call from Spitzer, and then once Spitzer was implicated rolled the case up. On the other hand, this is sort of the good kind of partisan motivated prosecutions. To a large extent the American political system depends on the idea that partisan motives will cause public corruption to be exposed. Spitzer was a rising star, so incentives exist for his political enemies to try to wreck his career. And wreck it they have. But they wrecked it with some bona fide dirt -- whether or not you think prostitution ought to be legal, it unquestionably isn't legal, and governors aren't supposed to be breaking the law. This isn't a trumped-up charge or an innocent man getting railroaded. All of which reminds me, naturally enough, of The Wire. How is it that the Republican incumbent and his friend the US Attorney manage to let Carcetti's vast coverup go unexposed? McCain's MeanderingsBrendan Nyhan notes that if you use the Keith-Poole methodology for congressional ideology you get the conclusion that John McCain has the most inconsistent record of anyone in the Senate. They write in Congress and Ideology that their model has the least predictive power when it comes to McCain: John McCain (R-AZ), normally one of the very most conservative members of the Senate, has been the worst fitting member of the Senate in each of his eight Senates, most notably the 103rd (2001-02), where he frequently voted with the Democrats, perhaps in pique over losing the race for the presidential nomination in 2000. [...] John McCain (R-AZ) started as a conservative, became a moderate after losing the Republican nomination to George Bush in 2000, and recently reemerged as very conservative. The positive spin on this is that McCain is a "maverick." Looked at in a less adoring light, it's just very hard to see any underlying principles about domestic policy running through McCain's career. Calling it QuitsI suppose I should link to the official Elliot Spitzer resignation story. It's too bad. He was a very promising, very solid political leader. What's more, as we watch the would-be first woman president square off against the would-be first black president, I won't deny having hoped on some level that Spitzer could be the first Jewish president someday. But most indications are that David Paterson will be a good governor and a good leader for New York state liberals, so given the damage already done to Spitzer's resignation it's hard not to see this move as for the best. Awake on My AirplaneSpencer Ackerman takes note of a DOD press release that includes the fact that former Filter bass player Sgt. Frank Cavanagh is an Army reservist scheduled to deploy. "For reasons of patriotism," writes Spencer, "Filter no longer officially blows." I say Filter never blew. Spencer wants to make them out to be nothing more than "Hey Man Nice Shot" but there's also "Take a Picture": I think that's at least "okay" though the video is annoying. AFL-CIO CampaignAlyssa Rosenberg from Government Executive offers this briefing on the AFL-CIO's conference call about their planned anti-McCain political activities: The AFL-CIO wants to catch up Republican candidates for governorships and Senate seats in the negative coattails they hope to create for McCain. They’re targeting governor’s races in Washington, Missouri and Indiana, and Senate races in Kentucky, which they used as a testing ground for their national strategy during the 2007 governor’s race and Alaska. Especially in the likely Obama/McCain matchup, I think Social Security will be key. McCain's support in GOP primaries skewed old, and Obama's support in Democratic primaries skews young. In a general election, you'll be looking at age as a major determinant of voting behavior. And yet Social Security and Medicare are domestic issues on which McCain has a rock-ribbed conservative record. Whether or not older voters, especially from the white working class, focus on those aspects of McCain's record is going to be key to whether or not he has a real shot at the general election. Hooker FlashbackA 1977 Atlantic article makes the case for decriminalizing prostitution. At the time, the authors were optimistic: To propose that our government stop making war on prostitution may seem quixotic. But American attitudes toward sex have been changing rapidly. The notion of a young couple openly living together or college clinics routinely providing birth-control devices would have been as shocking to most Americans a generation ago as toleration or regulation of prostitution is today. Furthermore, legislatures and the public in some states have begun to recognize how costly it is to use criminal sanctions against consensual behavior—evidenced by softening or removal of criminal penalties for public drunkenness, smoking marijuana, gambling, and abortions. Worked out for the abortions (until John McCain gets to appoint John Paul Stevens' replacement at least) and to some extent gambling, but not so much on the pot and hookers. First PrinciplesKerry Howley has a brief, provocative piece inspired by Elliot Spitzer that basically makes the case for legalized prostitution from first principles: Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form. I find the pristine logic of these sentiments to be more than a little challenged by every account I've heard of prostitution-in-practice under a variety of legal regimes. Still, I do think it's a fairly powerful challenge. It's hard to think of many other widely engaged in activities where the activity itself (sex) is legal, but charging money for it is illegal. Certainly the principle "a woman may have sex with whomever she wants for any reason she wants, unless that reason is explicit financial compensation" doesn't seem to have a ton of logic behind it. But in many ways, this seems to me like a "so much the worse for logic" kind of situation, where I'd like to see us move toward liberalization but think we should do so pretty cautiously (gestures in the direction of Burke, tradition, etc.). Civilian ControlKevin Drum's right about this but also wrong. Yes, I would like the principle of civilian control over the military to be upheld whether or not I like the civilians who are running the military. But in the real world the way the principle of civilian control operates is that when Republicans are president, we do what Republicans want with the military, whereas when Democrats are president, we do what Republicans want with the military. We all recall how Colin Powell relentlessly battled civilian policymakers and for his trouble became a It'll be the same when Barack Obama is president. If a single four-star general agrees on the merits with the GOP talking points of the day, suddenly General Republican will become the greatest military thinker in American history and disagreeing with him is basically the same as pissing on the corpses of our dead troops. We remember the surge flip-flop, don't we, where disagreeing with Bush's Iraq policy was considered treason until Bush decided he wanted to shift policy, cashiered his old generals, brough in some different guys, and then blindly supporting Petraeus became de rigeur. That's just the way it is, just like the press is suddenly going to rediscover "the rule of law" as a concept. State-by-StateThe Obama campaign sent out an interesting memo earlier today about the Clinton campaign's argument that Clinton has done better in the large swing states Democrats need to carry in November. I think that argument from Clinton is 90 percent hot air (why should we infer general election strength from primary strength) and consequently the counter-argument includes a lot of hot air, too. One bit of solid fact the Obama campaign brings to the table, however, is that Obama states Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota were all extremely close in 2004 (i.e., margins of less than three percent). Optimism-minded Democrats would like to think of "swing states" as being the states that John Kerry narrowly lost, but it's important to hold on to the states he narrowly won as well. Silly SeasonFrom the I can't believe it's not a joke file: "the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence." They Make VideosThe creative class strikes again on behalf of Barack Obama: As I've said before, I think hip, with-it irony is a losing strategy and the Clinton campaign's avalanch of lameness is about where the median voter is. Thought of the DayThere are two ways to conceive of a military establishment's proper relationship to civilian society. On one account, the military exists in order to make civilian society possible. Like police officers, fire fighters, bus drivers, etc. the soldier is providing a public service that allows civilian social and economic life to function at a high level. On another account, civilian society exists in order to make the military establishment possible. Farmers, shopkeepers, industrialists, etc. are here to create the resources that provide the supplies that a warrior needs in order to practice his most honorable of crafts. The former conception is what's generally deemed to express the values of a democracy or a republic. The latter conception is what you have in a feudal system. One way of understanding John McCain's oft-expressed hostility to politicians, his condescending attitude toward businessmen, and his frequent attacks on selfishness and individualism is as expressing that more aristocratic conception. That would be in keeping with McCain's family background and things like this odd genealogical note he's interested in broadcasting. Who's Rich?It's always interesting to ask about people's subjective definitions of "rich" and an interesting token of how class-stratified we've become as a society that so many people in the top twenty percent of the income distribution tend not to think of themselves as rich. That said, annual family income is a pretty crude metric of people's financial situation. The bottom end of the income distribution chart includes a lot of retired people, who aren't necessarily poor in any intuitive sense. Down there at the bottom you've also got a certain number of students and people in apprentice-like jobs (entry-level positions at political magazines) that they're expected to quickly transition out of. As a result, while $88,000 a year is good enough to put you in the top twenty percent, it's not nearly good enough to put you in the top twenty percent of real grownups (say, people over 25) who have full-time jobs. And of course wealth matters here as well. There's a difference between someone earning $88,000 a year and someone who's the beneficiary of a trust fund that pays out $88,000 a year. There's also a difference between earning $88,000 a year free and clear and earning $88,000 a year while trying to pay off college and law school debts. In PlayHarold Ickes says of states Obama's won: “Most of those states haven’t voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don’t see that changing,” said Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “They’re great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November. He’s winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election.” The converse of this, however, is that Clinton's delegate count is heavily dependent on states like California, New York, and Massachusetts that aren't in play either. Meanwhile, though they've traditionally gone Republican in presidential elections, I don't think it's beyond imagining that Barack Obama could put some of these north plains states -- the Dakotas, Montana, maybe even Kansas or Nebraska -- into play. There are plenty of Democratic senators from this part of the country many of whom are pretty orthodox liberals. Similarly, border states like Virginia and Missouri that Obama's carried in the primaries aren't out of reach in the general election any more than Colorado is and there's at least some reason to think Clinton would put some marginal blue states (Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, Minnesota) in play for McCain. Now what's true is that Ohio was the decisive state in 2004 and Clinton would probably be the stronger candidate for Ohio. There's not, however, much more to the Clinton argument than that. The whole thing about Clinton winning the states that matter or the "big states" just amounts to Ohio. Which is fine as far as it goes, and certainly leads me to believe that if Clinton does wrest the nomination away from Obama she'll probably win on a Clinton-Strickland ticket. I just think Obama would probably win too (especially if Clinton can somehow be persuaded to drop out after Pennsylvania thus letting Obama turn his cash and rhetoric against McCain), except with a larger number of states and more Democratic Senators. Spiritual GuideDavid Corn reports: "Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a 'war' against the 'false religion' of Islam with the aim of destroying it." Since McCain's managed to get away with not disavowing John Hagee, who can be tagged with anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments, I'm pretty sure that mere bigotry against Muslims isn't going to bring the heat. The press loves McCain, so it's hard to tag him with any of this stuff. It's rendered doubly hard by the fact that Barack Obama's campaign needs to keep fighting Hillary Clinton. The ReturnCaron Butler slated to return and start against the Cavs tomorrow. March 13, 2008It's All About IranThere's no doubt that Israel faces substantial security challenges that are driven by something larger than a sincere desire to secure justice for the people of Palestine. That said, I'm constantly astounded by the lengths to which some commentators will go to deny the fact that the Palestinian issue has anything at all to do with the situation. According to Yossi Klein Halevi, for example, everything that's happened in Israel since 2000 is all part of one vast Iranian conspiracy and everything else is just some kind of fig leaf or distraction. It's as if Israeli occupation of Palestinian land has nothing to do with existence of Palestinian nationalist groups for Iran to support -- like the Mullahs put all those Palestinians there in order to inconvenience the Israelis. McCain Enters the Octagon
Virginia Postrel highlights this section of a David Plotz article on Ultimate Fighting to underscore McCain's weird let's ban everything instincts. For example, McCain decided at one point that UFC bouts should be banned: When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring. I, for one, can't see the moral distinction and it seems troubling to contemplate the idea of a president who's banning stuff based on moral distinctions he can't even be bothered to explain. It was, however, straight-talky of him to at least come out and admit that he has no defense of his position on the issue besides a desire to impose his tastes on the country. Alphabet RightsOf all the congressional candidates out there, Dan Grant is certainly the one with whom I've had the most fun drinking. On top of that, he has an impressive record of experience and level of knowledge with the key foreign policy issues the country's facing. In short, very much the kind of guy who I would have liked to see take a seat. But he lost the primary campaign and failed to secure the Democratic nomination in Texas' 10th congressional district. Kriston Capps explains that he was done-in in part by having the alphabetically-determined second spot on the ballot. It's become cliché to describe something or other as the last acceptable prejudice, but discrimination against the alphabetically challenged isn't even a prejudice. It's just a brute fact of life that some of us need to put up with. I feel bad for Dan, but frankly a "Grant" doesn't know squat about drawing the short end of the alphabetical stick compared to an "Yglesias." Back in grade school, poor Rachel Zabarkes was at least behind me in line for everything, but a few years back she got married and traded up to "Friedman." For generations, Yglesiases have considered abandoning our gallego roots and switching to the more orthodox "Iglesias" but for everyone else suffering at the end of the alphabet I chose to stand my ground and fight for justice. Thursday Pizza Blogging
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire; and in a similar vein with no further episodes of The Wire you have to blog about Top Chef 4 which debuted last night. Scrutiny tends to focus on the elimination challenges due to the high stakes involved, but let me just say that as a New Yorker I found it painful to watch multiple NYC-based chefs whose names suggested Italian-American origin cooking . . . Chicago-style deep dish pizza. I was hoping that one of them would show some pride and cook, you know, an actual pizza. But they all chose the path of appeasement. And then the judge turned out to be none other than Rocco diSpirito, himself an Italian-American from New York City who ought to know the difference between a pizza (pictured above) and a gooey mess. Photo by Flickr user Skinnydiver used under a Creative Commons license Rocco SpeaksAs per the post below, I think Rocco would have been open to a chef just making a real pizza: Now, no offense directed at the lovely people of Chicago, but their pizza leaves a lot to be desired. It’s neither thin crust nor thick crust (what we call Sicilian here in NYC), it’s usually comprised of some random combo of ingredients, and it’s heavy as lead. The beautiful, defining characteristic of pizza is that it’s light, crispy, and a foil for wonderful toppings like cheese, sausage, basil, and anchovies. Deep-dish pizza leaves no room on the palate for much else but crust. It sort of pains me to admit it, but I actually think the best pizza may be in New Haven rather than New York, Summer in the City
Reihan Salam had a post the other day where he said "the vocal, influential segments of the center-left are turning against the suburban way of life in quite explicit terms, usually though certainly not exclusively on environmental grounds." Clearly, there's always been a kind of aesthetic critique of suburbia out there (and always will be) just as there are various aesthetic and quasi-aesthetic forms of critique and praise for the countryside and the big city, I think it's wrong to see the rising tide of interest in urbanism as primarily driven by anti-suburban sentiment. Cooking the BooksIt seems that Christopher J. Ward, the top guy for keeping track of election-related money in GOP circles, has been stealing money from campaign committees he's supposed to be overseeing. Couldn't have happened to a nicer political party, I snark, but seriously it's a bit confusing to me. If you're a big player in Republican circles and you want to cash in, they way to do it is help some business group rob the public blind, and then have them pay you. Ask Billy Tauzin. This isn't rocket science. A Whole New LevelI can't even describe how frustrating it is to read things like this from Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times: But Mr. Bush, most experts agree, has taken the American freedom agenda to an entirely new level, by trying to foster democracy in nations that have not known it before, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Some historians have called it folly, and Mr. Bush conceded in an interview with conservative commentators last year that his critics believe he is “hopelessly idealistic.” One point I really try hard to make in Heads in the Sand is that it's incredibly foolish to view the Bush foreign policy primarily through this democracy lens. For one thing, Bush's record as a democratizer doesn't stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. There's been no consistency of application (Egypt? Saudi Arabia?), and no record of successes -- look it up and you'll see much more democracy on the march during the 1990s. But even criticizing Bush's record on this score is almost besides the point -- an emphasis on democracy simply isn't what's noteworthy about Bush's policymaking. What's noteworthy about Bush is his effort to completely cast aside notions of institutional, legal, or even practical restraint in American conduct abroad. He wants to reorder international relations around a highly asymmetrical bargain where we simultaneously flout all kinds of multilateral processes while also engaging in an unprecedentedly high level of meddling in other countries' affairs. Iran can't go anywhere near uranium enrichment, but we won't sign the Comprehensive Test Ban and won't stop building a new generation of nuclear weapons. Rather than anything resembling a practical approach to helping democratic political movements, we threaten to decapitate any regime we don't like (while, yes, shouting "democracy!") and then act baffled and outraged when other countries try to acquire weapons capable of deterring us. This is what it's all about and this is what it's always been about. Fostering democracy in new places isn't especially novel, and isn't something Bush has particularly emphasized in actual policymaking. What's more, at this point in time it's just ludicrous -- completely detached from what even the surge's advocates say they're doing -- to see the mission in Iraq as having anything at all to do with democracy. What we're doing over there is taking what was once known as "failure" (creating a new post-saddam despotism) and relabeling it "success." Moderate Restrictionism?
Ross Douthat explains that anti-immigration politics hasn't failed, it's just never really been tried. I think this is what my late grandfather used to say about Marxism. I'm pretty sure that, at a minimum, it really was tried during the 2006 midterms where, just as it always does, it failed to deliver on its promises. To take Ross more seriously, he says that to succeed politically what's needed is a "moderate-restrictionist position" rather than the current dynamic where we have "politicians who make restrictionist promises they don't intend to keep in the hopes of keeping the yahoo vote appeased, and politicians who sound like, well, yahoos themselves." That may be right, but it seems to me that "moderate" anything is incompatible with being the sort of political silver bullet that for a while many Republicans hoped, and many Democrats feared, the immigration issue would be. It's simply not a high-salience issue for the majority of Americans who aren't rabid Mexican-haters. The way you would elevate its salience is through demagoguery, but there's little evidence that immigration demagoguery is genuinely popular. Photo by Flickr user bwats2 used under a Creative Commons license No Country for Sex ScandalsVia Jonathan Kulick, The Mail On Sunday reports that "Finnish Minister admits sending 200 dirty texts to erotic dancer from taxpayer-funded phone". It looks, however, like the minister in question is going to be alright, since "Though some MPs have voiced their displeasure at the latest scandal, the chairman of Kanerva's National Coalition Party said merely that if the story was true, he hoped Kanerva would use more consideration in the future." Meanwhile: Earlier this month Finland's prime minister, who accused his former lover of hurting his feelings by writing a steamy kiss-and-tell account of their relationship, lost a court case over the book but unexpectedly gained popularity. Matti Vanhanen, 52, prime minister since 2003, has been enjoying a wave of support since the disclosure that he likes to take a sauna before sex and enjoys his favourite meal of beef and baked potatoes afterward. Do we think that's really as steamy as the book gets? Unfortunately, I assume there won't be an English translation. Hillary in the HouseI won't engage in any further elitist disparaging of the quality of pro-Clinton user-generated content. But watch this video: Bonus points for the part about how "we don't need no bling." The Other WarI wrote a Current yesterday on Admiral Fallon's resignation, mostly focused on Iran. Now, though, it looks more like Iraq was the main issue with David Petraeus wanting to do a small-scale "de-surge" and then pause indefinitely, while Fallon, his commanding officer, wanted to withdraw troops more aggressively. But Bush agreed with Petraeus and so that's what you get. This goes back to what I was saying yesterday about civilian control and double-standards. The military is a big organization and, of course, top officers disagree about stuff. Bush, because he's a Republican and because he's a hawk, has been able to get away with portraying "accepting the advice of officers who agree with Bush" as a form of letting policies be determined by commanders on the ground rather than politicians in Washington. A Democrat, by contrast, isn't going to get any benefit of the doubt from the press, isn't going to get any benefit of the doubt from the officers, and isn't even going to be able to count on the support of his own party's members of congress. Clinton and Obama on EducationJosh Patashnik has an interesting piece on Barack Obama as an education reformer. Dana Goldstein comments: All that said, I disagree with Patashnik's suggestion that, once in office, Obama would prioritize education more than Clinton would. That could be true, but there's not a lot of evidence for it from where we stand. Neither Obama nor Clinton has injected education into the race in a deeper way than occasionally criticizing No Child Left Behind and promising to overhaul it. Supporting new ideas in white papers doesn't necessarily equal a commitment to pushing them through Congress. In terms of pushing things through congress, I'd say the most important factor is this. Ted Kennedy and George Miller chair, respectively, the Senate and House education committees. They're the main Democratic architects of No Child Left Behind, and they're both supporting Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has gotten a lot of support from the American Federation of Teachers which has been generally hostile to the broad thrust of what Kennedy and Miller have been doing. So while it's far from clear that either would-be president would, in practice, do anything noteworthy on K-12 education, an Obama administration would create a situation in which all the White House and the main legislative players regard each other as allies. Bread and PeaceDouglas Hibbs' well-regarded "Bread and Peace" model of presidential election outcomes is currently projecting a 46-47 percent share of the two-party vote for John McCain. I don't put a ton of stock on these models, but it basically reiterates what we generally know -- things don't look good for the Republicans. Houston, We Have Strikingly Few ProblemsIsaac Chotiner, longtime Rockets fan, pens an appreciation for Houston's incredible ongoing streak. There's no way they're going to break the 33 game record, but they only need one more win to move into second place on the all-time NBA streak list. MittPacMitt Romney forms a Political Action Committee. I'm looking forward to the Huckabee-Romney 2012 primary fight already. In The GeneralAt this point, I think we've all stopped hearing arguments of the form "Obama lost Massachusetts in the primary so he'll lose it in a general election" or "Obama won South Carolina in the primary so he'll win it in a general election" but there's a frustrating persistence of the idea that performance in a primary campaign in a swing state might be a good indication of general election strength there. In reality, there's just very little reason to believe that. I would very strongly prefer Obama over Clinton, but that doesn't stop me from very strongly preferring Clinton over McCain. All this throat-clearing by way of introducing a quote from this post from Noam Scheiber, commenting on some new Pennsylvania polling data: A poll showing that Obama can get blown out in the Pennsylvania primary and still hold his own there against McCain suggests working-class white Democrats simply prefer Hillary, not that they find something inherently objectionable about Obama, whom they're apparently happy to support in the general. Right. The poll indicates that Clinton will do much better than Obama More PizzaSome further notes on the perennially controversial issue of pizza: Whatever an NYC pizza lover may say in virtue of my hometown's best pies, there's also no denying that NYC has a staggering quantity of terrible by-the-slice outlets. Meanwhile, one should not overlook the fact that New York's Italian-American population has largely decamped to the suburbs at this point and brought a lot of good pizza with them (I would guess that Rhode Island, which is filled with the right kind of people, has good pizza, but I've never had the chance to test this theory out). By the same token, while Ezra Klein is right to note that some good pizza is now available in DC, it tends to be a very different kettle of fish -- more "gourmet," less rooted kind of thing -- largely owing to the district's lack of Italian-American heritage. Last, one shouldn't neglect the fact that the pizza in Italy seemed better to me than the pizza here; I was going to random places without any real insight or know-how and stumbling across tons of great pies. In general, there are better ingredients available in Europe, but cheaper labor available in the U.S. so we do well with really labor-intensive foods but pizza is much closer to the ingredients side of the scale. Someone's Head Is SomewhereI think we need better pundits than Michael O'Hanlon: "How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country?" asked Michael O'Hanlon, a national security adviser at the Brookings Institution who has been at the center of the Iraq debate since the war's outset." Not having any real credentials myself, I don't like to question the credentials of others, but it's worth noting that O'Hanlon is a defense budget analyst and not some kind of Iraq expert or brilliant strategist in either the military or political sense. He is, in short, just a pundit like me but he's a pundit who plays an expert on TV. If you think we could use a better class of foreign policy pundits, you might want to consider buying Heads in the Sand and making me a famous best-selling author just like Jonah Goldberg. Speaking of which, official blurbs are now up at the HITS Amazon page and one of them's kinda funny. On a more substantive note, look -- there are a lot of things making George W. Bush unpopular right now. But the disaster of Iraq is at the very heart of what it is that's brought the conservative movement into its current state of discredit. Democrats obviously want to keep that whole storyline front and center. The problem is that keeping it front and center is problematic for a certain number of people, O'Hanlon included, who were complicit in the selling and prolonging of the war. The interests of people like that just aren't well-aligned with the interests of progressive politics in the United States. March 14, 2008Why Not America?Nicholas Kristof says he used to be for legalizing prostitution, but changed his mind after learning more about conditions in the Netherlands, and now favors something more like Sweden's approach. I underwent a similar trajectory myself, but it's occurred to me more recently that rather than looking at the Netherlands as a model, we should probably look at Nevada which is, after all, right here in the USA. Unfortunately, I don't actually know anything about the subject, but I thought I'd toss it out there. Meanwhile, it's striking to me reading various takes on this that absolutely nobody -- including The Atlantic's resident moralizing social conservative -- seems to think the actual status quo policy of targeting hookers (rather than their clients) for primary legal sanction makes sense. The main impact of the current policy is, it seems to me, to make it easy for cops to rape prostitutes but hard for prostitutes to get out of bad situations. Idealism in ActionTo return to what I was saying in yesterday's post about the idea that Bush has taken democracy-promotion to a whole new level, another thing I point out in Heads in the Sand is that wrapping a foreign policy of aggressive militarism in the rhetoric of idealism isn't some awesome innovation of George W. Bush or Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney or anyone else. That's just what political leaders who want a foreign policy of aggressive militarism do. Back during the days of Victorian imperialism, policies of conquest and subjugation were always justified in very high-minded terms. What Bush is doing is no different from that. Lately, some advocates of an imperial foreign policy for the United States have taken to admitting as much, writing admiringly about the high ideals and humanitarian aims of, e.g., the British Empire. I think all that's wrong as far as both the U.S. in Iraq and the British in India (or, back in the day, the U.S. in the Philippines) are concerned, but there's barely even any reason to doubt that it is or was insincere. It takes a certain kind of nationalistic hubris to think that a policy of domination is being undertaken for the good of the dominated, but hubris and egomania are hardly unknown traits in human psychology. Besides which, I think the evidence indicates that the kind of domination-oriented policies Bush is pursuing aren't even good for the would-be dominators. It's a huge screw-up. What it's not, however, is a triumph of a new form of dreamy idealism -- "I should use my army to rule the world through fear and intimidation" is the oldest idea in the history of statecraft, it's just not a very good one. Clinton and S-CHIP
Hillary Clinton's been going around the country for months now, campaigning, and claiming credit for S-CHIP, the Sate Children's Health Insurance Program that was passed during her husband's administration. All well and good, but The Boston Globe says it's not true, citing the idea's main legislative sponsors as the source for their debunking. Photo by Flickr user maessive used under a Creative Commons license The Romance of EmpireGeorge W. Bush laments that his advanced age doesn't let him participate in his own screw-ups: "I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed." Need we note that when Bush had an actual opportunity to put his life on the line in a war, he chose to avoid doing so? The guy who sent me the link observed the connection between these sentiments and the point about Bush-style democracy-promotion as the return of Victorian imperialism -- shot through with daffy romanticism about dashing off to exotic lands to take up the white man's burden. The idea isn't to identify policies that are effective at boosting the prospects for democratic reform; instead, the idea is to identify policies that are pleasurable to the egos of the politicians and opinion-leaders who frame them. TornI think the talk of the Clinton-Obama tearing the Democratic Party apart is a bit overstated; this strikes me as the kind of thing where emotions will run high until, at some point, things wrap up and emotions stop running high. But Michele Goldberg raises a more reasonable micro-concern that pro-Clinton feminist leaders' open scorn for Obama-backing women could do real harm to feminism: "The irony is that, for the overwhelming majority of women, voting against Clinton was never about repudiating second-wave feminism. But the more leaders of the movement insist on conflating their noble struggle for social justice with the fate of an uninspiring and nepotistic candidate, the less relevant it will be." Caron: The Return
Went to the Wiz-Cavs game last night that featured Caron Butler's return from injury. After sitting through any number of Wizards games featuring lackluster crowds, it was thrilling to be at a serious rivalry matchup with a packed arena and an audience prepared to really cheer and boo. Something that at least looked to Wizards fans like an egregious non-call on a three second violation even prompted clearly audible protests from the stands. It was good stuff. Of course, the fact that the good guys won didn't hurt. I'm really hoping we can manage to get into that fifth seed in order to produce yet another Cleveland-DC playoff matchup. Meanwhile, I note the following quasi-optimistic take on the 2007-2008 Wizards. Basically, they're about as good as the 2006-2007 edition. Given that this year we haven't had the services of Gilbert Arenas, some pundits have taken to talking about how the greater ball-sharing, etc., that the current squad offers makes them actually more effective without Gil. In reality, this year's team scores 107.9 points per 100 possessions (11th in the league) whereas last year's version scored 110.1; the reason the results have been similar is that the defense went from yielding 110.6 points per hundred to giving up only 108.2 per hundred. If Gilbert can come back and restore the offense to its former glory while the defense stays in touch with the skills it's learned this year, the team can graduate from "mediocre" to "prettty good." Actual NewsThe greatest challenge for any blogger is coping with the threat of actual news -- for example something serious seems to be afoot in Tibet, as police are clashing with protesters and the situation turned violent. Don't want to ignore a significant news story, but can't really do anything to advance anyone's understanding of it. This is why we'll always need real reporters. No OnePetraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services. I dunno about that, certainly it seems to me that a lot of the current U.S. government's allies have been arguing, falsely, that there has been adequate progress toward reconciliation. Either way, I think the point is clear enough -- Petraeus is right that if you're willing to expend an infinite quantity of American lives, American money, and American resources of diplomacy and attention on Iraq, things might kinda sorta turn out okay at some point depending on what happens. I would only caution that if we cut and run it's also possible that some sunny scenario will emerge. But in terms of the goals actually set for the surge, i.e. reconciliation, it hasn't happened. The Success of the Surge
The Pew Center has a new survey out offering definitive evidence that the "surge" has, in fact, been a success in terms of its main goal of boosting the odds of an indefinite American military commitment to Iraq. Here we see on the left, for example, that coverage of the war in Iraq has plummeted in recent months. Stories like this one about how "the body of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop who was kidnapped in the northern city of Mosul last month as he drove home after afternoon Mass was discovered Thursday buried in a southeastern area of the city" aren't getting the kind of play they used to. After all, the war's over and there's nothing to write about or put on television. Similarly, an item like "Iraq: Car Bomb Kills 11 in Baghdad" could be bad for home front morale, but thanks to the surge and to general Petraeus' surge of savvy press management, people don't hear as much about that kind of thing as they used to. Similarly, depressing "downer" stories like "3 Fort Hood soldiers killed in Iraq bombing " aren't as big a deal in the media as they once were. And that's important, because for all the talk of the surge working, according to its proponents it's going to need to keep on working for something like ten years. Over time, that can add up to an awful lot of body bags so you don't want people to hear about that kind of thing.
In fact, these days the correct answer is around 4,000 but the surge has succeeded in making sure that relatively few people are aware of that fact. Controlling the information landscape is key, because the public continues to have mixed feelings about the underlying issue. People think the war was a mistake, and think it hasn't been worth the costs. But rather than quit right now, the median voter seems to want to let things play out for a little while longer. The challenge for people who want to end the war is to make people see that that's not a viable option -- that the real policy choices are between leaving in as quickly a way as is safe and practical or else staying for many years. The challenge for those who want to see the war continue indefinitely is to obscure the length of commitment they're talking about, and to obscure the ongoing costs of an open-ended U.S. military presence in Iraq. Judged by those standards, the surge is working pretty well. Off MessagePA governor Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter, has a problem with going "off message" but this time instead of saying something embarrassing he's just said something probably accurate: Pennsylvania's perennially close, but when you look at a state that went Democratic in the last four presidential elections and hasn't shown any underlying pro-GOP trend, it seems unlikely that any Democrat would lose it in a generally favorable political climate for Democrats. The Uncertainty StrategyMark Schmitt explains why the Clinton campaign doesn't really want a resolution to the Florida/Michigan issue: Contrary to the gullible media's belief that "time" is a "powerful ally" on Clinton's side, in fact, Clinton's only ally is uncertainty. The minute it becomes clear what will happen with Michigan and Florida -- re-vote them, refuse to seat them, or split them 50-50 or with half-votes, as some have proposed -- is the minute that Clinton's last "path to the nomination" closes. The only way to keep spin alive is to keep uncertainty alive -- maybe there will be a revote, maybe they'll seat the illegal Michigan/Florida delegations, maybe, maybe, maybe. In the fog of uncertainty, Penn can claim that there is a path to the nomination, but under any possible actual resolution of the uncertainty, there is not. Yes. The strangest thing about the twilight campaign of the past several weeks is that under any other circumstances, it just wouldn't be happening. Or, rather, it would be like the last few races that Mike Huckabee ran -- covered as an amusing sideshow. But because of the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton and their close associates have been the leaders of the Democratic Party for so long at this point, they've been able to take a remarkably slender thread of hope and spin it into a full-fledged horse race. At this point, though, they're perpetrating something of a fraud on their many grassroots supporters who continue to invest money, time, and energy in an already-failed enterprise. The bottom line, however, is that before the March primaries, Clinton looked doomed unless she could make up major ground in March. With all the March results in, Clinton hasn't made up any ground at all. That means she's doomed. The popular vote victory in the Texas primary is a nice moral victory for Clinton to console herself with, but the overall results just didn't create the kind of delegate count she needed to be viable. The Book of SecretsDCPD recovers original booking log from the investigation of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. It turns out that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible and John Wilkes Booth little more than a patsy. Paging Ezra KleinBack on Tuesday, Chris Matthews offered the following thoughts on the politics of health care: Now, if a Democrat were smart, who gets elected president, they wouldn't go back to the old Canadian model, where they're all—you know, single-payer model. They'd say, “Wait a minute. Why don't I take something that looks practical out of Massachusetts with Mitt Romney, something practical that Schwarzenegger's trying to do, and put my name on it and say, 'Let's try that. Let's try some kind of mandated benefit. Let's try some kind of effort where businesses and young people have to pay their way. Let's do something that sounds vaguely Republican and self-reliant' "—if you're a Democrat. You know why? Because it would pass! And you'd have national health insurance! But if you keep pushing from your ideological end, you never get there. It's a good thing Matthews has no familiarity whatsoever with the health care proposals of the major Democratic Party presidential candidates. What he's advising Democrats to do is exactly what Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have proposed, it's similar to what Barack Obama's put forward, and it's identical to what Ron Wyden is working on legislatively. Indeed, there's a prohibitive (and, I think, wrong) consensus in left-of-center health policy circles that abandoning single-payer in favor of something like what Matthews is proposing is the way to go. Most interestingly of all, Matthews goes on television to talk about politics for a living. The Jeremiah Wright FactorI've been slow on the uptake with the Jeremiah Wright issue because I don't just have a quippy joke to make about this. I'm unsure, in general, of what the standards we're supposed to apply to the political views of politicians' favored clergy. I have no idea what the rabbis at Temple Rodef Shalom (where I've gone to synagogue the past few High Holy Days) or at The Village Temple (where I had my bar mitzvah) think about political issues, but I assume I don't agree with them about everything, and certainly it'd be odd to drag up old statements made by any of the relevant rabbis about this or that and then ask me to either endorse the statement or repudiate the entire congregation. By the same token, we don't assume that a politician who goes to mass wants to ban birth control nor do we ask Catholics who favored preventive war with Iraq to repudiate the Pope in order to prove their hawk bona fides. In short, we generally assume that a politician's stated political views express his or her position on political topics, and that affiliating with a religious congregation does not constitute an endorsement of everything the leaders of that congregation have ever said. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I see this as a basically trumped-up issue. Obama's enemies have put this Wright stuff out there in bad faith, not because they're genuinely uncertain as to what Obama thinks, but merely because they think it can hurt him electorally. But of course they're right that it'll hurt him electorally because Obama's going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black neighborhood. At that time, associating with a very large, influential, local church with black nationalist overtones was a clear political asset (it's also clear in his book that it made him, personally, feel "blacker" to belong to a slightly kitschy black church). Since emerging onto a larger stage, it's been the reverse and Obama's consistently sought to distance himself from Wright, disinviting him from his campaign's launch, analogizing him to a crazy uncle who you love but don't listen to, etc. The closest analogy would probably be to Hillary Clinton's inconsistent accounting of where she's from (bragging about midwestern roots when trying to win in Iowa, promptly forgetting those roots when explaining away a loss in Illinois, developing a sporadic affection for New York sports teams) -- banal, mildly cynical shifts of association as context changes. This is why I don't, as an American citizen, worry that President Obama would be objectionable. But Americans take their religion seriously and aren't going to want to hear this story. So Obama's going to have to do some awkward further distancing. No Qaeda TakeoverOlivier Roy points out that people claiming that if we leave Iraq it'll somehow be taken over by al-Qaeda don't know what they're talking about. But, hey, don't listen to him -- he's done actual scholarly research that's relevant to the issue and that kind of thing has no place in American political debate. Must-ReadsEzra Klein wonders what the must-read magazines are. I think this is an unduly touchy subject for someone who works in the magazine industry to take on. I'll just say that excluding publications that anyone I know works for, I like Dwell, Monocle, N+1, and (yes!) ESPN the best. OmnihanlonI hadn't realized that Michael O'Hanlon also does local news. New member of congress Nikki Tsongas, for example, introduced legislation that would require troop withdrawals from Iraq so naturally the Lowell Sun turned to America's leading former defense budget analyst: "It just doesn't compute," Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said, arguing that Tsongas' plan could cause Iraqi factions to recoil in self-defense as the country destabilizes with the rapid departure of American troops. Funny, indeed. You actually see a classic here of best case / worst case mismatch. We can't leave because if we did things could get worse. But things got steadily worse for about four straight years while we were there, so it's not like keeping 100,000+ troops in Iraq is some kind of assurance that Iraqi political dynamics will play out in a favorable way. There's no reason to arbitrarily assume the worst if we leave and assume the best if we stay. UPDATE: "The Good News," by Michael O'Hanlon, The Baltimore Sun November 25, 2003: "Things could still get worse in Iraq. But at the risk of speculating, it seems more likely that they will start getting better. We are already witnessing improvements in the Iraqi quality of life; we may soon start to see improvements in the security situation." Tabling Elliot SpitzerFor the latest edition of The Table we brought Megan McArdle on board so as to marginalize Ross' quaint anti-prostitution views while our crack production team devised a newer, bigger, better, and even more absurd intro sequence: It's also, technically speaking, a different table. March 15, 200821!Congrats to the Rockets. North Plains RevisitedAfter emailing a bit with Brendan Nyhan about this post, I think I'd better back off my optimism that Barack Obama might be able to put some northern plains states in play. I'd been basing that on (a) the theory that a lot of Democratic Senators get elected in those states notwithstanding the party's usually poor presidential performance in that region, and (b) Obama's pretty good polling results in Survey USA's state-by-state surveys. To make a long story short, I think I've been overestimating the orthodoxy of the Senators in question. I knew Ben Nelson was one of the furthest-right Senate Democrats, but by Poole-Rosenthal's measures Max Baucus turns out to be not just right-of-average but actually the second-most-conservative Democratic Senator and then Dorgan, Conrad, and Johnson are all pretty conservative, too. Combine that with Obama's record on guns, and I think the chances of a breakthrough look much worse than I'd once thought. John McCain Is Your JalopeyIt had to be done. I'm afraid the phenomenon of a grumpy old man running for president is going to leave me even more out of touch with the median voter than usual. Weekend FunThis is a bit off the beaten path: Apparently the video was featured on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show which I'll admit I sometimes watch and is actually better than you'd think. Feldstein: Severe Recession LoomingI find it very hard to know what to make of various experts' economic forecasts but Martin Feldstein says we're in for a recession that may be "substantially more severe" than recent ones. Covering Tibet
I stole this image of Chinese news coverage of the situation in Tibet from James Fallows; do make sure to check out his whole post on the subject. Obviously, the PRC government puts a premium on information control. For a long time the hope has been that growing connectivity through the internet will start to undermine its information-control capabilities. And to some extent that's happened, but it also seems that The Great Firewall of China has generally been more effective than I would have thought ten years ago. Madness ContinuedJ.J. Adande presses the case against college hoops: Excessive use of the word "Cinderella." It comes up in the NBA, just not as often. Google search hits for "George Mason Cinderella": 355,000. Google search hits for "Golden State Warriors Cinderella": 70,000. And I dare any writer to go up to Stephen Jackson and compare him to a fairy-tale princess. And, yes, I know nobody agrees with me about this. TV StuffI'm gonna be on Fox News at 5:20 PM Eastern tomorrow to talk about the Michigan/Florida delegations controversy and how its existence proves that Democrats are craven appeasers who want terrorists to devour your children. UPDATE: Sorry, sorry, I'll be on today at 5:20. The SurgeTonight at the Velvet Lounge, Spencer Ackerman's new band The Surge will be offering their debut performance. Doors open at 9:30 PM. Also: 23 Rainy Days, Stalking Horses, and The City Veins. FlashbackWar critics, as is well known, are so blinded by ideology that they can't see the very real improvements in Iraq: Michael O'Hanlon, a Senior Fellow specializing in security issues in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution, spent some "two and a half days" in September in Iraq. He came back with the impression that "on balance" the United States will ultimately succeed in Iraq. And, yes, those were were written in December of 2003. Note O'Hanlon's keen grasp of the subtle dynamics of Iraqi politics and society: The Paradox of ElectabilityPolitical journalists, being journalists, tend to focus on campaign happenings and controversies as a key determinant of election outcomes. Research, however, indicates that most people vote as dogmatic partisans and that most of the election-to-election variance can be explained by macroeconomic trends. Some elections, obviously, are very close and thus "the campaign" turns out to have been a decisive figure, but even in these cases a very close election like the 2000 election featured so many "important" campaign factors (Bush's coverup of his DUI citation, Gore sighing in the debate, Bush not knowing the names of foreign leaders, the press insisting that Gore claimed to have invented the internet, etc.) that it's hard to believe that any one of them was actually all that important. Primary campaign voters, by contrast, are more fickle because there's much less underlying difference between the contenders. And one thing primary voters look at is electability, and another thing they look at is elite support and elites look a lot at electability. Voters and elites alike, meanwhile, like reporters, tend to wildly overestimate the importance of contingent campaign happenstance on election outcomes. Consequently, a primary season campaign gaffe that's seen as potentially harmful during the general election is arguably more likely to hurt you in the primary because of the perception that it'll hurt you in the general than it is to actually hurt you in the general election. Old MinesObama campaign picks up additional delegates out of Iowa now that the state caucus process is officially complete. Don't ask me to explain all the details, but broadly speaking the Iowa caucuses were projected to yield 16 delegates for Obama but at the state convention he actually wound up snagging more like 21. Some kind of similar process where caucuses projections need to be turned into actual delegate counts is going to play out elsewhere. |
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