Ray Takeyh had a great op-ed last week that I'm just now seeing:
In the past week, a parade of Bush administration officials have offered a new threat and new justification for prolonging America's errant war in Iraq: containing Iran.
The ironic aspect of this is that Iran not only enjoys intimate relations with the Shiite government in Baghdad, but that its objectives in Iraq largely coincide with those of the United States.
Meanwhile, it seems that the Iranians have decided to cut Muqtada loose and fully line up behind the ISCI government. That counts as a form of good news, I'd say, but it also shows how ridiculous the administration's talk of anti-Sadrist operations as somehow crucial to curbing an Iranian takeover are.
Ta-Nehisi Coates article about Bill Cosby in the new Atlantic reaches that high standard of excellent for long-form magazine writing wherein it's not really viable to adequately summarize the piece in a way that makes it possible to blog about. Instead, I'd just like to flag one interesting thread that Coates weaves -- the idea of a distinct "Black Conservative" political and intellectual tradition in America:
But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. [...] Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment.
Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. [...] W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. [...]
After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them. [...]
Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.
Needless to say, there's an interesting ambiguity in the white mainstream's response to this black conservative tradition. The aspect of the tradition that says African-Americans will need to solve their own problems has enormous appeal to most moderate and conservative whites. But the tradition's analysis of why that's the case -- that America is a fundamentally racist society -- is viewed with horror by those some moderate and conservative whites. This also highlights, I think, part of what's so preposterous about efforts to insinuate that Barack Obama is a closet black nationalist -- his ideas are clearly liberal ideas, and those a very different set of ideas from the ones animating black nationalism.
Privileged though they are, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama do want to shape policy to help the less well-heeled. Mr. McCain, who had a far more elite upbringing than either of them and whose wife’s estimated fortune exceeds the Clintons’, is not just condescending to working Americans but trying to hoodwink them. Next week, in a replay of the 2000 Bush campaign’s “compassionate conservative” photo ops among black schoolchildren, he will show he’s a “different kind of Republican” by visiting what he calls the “forgotten” America of Alabama’s “black belt” and the old steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. What he wants voters to forget is the inequity of his new economic plan.
That plan’s incoherent smorgasbord of items includes a cut from 35 percent to 25 percent in the corporate tax rate. For noncorporate taxpayers, Mr. McCain offers such thin gruel as a battle against federal pork (the notorious Alaskan “bridge to nowhere,” earmarked for $223 million in federal highway money, costs less than a day of the war in Iraq) and a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax (a saving of some $2.75 per 15-gallon tank). Now there’s a reason for voters to be bitter — assuming bloviators start publicizing and parsing Mr. McCain’s words as relentlessly as they do the Democrats’.
Ultimately, one suspects that it would be really, really, really hard for anyone involved in politics professionally for as long as a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton or even a Barack Obama to be really and truly "in touch" with peoples' lives. Which is what brings us back to policy priorities. McCains are reducing the level of government services in order to pay for an indefinite prolongation of the war in Iraq, the extension of Bush's tax cuts for the highest-income Americans, a large hike in non-war defense spending, and a series of new tax breaks. Clinton and Obama are both, in somewhat different ways, offering more services paid for by returning to something more like the levels of taxation that so devastated the national economy in the 1990s.
This New York Times article about how John McCain's political strategy is based on fundamentally misleading people about the nature of the situation in Iraq, but that's okay with the media not because they're fooled but just because they like John McCain, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so. But this particular paragraph is especially telling:
In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
At a time like this, you have to ask yourself what is the Brookings Institution for. According to the Brookings website:
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research [...] The research agenda and recommendations of Brookings experts are rooted in open-minded inquiry and our scholars represent diverse points of view. More than 200 resident and nonresident fellows research issues; write books, papers, articles and opinion pieces; testify before congressional committees and participate in dozens of public events each year. The Institution’s president, Strobe Talbott, is responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact.
To me, that sounds inconsistent with offering a public defense of the practice of using the term "al-Qaeda" to refer to entities that are not al-Qaeda. High-quality research would be that if some large number of public officials and media personalities started referring to something as "al-Qaeda" when it was not, in fact, al-Qaeda you try to correct the record. Instead, Pollack seems to feel his job is to help push back against the people who are trying to correct the public record.
It's certainly an interesting development. A lot of very good people work at Brookings. I imagine they enjoy working at a place that has a reputation for "high-quality, independent research . . . rooted in open-minded inquiry" but it's a reputation they're in danger of losing. Strobe Talbott, who's "responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact" might want to think about some of this.
I believe we can proclaim this one the "best film directed by the brother of a major blogger." Blogs aside, it's damn funny on its own right. As we now expect from Apatow-circle movies, the gender politics here are kind of problematic, but it certainly didn't stop me from laughting.
Here's a look at the Appalachian coal mining that powers the DC area. It's an very ugly business wreaking some horrible environmental effects even before you start talking about the climate issues. The interest of the mining communities in the coal-related jobs is, of course, understandable. On the other hand, though, one looks at the economic history of this part of the country and becomes skeptical that coal mining has really provided much of a path to prosperity.
There's a small-but-interesting story in the Times about how military commanders want to conduct more strikes in Pakistan but the Bush administration is forcing them to exercise more constraint out of deference to Pakistani sentiments. I'm not sure who's right on the underlying merits here, but the fact that this situation could arise helps illustrate how fatuous the Bush/McCain "We Must Do What Petraeus Commands" theory of Iraq is.
No President -- not even the one articulating the theory -- would actually behave in the manner Bush is suggesting. When formulating policy toward military operations in Pakistan you of course need to ask the military commanders what they think, but you of course don't just follow them blindly. There are other considerations in play and it would be absurd to blindly follow any one person's advice.
For reasons I can't quite comprehend, even some pretty hardened TNR-haters seem to see Leon Wieseltier as making a positive contribution to the world. Certainly, some very good stuff appears in the back of the book over there, but the man's own work is a kind of writing-as-thuggery. Anyways, it seems I have to add my colleague Andrew Sullivan to the ever-growing list of people TNR deems motivated by hatred of Jews. The context -- Bill Kristol sitting in his partisan hack armchair and determining that Barack Obama's Christian faith is insincere:
And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!
Um . . . really . . . noting the irony of Kristol's attack is now "Jew-baiting"? We seem to be defining our problems down here. But in Wieseltier's view, this is the equivalent of enslaving the entire people of Israel. And Wieseltier himself is, I guess, Moses? How preposterous. And this isn't a blog post -- Wieseltier has, nominally, an editor who ought to be able to engage in some quality control.
Wow. I wasn't particularly planning to watch the Pistons-76ers series -- nice upset. This will be more grist for Dave Berri's mill as he tries to convince the world that Andre Miller is better than Allan Iverson.
Like the thing we saw from David Brock's independent expenditure group, I think this is pretty good but it's almost too easy. I'd like to see some early advertising taking on McCain's perceived strengths, especially on national security. I suspect, however, that part of the problem is that while either Clinton or Obama would have similar criticisms to make of McCain on the economy, they would probably come at the security issue in different directions which makes it hard for an outsider group to know exactly what to say.
John McCain opposes a bill to improve educational benefits for veterans because "Enhanced educational opportunities could negatively affect retention rates." Mark Kleiman snarks that "McCain figures that if they had any real drive and ambition they'd just marry heiresses, the way he did."
Well, why shouldn't they vote on "character"? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin'. So if you don't want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?
Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama does, in fact, have accomplishments and a legislative record the other thing one could consider beyond a candidate's record is his or her proposals. You can bore down into detail about these proposals on Obama's website. Alternatively, you can opt for a more general characterization of the McCain/Obama choice where McCain would favor lower taxes, less generous services, and a more business-friendly regulatory environment whereas Obama would favor higher taxes, more generous services, and a regulatory environment that's more influenced by the views of environmental, consumer, and labor organizations. This whole general neighborhood of inquiry really ought to be familiar to someone who writes about politics for a living.
In a sign of the times, I saw my first ad for Express Homebuyers last night. They promise that instead of your house languishing on the markets for months, they'll make you an offer within seven days of you getting in touch with them. Presumably it's not going to be a very generous offer, but "We realize that sometimes life has you in a bind and selling your home as quickly and painlessly as possible is often the best option."
Of course, for a large segment of people simply walking away from a home and a loan and leaving the question of what to do with the property up to the bank is a more attractive option.
If you feel like I've bugged you enough already about my book let it be known that I have not yet begun to self-promote. Indeed, the book's official release date is not until April 25 (though online orders are already shipping, so don't let that stop you from ordering one today). Also on April 25, my firstbook event at the Center for American Progress:
In a controversial new book on America's debates over national security, Matthew Yglesias, associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly, presents a critical analysis of progressives’ failure to produce a coherent alternative to the conservative approach to foreign policy. Conventional examinations of progressives' political difficulties in dealing with the national security issue focus on a perceived lack of "toughness." Heads in the Sand proposes a different theory: that progressives have had difficulty taking full advantage of the Bush administration's failures because they've largely avoided arguing on the strategic level.
Rand Beers, President of the National Security Network and Kurt Campbell, Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security and co-author [with Michael O'Hanlon -- MY] of Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security, will offer a critical analysis of the book’s argument from their perspectives as the leaders of two institutions working to engage in America’s national security and defense policy debates.
It should be awesome. My fellow panelists have a lot more playoff experience and veteran savvy so I'm hoping to steal home court advantage by packing the arena with blog readers. The event is from noon to 1:30 PM at CAP HQ, 1333 H Street NW so if you have the kind of job that lets you count attending think tank events as working, or if you work in the neighborhood and can take some time over lunch, please come out. Click here to RSVP.
Many elite institutions of higher education are taking action to make their financial aid policies for students from low-income families more generous. That's nice to see, but as Kevin Carey argues it's also a bit besides the point: "The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in."
A combination of the fact that low-income kids tend to be poorly served by the country's primary and secondary school systems, plus the fact that college admissions procedures give a lot of advantages to people from privileged backgrounds, makes it very difficult for the poor to get accepted into selective schools. Consequently, the schools can afford to be generous to low income students in part because there are so few eligible people being admitted.
Photo by Flickr user Jos Shlabotnik used under a Creative Commons license
This week's TPM Café book club is on Heads in the Sand and I have an introductory post up on the trouble with center-left security policy elites who just can't quit preventive war and weird schemes to undermine existing legitimacy-granting institutions.
Here's the crucial part of Armed Liberal's dismissal of folks upset about the fact that teevee networks were putting "military analysts" up on screen purporting to be neutral observers when they were, in fact, acting as administration spokespeople:
I don’t think it’s wrong to be concerned about the government shaping the news. I think it’s necessary to shape perception as a part of any successful counterinsurgency.
Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of truth to this. If you think, as John McCain and George Bush and about 30 percent of Americans do, that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea then you need to engage in a lot of propaganda operations. After all, realistically we are much more likely to leave Iraq because politicians representing the views of the 70 percent of the public who doesn't think that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea than we are to be literally driven out by Iraqis who oppose the U.S. presence.
This is just one of the ways in which a protracted Iraq-style engagement tends to undermine the small-d and small-r democratic and republican values on which the country was founded. You see this in the way that David Petraeus has become a key official administration spokesman and you see it in the Times story about semi-covert operations happening on our cable networks. During Vietnam, of course, we had the government's security apparatus spending time working against anti-war groups, and for all we know this sort of thing is why the Bush administration is so eager to wiretap people without warrants.
This is the kind of thing that happens when an ongoing war becomes a key subject of political controversy, but at least the Civil War and World War I were conflicts that ended. The hawks' vision of a "Long War" means that we can expect them to continue these kind of emergency measures and abuses forever and ever.
Some Obama elements are trying to whip me into a fit of outrageous over Hillary Clinton deciding that she wants to cross the Rudy Line and enlist Osama bin Laden in her latest campaign ad:
I'm not all that outraged, really, but I think the problem with this whole line of attack -- 3AM ads, etc. -- is such a limited posture to take up. At the end of the day, if this is an election about how in uncertain times we need to flee into the arms of a strong, comforting, figure of experience and authority then that figure is John McCain. The alternative story is that in uncertain times we need to turn the pages on disastrous policies that have gotten us into our current mess. But Clinton often, from her vote to authorize the war through to a lot of her primary season gambits, seems too invested in the politics of "toughness" to really chart a better course.
In the 1970s, commodities prices went way way up and then eventually went way down again. Today, they're going up again. Will they go down again? Paul Krugman's not counting on it:
For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe, the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources.
That doesn't sound right to me. Surely the supply shocks from the commodities markets contributed to the slowdown in growth growth rates. Similarly, isn't a big increase in basic commodities exactly the sort of thing we would expect to slow down growth in China?
UPDATE:Why I'm wrong -- "China’s also growing at around 10 percent per year, a rate deemed too fast by the country’s own leaders. Expansion in China could slow considerably and still be greater than 4 percent–sufficient to place a lot of pressure on food and energy stocks."
Martin Hollick reads Heads in the Sand and says "It's great. You may think a book on foreign policy would be dry, but how can you not love an introduction that quotes both Nietzsche and Peanuts?" Indeed, it's actually impossible to avoid loving this book. But to love it, you must buy it. So why not buy a copy today and finally learn to love? And also about how to somewhat misapply Nietzsche in order to mock Tom Friedman.
Meanwhile, Martin thought something I said didn't make sense, but then it was all explained on the very next page because that's how awesome the book is. Incidentally, anyone out there who's reading the book and saying nice things about it on their blog should feel free to email (I'm myglesias at gmail or at theatlantic) me looking for links -- it's win-in.
Also on his blog, I too wonder why musical theater translates so poorly to film. One relevant point may be that animated musical movies seem to me to work much better, but I'm not sure what that gets you exactly.
I'm not sure I buy the notion that McCain is too much of a rageoholic to be president. For one thing, I've had some anger management issues in my life and McCain doesn't seem that bad off to me. For another thing, coming from someone else I might worry that he'd inadvertently start a horribly destructive war with North Korea or something, but McCain's made it clear in the past that his considered view is that a horribly destructive war with North Korea could be a good idea. The anecdote that highlights McCain's real problem is here:
A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona's Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening's celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler's chest.
"I told you we needed a stage," he screamed, according to Hinz. "You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it."
5'9" is probably too short to be elected president and, even worse for McCain, this is an anecdote from 1986. In the intervening 22 years he's almost certainly shrunk due to spinal compressional and he's actually below average. We used to elect short men to the White House before the invention of, you know, photography but there's no way this is going to fly in a modern context.
An interesting CQ article takes a look at Dennis Shulman's efforts to unseat Rep. Scott Garrett in the New Jersey 5. Among other things, Shulman is a rabbi, which is kind of neat. They're shifting their rating from "Safe Republican" to "Republican Favored" and remark that "Garrett, who is seeking a fourth term in office, was held to a career general election-low of 11 percent in 2006, but that election season was marked by nationwide anti-Republican sentiment. "
It's hard for me to see that being much comfort to Garrett. As best I can tell, the nationwide sentiment is only more anti-Republican than it was back then. The Bush administration is less popular than ever, and as I noted last week the remaining congressional Republicans made the odd decision to respond to the voters repudiating their policies by sticking with the same unpopular policies. Just take a look at the Democratic edge in party ID.
Freight rail is booming primarily because of the 3:1 fuel efficiency superiority of rail over trucks. Ryan Avent notes that "This boom is all the more impressive given that the railroad companies will pay for about 65 percent of the network expansion" while trucking companies do not, of course, pay for the roads.
Clearly trucks have a massive inherent advantage as a method of doing the last-mile of shipping, but for long-haul stuff a more rational federal policy environment in terms of carbon pricing and road/rail funding balance would give further momentum to this boom.
Adam Blickstein looks at some confusing reports about the state of play in Pakistan. Reports, one assumes, are bound to be somewhat confusing as the new government is trying to jell and people are, presumably, at least somewhat inclined to lie to both the U.S. government and the Pakistani people about the extent of their cooperation with our government.
The very complexity of the situation is a reminder that when we talk about Iraq taking resources away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan situation, we're not just talking about X number of planes and Y number of soldiers. We're also talking about scarce resources like attention and expertise. It's a complicated, delicate, multi-faceted situation -- do we have our best diplomats working on it? Are agency heads and cabinet secretaries in DC spending enough time staying on top of events? Is the President paying attention? These aren't just questions for the Bush administration, they'll be questions for a Democratic administration as well. Reducing force levels in Iraq down to a "residual" point will solve some of the resource problems relating to inattention to Central Asia but not all of them by any means.
One interesting Iraq-related subplot has been the escalating sniping between Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Air Force over the latter's foot-dragging on making itself useful for the conflicts the United States is actually engaged in rather than building up for hypothetical great power conflicts. A new edition comes today with Gates chiding air force students at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this, because Gates is basically right on the merits, but the whole issue has gotten tied in with the merits of the war in Iraq in complicated and fairly contingent ways.
Read Ron Brownstein on Obama and Clinton waging the first 21st century campaign. I would only add that the "first" business is a bit of a journalistic conceit, Clinton and (even more so) Obama are improving on many models and ideas that Howard Dean used in 2004 and were even to some extent present in the McCain 2000 campaign.
Dave Roberts interviews Doug Holtz-Eakin about John McCain's climate policy. The whole interview, including the fact that the McCain campaign bothered to send a high-level surrogate to talk to Grist about climate change, is the sort of thing that might lead a person to note that though either Clinton or Obama would be preferable to McCain, McCain would be preferable to Bush.
On climate, it seems to me that aside from a curious devotion to nuclear power, McCain's big blind spot has to do with transportation issues. It's true that we shouldn't underestimate the power of American consumers and businesspeople to adopt to an environment where a carbon cap puts a price on emissions. But the free market can't do things like provide commuter rail lines and subways or denser living patterns to help people adapt. The market is already adapting to rising gas prices and increased congestion by enhancing the relative value of homes in walkable neighborhoods or near transit. It's adapting by making those places more expensive. Along with capping carbon emissions, we need to increase the supply of places like that, so as to put them within reach of a reasonable number of people. That requires government action -- much of the necessary action is actually deregulatory action, but it's action nonetheless -- and not just the "cap and forget about it" philosophy.
But all things considered this is pretty good stuff. Unfortunately, one suspects that the difficult task of getting China on board for climate policy would be rendered much, much more difficult by McCain disastrous approach to foreign policy.
For such a nice country, Italy's politics seem weirdly screwed up. There's the famous instability of the governments, of course. And then there's the fact that their main right-of-center party is led by the legendarily corrupt Silvio Berlusconi. And then there's the fact that despite the broadly discreditable nature of Berlusconi, the left-of-center bloc can never seem to stop him from coming back to power.
And then there's the Northern League -- a blend of a separatist party with a far-right party that made substantial gains in the recent election and will be a junior partner in the new Berlusconi-led coalition. Henry Farrell says "US readers who aren’t familiar with European politics should try to imagine a political party with a program co-written by Mark Steyn, David Duke and Tom Tancredo, and they’ll be at least half-way there." Joshua Keating notes that "The League's control of the Interior Ministry puts Italy's immigration policy is in the hands of a party whose leaders have suggested that the navy fire on rafts carrying illegal immigrants."
Linda Hirshman's done a lot of interesting work, but here she is again with yet another tiresome and reductive article about how young women who are supporting Obama are betraying all that is right and good, this time with the posited reason being "mommy issues." Courtney Martin and Dana Goldstein have some smart responses, but it occurs to me to add that there seems to be something unusually mind-fogging about the prospect of a generational divide.
It's not, after all, as if every over-30 woman in America is voting for Hillary Clinton. If you're a woman, and you're also an executive at nuclear power company, you're probably going to find a lot to like about John McCain. African-American women of all ages tend to support Obama, though that wasn't always the case. Women, like men, participate in a variety of practical identities any one of which might seem more significant at the moment. Obama's base of support is younger, blacker, maler, and better-educated than is Clinton's. But obviously if his support was limited to young, male, African-American college graduates he'd be hopelessly far behind -- his candidacy is viable because many, many people who only share some of the characteristics of the ur-Obamafan have a tendency to support him.
Michael O'Hanlon suggests we undertake bad faith negotiations with Iran in order to "prove" that the Iranians are stubborn and thereby gain more support for hawkish policies. The pseudonymous Dr. Irack, who it would probably be more viable to quote if he used his real name, suggests that this may be O'Hanlon's audition for a job at the American Enterprise Institute. I would say it's more of a sign that his bridges to the Democratic Party are sufficiently burned that he's now looking for a post in the McCain administration.
This is, however, one reason I'm sort of glad that Bush rejected the Iraq Study Group's eminently reasonable advice that he seek a diplomatic settlement with Iran. A new diplomatic effort could, if undertaken in good faith, produce enormous gains for the United States. But bad faith diplomacy of the sort O'Hanlon suggests could be an effective political tool to trying to secure public and congressional support for disastrous escalation of the conflict.
I continue to wonder what the point is of exercises like having Adam Nagourney or the team of John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend the ABC News debate. What the debate's critics are saying, after all, is that ABC's conduct was the apotheosis of everything that's wrong with MSM campaign coverage. To point out in response that the people most responsible for the MSM campaign coverage status quo thought it was good seems totally non-responsive.
What I'd like to see in defense of ABC would be to identify some likely Democratic Party primary voters in Pennsylvania or some other upcoming state who are now better-informed about the election than they were previously. Until that happens, though, I'm going to stick with James Fallows' observation that ordinary citizens show an extremely low level of interest in this sort of stuff. The fact that the people who've turned political reporting into appalling farce found the somewhat more appalling than usual farce of last week's debate even more delectable than the merely appalling debate work we'd seen earlier from Tim Russert and others is no kind of defense at all.
In an interview with ABC News, Hillary Clinton said "In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them." But then Howard Wolfson told Ben Smith that neither this talk of total obliteration nor her talk during the debate about "massive retaliation" should be understood as threats to use nuclear weapons. But then she went on Olberman later and said we should "make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel."
John Aravosis is confused and so am I. If these aren't threats to use nuclear weapons, then what are they? Massive retaliation has a pretty clear meaning in this context. And I still don't understand why Israel's own nuclear deterrent isn't looming larger in these conversations.
Oy. Via Brendan Nyhan, we've now got Barack Obama jumping on the McCain autism ignorance bandwagon: "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it."
Making parents afraid to get their kids immunized does real harm to our public health. Politicians need to knock this crap off.
Arizona developer wants to buy some land from the federal government so he calls on friends in congress including John McCain. McCain, who stands at the intersection of the developer's campaign contributions and the military-industrial complex, "assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale." When the developer "appealed to a nearby city for the right to develop other property at the former base" he "submitted Mr. McCain’s endorsement as 'a close personal friend.'"
When the deal was done, the developer netted a cool $20 million in profit.
At the end of the day, this pales in comparison to McCain catastrophically wrongheaded ideas about foreign policy on the list of reasons not to vote for him. But it's yet another story which reveals how ultimately hollow the myth of John McCain as the great man of honor who'd never have his hands anywhere near the mucky side of politics is.
It's infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline. The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world, barring a massive buildup of nuclear plants, reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system. (Alternatively, the government could just ration energy, but fortunately we aren't going in that direction.) The last thing you'd want to do is reduce gas taxes during the summer, as John McCain has proposed. That would just encourage people to burn more gas on extra vacation trips--as any straight talker would admit.
McCain has, as she notes, been the worst offender on this score. But then again as a liberal I do kind of expect more from the Democrats. Rising gas prices clearly carry a lot of sting for a lot of folks, but the responsible reaction is to come up with policies that make it easier for people to cope with higher gas prices by making it easier to get along while using less fuel. More transit and intercity rail, more and better sidewalks and bike paths, more fuel efficient vehicles, etc. leading over the long run to different patterns of development and living so that a high price on carbon remains consistent with a high quality of life.
Meanwhile, note that though the short-term price elasticity of gas consumption is low because changing your behavior takes some time, consumption does respond to sustained price incentives. This is one reason why it's important for politicians to stop BSing around about gas prices. If people think future prices will fall, they won't invest in less fuel-intensive lifestyles. If people believe that future prices will rise but that the policy environment will evolve to try to make it easier for people to live in ways that don't require quite so much driving, then people will adapt to higher prices in constructive ways.
UPDATE: Further note that the decline in gas consumption was largest in the northeast since this is the part of the country where the built environment makes the most alternatives to driving available. Build more transit, more bike-friendly routes, and more walkable neighborhoods and people will respond to higher gas prices by driving less.
Photo by Flickr user rnugraha used under a Creative Commons license
Progressive Media USA notes that if you're looking for an elitist in the Presidential race you might want to look at the super-rich guy who made his fortune by marrying an heiress:
And of course the couple still won't release the part of their tax returns that has all the money on it.
I find this tidbit from Michelle Cottle's latest reporting on Mark Penn fascinating:
What's more, being The Man With The Data gives Penn a formidable edge in any debate over strategy. It is almost impossible to argue Penn down, say colleagues, because he brandishes his polling data like a weapon. And so, his fellow advisers explain, in the eternal debate over whether to keep the message focused on Hillary's strength and readiness or to try and humanize her, Penn would simply whip out data showing that "readiness" was the way to go. When anyone argued against going negative on Obama, Penn would point to more numbers.
Pollsters really are the witchdoctors of modern campaigning. Possession of the secrets of The Numbers lends a mystical heft to their strategic arguments. And yet, if pollsters actually had reliable methods at hand for conducting this kind of work, pollsters wouldn't be brand names. You'd have to hire a pollster, of course, but pollsters would be commodity products where any one of several firms would all give you more-or-less the same methods and produce more-or-less the same results. Instead, though, we know that Mark Penn habitually produces different advice from a Stan Greenberg or a Celinda Lake.
I think you've got to give Ross Douthat credit for mounting a defense of both the ABC debate and the "freak show" approach to politics in general, but I'd associate myself with the rejoinders from Ezra Klein and Ed Kilgore. It's all well and good to say voters want insight into the candidates personalities, but questions like "you once had lunch with a guy who said something you clearly don't agree with what do you say about that and why didn't you refuse to eat with him!!!?!?!?" don't offer any actual insights.
Stepping back, one of the things the progressive political coalition is trying to do in the United States is formulate economic policies that serve the interests of the majority rather than those of a narrow elite. I don't think it makes sense for progressives to whine about voters choosing to vote instead on the basis of policy issues about culture and values -- gun regulations, abortion, gay rights, etc. But it does make a ton of sense to complain about the fact that much of the coverage of campaigns seems designed to deliberately obscure what the policy differences between various politicians are so as to make it difficult for people to assess where their economic interests lie.
There's an interesting comments thread at Edge of the American West about the status of counterfactual questions in history. Historians are, by and large, loathe to deal with counterfactual issues, viewing the whole question as un-historical and un-professional. This is an interesting contrast with the world of philosophy, where it's very common to analyze counterfactual claims as inextricably bound up with claims about causation. To say that "Bush carried Florida because flawed ballot design in Palm Beach County caused many Gore supporters to inadvertently mark their ballots for Pat Buchanan" is to say that "if the Palm Beach County ballot had been designed differently, then Gore would have carried Florida."
Bigger questions, like what would have happened if Gore had become president, are, of course, not amenable to straightforward conclusions or definitive answers. But from where I sit, thinking about them is just a different way of thinking about how we've gotten to where we are today.
For instance, Jason Zengerle plausibly posits that had Joe Lieberman become Vice President in 2000, he never would have taken his current turn to the cranky right. That's probably correct. By the same token, Gore seems to have been pushed left by his own misfortunes. Indeed, the whole trajectory of U.S. politics would have taken a rather different turn, with most Democrats (and certainly the Gore-Lieberman administration) hewing to the centrist trend of the second Clinton administration rather than to the now-prevailing populism. I think we can assume that by 2004, the constituency for something like a Ralph Nader left-wing third party would have grown and either Gore would have been a successful president who decisively seized the center of the U.S. political spectrum to establish the Democrats as a dominant force, or else Gore might have been a failure who bled support from both the right (from people looking, for example, for action against Iraq or Iran) and the left (from opponents of the quagmire in Afghanistan and of neoliberal economic policy) paving the way for Jeb Bush to seize the White House.
Spackerman draws my attention to Heritage foreign policy honcho Kim Holmes' big new idea which is basically that New Left ideology has taken over the "newsrooms and the halls of universities, churches, movie houses, European foreign ministries, and the United Nations" and, therefore, while America's traditional allies "continue to espouse a rote commitment to the basic principles of freedom and democracy, they no longer believe that these principles are the ideological heart of the free world."
What follows from this, for some reason, is the idea that we need to double-down on unilateralism, militarism, and assertion of hegemony.
Spencer takes apart most of Holmes' specific points, so I would just add a historical note. If you're the American conservative movement and the question is "what should we do about our foreign policy" the answer is always to double-down on unilateralism, militarism, and assertions of hegemony. There's a tendency toward amnesia on this, as if the right-wing was the original architect of NATO and containment, when in fact just as Holmes is right now arguing that liberals and diplomats and Europeans are selling out freedom and Americanism back then this was their argument to. If conservatives hadn't gotten us bogged down in fruitless invasion of Russia in 1946, they would have destroyed the world in a nuclear war in 1956, had the United States spend the entirety of the 1970s bogged down in Vietnam, rebuffed Gorbachev's efforts to wind down the Cold War, etc. To a striking extent, American security and prosperity has relied on the fact that not only have Democrats usually propounded a sounder course, but at key moments Republican presidents have turned off the true path of the movement.
George W. Bush has been different, of course, in consistently rebuffing the entreaties not just of liberals, but also of right-of-center establishmentarians like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft to show some appreciation for reality. And we can see all around us what it's wrought. Homes' theory is that the massive failures of conservative foreign policy can be blamed on a vast swathe of the democratic world turning its back on the true path. The truth, however, is that pre-9/11 we've almost never seen the United States actually try the true path for any period of time -- we've never tried it because the true path is crazy and impractical -- and what's happened since then is just the result.
I really worry sometimes about things like The New York Times Magazine giving advice on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process.
Beyond all that, the market in trendy "green" products has certain counterproductive effects -- it creates a profitable niche market in expensive green-branded goods that most people can't afford and lowers the price of carbon-intensive goods. But in a fundamental sense, the only way to make a green economy work is to make carbon-intensive goods expensive not render them stigmatized and uncool, which should, in tandem, help spur the development of more sustainable alternatives for a not-particularly-cool-or-trendy mass market.
Looks like Clinton's drunk the kool-aid on this as well. Really disappointing to see everyone feel like they need to pander to this not-especially-fearsome lobby.
I don't know how many readers of this blog check out the comment section. But I think it's interesting. One of our longest-time contributors goes by the name of "Petey" and has traditionally had a lot of interesting things to say about both politics and basketball. Lately, though, all of his posts consist more or less of calling me a "trust-fund scumbag" and accusing me of being opposed to universal health care.
It makes for an odd argument. Basically, before Iowa Petey strongly supported John Edwards. My feelings were more mixed, but I came down softly on Edwards' side. Now Edwards is out of the race. Petey thinks Hillary Clinton's health care plan is better than Barack Obama's. As it happens, I agree. Petey also thinks there are other problems with Hillary Clinton. As it happens, I agree with that, too. To me, the problems with Clinton outweigh the fact that I think she has a better health care plan -- among other things, I think the outcome of 2008 Senate elections will have a larger influence on the ultimate shape of health care policy than will the outcome of the Clinton_obama primary -- but Petey disagrees. From this rather narrow disagreement, a huge amount of bile has spewed, including repeated insistence that I oppose the idea of universal health care when I clearly don't.
There are no perfect presidential candidates any more than there are perfect presidents. But by the end of January we had two options, and I think Obama's the better one. As of today, it's even more constrained than that -- if Clinton does poorly tonight, she'll be forced out of the race and progressives will be in good shape to acquire a level of political power we haven't had in decades. If she does well, she'll stay in the race and an incredibly destructive Democratic primary will continue for a while longer and the odds still make it overwhelmingly likely that Obama will emerge as the winner. That would be bad. I like her health care proposal more than I like Obama's (and I like Obama more on foreign policy, climate change, and several other issues) but I hope she does as poorly as possible tonight and gets out of the race. Either way, though, it's deeply irrational for people with similar political views to get so mad at each other just because we may disagree about which politicians do the best job of imperfectly embodying those ideals.
Alex Massie makes the point that though Italian politics seems kind of screwed up today, it's way more normal than it used to be. After all, Italy experienced almost the entire Cold War with a revolving door cabinet system masking a partisan stranglehold on power, ridiculous corruption, etc. Now it's moved -- and is increasingly moving -- toward a more conventional system where power rotates between competing political coalitions.
What to say about last night's disastrous Wizards game? I suppose the point to make is that LeBron James' 30/12/9 night, though impressive, wasn't really all that awesome. The nature of the Cleveland squad is that you ought to be able to give up that kind of ground to the King and still win the game. The problem is when you let the non-LBJ Cavs shoot 53 percent from the field.
That and, um, you've got to score. People kind of forget that last years' Cavaliers squad's success was really driven by their defense. LeBron is probably the best offensive player in the game, but his teammates were sufficiently woeful last year that the overall Cleveland offense was pretty middling. But the defense was top-notch and credit for that goes well beyond James. Last night, though, the Wizards offense was pathetic. Hopefully my boys can turn things around back in DC.
Suppose Hillary Clinton wins a huge victory tonight and manages to pull ahead of Obama in the popular vote total. I still don't see how that could possibly secure her the nomination as long as the national polling looks anything like this. The superdelegates are obviously free to take into consideration whatever they like, but I assume that anyone contemplating bucking the elected delegate totals is going to be more interested in the current opinion of his or her constituents than in months-old vote totals -- a huge share of HRC's votes came from wins on Super Tuesday before Obama's big surge in the national polls.
Now of course if there's a large lurking bloc of superdelegates with strong pro-Clinton sentiments that they're eager to unleash as soon as they're given a plausible pretext, the popular vote would be a good pretext. But given that there almost certainly isn't any such batch of superdelegates (serious Clinton fans would have endorsed her early) the whole enterprise looks doomed no matter what happens tonight.
My read of the pre-results spinning is that both sides seem to be anticipating a Clinton win in the high one digits. If true, that'll mean a continuation of the status quo -- Clinton hopelessly behind, and yet no particular reason (except the good of the party) for her not to stay in the race and hope Obama dies in a freak accident or something.
Russert just said that in a general election, Obama needs to shore up his support with working class white women. Fair enough. He speculated that you might do that by focusing on the economy. Sounds plausible. He then speculated you might do that by picking Mike Bloomberg as VP. So put it all together, and Russert thinks working class white women are looking for . . . New York City's billionaire Jewish mayor? Really?
They're not calling it yet, but it seems clear from the exit polls (Clinton wins 55 percent of white men, for example) that Clinton will prevail. Less clear is the shape of the delegate count. Obama's managed to carry Philadelphia and the Philly suburbs which, thanks to the apportionment rules, are where the bulk of the delegates come from.
I have to say that I'm getting really tired of this. All the superdelegates should just say who they're voting for and bring this to the end. If they want to back Hillary Clinton despite Obama's majority in elected delegates, they should say so. Or if they want Barack Obama to be the nominee, they should say so. The idea that in two weeks we'll have another inconclusive primary, then another, then another, then another and then the superdelegates make up their mind is inane -- everyone else who follows politics can decide.
I'm not sure I understand the emphasis -- from both the pundits and from the Clinton campaign itself -- on money at this point. Didn't we just learn that the Clintons have a fortune of over $100 million? Surely insofar as her campaign thinks it's actually the case that money is what stands between her and the White House the family can afford to spend the necessary cash whether or not her fundraising revives.
Brad Henry, Oklahoma governor and superdelegate, endorses Barack Obama. Other undeclared superdelegates should likewise state their preferences. If there's a large pro-Clinton group out there, fine. So be it. Stand up and let yourselves be counted. If not, if you're for Obama, then even better -- raise your hand. People keep explaining to me that superdelegates have good selfish reasons to avoid declaring and giving us a chance to end this thing. That's true, but a great many of them also have constituents on whom pressure can be brought to get off the fence without waiting until June.
At this point, we know what we need to know. We know the policy differences between the candidates, we know the "freak show" issues surrounding the candidates, we know the basic shape of each candidate's core electoral coalition, and we know that in the end Obama will have a modest but real lead in elected delegates. Everyone should declare.
I'm pretty much a lifelong non-owner of a bicycle, and I've certainly never done city biking in traffic, but I just got one yesterday. So be prepared for many future posts about the low quality of America's bike infrastructure and how we should be more like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. For example, the city fathers of Washington, DC should consider that though it's nice that they've established some bike lanes, the key thing would be for the lanes to connect with one another and go into the downtown area so they'd be helpful for people trying to get from where they live to where the bulk of the stuff is.
It's like how the roads for cars don't just stop arbitrarily. Think about it. Also, to the bike thieves of the world -- don't steal my bike!
Via Somerby and Lemieux, Richard Cohen has an war is peace moment:
And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion—about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance—but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons.
To be simplistic about this, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain. To try to be a bit more charitable, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly invested in the doomed epistemology of character. We can't know what lurks in the hearts of pols, but we can make inferences based on their behavior. But all politicians' behavior is mixed. So we (and by "we" here I mean "Richard Cohen") read that behavior through our preexisting beliefs about their character. And since we "know" that McCain is honorable, he fudges and ducks and swallows etc. for "understandable" reasons, whereas other, lesser politicians are just soulless scumbags. Of course McCain's reasons are understandable -- he wants to win! -- but they're just the same reasons everyone else has. They pander, he's understandable. They lie, he fudges. It's all senseless.
Which is, I suppose, just another way of observing that we're looking at a press corps that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain.
Let me just note that simply because Hillary Clinton is hopelessly far behind in North Carolina doesn't mean that Indiana is the only May 6 primary that matters. Insofar as the remaining contests matter at all, they all matter. The Clinton campaign did a good job of making the contests Obama won between March 4 and Pennsylvania go down the memory hole, so that I heard TV people talking about Clinton having a streak (her actual streak as of today is one win!) but she doesn't get to arbitrarily decided which states matter.
Democrats look well-positioned to pick up a House seat in the MS-1. Trouble with ending the nominating context for the presidency aside, the fact does remain that the underlying fundamentals are very favorable to Democrats this year.
Yesterday I speculated that Michael O'Hanlon was trying to wheedle his way into John McCain's good graces because he's burned his bridges with leading Democrats. That still might be true as far as the Presidential candidates go -- he's criticized Clinton and Obama by name, repeatedly, and Obama especially harshly -- but since writing that I've got some second-hand reports that he's still briefing congressional Democrats and the like. If that's true, I really do wish people would look elsewhere for their expert advice.
The Miami area, it should be pointed out, had one of the worst housing bubbles and is now suffering from serious foreclosure-mania so I imagine there's some real possibilities for political upheaval.
I'm not sure I understand Marc Ambinder's logic here:
The data from last night suggests that voters believe that Hillary Clinton's argument about Barack Obama's general election viability will remain valid until Obama renders it invalid. He did poor relative to Clinton among most discernible swing groups despite a massive, $12 million, six-week investment. The argument, incidentally, isn't that because Obama didn't win Pennsylvania in the primary, he can't win it in the general. It's that the coalition Obama is building in these states cannot, without a significant modification, give him victory in the fall. The corresponding argument is that it will be easier for Clinton to expand her coalition.
It seems to me you need to cut this closer. Certainly one easy opportunity Clinton has to expand her coalition is that versus John McCain she would pick up all these African-American Obama supporters. But conversely, I don't see Hillary Clinton's feminist supporters suddenly deciding that they want to see John Paul Stevens replaced with an abortion-banner. The theory here seems to be that Clinton's strength among white working class Democratic party loyalists will translate into strength among white working class non-loyalists. But there's no evidence for this theory -- both Al Gore and John Kerry formed "beer track" primary coalitions and then went on to perform terrible among white working class voters overall. This is an electoral challenge for either candidate, but it really is an electoral challenge for either candidate. Young, anti-war Obama supporters will back Hillary over Old Man War and Clinton's supporters in the public sector unions (notice all the AFT and AFSCME signs behind her at every rally) will easily sign on with Obama. Ultimately, for the party not to unite behind the eventual winner there would need to be a much more serious substantive cleavage between them.
Ultimately, the only thing we really know about either candidate's base of support is that Obama's is slightly larger, and that he's demonstrated more ability to expand it over time through campaigning. Either way, though, I think Democrats can be fairly confident. What voters "know" about the three candidates right now is that John McCain is a war hero maverick, Hillary Clinton is a castrating harpy, and Barack Obama is a radical black Muslim and given that . . . the race is about tied. As Ross Douthat points out that's not good news for McCain.
Yikes: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners." Needless to say, we lead the world in imprisonment. This seems like a serious problem, especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards.
Is it possible that we all somehow managed to forget about the San Antonio Spurs? No exciting trades or thrilling storylines this season, but they've looked pretty damn good in two games against Phoenix. Meanwhile, the Suns are seeing that one cost of the Shaq trade is that they lost a very good perimeter defender and now don't have a real way to guard Parker and Ginobili on the outside. Maybe some of the guys who looked too old during the regular season were just taking it easy and are ready to buckle down now? Given that it's an even-numbered year, I bet they don't get the rings and take the offseason to retool some of the secondary players, but still it's amazing how San Antonio manages to sneak up year after year.
Maureen Dowd peers into the mind of Barack Obama and discerns his taste in breakfast:
In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.
But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.
Haha, after all everyone "knows" Obama is the wine track candidate in this race so he must hate waffles and only eat egg whites. Back in the real world, though, Obama's state senate district was a mixed-race, mixed-income urban neighborhood (it's no Chappaqua) not unlike the one I live in. And not to overgeneralize, but the U Street area features plenty of heavy breakfast joints (see Florida Avenue Grill above) and spots like Ben's Chili Bowl and you wouldn't make it very far in local politics in a place like that if you were really so averse to unhealthy eats.
But since the wine/beer narrative has some explanatory force in the 2008 primary, we must now allow it to dominate our characterizations of everything -- never mind the facts or the complicating factors of actual biography, race, etc.
Photo by Flickr user Intangible Arts used under a Creative Commons license
It's a pretty logical promotion and also, in my view, a pretty savvy political move. In this new office, Petraeus will have the appropriate kind of standing to argue that, no, those who say we ought to shift resources out of Iraq and toward Pakistan/Afghanistan are wrong. Of course just because he says they're wrong (if that is, as I suspect, what he'll say) doesn't make him right. But he's been an effective spokesperson for the administration, so it makes sense to move him to a more big picture strategic job.
I can tell from my Google Analytics that I actually have readers in the DC area who aren't people I know. Sometimes, I even meet one or two of you out at bars. So if you really do exist out there, reading this blog, you're probably eager to come to the first Heads in the Sand book debate this Friday at noon at the Center for American Progress. Beyond yours truly, some of the key leaders of the most influential new institutions thinking about the future of progressive national security policy -- namely CAP's Brian Katulis, National Security Network's Rand Beers, and the Center for a New American Security's Kurt Campbell -- are going to be on hand to explain why I'm wrong, so it should be a great event.
Justin Logan tries to draw our attention to data indicating that anti-American sentiment is driven by specific American policies, but as I've said before we've spent years ignoring actual data about foreign public opinion and I don't see why we should stop now. They hate us because they hate freedom!
John McCain would like us to believe that he was some kind of uber-prescient early critic of the Bush administration's tactics in Iraq but it's just not so. Barack Obama warned before the war that disaster was likely, McCain cheerleaded for war. Then when the war appeared to be going well, McCain thought Bush and Rumsfeld were fantastic. Then when the war very clearly wasn't going well, McCain started opportunistically turning on them. That's nice, I suppose, but it's still a record of badly flawed judgment.
It always gives me pause to disagree with the brilliant John Judis, so I read his gloom and doom articles about Barack Obama's electability after every primary with interest. Still, I don't buy it. If it's true that Obama has trouble winning over Hillary Clinton's core supporters because of their deep-seated aversion to Obama, then how is he leading in the national polls against McCain? I think Clinton's voters are loyally backing her because they like Hillary Clinton a lot and given her status as a quasi-incumbent, party leader, and her husband's wife it's very hard to knock her off that pedestal.
To make a long story short, John's way of looking at the race seems to simply exclude the possibility that both Democrats are running strong campaigns. But I don't see any reason to view either candidate's trouble as reflecting "weakness" as opposed to his or her opponent's strength.
Here's one reader's take on America's sky-high incarceration rate:
One thing to considered when considering this issue is that China has a much lower prisoner population because they summarily execute a lot of prisoners and what I would call unreliable record keeping of prisons as they are an autocratic regime. That isn't to say that the high prison population in the US is something to ignore, it's important to put everything into context.
Those are some decent points, but I'm not really sure that context changes the fact that we still have a frighteningly large proportion of people incarcerated here.
Brian Morton's Dissentarticle on bloggers says nice things about me, so I hate to criticize it, but in addition to what Kevin Drum says about age and Kay Steiger says about gender, I have to take issue with one of Morton's assertions about "Old Bolshevik" intellectual Nikolai Bukharin:
By saying they're ambitious, I mean that most of these writers share a politics that is interested in deep-going social reform—you could say it's a social-democratic politics, although few of them would use that term. (As far as I can tell, they have absolutely no interest in socialist thought, which, in my opinion, is a good thing. At any rate, I can't see that any of them has been hobbled intellectually because of a lack of opinions about Bukharin.)
I have opinions about Bukharin!
Back in college, I wrote a term paper on him for a slightly weird seminar that Robert Nozick co-taught with a scholar of the Russian Revolution from the History Department. My take was that Bukharin's right deviationism (and other efforts at "reform Communism") was ultimately a mirage. The hard-liners were correct to think in Bukharin's day, just as they were when they crushed the Prague Spring and when they tried to stage a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, that Communist Party political control couldn't survive substantial liberalization of the economy.
Beyond that, I'll admit to not having much interest in socialist thought. I will say that I'm pretty much a believer in Marx-style base/superstructure theory to an extent that most of my friends and colleagues seem to find somewhat appalling. I don't, for example, believe that William F. Buckley, Jr. exercised any substantial real causal influence on American history not through any fault of his own but simply because I don't think intellectuals really impact the course of events. This is, needless to say, not a popular opinion among writers.
Two further points. One -- in a lot of ways "McGovern!" is the "Munich!" of campaign journalism, probably an analogy we should all just agree to do without. The circumstances of the 1972 campaign were very much circumstances of 1972 (see Rick Perlstein's Nixonland if you don't believe me) and it's exceedingly unlikely that anything like that will happen again.
Two -- it's important to remember that by far the biggest source of uncertainty about the November presidential election has to do not with the Democratic primary campaign, but with objective reality. I don't believe that the situation in Iraq or the economy will look radically better in November than they do today, but in principle either or both might. Something like that would make John McCain -- a popular and skilled politician who gets good press -- extremely hard to beat. But if the economy continues to be weak and Americans keep dying in a war that offers no light at the end of the tunnel, it's very hard for McCain to win. This kind of thing -- the inherent unknowability of things like the Q3 GDP growth rate and the future course of inflation, the possibility of new foreign crises or dramatic changes in Iraq -- is what makes the outcome uncertain. The differences, qua candidates, between Clinton and Obama are small in comparison to this haze of uncertainty.
Patrick Healy has an excellent article in the Times making the point that it's illegitimate to make inferences of the form "A lost State X in the primary, therefore A will lose State X in a general election" or "A lost Demographic Y in the primary, therefore A will lose Demographic Y in a general election." If Clinton loses Demographic Y that could be because their preference is Obama > Clinton > McCain or it could be that they think Obama > McCain > Clinton and their behavior in the Obama/Clinton race doesn't give us any evidence.
The best evidence we do have to test these claims is provided by the early general election polling matchups, we can at least illustrate broad trends. According to Gallup, Clinton and Obama are both tied with McCain:
In head-to-head matchups against presumptive Republican nominee McCain, Clinton and Obama perform almost exactly the same. In Gallup's latest tracking of the general election, based on interviewing conducted April 18-22, McCain has a one-point lead over both Clinton and Obama. In the April 18-20 USA Today/Gallup poll, both Clinton and Obama were slightly -- but almost identically -- ahead of McCain among likely voters. In neither instance is there any meaningful difference in how the two candidates stack up against McCain.
Obviously, there's no way Clinton could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Obama supporters, and there's no way Obama could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Clinton supporters. Basically, there's nothing to see here.
