« April 20, 2008 - April 26, 2008 | Main | May 4, 2008 - May 10, 2008 » April 27, 2008 - May 3, 2008 ArchivesApril 27, 2008Blast from the PastDC real estate classified ads segregated by race from an August 1950 issue of The Washington Times Herald. Everyone knows that much of America, Washington included, was formally segregated not so long ago, but artifacts like these are still incredibly striking. Book SalonI'm going to be doing a FireDogLake book salon on Heads in the Sand today at 5PM, so if you've got any questions about the book you'd like to see answered, definitely head that way and ask 'em. What a Difference KG MakesSorry for bastardizing "Leo the Late Bloomer," one of my daughter's favorite bedtime stories and a true classic. But I couldn't help it. Not only has Rajon Rondo's belated emergence been the most fascinating subplot of a storybook Celtics season, but he's just like the character in that book. Like Leo, Rondo never spoke. Like Leo's father, Celts fans spent an inordinate amount of time wondering when Rondo would "draw" (in this case, play with consistency) or "write" (in this case, bang home open jumpers). Leo had patient parents who believed in him; Rondo had veterans such as Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, role models who provided the confidence and toughness he desperately needed, eventually springing him from his on-court shell and altering the course of his career. We always hear about the value of young teams adding veterans, but after watching the effects over the course of an 82-game season, it's probably impossible to exaggerrate the importance of polished, professional, competitive, proven veterans on young guys who don't know what the hell they're doing. I think this is pretty far off-base. The reality is that Rajon Rondo played pretty well for a terrible 2006-2007 Celtics team. When you added Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to the mix, had Paul Pierce play a full season, and rounded out the rotation with some decent veterans, the team was much better. That put Rondo in a position where people notice that he plays pretty well. But relative to last year, he's rebounding is a bit worse, his free throw shooting is a bit worse, and his field goal percentage is better. None of that would be shocking for a guy of his age, but it's especially non-shocking when you consider that it's harder to rebound when you're competing with the Big Ticket and better teammates give him more open looks. He's a pretty good player, and deserves credit for contributing to the team. But there's no dramatic transformation here. VettingIt's worth noting that Hendrick Hertzberg is absolutely right to say that it's just not true that Hillary Clinton has already been vetted, she "has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out." There's a whole set of potential vulnerabilities dealing with pardons and finances from about 2000 to 2006 or 7 that haven't been explored in detail during the course of this or any other campaign. I don't really want to rehash those incidents because I think it's sleazy and their existence isn't the reason I think Clinton would be the worse nominee. But if you're out there thinking Obama's got this Ayers and Wrght stuff in the closet and Hillary has no new vulnerabilities for the GOP to explore you're fooling yourself. Let Them Sell RiceTyler Cowen argues that restrictions on trade in and sale of agricultural commodities are contributing to the current food crisis. The result of all these various protections and restrictions is to reduce overall production and to create an inefficient market where it's relatively difficult to get goods to where they're needed. This is all why I find it difficult to get too upset one way or the other about things like CAFTA or the Colombia trade deal. The real gains to be realized from further liberalization of trade at this point have to do with farm stuff that's been kept off the table in all these negotiations. McAuliffe on MichiganHere's Terry McAuliffe in his book explaining his own personal role in the delegitimation of the Michigan primary that he now decries: "I'm going outside the primary window," [Michigan Sen. Carl Levin] told me definitively. This kind of thing is why when you see "Michigan" featuring in a Clinton campaign account of something or other you shouldn't take it very seriously. The House/School TreadmillRobert Frank says the positional nature of school quality helped fuel the housing boom, making it difficult for families to borrow responsibly when purchasing a home: But what works for any individual family does not work for society as a whole. The problem is that a "good" school is a relative concept: It is one that is better than other schools in the same area. When we all bid for houses in better school districts, we merely bid up the prices of those houses.[...] I don't think it makes sense to view the quality of local public schools as a pure positional good (there would be a real difference between a society where the graduates of even the worst high school all had basic reading and math skills and the society we actually live in) but there clearly is some positional component here and I think Frank's analysis explains at least some of what we've seen. Wiz-Cavs Game FourThat LeBron James is a pretty talented player, huh? I think he's going to go places in the NBA. Beyond that, I don't really understand Eddie Jordan's notion that the Wiz should close games with Agent Zero iso plays. I think the Wizards and the Cavaliers are about equally matched teams. But the Cavs' best player is much better than our best player. Our advantage is that it's a game of five-on-five. I'll Be BackFireDogLake seems to be having server problems so I had to stop contributing to my book salon over there a bit more than half way through. But assuming things get fixed, I'll return tomorrow to try to follow up on the questions still outstanding. Check it out -- if you haven't seen an FDL salon before, it's a pretty cool format. April 28, 2008Pies WorkVia Jonathan Kulick, striking new evidence that the pie-toss is an effective means of bringing about social change. Prince's "Creep"Prince covers Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella: I got that link via Petey so it's possible that the video embeds subliminal "vote for Hillary" messages or something. Out of ContextObviously, this ad is terrible unfair: It's unfair, because it's out of context. In context, McCain offered his Magical Death-Free Proviso in which our troops are going to be immune to enemy fire for the duration of his proposed 100 year presence. Or something. Basically, we'll have an open-ended war in Iraq followed by 100 years of peacefully kind of hanging around. That, obviously, makes his views much more reasonable. Capital GainsMostly what Atrios said. But beyond that, a political movement that's interested in providing new public services requires revenue to pay for those services. To get the revenue, there have to be increases in the overall level of taxation. Those increase should take a progressive form -- the rich should pay more. But it's absolutely crippling to any effort to outline policy with any level of ambition to concede the idea that any tax that places any burden whatsoever on the non-rich is therefore unacceptable. It's fairly easy to design revenue measures that fall mostly on the rich, but extraordinarily difficult to design measures that exclusively snag people who fit a conventional definition of rich. It's true that a married couple composed of an NYPD detective who pulls lots of overtime and a NYC public high school teacher with a lot of seniority can have a joint income of over $200,000 a year but a tax hike on the $200,000k+ crowd is still, all things considered, an extremely progressive measure. RedundancyI'm in NYC for a few days, and over the weekend it got a bit confusing to take the subway because an awful lot of routes had been re-routed for the purpose of track maintenance. Confusing, but still doable -- if you followed the signs and were willing to put up with perhaps a bit of a hassle, you could get where you wanted to go. That highlights one of the advantages an extensive rail system like the NYC Subway has over a small one like Metro in DC -- the proliferation of lines and existence of separate express and local tracks on many of them creates redundancies in many parts of the system and makes it possible to shut some sections down without causing the entire network to crash. DC, by contrast, is essentially operating with no margin for error so problems anywhere near the middle of the city spill over and create huge problems for the whole system. InnumeracyBrendan Nyhan flags this preposterous lede: 3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit Brendan thinks the problem here is a tendency toward false equivalence. I'd say it may be simple innumeracy. Later in the article we find out that McCain's proposals "if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade." Conversely, "even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan." Let's do some math. McCain's plans will at "at least $5.7 trillion" whereas the Democratic plans will add "less than" $1.9 trillion to the deficit. The difference between them, in short, is at least $3.8 trillion. That, obviously, is a huge difference -- larger than the net worth of Bill Gates or the GDP of Italy. There's no grounds for saying that two plans' costs have something "in common" when they differ in cost by at least $3.8 trillion, but to understand this you need to understand what you're talking about. After all, if one candidate was offering budget-busting on the Democratic scale, and another candidate was offering $2 trillion in deficit reduction nobody would have trouble distinguishing between the budget hawk and the deficit spender. But the difference in magnitude is the same in either case. Tough Enough
James Fallows talks about how politicians want to talk about their agenda, but the press only wants to hear about the freak show: The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work. What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective." In particular, being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments. And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage. So instead you ask tough questions about process or about trivia, even though there's little evidence that these are the subjects about which people want to hear. HITS Evening EventI'll be doing a reading/Q&A/signing event for Heads in the Sand at the Borders on 18th and L in Washington, DC Thursday at 6PM so folks whose "jobs" and such prevented them from coming to my CAP event on Friday should come by and check it out. Today in Book PromotionIlan Goldenberg, policy director at the National Security Network, has a very kind writeup of Heads in the Sand that expresses many of the book's core ideas and helps apply them to the current moment. I thought I also might link to Spencer Ackerman's two part live-blog (one, two) of Friday's CAP event and once again to the page for the FDL book salon where I've now added some new remarks. Information GapAmbinder says "given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they'll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there's no real reason for those superdelegates to choose in June. They'll have MORE information about electability in July or August... so why choose in an environment with less info?" Well, I'd say the reason is that we're not really gaining more information as time goes on (Clinton backers, for example, were making the Wright/Ayers anti-Obama argument to pundits and no doubt superdelegates as well quietly for months before it "hit" the mainstream). What's happening, instead, is that both candidates' negatives are going up while resources aren't being applied against John McCain. Insofar as superdelagates genuinely want to pick a winner, they'll recognize that picking someone gives them a better chance of winning than does a summer of indecision. Cold War, WhateverI'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's noticed that John McCain wants to start a new Cold War. Fareed Zakaria's also on the case: We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war. Right. I mean, regardless of what you think of the merits of McCain's thinking on this front, surely the country deserves some debate and analysis of what's going on here. Instead, insofar as any attention has been paid at all to McCain's foreign policy vision it's centered on his empty promise to try to act nicer to Western Europeans. But his views toward Russia and China would represent a much more dramatic and consequential departure from current practice -- just not in a friendly and moderate way. The McCain Doctrine
My cover story in the latest issue of The American Prospect is now online. It's a look at John McCain's views on national security policy and how frightening they are: Things were looking bleak for Republicans in February, and it was clear that only a candidate with crossover appeal to war opponents stood any chance of going toe-to-toe with a Democrat. Thus, though it may have angered the conservative base, the Republicans got lucky as McCain emerged as the front-runner over Mitt Romney, the preferred choice of Bush-lovers. But there is a problem. Despite neoconservatism's close association in the public imagination with the Bush administration, and despite McCain's image as a moderate, a look at the record makes clear that McCain, not Bush, is the real neocon in the Republican Party. McCain was the neocons' candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we've seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing. McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism. To tie this in to some of the themes of Heads in the Sand McCain offers Bush-like ideas -- indeed, Bush's ideas in a rawer, purer form -- but without Bush or necessarily too much of Bush's personnel. To make the case against McCain you need to be able to make the case against their ideas and not just against the alleged incompetence of Bush and his key subordinates. But of course to do that, McCain's opponent is going to need to have adequate separation from those ideas. At any rate, the article is part of a larger package on McCain on the TAP website so also check out Harold Meyerson and Mark Schmitt. Meanwhile, the June issue of The Atlantic should be out one of these days and features my take on Barack Obama's foreign policy. Objectives
Via Spencer Ackerman, Fred Kagan's mad as hell that folks like me don't know what "victory" in Iraq is supposed to mean: Virtually everyone who wants to win this war agrees: Success will have been achieved when Iraq is a stable, representative state that controls its own territory, is oriented toward the West, and is an ally in the struggle against militant Islamism, whether Sunni or Shia. This has been said over and over. Why won’t war critics hear it? Is it because they reject the notion that such success is achievable and therefore see the definition as dishonest or delusional? Is it because George Bush has used versions of it and thus discredited it in the eyes of those who hate him? Or is it because it does not offer easily verifiable benchmarks to tell us whether or not we are succeeding? There could be other reasons–perhaps critics fear that even thinking about success or failure in Iraq will weaken their demand for an immediate “end to the war.” For an article that's full of dishonest propaganda, Kagan actually does a pretty good job of exploring the issue here. The fact that his definition of success doesn't admit of any sort of benchmarks really is a serious problem with it. And, indeed, the fact that it's a dishonest and delusional vision also counts against it in my view. At the heart of the problem is that Kagan's vision is contradictory and absurd. Given the contradictions involved in mixing various kinds of procedural and substantive criteria, any development whatsoever can be portrayed as bringing us closer to success. Given that there is no viable political movement in Iraq that embodies this vision of a unitary, U.S.-aligned, democratic Iraq any advance by any turn of events embodies it just as well as anything else. The hawks haven't failed to produce some words they claim define success, they've failed to produce a realistic notion of success. There only interest is in whining about defeatism on the idea side and ginning up fairy tales about how wonderful everything will be if only the mean ol' war critics will stop pointing out that the mission has long ago become pointless. U.S. Army photo by Sgt Tim Ortez The Swing StatesI don't think early polling should be dispositive in anyone's thinking about anything, but can we put the notion that Hillary Clinton has some kind of decisive edge in swing states to rest with polls like this one out of Wisconsin? There are contested regions where Clinton looks stronger than Obama (specifically: PA/OH and FL) and contested regions where Obama looks stronger than Clinton (specifically WI/MN/IA, WA/OR, and VA) and for either to win they'll need to do pretty well in some regions where the other one is better. Mmmm....Beer
Ezra Klein wonders when arugula became the signpost of fancy-pants elitism. I wonder, too. On the one hand, I'm pretty much a fancy-pants elitist but I'm really not sure which of the various leafy greens you see in salads is the arugula. Apparently it's also used as a garnish at Olive Garden. But the real question is when did beer become so downscale? Go to a retail corridor in a yuppified neighborhood in any town in America and you'll find a bar full of people drinking . . . beer. Go to a Whole Foods in a town where supermarkets are allowed to sell beer and you'll find . . . beer. Surely these are well-known facts. Meanwhile, in literal sense the American "beer track" seems to involve Obama-friendly plains states plus outliers like Nevada (casinos) and New Hampshire (people driving in from neighboring states to avoid taxes). ParkingThe fetish for government-subsidized parking is truly an odd thing. In any society with as many cars as ours, there are going to need to be a lot of parking spaces. But normally there's a case for government subsidies when there's some kind of positive externality associated with some form of behavior. That's just really not the case with driving and parking. People like the convenience of driving right up to a store or office or whatever and parking there -- indeed, they like it enough to pay for! How much will they pay? Well, it's hard to know in advance which is why you need markets. But that's what you should have -- as much parking as the market will bear. Not government-mandated parking, and not government-provided free or discount parking. Let people build garages and if it's more economical to provide less parking, let there be less parking. Obama 3-3Barack Obama plays three-on-three: His opponents seem to be putting up a defensive effort that's reminiscent of recent New York Knicks squads. The fact that they're all Obama campaign volunteers may play a role in this. McBucksAs a married couple, John and Cindy McCain are multi-millionaires. But John McCain on his own is just a guy with some money in a Wachovia savings account. In other words, he's stashed all his considerable assets under his wife's name, and then proceeded to not disclose anything at all about his finances under pretense of protecting his daughter's privacy. It's absurd. Meanwhile, what could possibly be in there that he's worried would be damning. Stock in the Umbrella Corporation? April 29, 2008Wright Round BabyIn case you needed my opinion to figure this out, Reverend Wright doesn't seem to be doing his former parishoner any favors, choosing instead to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, reiterate the most objectionable of his greatest hits, and I guess just see what John McCain can do with this. One supposes this'll lead to a more open breach between Wright and Obama, which might help the latter in the long run, but it's a pretty depressing mess at this point. Wright Round BabyIn case you needed my opinion to figure this out, Reverend Wright doesn't seem to be doing his former parishoner any favors, choosing instead to hog as much of the spotlight as possible, reiterate the most objectionable of his greatest hits, and I guess just see what John McCain can do with this. One supposes this'll lead to a more open breach between Wright and Obama, which might help the latter in the long run, but it's a pretty depressing mess at this point. More of MeI made a video with the gang from ThinkProgress talking about my book, the Bush doctrine, etc. Sorry I Missed ItI once again was not invited to the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and this recounting by Mike Scherer doesn't make it sound very interesting except this one part: As is tradition, the President stood to do a short stand-up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor. Um . . . really? That happened? And it's an old joke? Emerging Democratic Majority
These are the latest youth cohort party ID numbers from Pew. As you can see here, the future looks a bit bleak for the GOP. The chart illustrates the fact that, contrary to myth, the Democratic edge with young people has usually been pretty small but now it's huge. In a micro-sense, of course, anyone whose experience consists mostly of eight years of peace and prosperity under Bill Clinton followed by Bush acceding to the White House under dubious circumstances and then leading us into inept governance, failed wars, and a shaky economy is bound to favor the Democrats. But in a macro sense, you're looking at the undertow of the past thirty years of conservative identity politics. The right has had great electoral success mobilizing people against the kind of social transformation we've been experiencing for the past several decades (more and more assertive racial and ethnic minorities, secularists, cosmopolitan types, etc.) but they haven't actually halted any of these transformations and the lines of cleavage that have given the GOP the bigger half of the cookie in most elections since 1968 leave them with the smaller half among the youngest cohort. Reich on the RaceHere's Robert Reich, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, explaining his endorsement of Barack Obama: Reich, it should be said, started criticizing the Clinton administration from the left in the 1990s so his support for Obama isn't like the turnaround of a die-hard loyalist, but I do think it reflects the judgment of a guy who has a good sense of where the Clintons stand vis-a-vis other possible progressive leaders. Accept No Substitutes
Some turns of events just cry out for the NY Post headline treatment. Meanwhile, a friend Twittered the suggestion that perhaps the right way to understand Rev. Wright is as a successor figure to the Billy Carter / Roger Clinton / Neil Bush tradition of embarrassing associates. In The ZoneIn response to Tyler Cowen's post on zoning I'd say the beginning of wisdom is the simple recognition that if you're hoping for deregulation to allow people to build in a higher-density manner, looking to deregulate Manhattan doesn't make a ton of sense as a first step. Not that Manhattan doesn't have a ton of zoning and other regulations (it does) but it's already pretty damn dense. Even restricting yourself to the NYC area, the things to do would be to permit Manhattan-scale building in all the parts of the outer boroughs that are near Subway stations and create more transit-oriented development near LIRR/MetroNorth/NJTransit stations in the suburbs. But in general, almost everywhere is overzoned. If you start paying attention to hyper-local politics almost everywhere, you'll quickly see the political economy behind this, namely that zoning rules are often made to be broken. But to break the rules, you need to get a variance. And to get a variance you need to do, well, something to persuade the people empowered to grant variances to give you one. So at the margin, regulators will prefer to make restrictions that are too stringent even according to them and then grant variances that involve sundry side payments rather than simply loosen regulations. Last, it's always worth saying that if every spot of the planet allowed Sao Paulo levels of density it doesn't follow that such density would actually emerge all across the planet. The density of any given American city is determined by (among other things) the regulatory environment, but the overall density of the country is determined by the birth, death, and immigration rates. If all our major metro areas simultaneously allowed for increased density, the short-term impact on any particular place would be relatively modest. Then and NowIt seems that back in 2005 John McCain understood how dumb John McCain's current position on Iraq is: Host Chris Matthews pressed McCain on the issue. "You've heard the ideological argument to keep U.S. forces in the Middle East. I've heard it from the hawks. They say, keep United States military presence in the Middle East, like we have with the 7th Fleet in Asia. We have the German...the South Korean component. Do you think we could get along without it?" Kudos to Sam Stein for writing this up. Checking the record by using Nexis doesn't count as "reporting" under the fairly arbitrary rules governing "real journalism" but it sure can be valuable. Transgendered MarriageHilzoy has an eloquent post on the infuriatingly ambiguous legal status of a New Jersey couple wherein husband Donald has now become Denise, thus rendering theirs an illegal same-sex union. Best and WorstAlex Massie wants to know who the most overrated and underrated U.S. presidents are. The trick with this sort of thing is you need a metric of "rated." Ross, for example, says Ike is underrated but my impression is that at this point Ike is already very highly rated (every foreign policy conference seems to open with a discussion of the need for a new Solarium project. I'll use the 2005 Wall Street Journal poll of scholars as my baseline, and say that Eisenhower's at number eight so he's not a good candidate for underrated. I think Grant is undervalued at 29, Carter is undervalued at 34, and John Quincy Adams undervalued at 25. Overrated on the list are Kennedy at 15, McKinley at 14, and Reagan at 6. There seems in general to be a slant in favor of presidents who were very successful partisan politicians (even guys from long ago like Jackson and McKinley) and thereby entered the pantheon of "historical figures who present-day figures sometimes mention in a positive light" and an undervaluation of people who faced difficult political circumstances beyond their control and nonetheless did some good things. Losing FriendsLooks like South Africa may have had about enough of Robert Mugabe and has put the situation in Zimbabwe on the docket for a Security Council session they'll be chairing. Down She GoesCirculation declines at most American newspapers. Clearly, technology and changing habits have a lot to do with this story. Still, to me it's always striking that when journalists talk about the slow-motion death of most of the nation's major newspapers the issue of quality rarely comes into it. And yet the decline is by no means uniform: National newspapers like USA Today and the Journal have tended to hold their ground better, as have smaller-market dailies where competition from other media like the Internet isn't usually as intense. I think you see here that the issues of quality and competition from the internet are really interlinked. I've heard people worry to me about what will happen to local coverage in an internet-dominated world, and these people are correctly identifying a comparative weakness of current new media, but the answer is that the papers that specialize in covering local news seem to actually be doing okay. The newspaper, as an institution, is an odd one -- an enormous bundle of disparate kinds of content whose rationale for existing has to do with the economics of printing and distributing cheap paper and ink on a daily basis. In an online world, the economics are different and argue in favor of specialization and niches. And this is also almost certainly better for editorial quality. It would be extremely odd for one person to be well-qualified to supervise coverage of all the different things The New York Times tries to cover. Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from a place that specializes in movies, and local news from an organization that's really passionate about covering its community rather than viewing it as a JV form of journalism to be endured before moving on to something bigger? And in the future, we will. Department of Bad IdeasTruckers demand congressional cap on gas prices. Admittedly, this could be a good idea for truckers since when we need to start rationing gas I bet they'd get preferential treatment. Then again, I sort of despair of persuading people to adopt reasonable policies like congestion pricing and -- yes -- higher gas taxes, so maybe price controls, shortages, and rationing is the way to get us thinking about ways to get folks out of their cars and onto sidewalks, bikes, buses, trains, etc. The Ghosts
Stanley Fish says it's confession time: "I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned. This well-captures the absurdity of the idea that Barack Obama is some kind of terrorist for having had a passing association with Bill Ayers. It seems that everyone who's anyone in Illinois political and intellectual circles has had some passing association with Ayers. This, however, doesn't do much to explain why Ayers has managed to acquire this kind of banal-yet-prominent position on the scene. One can easily imagine an alternate universe in which this not-really-repentant ex-terrorist is basically shunned -- bombmaking being a kind of shun-worthy activity. But then again lots of folks with much more blood on their hands from that same period -- Henry Kissinger and his subordinates -- are even more respectable figures, key members of the national establishment. Donald Rumsfeld has an appointment at Stanford! Lord knows how many aspiring lawyers will learn their trade from John Yoo at Berkeley. If I had my druthers, we'd shun 'em all, but I think that's not in the cards. Less Snark, More Penetrating InsightLee Beck gives five stars to Heads in the Sand: The jump from blog to book worked well for Yglesias. I get the sense that he was pushed toward a less snarky, slightly stilted style, but you essentially get the same tightly reasoned and witty passages you'd expect from his longer posts or magazine stuff. What's surprising (for a blogger) is that these passages actually thread together into one continuous and earnest argument, a case for traditional liberal internationalism. Not, I hope, too earnest -- there is stuff in there about Darth Vader's theory of hegemonic stability (similar to Bush's, led to the breakdown of the polity he thought he was strengthening) and, of course, the right-wing's Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. At any rate, buy the book. We can count both blog readership and book sales, you know, and when the numbers don't match up my feelings are hurt :-( The Jenna FactorIt seems the GOP youth vote problems extend to Jenna Bush, who's not ready to commit to McCain: I know some conservatives think George W. Bush's inevitable convention speech is bound to be a disastrous reminder to America that McCain represents continuity with Bush, but maybe she's one voter her dad can persuade. Suffer the ChildrenThe right likes to emphasize the role that educational attainment plays in rising inequality, and it also likes to undermine efforts to improve educational outcomes for poor kids. Thus, the Bush brew of tax cuts for the rich, and declining per capita spending on preschool: Discretionary grants under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) were flat funded at $2.1 billion, meaning that 200,000 children may loose assistance. Funding for HeadStart and Title I increased only at sub-inflation levels, leaving states to pick up the tab and putting more kids at risk of loosing access to early education. We wouldn't want five year-olds showing up for kindergarden well-prepared now would we? But of course if your dividend earnings are almost large enough to pay out of pocket for preschool, Bush's prescient tax cutting has now put the dream within reach. Jay-Z Strikes BackJay-Z lays down a track lambasting DeShawn Stevenson without even using his name. Elastic GasI started out thinking that Hillary Clinton was just making a clever dodge on the gas tax holiday, but now she's lighting in to Barack Obama for having the correct position on John McCain's stupid idea. This is basically the environment/energy/transportation equivalent equivalent of Obama's anti-mandate fliers and it makes it very hard to imagine that she's prepared to try to do anything about climate change. Meanwhile, short-term demand elasticity for gasoline is low, because the main things you can do to use less of it -- buy a new car or move -- aren't really short-term decisions. But this inelasticity goes both ways and a temporary (though of course one doubts it really would be temporary) cut in gas taxes doesn't give anyone much incentive to cut consumers a break. What's needed are measures that can increase the short-run elasticity of demand. Making federal funds available to increase the frequency of bus service and/or reduce fares to give people better alternatives to driving might work. Or some kind of program designed to facilitate/encourage the trading in of inefficient vehicles for ones that don't guzzle as much gas. I've heard over and over again about Clinton's vast powers of wonkery and incredibly command of policy, so maybe she should show us some with some creative thinking on a tough problem rather than mindlessly parroting John McCain's proposals. ReduxRobert McFarlane was National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and is officially down as a supporter of John McCain, but Jacob Heilbrunn reports that McFarlane thinks know-nothing neocons will run the show in a McCain administration, "According to McFarlane, 'the youngsters' would run foreign policy the first year and then likely be 'fired' by the second after they mess up." So that's the grown up defense of McCain. He's the kind of guy who's likely to appoint a bunch of people who screw up, and then fire them. More: My ears perked up when I heard this assessment because it confirms what I've been hearing elsewhere: while Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and other realist elders are consulted by McCain, his heart is with the younger neocons, the "beavers," in the words of one McCain supporter, who draft the speeches and get the grunt work done. I would suggest that this isn't just a question of personnel and the neocons having groomed a younger generation that the realists haven't. McCain's choice of personnel reflects his own ideas about national security, honor, national greatness, etc. The realists McCain knows are all older guys who are sort of out of the game because McCain was a realist a long time ago in the 1980s when I was in grade school and these old dudes were practitioners. But his conversion happened a while back, and he's been quite consistent in his adherence to neoconnish ideas (and, indeed, he's shaped the direction of the movement and not just signed on to it) presumably because he thinks they correctly depict the post-Soviet security environment. He's wrong but it's not like he hasn't thought about this stuff or is some small-time governor being manipulated by his devilish speechwriters. These are his ideas and they're bad ideas and lifelong Republicans who don't like these ideas and don't want to see them implemented should support his opponent. To the ArchivesPhillip Weis went to college with Geoffrey Garin, Hillary Clinton's new top pollster, and recalled him as having been quite the radical. And thanks to the Crimson's extensive archives, you can actually read his old op-eds calling for, among other things, the violent overthrow of the government. Which is not, obviously, a good reason to vote against Clinton but it does put her campaign's Ayers-related attacks in a certain perspective. April 30, 2008Paul NewellPaul Newell is challenging Sheldon Silver in a NY State Assembly primary. That sounds a bit like a parochial local concern, but Silver is the super-powerful Speaker of the assembly and actually quite reactionary on a variety of issues including an unhelpful posture on the now-dead NYC congestion pricing initiative. Were he to lose -- or even just need to feel the fear -- that would send a loud signal about the rising political prospects of urbanism. Streetsblog has a worthwhile interview. Fast LaneSecretary of Transportation Mary Peters, now my favorite Bush cabinet official (admittedly, the competition's not that tough) thanks to changing her mind on the Dulles rail project, has also started a blog called "Fast Lane." Conveniently enough, this also happens to be the title of one of my favorite short0lived bad TV series. Trade-OffsHere's Randy Scheunemann, John McCain's top foreign policy aide, talking about Georgia and U.S.-Russian relations and casually dropping tid-bits of his bizarre theoretical approach. For example, here's his view of diplomacy: Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics. That's right, he thinks the entire process of bargaining for mutual advantage that lies at the core of diplomacy -- and, indeed, of almost all constructive human interaction -- is a relic of a bygone era of power politics. In the brave new future, either the Russians give way on all points, or else we raise up the national missile defense system and it's bombs away. For a more rational take on international relations, you might want to come by my Heads in the Sand event tomorrow at 6:30 PM at the Borders at 18th and L in DC. UPDATE: That should be 6:00 PM at Borders, apologies. ChangeNice ad from Obama hitting back on the gas tax thing, tying his process/change argument to the concrete issue of energy prices: If only there'd been a bullet point about transit. Off The FenceThe pace of superdelegate endorsements seems to be picking up this week, with Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley signing on with Obama, Rep. Ike Skelton going for Clinton, and before that Senator Bingaman for Obama and also someone else whose name I forget. That's as it should be. Whichever candidate you prefer, it's just better to have the superdelegates state their preferences sooner rather than later. What About the Good News?There's some good local news out today. For one thing, the city government's public private partnership with ClearChannel to launch a bike sharing/rental service is getting off the ground. Good! And the "silver line" new Metro spur to Dulles Airport is back on track with the Bush administration deciding to un-kill the proposal in a rare triumph of sound policymaking from this crew. Good! And last, Prince Williams County is starting to edge away from the draconian anti-immigrant policies it implemented during last year's hysteria. "Obama is Essentially Right"Here's a crazy media moment. ABC News is reporting on the candidates' gas tax dispute and instead of just going with claim and counterclaim a reporter informs us that he spoke to several economists about the issue and they all agree that "Obama is essentially right" that what Clinton and McCain are proposing wouldn't accomplish anything: Strange days. End of an Era
The Steve Nash Era in Phoenix has been a pretty amazing thing for NBA fans (especially those of us with no allegiances to any other Western Conference contenders) to behold. When the Suns signed him to his deal, the move was pretty widely criticized, but with Nash and Amare Stoudemire in the mix the 29-53 Suns of 2003-2004 became the 62-20 Suns of 2004-2005 and electrified fans with an up-tempo game. Then Amare went down with injury and the 2005-2006 Suns stunned us by going 54-28 with the previously unheard-of Boris Diaw serving sometimes as center sometimes as a backup point guard. Then Amare came back the next year, they won 61 games, and lost again in the playoffs. I was hoping to see them do better, just as I was hoping to see them do better this year. I think a lot of us were. It was a great story, and they played a really fun style. And now with the Shaq trade and last night's first round exit, it seems like that era's over. It's hard to imagine Shaq or Nash or Grant Hill getting any better next year and hard to see what kind of moves they can make. The window has closed, and it's too bad. Subjectivism Goes to War
Jumping off some of Hannah Arendt's observations about Vietnam, Dave Meyer has an excellent post about Iraq and war as a "signaling" strategy: The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength." To add some further context and specificity, I point out in Heads in the Sand that the Bush administration wanted to simultaneously get more rigorous about cracking down on nuclear activities in unfriendly states and less scrupulous about U.S. compliance with the multilateral non-proliferation regime. Consequently, they wanted regime change in Iraq not just for its own sake, but also to "send a message" to would be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere. As Dave points out, however, among many other problems with using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home -- "Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message." This is especially true in the modern world where it's essentially impossible to segment your message. In the past, it might have been viable for an administration to communicate one message, in foreign language, via the foreign press, to foreigners while allowing for a more muddled national dialogue in the domestic press and vernacular. But those days are gone, and today message discipline requires totally discipline. I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you're going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet Rise of the HumanzeesIt's not something I focus on as much as the robot threat, but via Ronald Bailey comes Jenny Hawthorne's report for the Scotsman on the possibilities of human-chimp hybrids: "A leading scientist has warned a new species of 'humanzee,' created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting." Interestingly, I believe it was the Scotsman that also broke the story of Joseph Stalin's efforts to breed a humanzee super-soldier so they've clearly marked themselves out as your go-to source for coverage of this vital issue. Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids? Did such a ban pass? Predictions About the FutureThe news that Q1 economic growth, though extremely low, came in somewhat above recession levels is a good opportunity to once again remind people that the big sources of uncertainty in the general election have to do with objective reality rather than candidate-attributes or campaign tactics. That stuff can matter, but the evidence suggests that it doesn't matter as much as the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are, in a sense, unknowable. Certainly if you made me pick, I'd say the economy will continue to be lousy and Iraq will continue to be a mess, and the Democrats will have a big advantage, but neither of those predictions can be offered by me (or anyone else) with any real degree of confidence at this point. And yet those factors will probably determine the outcome in November to a much greater extent than controversies about lapel pins or McCain's bizarre campaign finance shenanigans. McCain and PolicyTyler Cowen ponders John McCain's health care proposals for a bit and then muses: Trade aside, so far I've yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp. Mostly I've seen attempts to signal that they won't do anything too offensive to the party's right wing. Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to. I don't even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals. We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals. I'm a little unclear on how this happened myself -- the GOP seems to have decided to blow a not-very-appealing idiosyncratic element of George W. Bush's personality into some kind of principled objection to policy proposals. Meanwhile, I understand that free traders are not very impressed with Democratic rhetoric these days but I think it'd be generous to describe this as a policy proposal: John McCain Will Lower Barriers To Trade. Ninety-five percent of the world's customers lie outside our borders and we need to be at the table when the rules for access to those markets are written. To do so, the U.S. should engage in multilateral, regional and bilateral efforts to reduce barriers to trade, level the global playing field and build effective enforcement of global trading rules. These steps would also strengthen the U.S. dollar and help to control the rising cost of living that hurts our families. There doesn't seem to be a recognition here that the multilateral WTO trade process has basically run aground. But it's run aground. A president who wants to lower barriers to trade in a way that's economically significant (as opposed to, say, the Colombia deal) needs some bright ideas about how to do this. In McCain's defense, such ideas are hard to come by, but if you want to tell people that lowering trade barriers is an important part of your economic strategy then you need some. More Powerful Than a Less Powerful Locomotive
Via Ryan Avent, true high-speed rail is coming to Argentina which will make them the first in the Western Hemisphere. Someday maybe we'll get some, too. Some Collegial AdviceWhether or not one enjoys blogs and blogging, I don't think that writing a blog that seems to consist primarily of complaints about blogging is likely to attract a large audience to the new Jeffrey Goldberg blog. Blogs are mostly read by people who like blogs -- writing about the evils of blogging is probably a good op-ed subject. Like rather than wondering aloud "why more people don't simply pick up the phone once in a while" why not pick up the phone once in a while and write a blog that's dramatically better than all the phone-less blogs out there, thus proving the superiority of phone-based blogging? Meanwhile, though, thanks to the blog I saw Goldberg's Q&A with Shmuel Rosner in which he makes a ton of good points. The Good FriedmanI feel kind of bad that my book opens with something about the evils of Tom Friedman at just the moment when he's returned to columnizing with a new focus on environment and energy issues where I generally agree with him. Today column, for example, is all good. At any rate, if Friedman or anyone else wants to throw some pie at me, the place to do it would be tomorrow at 6PM (that's the correct time, I messed up and mentioned 6:30PM earlier) at the Borders at 18th and L. Alternatively, you could just hear me talk about the book, answer questions, sign copies, whatever else you might like. Straight Talk By LobbyistsMatt Duss notes that Randy Scheunemann has a background as a lobbyist for the government of Georgia (the foreign country, not the state), the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, etc. To be fair to Scheunemann, though, this really seems to me a case where someone gets lobbying work because his sincere convictions (in favor of a more confrontational policy toward Iraq and Russia and basically everywhere) happen to line up with someone's lobbying agenda. It'd be like if Big Train started giving me money (which, frankly, they should) rather than like the highway lobby hiring me and then suddenly all my opinions change. GassyWhat Jonathan Alter said about the gas tax. Beyond that, though, it's worth saying that real harm is done to people's lives by this sort of gimmickry. It's not at all clear to me that ordinary voters understand that the underlying supply and demand trends make it overwhelmingly likely that the cost of gasoline will continue, on the whole, to move upwards in the future. But that's the reality -- the market will fluctuate and it's possible that policy choices about the SPR can influence those fluctuations, but we're not finding new sources of cheap oil at the same rate that global economic growth is making people want to burn more oil. Both as a country, and as individuals, we need to plan accordingly. Not everyone will agree with my preferred policy prescriptions, which tend toward denser land use and more transit, but we need some long-term policy response. And people need to respond in their own lives when they make decisions about which car to buy and where to live. But when national leaders act as if they believe current fuel costs are a passing phenomenon to be weathered with short-term measures, then at least some voters are going to believe them and make bad personal and political decisions that we can ill afford. A lot of electoral gambits are nonsense without being actually harmful, but McCain and Clinton are making problems worse just with their rhetoric. Cheney Versus WhalesJust to prove that he is, in fact, evil Dick Cheney seems to have decided to launch a secret OVP effort to stop government scientists from helping whale preservation. MoveOn On McCainNew ad continues to hit the 100 years theme: They're obviously making a rhetorical point at the end about being worse than Bush, but my guess is that on Iraq as such McCain is likely to be somewhat better as he has over the years seemed more engaged with the various tactical questions about how best to proceed. Where he's most likely to be worse than Bush concerns our relationships with other major countries like Russia and China, where Bush has generally been cautious but McCain might take a substantially more confrontational approach. Still, for political purposes probably nobody's going to care about Russia and China, so the fact that McCain, like Bush, will ensure that troops keep fighting and dying in Iraq for as long as he's in a position to order them to do so does seem like the salient issue. 100 YearsMoira Whelan has a good rundown of the whole question of where the "100 years" talking point came from, and is it really unfair to attribute a desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq to John McCain just because he kept emphasizing his desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq before deciding it was politically inconvenient to be attacked for it. One further point to ad is that McCain's apparent belief that our military bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf are entirely unproblematic seems to reflect a limited comprehension of the overall situation. After all, even our military presence in Saudi Arabia hasn't been casualty-free and it's extremely likely that we wouldn't be able to keep all of the Gulf bases we currently have were the region more democratic. At the moment, the extraordinary weakness of the Iraqi state and the general lack of security have tended to obscure the basic reality of how unpopular are presence there is. Solutions, Not SpeechesSam Stein: "Expert Support For Gas Tax Holiday Appears Nonexistent". By getting on board the holiday bandwagon, John McCain mostly reenforces one's impression of him as someone who doesn't have real ideas, principles, interest in, etc. domestic policy issues. I think that, by contrast, Hillary Clinton is managing to undermine the perception -- something she'd embedded in even a lot of people who aren't hugely sympathetic to her campaign -- that she's the candidate of substance, the earnest policy wonk type who really knows how to fix America's problems. It's a reminder that Bill Clinton, who certainly stands out among presidents for his wonkishness and interest in policy detail, also wound up gravitating toward a political strategy that leaned heavily on what you might call "policy gimmicks" rather than a serious effort to grapple with national problems. Less Than ZeroAll season long, I'd been resisting the temptation to proclaim the Wizards "better without Arenas" but the evidence from this playoff series against the Cavaliers is really tending to change my mind. The fact that Agent Zero has a solid backup in Antonio Daniels is what makes this work, but the whole rest of the team really does seem to play with both more defensive intensity and more tactical acumen in key offensive situations without Gilbert. Certainly I don't think it's a no-brainer at this point that Arenas should be paid more money if he chooses to opt out of his current contract. May 1, 2008Mission Accomplished
Some contemporaneous coverage from CNN five years ago: "Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it," said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968. [...] The landing came just hours before Bush is to tell the nation that major combat operations in Iraq have ended. The speech will be delivered from the carrier's flight deck at 9 p.m. EDT. Since that time, thousands of Americans have died, who knows how many more have been wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, and millions of Iraqis have been killed or displaced. Naturally, current policy calls for us to stay in Iraq, possibly fighting for decades in the hopes that peace eventually breaks out on terms that allow us to establish a permanent military presence there. Makes sense to me. Wingnut Versus WingnutIt's Stephen Hayes versus Laurie Mylroie in a hilarious "battle of the Iraq/al-Qaeda conspiracy theorists." My preferences here lie with Mylroie who takes on a more extreme, and therefore more coherent, worldview in which we're supposed to essentially believe that Saddam Hussein is the cigarette smoking man behind all evil in the galaxy. Hayes, by contrast, tends to operate as someone who's primarily interested in scoring debater's points -- "liberals sometimes say there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but an Iraqi guy and a guy who knows Saddam met once in 1996 so we had to invade to stop another 9/11!" Changing Demographics"The Hispanic population has taken on a momentum of its own," said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute. "If you close the borders tomorrow, there is still going to be a large Hispanic increase." That's from a Wall Street Journal writeup of a Census report on the fast-growing Hispanic population, showing that a bit over 60 percent of the increase is attributable to the Hispanic birthrate rather than to immigration. This is why I think the GOP has probably dodged an important medium-term bullet by nominating John McCain. For a while it looked like there was a very real chance that the Republicans were going to abandon the immigrant-friendly posture that's helped their party do well with more prosperous Latinos in favor of embracing a politics of Anglo ethnic panic that could have been enormously harmful over time. At the non-presidential level, though, the right still seems quite invested in crackdown policies and McCain has made some significant gestures in that direction during the primaries so it remains to be seen what they'll start busting out if things look bad in the fall. New York States of Mind
Streetsblog notes that right along side Hillary Clinton, New York's senior senator Chuck Schumer has been another leading advocate of gas tax demagoguery. This is really a bizarre position for the Senators from New York, of all places, to be taking. After all, they represent the densest, most transit-intensive, least car-using major population cluster in the United States. If anyone statewide politicians ought to be in a position to resist political pressure to do something pointless, and to show the way to alternative transportation and lifestyle schemes, it ought to be them. Clinton, of course, is only a very nominal New Yorker, but Schumer is an honest-to-God Brooklynite. Note that these are also people who, nominally, believe that catastrophic climate change is a real problem and that action ought to be taken against it. That's nice, but when you combine that conviction with the set of political beliefs they're operating under, you get the result that catastrophic climate change is a real problem that should be dealt with, but won't be due to sheer cowardice. It's something Al Gore might want to consider. Perhaps his own 2000-vintage SPR gambit would prevent him from speaking out on this controversy, but I think most of Gore's post-2000 career has been aimed at getting away from the style of political engagement that made his 2000 campaign such a hollow one. Photo by Flickr user Aturkus used under a Creative Commons license If You Build It
You often hear that there are huge swathes of the country in which it's just not feasible to make changes that will lead to people driving less -- there's no other way to get around! This is often quite true in a literal sense. But oftentimes it would be possible to make non-drastic changes that would still make a difference at the margins. Here's a satellite photo of a swathe of Virginia near Tyson's Corner. You'll note that the housing north of the highway is actually very close to all this non-housing stuff south of the highway. But if you live north of the highway you can't walk to the south of the highway stuff just because the streets aren't designed to make that possible. The necessary changes would, however, be relatively simple to make and would even provide money and jobs for people in the road-building sector -- it's just a case of making sure that roads actually link up with one another (rather than being cul-de-sacs strung together to reach a handful of arterials) and feature sidewalks or bike paths. People are still going to drive for some -- maybe even many -- trips, but at least some of suburban American's trips could be replaced by walking or biking without radically overhauling neighborhoods or constructing massive new transit systems. Among other things, that would take pressure off the roads and fuel supply, leaving those resources available for trips where there genuinely is no reasonable alternative. Rove on Stress PositionsGreat catch by Jon Chait: Rove writes, "Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours." So, wait, now putting prisoners in stress positions is torture? I was going to say "it's funny because it's true" but it's really not all that funny that we now torture people as a matter of policy in the United States. The Colombia ScenarioRobert Kaplan does an interesting Current on Colombia noting that "Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought -- and is winning -- a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights. Nuri al Maliki and Hamid Karzai could learn from him." I think the first two sentences here are persuasive, the final one less so. I'd say rather that we could learn a lot about Iraq based on how fitful and difficult progress has been in Colombia. Suppose Spanish-language skill were as widespread in the United States as Arabic-language skill is. And suppose there were a large religious difference between Americans and Colombians. And suppose that Colombia contained a large, linguistically and ethnically distinct minority group that had been waging an armed struggle on-and-off for decades for its independence. Map a sectarian division among Colombia's Spanish-speaking Catholics onto the situation. And have it be that U.S. policy is widely blamed for first 12 years of severe economic deprivation and then for creating the current situation of chaos. Well, that'd be a lot tougher. And yet for all the advantages we have in Colombia (to say nothing of the fact that the relatively small burden on the U.S. economy and military makes it much more reasonable to consider a long-term engagement) the situation has hardly been unproblematic over the years and it's not truly clear that it'll work. Rather than giving us confidence, in short, that we can make Iraq succeed, I think a consideration of Colombia should give us pause. TV News: We Don't CareRead Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' stunningly unresponsive "response" to the NYT's revelation that the coterie of ex-officers used by TV news to comment on military affairs was riddled with conflicts of interest and being used as a Pentagon propaganda arm. I'm not sure what's more stunning, that Williams can't be bothered to correctly state the nature of the complaint, or that his response is actually more than we've heard from any other network. Apparently, nobody's even slightly embarrassed by any of this. And on some level, why should they be? Since as best I can tell all the networks are complicit, as long as they all agree to just hum along nobody should lose any market share to anyone else. Cable News DeclinesVia Matt Stoller, some evidence that the total audience for cable news is on the decline: MSNBC’s ratings momentum continued in April, as the network finished the month as the only cable news net to show a viewership increase over last year (342,000 vs. 333,000, M-Su Total Day). MSNBC also showed the most growth in weekday primetime, up 9% in the key Adults 25-54 demo (253,000 vs. 232,000), while CNN dropped 9% and Fox News Channel plunged 14%. That's nice for MSNBC, and I do think they're the best cable network and have come to rely on them for primary-night coverage, and the overall lowering tide would seem to be good for America. One of my new lines when print journalism types start fretting about the blogosphere is to remind people that the emerging media landscape can't possibly be worse than 24 hour cable news, which often seems to be going out of its way to be uninformative. Casualties Up
SecDef Robert Gates admits that U.S. military deaths are back on the upswing in Iraq. McClatchy reports that "April has been the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since September, with 44 troops killed, compared to 39 in March and 29 in February." Spencer Ackerman offers analysis: To make a calmer, more substantive point about what we’re seeing in Iraq. The rhythm of any protracted war goes something like this: you do stuff; the enemy responds; you adjust; so does he; and on and on until a point of decision is reached. An Air Force colonel named John Boyd once coined a useful (if jargony) term for this: The OODA Loop, where “OODA” stands for “Observation / Orientation / Decision / Action.” Boyd reasoned that the initiative in war goes to he who can achieve a faster OODA Loop than his enemy, and who can disrupt his enemy’s Loop. Spencer thinks instead that it was merely disrupted but "the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed." I'm not 100 percent happy with that characterization (more on why later), but I think it does capture the important point that in war a successful tactical shift is no guarantee of strategic victory since other players get to change tactics as well. A broader point I would make is that one thing I was reminded of while researching and writing Heads in the Sand is exactly how many times we've won the war in Iraq. Today we're celebrating "Mission Accomplished" day but that was only one of several occasions on which war skeptics w |
