4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.
Pelosi has certainly said and done some things that have "signaled" this, as we say in DC, but I think that insofar as it's really true that she and "other leading members of Congress" think this, they need to communicate it more clearly.
After all, consider the situation in Pennsylvania. All indications are that a clear majority of Pennsylvania Democrats would prefer for Hillary Clinton to be the nominee than for Barack Obama to be the nominee. But there are few indications that they understand the real structure of the race -- that a miracle Obama comeback in PA would mean that Democrats enter May with a nominee and a financial advantage, whereas a sizable Clinton win in PA may mean that Democrats don't get a nominee until August and that that nominee, who'll almost certainly be Barack Obama anyway, will have a much tougher time winning in November. I think if voters better-understood the situation, they'd be much more inclined to vote for their second-favorite Democrat in the race, much less eager to do volunteer work for Clinton, much less inclined to donate money to her campaign, etc. But people won't understand the dynamic unless it's explained to them by credible party leaders.
Here's wishing an enjoyable holiday to the Christians in the audience! I find Peeps sort of bizarre, but I'm hoping to find myself some chocolate in a bunny shape later today.
The Campaign for America's Future proudly emailed this attack video against John McCain to me the other day, and frankly it's disappointing stuff:
There's just no evidence that McCain did anything wrong here. He was on the side of the angels in helping to investigate some dirty dealings in the contracting process for this tanker back in 2004, and the idea that Boeing should have a permanent monopoly on Air Force contracts because to work with rival firms would be "shipping jobs to France" is absurd. If people don't want to go after McCain for something real, they should go after his shabby treatment of his first wife or make fun of him for being so damn old or something. Or go after him for something real! But this ignorant and silly.
It all started innocently enough. UCLA's Burkle Center hosted a conference last week on the best way to deal with rogue states. On a panel proffering advice for the next administration, I disagreed with the American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka over policy priorities. Pletka urged the next president to emphasize democracy promotion and the spread of human rights among rogues. I suggested that counterterrorism and counterproliferation merited greater attention.
this point, Pletka accused me of being on the far left. This amused my friends at the conference, since I am a Republican who acted as an informal advisor for the 2000 Bush campaign. When informed of my party status later, Pletka replied, "Well, he's not like any Republican I know!"
Dan's obviously got a problem here, as does the country, but if a desire to focus on counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation issues rather than overthrowing foreign governments is not the sign that you're on the "far left" then I think those of us on the left are in pretty good shape going forward.
The Wright/Obama story and the Hagee/McCain story are imperfect parallels in several directions, but surely John McCain's successful efforts to court the endorsement of an anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish preacher who admires McCain's foreign policy as likely to bring about the apocalypse deserves more than no coverage whatsoever from the country's major newspapers.
It took so long into this New York Times story about congressional efforts to bring some regulatory oversight to the unregulated elements of Wall Street that it actually brought a smile to my face when we finally arrived at the inevitable "But industry groups warn..." part of the article. After all, I was curious, what will industry groups warn? What dire menace would it propose to the Republic if financial institutions that get bailed out like banks when they go bust, and now get access to the discount window like banks, also get regulated like banks before they do things that could force the government to step in and clean the mess? What should a politician eager to the bidding of firms who've bribed him pretend to be worried about?
The answer is: But industry groups warn that heavy-handed regulation could dry up investment capital just when the economy needs it most.
Because, of course, had new regulations been proposed 18 months ago, industry groups would have leapt at the chance. But now's not the right time!
Malik Rose comes off the bench to deliver a team-high twenty points on 8-13 shooting in New York's 93-114 loss yesterday to the mighty Minnesota Timberwolves.
Via Radley Balko, the latest item on the list of things to keep in mind when considering where anti-American populists like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales get their electoral support:
The latest affront, they say, is a recommendation this month from the UN’s drug enforcement watchdog, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), that Bolivia and Peru criminalize the practice of chewing coca and drinking its tea. The move has provoked widespread anger and street protests in the two countries, especially among the majority indigenous populations. For them, coca has been a cultural cornerstone for 3,000 years, as much a part of daily life as coffee in the U.S. (La Paz is home to perhaps the world’s only coca museum.) From the countryside to swanky urban hotels, it is chewed or brewed to stave off hunger or exhaustion or to ease the often debilitating effects of high-altitude life in the Andes. It is also “used by healers and in ceremonial offerings to the gods,” says Ana Maria Chavez, a coca seller in La Paz, who refers to her product as “the sacred leaf.” Pope John Paul II even drank coca tea on a 1988 visit to Bolivia. It is, says Chavez, “part of who we are.” [...]
Even as the INCB was issuing its report, the Bolivian government was reaffirming its desire to increase Bolivia’s legal coca crop limit from 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) to 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres). The Bush Administration has warned that the latter move would put Bolivia in violation of its international agreements — it is “not consistent with Bolivia’s obligations,” said the State Department — and risk tens of millions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Obviously, if we get our way on this the whole cocaine problem in the United States is going to go away. Hahaha. In broader strategic terms, it's no coincidence that the regions of the world that have most consistently been subjected to an imperial approach from the United States -- Latin America and the Middle East -- is where you see the most hostility to the United States. Portions of the world that have received more dignified, respectful treatment generally return the favor.
I see that the Amazon page for Heads in the Sand is telling me that people who buy my book might also enjoy Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. Indeed, you can buy both simultaneously for just $41.88.
As it happens, I just got to read the first 15 pages or so of Nixonland yesterday before relinquishing Spencer's copy back to him, and it's eye-opening. While Rick's been slumming it up as a blogger and pamphleteer, I'd sort of forgotten what an engaging, evocative narrative writer he is. Somewhat confusingly, the book's not about Nixon, it's about the "Nixon era" of American politics starting in 1966. But buy the book. And buy my book, too. Buy them together.
I find it striking that, as presented in episode two of John Adams, the case for independence is distinctly underwhelming. In particular, the point that a rebellion which can only succeed with foreign assistance is as likely to result in domination by France as in freedom from Britain seems like an important cautionary note. What's more, favored by hindsight and the example of Canada and Australia, the imagine of a non-independent America as destined to be slowly-but-surely ground into a state of tyranny looks wrong.
Conversely, however, the British seemed to be badly missing the big picture as the crisis approached -- risking a very valuable series of possessions over some relatively trivial policy issues. Taking the long view, independence looks more like the somewhat tragic result of short-sighted thinking on both sides than like a heroic triumph for the forces of liberty.
Which is a long way of saying, is there a book out there about the revolutionary era people would recommend that's not in the "no this guy was the best founding father!" genre?
To to tell the guys responsible for attacking the Green Zone with 20 mortars that the surge has been an enormous success. Similarly with whoever planted the homemade bomb in southern Baghdad that killed four American soldiers. I hope things manage to stay on roughly this plateau until through the election and when we get a chance to start bringing the troops home, but I think you've got to fear that as spring turns to summer and we can't maintain the full-size surge deployment that violence is going to keep crawling back up.
"Sustainment" is one of the uglier neologisms I've heard in quite some time, but Shawn Brimley's short article advocating "A Grand Strategy of Sustainment" is one of the better quick takes on forward-looking strategy that I've read in some time. Highly recommended.
Note that beyond an end to the exclusion of voices who were right about Iraq in 2002-2003, what we really need is more diversity of ideas about American foreign policy and more strategic thinking that, like what Brimley's written here, reflects a real alternative to the years of hubris.
Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a seix-year world war in which fifty million would perish.
Elisabeth Bumiller does us all the service of focusing some attention on McCain's flirtations with becoming a Democrat, first in 2001 when considering switching parties to flip control of the Senate, and then in 2004 when considering running as VP on John Kerry's ticket. McCain naturally decided to sweep all this under the rug when he decided to hug Bush and start positioning himself to run as a Republican in 2008 but his staff was taking this stuff seriously by most accounts.
I think it's pretty clear that McCain's been less-than-totally honest about this stuff, but beyond that, what's the point? I'm not really sure what the point is, myself. On the one hand, to some extent it highlights McCain's unseriousness about the bulk of domestic policy issues that he's drifted around so much on those topics and was willing to consider basically jettisoning his entire record. But at the end of the day, he didn't do it and (especially in 2001) domestic issues were presumably at the center of that. He really does have a conservative record and a conservative self-conception, and wanted to stick with that.
There's absolutely nothing in the world I find more baffling than the right's continuing critique of liberal bias in Google logo choices. Do I need to recommend some reading on free markets?
Paul Krugman notes that not only is John McCain going to be an absolute nightmare on the need to reimpose some kind of regulation on our financial system, but both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are maintaining an eerie silence on these issues and one has to suspect that the generous contributions the scions of high finance have made to both Democrats is playing a role here. It's not directly on point, but the relevance of my old boss Bob Kuttner's book on Squandering of America is clear; or see Noam Scheiber's review.
Part of Jim Henley's accounting of how he got Iraq so right is that he recognized that Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge:
I could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war - how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren’t going to be that.
In my view, these considerations remain a huge challenge for counterinsurgency optimists looking forward in Iraq.
The New York senator said the panel should be led by financial experts such as Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary in her husband's administration, and former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker.
Obama's campaign is noting that they called for something similar a year ago, and according to the campaign "One key difference, however, is the diversity and representation that Obama called for – not just some of the same people who helped to create these problems or have a direct financial industry stake in the outcome." Specifically, he called for "summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge."
That doesn't seem like an earth-shattering difference in initial policy, but Obama's certainly picked up a certain tone-deafness in the Clinton "let's get together the people who caused the problem!" approach.
Everybody knows that Barack Obama was against invading Iraq in 2002-2003 whereas Hillary Clinton was for it. But what does that mean today and what does it mean for the future? Obama says "I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place" but, again, what does that mean? Spencer Ackerman spent some time talking to Obama's inner circle of foreign policy advisors trying to figure it out and came away very impressed with the Obama Doctrine.
Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license
Via Nick Beaudrot, Granite Prof generates an "elite score" for various Democratic contenders based on their performance in different parts of New Hampshire. Nick comments "As you can see, yes, Obama is the wine track candidate, as are all insurgent challengers. But he is less wine track-y than almost all other challengers."
Throw in the fact that the wine/beer balance is shifting over time in the Democratic party in favor of wine, and that Obama has tremendous strength among African-Americans of all tastes in beverages, this explains how Obama becomes the insurgent who wins.
In an odd way, the most outrageous of Jeremiah Wright's statements are also the easiest ones for an Obama supporter to deal with -- it's clear enough that Obama doesn't believe those things, and rightly so. The difficult problem of Jeremiah Wright is really with his less outrageous statements, with things like "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye." This is too hot for US Presidential politics, and I certainly don't think it makes sense to think of 9/11 as justified divine retribution for Nagasaki, but the attempted puncturing of the cult of American self-righteousness here is spot-on.
You just can't say those sorts of things! Or of course you can easily say them on your blog, or even in your lefty magazine article, but when you step into the practical political arena in the United States, you enter the Self-Righteousness Zone where loving your country entails a staggering level of obtuseness. I hope Barack Obama does have some qualms about America's WWII-era habit of directly targeting Japanese and German civilians for massive violence, and as a political realist I also hope he never needs to speak serious about them in public until sometime in the 2020s.
Made by Andrew Bacevich. Of course to Bacevich, opposition to the hubris of empire is part of what makes a conservative. And in a purely abstract sense, he may have a point. But actually existing American conservatism seems so committed to a project of militarism and coercive domination that Bacevich's case seems a bit precious.
Corby Kummer has a fascinating piece in the print Atlantic about the Nuestras Raices Farm in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a non-profit group that's helping to stabilize the economically depressed and crime-ridden town of Holyoke, Massachusetts by teaching people to farm.
Bloggingheadsing with David Frum, Jacob Weisberg explains that there's almost no content to George W. Bush's understanding of his Christian faith:
Of course one might note that there's little real content to Bush's understanding of anything, so it's no surprise that he has a vacuous take on faith as well.
The Clinton campaign's now putting it out there that Hillary Clinton "misspoke" when describing her fake death-defying landing at Tuzla, but it certainly seems to have occurred in her prepared remarks.
The fib itself isn't a big deal, but an exaggerated notion of Clinton's level of experience really is at the core of the Clinton campaign's argument.
I've been remiss in not linking to this thrilling article in which Evan "he's the future of the Democratic Party and he always will be" Bayh explains that superdelegates should consider ignoring Barack Obama's lead in elected delegates and the popular vote, and instead focus on the fact that Hillary Clinton would we winning if primaries were governed by the electoral college.
I believe that by the Duhem-Quine thesis there are actually an infinite number of arbitrary criteria we could devise to prove that our preferred candidate is "really" winning. For example, Obama's leads in delegates and votes are relatively narrow, but I bet that if we counted by mass his disproportionately male base of support would have a much larger edge.
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
Looks like Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is getting formally charges with "misconduct in office, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and perjury" including charges of "authorizing the city of Detroit to settle an $8.4 million lawsuit with several former police officers “with the corrupt motive” of preventing the release of text messages which would have revealed that he had lied under oath in the case." This, unlike last week's city council vote, may actually get the dude out of office.
The city of Detroit is obviously facing structural problems that go beyond any one person's conduct, but this sort of corruption among public officials doesn't help. Meanwhile, at the bottom of this post, Dave Weigel notes some Royce-esque re-election icononography.
Glad to see that the Sirius-XM merger got approval. The companies' competitors in the terrestrial radio industry had been making the self-refuting argument that a merged entity would face no competition on the theory, I guess, that satellite radio is a hermetically sealed market totally unaffected by the rest of the broadcasting and music industries.
Here's some unmitigated good news -- a huge victory for a labor/environmental alliance a the Port of Los Angeles that stands an excellent chance of improving air quality around the port while improving living standards for the people who work there. It'll also put pressure on the nearby Port of Long Beach to follow suit. This is the biggest port in the United States, so it's obviously a big deal, and a big organizing coup for the good guys -- the success of the labor/environmental is great news for the progressive coalition.
Abu Muqawama offers some of his thoughts on how Britain could have employed counterinsurgency theory more successfully during the American Revolution. As long as we're talking strictly hypotheticals, I'm not sure this namby-pamby COIN business is the way to go. What if in early 1776 the British had burned Boston to the ground before retreating to Nova Scotia?
Then you're in a position to communicate to the colonists the basic shape of the situation. Britain, obviously, is not in a position to occupy the entire territory of the 13 colonies. By the same token, the colonies are in no position to defeat British naval power. The colonies thus have a choice -- they can submit, withdrawing their delegates from the Continental Congress, at which point all will be forgiven, or else they can continue to resist in which case their cities will be subjected to sporadic invasion and burning-to-the-ground. Communicate to the Indians in-or-near Massachusetts, that the Crown considers that colony to be a lost cause and he's prepared to support with weapons and money any attempt by natives to dispossess the white population there.
UPDATE: Now needless to say, this would have been politically untenable in England. And, of course, as a person of conscience I wouldn't recommend doing it. Even on a strategic level, this kind of policy wouldn't make sense -- Britain's interests are best-served by training to stay on good terms with the colonies, ideally by reaching a compromise that keeps them in the empire, but failing that by letting them go independent and just making sure they don't become a pawn of some rival power. In general, the best policy when faced with a country that doesn't wants your country to just go away is to go away and try to secure your interests from afar.
Photo by Flickr user Cernavodo used under a Creative Commons license
Man, I sure am glad all our economic problems are solved now that new home sales are slightly up (though still way below where they used to be) on falling prices. It's a new day in America! These are some seriously bizarre times.
I guess John McCain thinks outsourcing his strategic thinking to Osama bin Laden is such a great idea that he wants to brag about it:
As you know, I was in Iraq, Jordan, Israel, France and England on my last visit. And a couple of days ago, as you probably know, an audiotape -- actually it was last week -- an audiotape was released where bin Laden said, and I have to quote bin Laden, ... 'the nearest field to support our people in Palestine is the Iraqi field.' He urged Palestinians and people of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to quote 'help in support of their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq, which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task.' Now my friends, for the first time I have seen Osama bin Laden and General Petraeus in agreement, and that is, the central battleground in the battle against al Qaeda is in Iraq today. And that's what bin Laden is saying and that's what General Petraeus is saying and that's what I'm saying, my friends, and my Democrat opponents who want to pull out of Iraq refuse to understand what's being said and what's happening, and that is, the central battleground is Iraq in this struggle against radical Islamic extremism.
There's no question that, as McCain points out here at some length, that bin Laden would really like to see an epic struggle in Iraq between the United States military and an array of al-Qaeda recruits who, inspired by the idea of a struggle against American occupation, will flood into that country. As McCain says, this is bin Laden's view of how events in the world are unfolding. Why McCain thinks the correct response is to do what bin Laden wants, I couldn't quite say. Possibly, he's just not very bright.
Hillary Clinton gets some pushback on her idea of letting Alan Greenspan solve the country's economic problems and replies:
Not only that, but the Fed didn't act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach. I think it would be wise to include him. And recently he's come out and vert smartly so that we have to deal with housing and maybe we need to have some kind of buyout mechanism for mortgages. So he's moved on his understanding and depth of the problem -- but you know you could pick three others. You just have to have some demonstrable involvement of presidential leadership.
Basically, she's the candidate of experience and policy substance, but when challenged on the particulars of her policies it's all "math is hard!" don't ask me how the magic works. But when Greenspan told people they should take out Adjustable Rate Mortgages, I think that was perfectly clear and understandable. And many of them probably felt that if the Delphic Greenspan believed that sort of thing was wise financial management, that maybe they should swallow their doubts and do it. And therein lay the genesis of at least some of our current problems.
Looks like Mexico is en route to surpassing the United States as the world's fattest nation. Note that Mexico has an impressive life expectancy at birth of 75.6 years despite being a pretty poor country without first class health care services and a diet that's not generally regarded as particularly healthy.
This is perhaps related to the so-called "Hispanic Paradox" in US health care outcomes, wherein inside the United States "which most Hispanic groups are characterized by low socioeconomic status, but better than expected health and mortality outcomes."
I've read it twice, and I don't really understand what George Packer's problem with Barack Obama's Iraq policy is:
Obama offers Iraq as the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home. There’s more than a little truth to this, but I can’t help wishing that his speech on Iraq in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Wednesday, had anything close to the level of complexity and depth shown in his historic speech on race the day before, in Philadelphia. There was no deep consideration of the fate of more than four million displaced Iraqis, the specter of growing Iranian influence in Iraq, the likelihood of a return to terrible levels of violence as American combat brigades are withdrawn, the border tensions between Iraq and Turkey, the future of Kirkuk, or a strategy for preserving the very fragile improvements of the past six months. Instead, the speech presented what sounded like a fairly cost-free, win-win plan.
Obama's key contention, as underscored by Packer, is that Iraq is "the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home." Now obviously if you don't buy that analysis, you're not going to like Obama's Iraq policy. But Packer doesn't seem to disagree with it. Instead, he says "there’s more than a little truth to" what Obama is saying. But so if Obama's right, then he right. Packer doesn't see it that way. He seems to think that Obama should have gone in for some more showy hand-wringing. But why should he do that? Packer's upset that Obama doesn't have a viable plan for Kirkuk, but that's just the point; Obama recognizes that nobody has a viable plan to solve Iraq's problems so he wants to put our resources where they can do more good.
A policy that puts over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq in order to not solve Iraq's problems isn't a close substitute for solving Iraq's problems. On the other hand, maybe Packer just liked Obama's race speech a lot more than I did.
I was on an email list yesterday where there was some talk of whether or not the mortar attacks on the Green Zone coming from Sadr-controlled territory indicated that Sadr's cease-fire days were done. The consensus was: No. But today it looks like that line of thinking may be overtaken by events, as this BBC report and this McClatchy report certainly make it seem like it's "fire away" time. Spencer Ackerman says:
At least one theory worth entertaining is that the Sadrists waited out the surge. I don't have remotely the evidence necessary to support it, but it's something to consider when Petraeus testifies before Congress early next month.
It could be or it could be something else. In an intriguing development it looks like someSadrists are calling for civil disobedience. Meanwhile, let me say that while it's definitely been U.S. policy to ally with the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades in order to try to fight the Iranian-backed Muqtada al-Sadr, it's never been clear that that's wise policy. So whether what we've been doing is a successful effort to crush Sadr or whether it's about to blow up in our faces in the form of a big increase in violence, I think it's all questionable policy -- a United States that wasn't determined to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq would have nothing in particular to fear from a populist nationalist like Sadr.
Robin Toner asks "Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?" Since I was on the radio this morning to talk about polarization, this came up. And here's how I see it. Can Obama bring Republicans and Democrats together and reverse decades of structural trends toward ideological polarization? No.
Then there's the other thing. One thing many liberals believe is that one important reason America hasn't embraced liberalism is that the country is trapped in a politics of cultural division, and especially racial division. The theory of the Obama campaign is that the time is right for the right person to push the country past that and that Obama is the right person. I don't know that I believe that theory (I've primarily always been an anti-Clinton voter in this primary and I think there are fully adequate other reasons to back Obama) but I don't think it's a crazy theory. If Obama were to wind up securing 52 percent of the vote, that would be a long way from "unifying the country" but it would still be the biggest progressive mandate the country's had in decades.
Donnie Walsh has definitely had some success over the years with the Indiana Pacers, but the idea of recruiting him away from Indianapolis and to New York seems a bit odd. Walsh will be leaving Indy on a sour note, after several seasons worth of his team being in decline. The Knicks seem like they need a guy on his upside, someone who's been having some success and now is going to take on a bigger job.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Larry Bird's plan for turning the Pacers around is? Trading away the team's unpopular-with-the-fans "bad character" guys in exchange for overpaid white guys who don't play basketball very well hasn't turned out great and it's hard to undue mistakes like that.
Eric Alterman has an in-depth piece in The New Yorker on the now-inevitable decline and fall of the American newspaper. I don't disagree with a thing Alterman says in the piece, but for whatever reason I can never muster the level of angst that it's apparently necessary to have to qualify as a really serious media person in America. To me, the most important thing to keep in mind about the transformation of the American media is here:
The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.
The Lippmanite newspaper has always been a phenomenon that was pretty sharply bounded both in time and in place, and I just see no particular reason to think that the United States in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a transcendent ideal of incomparable awesomeness. The future will be different; more like the past, or like present-day Europe, but it's not as if modern-day Britain (or Spain or Denmark or whatever) somehow fails to function as a society or a democracy. People will probably be happier with the media product they consume, and certainly the internet makes it possible for those who are interested to become far better-informed than anyone was fifteen or twenty years ago.
But if you want more hand-wringing, rather than less, Farhad Manjoo's new book True Enough is the place to go to get it.
Neat map of proposed new streetcar and bus rapid transit lines in the District. This is via Richard Layman who rightly suggests that 14th street (the current 52/53/54 lines) would also be a good candidate for rapid bus service.
About a year ago a process that I believe is technically called "getting old and uncool" began to take hold and I fell hopelessly behind the curve on music matters. I kept listening to music but it was, you know, the same music I'd heard before. But for whatever reason I was inspired to download the Raveonettes' Lust, Lust, Lust and it's good.
So good, in fact, that perhaps I'll be awakened from my dogmatic slumbers and start paying attention again to what the cool kids are listening to. Because everyone knows the cool kids are always right.
Sudarsan Raghavan did a great piece looking at American success in Fallujah in yesterday's Washington Post. As he lays it out, the successes are very real -- the city was once held by the insurgency, and now it's basically under control. Specifically, it's under the control of Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie who served in the Republican Guard, then served as a commander in the insurgency, and then got fed up with AQI's antics, and now serves, with American approval, as police chief of Fallujah.
He still doesn't like Americans, still doesn't like the Shiite government of Iraq, and still doesn't like democracy. But he is happy to take American weapons and money and to cooperate with the American military. It's not clear if his cooperation would continue if we asked him to cooperate by, say, running the town along liberal principles or submitting to the authority of the central government, but the local troops are trying to get along and he's willing to get along. And so there you have your success. It's real enough. It's also obviously not what we invaded Iraq to accomplish (after all, the Republican Guard was running the country already before we invaded) and it's not at all clear where it leads you.
If we leave, it seems to me that Colonel Zobaie will either govern wisely, or else he won't. He may use a reasonable mix of firmness and good government to maintain control over his town, or he might screw up and tip things back to the insurgency. He may reach a reasonable accommodation with the central government or else he might not. And if we stay, all those same factors stay true.
John Sides takes a look at the evidence that libertarianism is the future of American politics and finds it wanting.
The evidence, as I see it, just points to the public shifting somewhat to the left -- demanding somewhat more public spending, plus growing more friendly to both libertarian and non-libertarian aspects of things like the gay rights movement's demand for equality irrespective of sexual orientation.
Gallup reports that Barack Obama's troubles with Jewish voters may be overstated as in fact that Obama-Clinton Jew split is quite tight. Still, when you consider broader demographic factors I think this looks less good for Obama. Jews, after all, mostly fit into the upscale "wine track" category of Democrats in which Obama is doing well and historically Jewish voters have supported reformist liberals of Obama's ilk. Given those priors, Obama being near-parity with Clinton is Obama doing poorly, and I think shows some of the attacks on him over Israel and some of the smear campaigns have had some effect.
On Spencer Ackerman's recommendation, I checked out Frontline's "Bush's War" last night. It was, to me, physically difficult to watch. The idea of seriously sitting down to interview Richard Perle about Iraq -- your interviewer here, your cameraman there, etc. -- is, to me, vaguely repulsive. How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him? I dunno. Do I want to watch him talk on my television? Or John Yoo? Even in the context of a documentary that makes it clear that they're repulsive sociopaths? Not really.
The die-hards, though, at least stand by their war. It's puzzling to think about the rest of them. John McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA throughout the pre-war period, has a ton of reasonable things to say about Iraq and the decision-making process. You're sitting there thinking, this is a smart, knowledgeable, insightful guy if only he'd been a high-ranking government official of some kind maybe he could have stopped this! He could have quite and said "holy shit! the government's being run by crazy people, don't let these psychos invade Iraq!" Of course Richard Clarke and Rand Beers did resign and no good came of it. Maybe there was no stopping the madness.
Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations is taking suggestions about future episodes. See Spencer Ackerman's video proposal for a trip to sample the culinary delights of Iraqi Kurdistan (video's not strictly appropriate for children). I'd watch that.
Robert Gordon has a nice piece in TNR making the point that though it's good that crime demagoguery has largely dropped out of our politics it would actually be a good idea for politicians to address crime since, hey, crime rates are still really high in the United States and all this murdering causes a lot of suffering. Gordon further notes that the uneven successes of crime fighting efforts in the 1990s appear to have taught us some important lessons about effective policing techniques that could do a lot of good were the federal government to help underwrite their spread.
This is all correct, and we should do it. Also, I would say, federal money for more cops. Meanwhile, one effect of the Iraq War has been to take a lot of cops out of the field fighting crime at home and send them to Iraq as Army Reserve and National Guard members instead. That's hardly a knock-down argument against the war, but it's a reminder that these visions of endless "strategic patience" don't come without cost.
Chris Bowers sketches out a plausible and appealing scenario in which Barack Obama wraps up the nomination on May 6. Among other things that would be good about such a scenario, it's worth noting that at this point the main obstacle to a satisfactory resolution of the Florida/Michigan situation is that Clinton continues to be in the race. If she drops out and endorses Obama on May 7 or shortly thereafter, it'll be easy for Michigan and Florida to be "forgiven" in late May and allowed to fully participate in a rubber stamp convention in exchange for promising to never do it again.
This is what, I think, everyone believed would happen when the harsh sanctions were first announced. Only the fact that Hillary Clinton is trying to use the seating of the improperly selected delegates to actually overturn the results of the legitimate nominating process is creating a crisis situation that threatens Democratic prospects in the fall.
Anatol Lieven's departure from our fair shores to return to England was a huge blow for the DC think tank universe, but I'm glad to see he hasn't completely given up writing on our issues. Thus, I've been distracted from my efforts to write a long piece about how absolutely terrifying John McCain is on foreign policy by Lieven's brief piece on how terrifying McCain is. If we're lucky, McCain will only start wars with North Korea and Iran. If we're unlucky, we may need to add China or (more likely) Russia to that list.
I suppose nothing should surprise me anymore, but it seems that conservatives are using the recently-released Pentagon report showing (yet again) that there's no Saddam/al-Qaeda connection to prove the existence of such a connection. What's more, they're even telling the truth about the media not paying much attention to the report. Indeed, they're taking advantage of the fact that the media hasn't paid attention to the report to just mislead people about what it says.
Kirk Ellis, one of John Adams's writers is jumping intoTNR's exchange on the series, and provides some insight into the provenance of the accents on display in the series:
Steve, you also inquire as to origins of the "hybrid accents" we use in the series. From the beginning, we wanted to emphasize that independence was a battle between British Americans and their brethren in England, not, as so often depicted, a conflict that pitted Crown officers with plumy Oxonian accents against patriots with full-blown American dialects. All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations.
He says they provided capsule biographies of the different characters to the series' dialogue coach to help them come up with something appropriate, sometimes based on the insight "that one's residence in America frequently depended on one's point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia--in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region."
Ellis' participation in this, along with some other similar examples, does raise some questions about the changing nature of the critical enterprise in the internet era. My sense is that, traditionally, creators have tended to shy away from direct intervention into critical debates about their work. But something about the seemingly informal nature of internet commentary seems to have subverted that rule, so you're seeing much more of this kind of intervention. It has, I think, the potential for a distorting impact on our understanding of things since, at the end of the day, it's really not the creator's role to offer authoritative accounts of what a given work "really" was or is.
So apparently Hillary Clinton was "sleep-deprived" when she forgot that she'd never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All "misspoke" theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she's mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign. But maybe we have an explanation of her war vote -- maybe she was sleep-deprived when she authorized the war? Maybe she's been staying up all night studying the classified National Intelligence Estimate trying to get to the bottom of things? Well, okay, she wasn't doing that, but maybe it was something. Presumably her plan is to be well-rested during her freaky 3AM phone calls.
Indiana looks to be something we haven't seen in a while -- a state where either Clinton or Obama could genuinely win. Anne Kornblut takes a look at the terrain and he closely matched forces there. Since the outcome of the race is determined by delegates, and Indiana is virtually certain not to provide a large delegate advantage to anyone, the state isn't, literally speaking, particularly important to anyone. But the outcome may have a substantial impact on the confidence game Clinton's trying to run on superdelegates and party leaders.
Yesterday, I mentioned the theory that racial conflicts were at the root of a lot of our political disputes even when they're not explicitly mentioned. Then later in the day strolling through the Atlantic's archives looking for something else, I came across Thomas Edsall's May 1991 article on race in politics and didn't really make the connection until I clicked back over to it just now. But there it is -- a classic statement of the thesis.
As best I can tell, nobody can quite figure out what's happening in Iraq right now -- nobody sure who did what that led to the current fighting or exactly who's fighting whom. Thus we get reporting about how the fighting "threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war." Once a giant battle is already under way it seems a bit late to worr that a cease-fire might be threatened, but that's a sign of how confused the situation is.
The International Crisis Group's old report on Shiite politics in Iraq remains a vital backgrounder if you're interested.
Mark Helprin had one of those let's bomb Sudan and everyone who doesn't want to do so immediately is obviously complicit in genocide in Darfur op-eds the other day. The trouble, as Mark Goldberg from UN Dispatch points out, is that this is completely detached from the nature of the problem in Darfur, which wouldn't at all be solved even if the Sudanese government was "persuaded" by air strikes to withdraw its forces from the arena. What's needed to provide security are actual boots on the ground that can do some good, and "So far, the only organizations willing to take on this challenge are the African Union and UN peacekeeping, which Helprin dismisses as a 'camping trip to the tower of babble.'"
Now Mark's far too polite to point this out, but what you're seeing once again is that there's a certain set of people for whom Darfur is an interesting situation just insofar as it provides a venue for UN-bashing and a "more bombs would make the world awesome" worldview. It's obviously frustrating to contemplate how unsatisfactory current UN and AU efforts in Sudan have been, but the reality is that they've done much more good than anything else. The idea that if we would just cast off these shackles of multilateralism that an excellent solution is just around the corner is daft.
To say a bit more about the situation in Iraq, the details remain murky but the broad outline is that we're continuing to see conflict between the exile party ISCI, which has been cooperating with the US and Iran in post-war Iraq, and the domestic nationalist Shiite movement associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, which has received some backing from Iran and been mostly hostile to the United States. From the point of view of American interests, this seems to be a fight in which we have no dog. Our main interest in this rivalry ought to be simply that it not turn into a bloody fight that leaves our troops in the crossfire.
But that, of course, is exactly what's happening. Why are we letting ourselves get dragged into this? Spencer Ackerman explains:
Here's an answer. As long as Maliki is in the prime minister's chair, and as long as we proclaim the Iraqi government he leads to be legitimate, Maliki effectively holds us hostage. "I need to go after Sadr," Maliki says. "The situation is unacceptable! In Basra, he threatens to take control of the ports, and in Baghdad, he's throwing my men out of their checkpoints. Would you allow the Bloods or the Crips to take over half of Los Angeles?" And as soon as he says that, we're trapped. It simply is not tenable for Petraeus to refuse a request for security assistance from the Prime Minister to deal with a radical militia.
This is, of course, a big part of the problem with making an enduring American military presence in Iraq a key strategic priority of the United States. To do that, we need to make ourselves useful to some politically powerful horses in Iraq. But to do that we need to get sucked into our favorite horses pet political disputes. So now we're there to provide backup and air support for the Badr Brigade as they try to liquidate their foes in Sadr's political party. And if it doesn't work, we may need to find a new Iraqi politician (remember Iyad Allawi? Ibrahim Jafari?) to be our special friend.
Noah Feldman says it's awesome but his article seems deeply confused to me for roughly the reasons Noah Millman points out. Feldman's running a lot of different ideas together, and getting too cute by half.
“I like bad boys for the most part,” Meghan adds. “In the past, I have liked tattooed guys who wear Converse. But I’d be open to anyone as long as you have a sense of humor. I have also dated totally normal guys who look like you, I guess—D.C.-looking guys.”
How much of a bad boy does wearing Converse really make you? We also learn that Senator McCain bought a condo for his daughter as her graduation present (nice!) and that she likes The Big Lebowski which Jon Chait sees as a potential dig at her Walter Sobchak-esque dad.
Robert Reich sounds like he's had about enough of Bill and Hillary Clinton at this point. Of course, Reich has had his differences with the Clintons before, despite being an old friend of Bill's and having served as his Secretary of Labor, but still I think it's a sign that the non-die-hards are about ready to see this campaign brought to a close.
Repeated invocations of the concept of "victory" or "winning" in Iraq from the hawks continually raise the question of what the heck it is they think victory would look like. As Fred Kaplan points out, whenever you look at what the president means (or at least seems to mean) by this, it turns out he's just ensuring defeat. I would only extend Kaplan's analysis by noting that John McCain, like Bush, has firmly committed himself to a similarly vague and unrealistic vision.
I understand that McCain has cred and therefore deserve a free pass from every reporter on every issue you can think of, but given that McCain has decided to put Iraq at the center of his campaign you'd think someone on the campaign trail might find time for a little scrutiny of what he's trying to say about this.
Eric Martin rounds up some evidence that "should make US policymakers wonder whether, yet again, we are backing the less popular local elements simply because they tell us what we want to hear." That seems wrong to me. The would-be imperial power has to back the "less popular local elements." The key thing is to find groups that are strong enough to hold on to power with external support, but too weak to come to be in a position to kick the ladder of external support away.
Yes, it seems stupid for American soldiers to be risking their lives for the sake of Iranian-backed Islamist parties' struggle against a nationalist Islamist party, but that's the perverse logic of the situation. If ISCI had more popularity and legitimacy, they wouldn't need us. And if they didn't need us, we wouldn't want them, just as we don't really want anything to do with the self-confident Sadrists. The only problem is ginning up domestic political support in the United States for the gambit. Hence we hear a lot about Iranian support for Sadrist elements or even al-Qaeda, and very little about Iranian support for their primary allies in Iraq -- allies who just happen to be our allies too.
Check out this last of America's largest urban areas ranked by weighted density. You'll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn't especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters -- if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we'd have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.
Inspired by liking Lust, Lust, Lust I'm now listening to other new albums people are recommending. For example, The Kills' Midnight Boom? Good! Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals? Also good!
To echo Ilan Goldenberg and Shawn Brimley, I think it would be a disaster for the next President to appoint a Republican as Secretary of Defense. The symbolism -- a combination of "Democrats can't handle defense" and "Democrats don't care about defense" -- just sucks.
In general, I'm not so high on the idea of appointing Republicans to anything, but you especially want to keep them away from the national security realm. Now it's a different matter to give an appointment to someone who's an ex-Republican (or willing to become one). Actual party switchers who are willing to publicly articulate a narrative about switching are a valuable commodity and people like that should be shoved out in front of the camera whenever it's plausible to do so.
Kate Sheppard notes that the gap in life expectancy between richer and poorer Americans is growing: "affluent and better-educated people are more likely to have quality health insurance and be able to take advantage of medical advances, and are less likely to smoke, live in dangerous neighborhoods, or eat unhealthy foods."
I was certainly always taught that if you buy stocks and hold them for the long run, that's going to ourperform other investments. But via Ezra Klein, The Wall Street Journalpoints out that this hasn't held up recently:
The stock market is trading right where it was nine years ago. Stocks, long touted as the best investment for the long term, have been one of the worst investments over the nine-year period, trounced even by lowly Treasury bonds.
You can see the chart to the left. Dean Baker wonders what would happen if instead of Social Security benefits everybody retiring right now had just lost a bunch of money in the stock market. It's a good question. I suppose it's always also worth wondering amidst a downturn if the seemingly too-high risk premium that sticks have traditionally paid might just go away -- maybe the free ride is over.
I was a little bit confused initially by John McCain's plan to deal with the crisis in the housing markets because on first read there doesn't seem to be a plan there at all. On second read, there's just no plan. Rather, there's fear that there might be a plan. But John McCain's promising to put a stop to that. Ryan Avent remarks:
As best I can tell, he must figure that offering a mortgage policy solution that’s far stingier than that put forth by one of the least popular presidents in modern times will burnish his maverick image, thus earning him more press cred. And then maybe the press won’t really talk that much about his stingy mortgage policy? He’d better hope they don’t, because if the American public finds out that he feels Bear deserved its bailout and homeowners deserve nothing, they’re going to be pissed.
Right. McCain's thinking on economics seems driven by a kind of "eat your peas" moralism. The press, which always favors economic pain for people other than themselves, their owners, and their advertisers tends to like this sort of thing. Like when McCain tried to run in the Michigan primary by promising voters that he thought their state's economy was doomed. But actual voters don't much like that kind of thing; I think there's skeptical as to how much different government policy makes in their lives, but they want policymakers to be at least trying to make their lives better.
The most salient characteristic of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the eighteenth century was its decentralization. In fact, the Ottoman state can only be considered an empire in the loose sense in which the term is used to refer to such medieval states as the Chinese under the late T'and dynasty. Its administrative establishment, economic system, and social organization all call to mind the structure of a premodern state. On paper, Ottoman territory at the turn of the nineteenth century stretched from Algeria to Yemen, Bosnia to the Caucuses, and Eritrea to Basra, encompassing a vast area inhavied by some 30 million people [MY note: this was a lot at the time]. In practice, the reach of the Ottoman government in Istanbul rarely extended beyond the central provinces of Anatolia and Rumelia, and then only weakly.
What's more, to prove that even a seemingly far-afield topic can be turned into a book plug, consider that this sort of herky-jerky governance across the breadth of the Muslim world would be deemed intolerable today. Contemporary Americans feel -- and not wrongly -- that in the wake of 9/11 we can't just be indifferent to what happens elsewhere. Anarchic conditions, or worse nuclear weapons programs, in far-off places could get people killed right here in the United States. The Bush administration's proposal to deal with this reality is to try to turn the United States into a kind of universal empire that will tell other countries what they may not and must do, and will mandate compliance through military might. Well, it doesn't work. The alternative I advocate in Heads in the Sand is liberal internationalism -- governance by agreement, non-proliferation and other goals achieved through legitimate multilateral processes that respect the interests of others and are capable of gaining the adherence of others.
In the wake of 9/11, that path was abandoned out of a combination of the sense that it was too laborious and the sense that it was politically untenable. But we've seen for the past seven years that the "shortcut" alternative of universal empire is no shortcut at all -- casting off international restraint hasn't empowered us to do new and exciting things, it's been counterproductive at great cost. Politically, the path of cowardice and timidity didn't achieve anything noteworthy for Democrats in 2002 and 2004, and with the Bush doctrine discredited the moment is ripe to try and offer people some serious ideas rather than merely "Serious" ones.
Photo by Flickr user Coltharp used under a Creative Commons license
Harold Meyerson asks us to imagine John McCain getting a 3AM phone call about an al-Qaeda bombing somewhere in the world:
McCain takes a deep breath. "Character counts, my friend," he says. "Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb Iran."
There is a rustling of blankets, and, brushing aside Cindy McCain, a concerned Joe Lieberman rises from the bed. "Not Iran, Mr. President," he says. "They hate al-Qaeda."
"That's right," the president says. "I remember now." He sighs with relief. "Good thing you're here every night, Joe."
It's a disturbing image but, as Harold says, not nearly as disturbing as the idea of a President who we have to hope listens to Joe Lieberman.
I think Brendan Nyhan's right in his explanation of why Democratic Party leaders are unlikely to unite to push Hillary Clinton out of the race even though they'd all benefit if it could be done -- it's hard to coordinate, and nobody wants to bear the costs of alienating Clinton's still-sizeable fan base. Still, dribs and drabs of superdelegates could, in sufficient numbers, succeed in pushing her out by May 6 as long as Obama turns in a decent performance in the upcoming primaries.
James Poulos says we should keep the penny and kill the nickel, followed by giving the penny a promotion so that it's worth five cents. He makes a pretty persuasive case. Note that this would also be an expansionary monetary policy measure that, given the current situation, might be more effective than further interest rate cuts from the Fed.
I was listening to a bit of Energy earlier today and decided I needed to look something up on the Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. What did I discover but this other Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. Apparently the band is named after an actual operation, "the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole" taking place in the Pacific Proving Grounds on the Marshall Islands.
Two bombs were tested, Mike and King, with Mike holding the distinction of being the world's first hydrogen bomb. And now you know.
I have to say that I doubt threatening Nancy Pelosi to take their toys and go home if she doesn't urge superdelegates to do what they want is really the smartest way for Hillary Clinton supporters to try to win this election. It sort of re-enforces the case that the Clintons and their close allies are selfish people willing and ready to destroy the party in order to maintain control over it.
An excellent rundown courtesy of Matt Compton. I suppose this is an obvious point to make, but you've got to assume that some of the states who were so eager to move their primaries up to February 5 are having some regrets right now. New Jersey just kinda got lost in the shuffle back in the day as a Clinton quasi-home state, but if they had an April 8 primary we'd all be hearing about the unique challenges facing the Garden State right now.
AUDIENCE: My name is Sabah Elbardisi (sp) with Al Jazeera TV. Senator, Mr. Gephardt spoke on Sunday and said that Mr. Rumsfeld is not doing a good job, and he stopped short of calling for his resignation. He also said that the presidents cannot leave the responsibilities for their subordinates. Are you also calling for his resignation? Or what are you calling for?
McCain: No. I think there are certain things that happen with the elections; a president to select his team is certainly a part of that. I certainly would not advocate that.
This came in the context of a speech followed by Q&A in which McCain discussed problems in Iraq at length and didn't mention sectarianism at all and, indeed, he seemed to be unaware of the existence of a Shiite-Sunni split in Iraq.
UPDATE: "Attack" is too strong a word. The point, however, is that people were calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, McCain was asked about those people, and McCain said those people were wrong. For McCain to turn around and characterize that as him calling for Rumsfeld's resignation is highly dishonest.
Anthony Cordesman on the stakes in the current fighting, which he remarks "is as much a power struggle for control of the south, and the Shi'ite parts of Baghdad and the rest of the country, as an effort to establish central government authority and legitimate rule."
The US teams we talked to also made it clear that these appointments by the central government had no real popular base. If local and provincial elections were held with open lists, it was likely that ISCI and Dawa would lose most elections because they are seen as having failed to bring development and government services.
Basically, we're helping ISCI and Dawa use force in the south to lay the groundwork for them to hold onto power that they would otherwise lose at the ballot box. For more, check out this telling post at the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama which starts out by saying "You know who was cool? The Jam. What a great band. You know who isn't cool? JAM -- Jaish al-Mahdi. Those guys pretty much suck." But then by the end it says:
Why, some wonder, is the U.S. closer to the Iran-backed ISCI and Badr Brigades than it is with the Sadrites? Why does this make sense? Two Baghdad political veterans have ruefully pointed out to Abu Muqawama that while Sadr has more popular support, the ISCI crowd have something more valuable: they speak English. One former State Department veteran with whom Abu Muqawama spoke a few months ago pointed out that former Iraq honcho Meghan O'Sullivan was particularly vulnerable to falling under the sway of those politicians who didn't just speak in that confusing gutteral language where they write from right to left in co-joined letters. Ergo: they speak English, so they must be our friends! Hoo-ray, democracy!
It's always worth recalling that one major problem with U.S. efforts to micromanage political outcomes in foreign countries is that it tends to be way easier for Iraqi (or Pakistani, etc.) political actors to manipulate our leaders than it is for our leaders to manipulate political actors in foreign countries. Americans have more levers -- more money, more guns, more power -- but foreigners have a much better understanding of what's happening.
With Michael Bloomberg introducing Barack Obama at Obama's "major speech" on modernizing financial market regulation, has the time come to replace pointless speculation about a Bloomberg presidential bid with pointless speculation about a Bloomberg vice presidential bid? I say: Yes. What better way to balance a ticket headed by a lanky black guy from Hawaii/Chicago than by adding a short Jewish guy from Boston/New York? It sounds ideal to me. Plus if Haim Saban and friends follow through on their threat to cut off the flow of big checks if Hillary Clinton doesn't get her way, Bloomberg bucks could make up the difference easily.
[Pointless speculation over]
What I'd really like to see Bloomberg do with his career, though, is invest some of his vast wealth in starting up a new policy analysis and advocacy center focused on issues of big cities and urbanism. Outside of the sub-set of urban issues that have to do with inner-city education policy, there's almost no investment in these issues in the policy game. Alternatively, Bloomberg could leave NYC and move on to a second political career as the mayor of a more challenging city. He did a good job in New York, but can he tackle the more serious problems of a Baltimore? A Detroit? That'd be truly great mayoring.
