Gone Too Far
My estimation of Hillary Clinton has gone way down over the past six months, but we Obama fans still have a long way to go before we can match the likes of WorldNetDaily's "How Hillary will lead America into hell".
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May 4, 2008 - May 10, 2008 Archives
May 4, 2008
Plan A
Kevin Drum, talking about Ricardo Sanchez, mentions the idea that "the Wolfowitz/Feith/Rumsfeld plan to immediately draw down to 30,000 troops and essentially abandon Iraq is pretty well known, though never officially acknowledged by the Bush administration to the best of my knowledge."
Clearly -- both in retrospect, at the time, and in advance to anyone with any sense -- this was a pretty stupid plan and couldn't possibly have worked. But given that the alternative hasn't worked either, wouldn't it possibly have been better if Bush had just listened to Rumsfeld? I've suspected for a while that a lot of pro-war Democrats basically expected that outcome -- "the war" would be a "success," and then there would be the giant postwar mess that average Americans didn't care much about because it didn't involve U.S. troops, and then guys like Ken Pollack would point out that they'd written articles saying that successful reconstruction "will likely require a presence of as many as 200,000 troops" for "one or two years" and claiming Bush ineptly screwed things up.
Catch-22
Griff Witte and Ellen Knickmeyer report that "The shortage in U.S.-funded supplies threatens the Palestinian government's ability to provide security in the West Bank, which Israel has made a condition of future withdrawals from the occupied territories." And why is there a shortage in U.S.-funded supplies? Well, in addition to making competent Palestinian security forces a condition for withdrawal from the West Bank, "Israel has traditionally viewed Palestinian security forces as potential adversaries" and therefore "Israel failed to approve delivery of the requested supplies in time for the deployment, according to senior Palestinian officials."
Obviously, obviously, complex situation, much blame to go around, etc., but this kind of thing -- things which most Americans are very ill-informed about -- is why Arabs tend to doubt Israel's protestations that they're eager for a fair and peaceful resolution of the conflict.
Angst
David Sirota has a nice post up on book-related anxiety as a publication date becomes imminent. The good news, as I've discovered, is that either my book is universally beloved (unlikely, but if true perhaps not reassuring to other authors) or else that in general people who don't like one's book are too polite to say so (reassuring).
Ask, and Ye Shall...
I was in New York last weekend and remarked to a few people that I thought the city would benefit from a more strictly schematic subway map. Well, low and behold what's Men's Vogue done but get Massimo Vignelli to do a more strictly schematic map of the New York subway system.
Locally Uncompetitive
Via Ryan Avent, David Scheicher has an interesting paper about the lack of partisan competition in elections for city council races:
Despite the attention given to the anticompetitive effects of gerrymandering on national and state elections, little notice is paid to the least competitive legislative elections in America: its city council elections. In cities with partisan elections, individual competitive seats are rarer than at the national level and there is almost never competition for partisan control of councils. Nonpartisan city council elections are even worse, with virtually undefeatable incumbents and no policy competition of any kind. The dominant explanation in the political science literature for this phenomenon is that the lack of partisan competition in local elections is a result of the issues at play in local politics. Local politics, the argument goes, is not ideological - it is only about the competence with which public goods are provided and the allocation of these goods to different groups. This claim cannot stand up to scrutiny. Debates over issues like policing strategy and urban development are ideological, and voters do have beliefs about them, but there is still no partisan competition.
This paper argues that the explanation for the lack of partisan competition in city council elections lies in the laws governing these elections. Several laws - by my definition “unitary party rules” - serve to ensure that the national parties are on the ballot in local elections and that candidates, activists and voters do not defect from dominant national parties during local elections. When combined with the little information available about individual council candidates, the existence of the national party heuristic on local ballots crowds out other information and the laws create severe barriers to entry for potential local parties. The result is that the vote in city council elections directly tracks the vote in national elections, despite strong empirical evidence that voters have very different beliefs about local and national issues. In cities in which one party dominates at the national level, there is no competition. Thus, local legislatures are extremely unrepresentative of voter preferences and have little democratic legitimacy. Repealing the unitary party rules would spur a rearrangement of the two-party system at the local level and create party competition at the local level.
The basic issue is that beliefs about national issues don't map well onto beliefs about local issues. The Progressives thought the solution to this was non-partisan local elections, and until recently I thought so, too, but the research indicates that the situation is even worse in non-partisan election cities. I always found the choice voting system used to elect the Cambridge, MA City Council to be pretty appealing and wonder if it would, in some ways, help bring about what non-partisan local elections were supposed to achieve.
The High Price of Cheap Gas
Steve Mufson has a good item up on the Washington Post website about how many countries, especially in the developing world, actually subsidize gasoline consumption which, among other things, keeps demand high even in the face of soaring oil prices because customers don't necessary see the price at the pump.
From an environmental point of view this is, obviously, terrible public policy. It's also not terribly sound economics. Particularly damaging, however, is the long-run implications of this sort of thing. China has a golden opportunity to look at the problems currently afflicting the United States and decide to pour its burgeoning wealth into building sustainable transportation infrastructure and lifestyles from the ground up, instead of first building all-cars-all-the-time and then trying to retrofit to 21st century realities. Instead, though, they're subsidizing gas consumption.
Friends of B
Friends of the Earth, which had earlier endorsed John Edwards (like Peter and a certain Trust Fund Scumbag), hops on the Obama bandwagon, citing his solid climate change plan and his principled stand in favor of good sense on the gas tax question.
The Black Blogosphere
Washington Post writes up Color of Change and other activism-oriented African-American blogs. Much as with white activist bloggers, some of the dramatic rhetoric and transformational aspirations seems overblown, but I think the impact is very real and fundamentally positive.
Good To Know
I had no idea that the economic interests of oil companies were identical with those of the vast majority of Americans. Good thing we've got Hillary Clinton, Populist Extraordinaire around to tell us otherwise:
She did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”
Economists, environmentalists, everyone who's thought about the issue for ten minutes, etc. I'm not going to say that our public policy should blindly conform to the consensus among the economics profession, but the gas tax holiday is an illiteracy on a much deeper level -- there's simply no support for this idea among people who've looked at it in a serious way. That's not elitism, that's reality, and what Clinton's selling is Bush-style misgovernment.
Fair and Balanced
Sweet Iraq panel from the NYT. It's got Richard Perle and Danielle Pletka and Frederick Kagan and Paul Bremer. That's four out of the nine slots! Plus you've got Ken Pollack, and what Spencer Ackerman describes as "non-liberal members of the reality-based community like Paul Eaton and Anthony Cordesman and Nate Fick." Representing American liberalism in even the liberal New York Times is Anne-Marie Slaughter all by her lonesome -- can't let too many hippies congregate on one op-ed page.
May 5, 2008
"Windfall" Profits
I'd say that John Cole is right and a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies is a pretty bad idea -- it doesn't really make sense to say that we're going to try to pass laws explaining exactly how profitable different kinds of companies should be. Now, "windfall profits tax to raise revenue" (Obama) is a better idea than "windfall profits tax to finance gas tax cut" (Clinton) or "gas tax cut paid for by magic" (McCain) but if you're really willing to hurt the oil companies in the name of the public interest what you really should be doing is raising the gas tax and rebating about half of the revenues to taxpayers.
Half is about the consumer share of the gas tax burden. Some folks will plow all of their rebated cash back into gasoline purchases (thus leaving things about where they were) but others will reduce consumption and use some of that money in other ways ways. Meanwhile, the remaining revenue raised can be spent on alternative modes of transportation. With that done, how profitable oil companies are will just be a question of how cleverly their executives adapt to a new policy environment. Something like BP's claim to be "beyond petroleum" is largely greenwashing, but in principle there's no reason why hugely profitable oil companies couldn't turn themselves into hugely profitably energy companies of another sort. The problem is the oil not the profit.
Monday Rancid Lyrics Blogging
So, you're doubtless wondering to yourself, what's the deal with Rancid's "Olympia, WA" off 1995's ... And Out Come The Wolves. Okay, you're probably not wondering, but Spencer and I were talking about the issue last night. He clued me in to the fact that the reason he wishes he were going back to Olympia is that he's carrying a torch for Tobi Vail, while on tour in New York City. With that context in place, "hanging on the corner of 52nd and Broadway" suddenly snapped into place for me -- they're playing at Roseland not just hanging out in midtown. But what's on sixth street? Visiting the old Curry Row?
Outback Strikes Back
Ezra Klein's right to bemoan the sneering condescension in this NYT piece on suburban chain restaurants. For me, this is made all the worse by the knowledge that the attitude of contempt is almost certainly fake. I was actually born and raised in Manhattan by fancy-pants parents who wouldn't dream of darkening the door of an Outback Steakhouse. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge by father has never tasted the joys of Chili's (those two are my favorites).
All of which has mostly made me aware of how rare this is. Most of New York City's elitists grew up in very conventional middle class suburbs and then moved to the city sometime after college. They may look like -- indeed, be -- Greenpoint hipsters now, but they come from the same places as all the other college educated white people in this country. Moreover, one suspects that the exotic locales visited by the Times' intrepid correspondents -- such places as Westchester and northern New Jersey -- are just where many Times readers live and dare I venture to guess that perhaps a few of the Times's writers and editors even commute in from the suburbs. Indeed, their section on the Olive Garden might have mentioned that there are three Olive Gardens in New York City one of which is about five blocks from the NYT building.
The Real Threat
Professional crazy person Daniel Pipes explains that the real threat's not from terrorists, it's from peaceful Muslim moderates:
“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”
You see, first Harvard starts trying to accommodate Muslim students who want a gender-segregated exercise space. From there, it's just a hop skip and a jump to taking over the school system and -- bam -- dhimmitude! All while Chamberlain-esque liberals were distracted by the mirage of violent radicals who kill people and wasted our time trying to build bridges with other Muslims to isolate and eliminate the hardest-core jihadis. Silly us.
Hack-a-Why
Several weeks ago, a colleague turned me on to David Freedman's 20 Second Time Out blog about the NBA. I don't really agree with all the themes Freedman develops, but one very solid point he's been making is that despite Greg Popovich's sterling reputation and solid track-record of success, his love of hack-a-X plays -- whether "X" is Shaw or Tyson Chandler or whomever -- doesn't make a great deal of sense.
To get it down to cold, hard math the NBA's top team in terms of offensive efficiency this year, Phoenix, scored 1.11 points per possession. Even if you assume no chance of offensive rebound that's equivalent to giving up two shots to a 55 percent free throw shooter. And that's the average for the best offense in the league. San Antonio only gives up 0.95 points on its average possession which is equivalent (again, wrongly ignoring the possibility of an offensive rebound) to giving up two free throws to a 48 percent free throw shooter. In general, bad as guys like Shaq and Chandler are at shooting free throws, for either of them two free shots is still a more-efficient-than-average offensive possession.
As I say, Popovich's love of this tactic is unusually odd since the Spurs are a very good defensive team. The Wizards, by contrast, are a not-so-hot defense that was at times facing off against Ben Wallace who's even worse than Shaq or Chandler, creating a situation where hack-a-Ben really might have been a good idea.
Zakaria Book Club
You're probably all too busy reading the only book that matters to have time for Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World but I'm participating in his TPM Cafe Book Club this week and would post something there about his first contribution to the forum, but I agree with it too much.
Shocking Results
NYT polls the gas tax issue. How remarkable. It's almost as if the press' unusual decision to make some effort to cover the issue in a substantive way led to a better-informed electorate. Weird, wild stuff.
It's strange to me how media types can simultaneously keep in their heads the idea that voters are very concerned about things like high gas prices and the rising costs of health care, but wouldn't be interested in political news that focused on which candidates have good ideas for addressing those problems. Oh well, hopefully we can get back to all freakshow all the time soon.
More Map
Here's another effort at a schematic diagram of the NYC subway system, that I think looks a bit better than the Vignelli one I linked to yesterday.
Iraq-Afghanistan Linkages
The idea that we need to withdraw from Iraq in order to, among other things, focus more effort on Afghanistan is, among other things, a good political talking points for the anti-war side of the Iraq debate. My sense it that very fact has convinced a lot of people that it's just a good talking point for the anti-war side of the Iraq debate. In fact, however, it's totally true. Truer, in fact, than a lot of people realize because the resources being squandered in Iraq include not just our own resources, but the political will of our NATO allies in Afghanistan many of whom are making important contributions there. Robert Farley summarizes Samantha Power on Canada:
It's in this context that articles like Samantha Power's recent Time magazine piece are particularly important. Canada has borne a disproportionate share of the fighting in Afghanistan, and has suffered dreadful casualties. Eighty-two Canadians have thus far been killed in Afghanistan, as compared with ninety-five from the much larger UK contingent. The death rate has taken its toll on Canadian public opinion, but one lesson of the Power article is that Iraq continues to poison everything; to the extent that the Afghan operation is conceived of as part of greater US foreign policy, it becomes less popular.
My experience generally has been that most elites in NATO countries appreciate the importance of the mission in Afghanistan, would like to contribute to its success, and are even willing to risk some level of public opprobrium for doing so. But these are democratic countries and people are accountable to their voters, and voters don't like the idea that Canadian (and British, German, etc.) forces are in Afghanistan in order to hold America's coat so that we can continue our occupation in Iraq and build a multi-billion dollar hotel and condo complex inside the Green Zone.
The Eight Year Itch
I see a lot of folks mocking this grandiose claim from Bill Clinton:
Folks, it's always a mistake to bet against America. It was tough in 1968, and we came back. It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we've had in modern history.
Is that really such a crazy thing to say? I doubt that eight out of the best eight years ever happened during Bill Clinton's term in office. Indeed, one cause of the GOP sweep in 1994 was lingering bad macroeconomic conditions and growth was slowing in the second half of 2000. But there was a solid 5+ year peacetime boom in there with few precedents, and American living standards really did reach a peak in 1998-2000 that was higher than anything in our earlier history and that we've yet to regain. If you'd been president then, you'd be bragging, too.
If You Build It...
Despite a hefty and unfortunate fare increase, Metro ridership is way up in recent months. It's almost as if when regions invest in creating reasonable alternatives to driving, commuters are able to adapt to increased fuel prices by switching their travel patterns around. Some might say further such investments would be a good idea.
Inducing Demand
This Washington Post article on severe traffic problems in Northern Virginia is perhaps a good opportunity to try to explain the concept of "induced demand." I feel like transit advocates sometimes talk about this like it's a mysterious phenomenon where you build the roads and, mystically, the road calls into existence its own traffic. Realistically, it is, of course, true that if you widened the major NOVA highways the traffic would start flowing faster on them.
But you need to consider what happens next. Right now, many Virginians commute to work by taking Metro or the VRE commuter rail or one of several buses. If there were less traffic, fewer of those people would be inclined to do so. Similarly, right now the very long commute is one reason people might not want to move to certain parts of Prince William or Loudon Counties. But if the commutes got shorter due to reduced traffic, them more people would move. Soon enough the roads are congested again. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just illustrates the point that the purposes of building new roads is to expand the area under development not to relieve traffic congestion. Small dirt roads rarely feature traffic jams, not because they have high capacity but because nobody wants to drive on them. You replace a small dirt road with a better paved one not to improve the flow of traffic, but to encourage people to locate stuff -- homes, businesses, etc. -- along the route of the road. The goal, in short, is to induce demand for driving on the road.
At the end of the day, an uncongested road is an excellent thing and driving on one is a fast and convenient way to get places. And when you have a valuable commodity that's not priced, over the long run people wind up over-consuming it and creating shortages. If the government set up a "french fries trust fund" to cook that were then given away for free, they'd soon enough run out of french fries. It's the same with the effort to build uncongested highways. Over the long run, it only really works for absurd pork barrel schemes that involve building giant roads in places nobody wants to go. If you want an uncongested road in a desirable location, you need to put a price on using the road during peak times and then you need to take the funds raised by the congestion charge to finance alternatives.
Photo by Flickr user ethandb used under a Creative Commons license
GastTaxScam.com
Check out GasTaxScam.com, a new website dedicated to an exciting Clinton/McCain plan to save you big bucks at the pump this summer.
Culture Clash
I'm with Spencer Ackerman on this. It's really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it's not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don't like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.
What a fascinating place Iraq must be! Maybe someday we'll discover that in Arab culture they have this weird thing where people's political allegiances are heavily influenced by issues of ethnic, cultural, and religious identity and that having their destinies controlled by a foreign, religiously alien, occupying army that doesn't speak the language is kind of a drag. Who knows?
Get Out of Jail Free
Facing budgetary pressures, states are looking to save money by letting some folks out of jail early. One can only have mixed feelings about this sort of development. We do over-imprison people in the United States, so from a humanitarian point of view this is nice to see. On the other hand, it's also true that the crime rate in the United States remains at what I'd consider an unacceptably high level and there are some indications that it's on the rise again.
Much better than simply letting people out of jail to save money would be a more focused effort to switch our anti-crime priorities away from such a heavy reliance on incarceration and toward more cost-effective methods. Drug treatment programs that work are great, but not just anything called a drug treatment program actually works. Coerced abstinence (PDF) seems promising, as does simply hiring more police officers. It also wouldn't hurt to see more states and localities trying harder to identify and implement "best practices" from elsewhere on the policing front since some jurisdictions have much more success than others at successfully preventing crime. One could imagine a valuable federal role here beyond the money provided by something like a revived COPS program.
Time Machine
Ryan Avent says we can't go back in time "and redo the last ten years" of transporation policy. But wouldn't it be nice if we could? And not just on transportation, either. There are tons and tons of policy areas in which a time machine would be an enormous help. Of course kill a butterfly in the past and the next thing you know fascists take over in the present so maybe it's a bad idea.
The McCain Foreign Policy
Eric Rauchway and Pete Scoblic have both published nice pieces recently making the point that McCain seems to be indicating a desire to go further than Bush in unraveling the internationalist framework that's basically served America well since World War II. There's also what Jacob Heilbrunn says here:
Heilbrunn knows neocons, he wrote the book on them. Of course if you want a longer-form version of the argument about McCain's dangerous foreign policy vision you need to check out my definitive take. And I'll spare any mention of a potentially relevant book that you can find way down at the bottom of the floor where finer bookstores stash works whose authors' last names begin with the letter "Y."
Dear Washington, DC
It seems unfair for the city to refuse to pick up our garbage for several weeks and then to send an inspector around threatening to fine us for having too much garbage sitting outside the house. We live in the house and don't want the garbage to be there either.
HITS Web Video
It's me and Ross Douthat, talking about Heads in the Sand:
There will be a sequel about Grand New Party as that book's release date grows near.
The Battle Continues
More on the District's unrelenting war on my house. Don't these guys know we were featured in the NYT Style section? We could have important taste-makers crush them like bugs.
Clinton vs. OPEC
This Clinton campaign idea of somehow busting up the OPEC cartel not only seems impractical (how, exactly would this get done?) but it also bespeaks a real ignorance of what's happening with the price of gas. It's just not the case that the current price escalation is driven by OPEC-induced supply restrictions -- all indications are that everyone's producing as much oil as they possibly can. After all, with prices this high how could you afford not to pump as much oil as you could? It's just that demand for oil is high and rising, so the price goes up.
May 6, 2008
Will Mac Be Back
In the course of making some good points about Bobby Jindal yesterday, Ross mentioned "the possibility that [McCain] would only serve one term." I've heard a lot of speculation about this from conservative pundits, but it seems like a fairly straightforward question that McCain ought to be asked and that he ought to give some kind of answer to.
I think it was Ramesh Ponnuru who first suggested that it might be a canny move for McCain to foreswear ambitions for a second term, and I think he was right -- it would assuage fears about his age, make conservatives happier about him, fit in with his "straight-talk" persona, and give us all more opportunity discuss TMBG's "James K. Polk".
O'Hanlon v. Army
Michael O'Hanlon wants us to know that contrary to myth, the Army's just in great shape and not at all overburdened by the situation in Iraq. Brandon Freidman points out considerable evidence from within the military that O'Hanlon is wrong and the conventional wisdom got in place because it's, you know, true.
Kids Today
Blake Hounshell draws our attention to a distressing trend:
A teenage rap duo in Chicago has recorded a track, aptly called "The Economist," that extols the British publication's breadth and brevity and samples podcast commentary by correspondents Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb.
"The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?" the rappers wonder.
The answer, of course, is "heavy-handed editing" facilitated by lack of bylines.
Strange Ceasefire
This story out of Nigeria is getting around on the internet:
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has said it is considering a temporary cessation of hostilities in the oil-producing region based on an appeal by United States presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Obama.
MEND also said in an e-mail that its ceasefire was to enable the federal government to have a rethink over the way it has handled the matter concerning its leader, Mr. Henry Okah.[...]
"The MEND command is seriously considering a temporary ceasefire appeal by Senator Barack Obama. Obama is someone we respect and hold in high esteem. The period of halting attacks, we hope, when considered, will afford the Nigerian government the opportunity to address the issues with Henry Okah, including improving his living conditions and having access to a bible which he has requested for but was denied," they said.
Fascinatingly, I checked with the Obama campaign and they don't believe Obama actually made any such appeal. So someone's making something up.
UPDATE: A somewhat different version of the story is on the Reuters wire.
Official Prediction
I should make an official prediction about tonight, right? Well, clearly the universe is conspiring to make this primary last as long as possible. So what's going to happen is that (of course) Clinton will win Indiana and Obama will win North Carolina. But Clinton will win Indiana by a larger margin than Obama wins North Carolina, and Clinton's supporters will note in somber tones that Obama lost the white vote in NC. At the same time, because NC has substantially more delegates than Indiana, Obama will actually make a small gain in net delegates causing his supporters (i.e. me) to become further enraged at Clinton's refusal to admit that she's lost and the press' insistence on indulging the idea that there's real doubt about the ultimate outcome.
It's True
Ever since I got my bike I've been capable of extraordinary new sexual feats:
That's via Ezra Klein who's got some translation, but really you ought to be able to figure it out.
He's a Muslim -- And His Minister's Nuts Too!
Lisa Shiffren at NRO walks us another step forward in trying to mainstream the notion that Barack Obama had a secret Muslim upbringing -- "Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don't know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank."
Pipes is, of course, a crank as we saw in yesterday's post where he was busy complaining that the real threat is that sneaky Muslims will abandon terrorism and start using the democratic process to get their way. What makes this kind of thing so odious is that once you manage to present the question, there's no way to debunk it. Is John McCain a manchurian candidate controlled by North Vietnamese Communists? He denies it, but these cranks say he is and if he's lying it speaks to his character. And how's McCain supposed to categorically disprove the charges? After all, none of us really know what happened in those jungle prison camps. . . .
For Economists Before She Was Against Them
And oh what a time it was:
It should be said that I wouldn't find anything especially objectionable about going for a policy most economists don't like if you were able to articulate some kind of reason for doing so. But all Clinton has to offer in response is vacant anti-elitist posturing.
California Love
A reminder that tomorrow at 7:30 PM Pacific time, I'll be doing a Heads in the Sand event at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Please come out if you can, since I can't coerce random friends into filling the room.
Did McCain Vote for Bush
Arianna Huffington says John McCain told her shortly after the 2000 election that he didn't vote for George W. Bush, McCain's camp now denies this which prompted this funny rejoinder from Huffington about McCain's history of denying he did things he clearly did:
He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry's '04 running mate -- then later admitted he had, insisting: "Everybody knows that I had a conversation." He denied admitting that he didn't know much about economics, even though he'd said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun. He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record. He denied that he'd ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.
Clearly, I don't know what McCain did or didn't do in the voting booth in 2000, but considering the position she was taking at the time it does seem like the logical thing to do would have been for McCain to support Gore. In 2000, after all, Bush's signature initiative was a tax cut proposal that, at at the time, McCain opposed -- just like Gore. Similarly, McCain's signature initiative was a campaign finance reform proposal that Bush opposed but Gore favored. On foreign policy, I don't think a clear differentiation emerged between Bush and Gore, but many construed Bush's rhetoric as calling for a retrenchment of American commitments abroad at a time when McCain was calling to expand them and adopt "rogue state rollback" as a signature issue. Gore's running mate was Joe Lieberman, who's clearly someone McCain adores. As a career Republicans, you could imagine McCain deciding he couldn't possible vote for Gore and just not voting, but considering the issue positions and personal bitterness why would McCain have voted for Bush?
The issue landscape has changed a lot in eight years with Democrats generally moving left on domestic issues while McCain's moved right and seen the GOP mainstream line up with his previously idiosyncratic brand of apocalyptic nationalism even as the once-pressing McCain-Feingold issue has come to look trivial. But in the past McCain voting for a Democrat was quite plausible -- after all, he soon went on to discuss switching parties, to discussing being Kerry's VP nominee, etc.
Washington Offseason
Word is that the Wizards are planning to resign Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison. That all simply raises the question resign them for how much money? Jamison is unquestionably a good player, and Agent Zero was a good player when he was healthy and presumably will be again -- they're guys that, all else being equal, it's good to have on your team, but all else is rarely equal.
Gilbert, in particular, keeps talking as if he expects a max deal and I think that'd be crazy. The maximum salary rule is a great opportunity that allows a select number of lucky teams to underpay elite players -- guys like Chris Paul and LeBron James are never going to be able to do what Shaq and Kevin Garnett did and get paid their real market value. You don't want to blow that kind of opportunity on lesser players unless you've got good reason to. This year, Jamison's earning $16 million and Arenas is earning $12 million and I seriously doubt there's another team in the league that's in a position to offer either of them more than that. And yet, sometimes you see a franchise do what Orlando did with Rashard Lewis last year and overbid the market for no real reason.
D'Antoni to Chicago
I wish Mike D'Antoni well, but Chicago seems like an odd choice of destination considering that the Bulls have been constructed around a defense first gameplan and that's hardly what D'Antoni's known for. On the other hand, the way in which Chicago spectacularly failed to meet anyone's expectations this year certainly seems to argue in favor of a change in direction. It was so strange to watch a pretty good and very young team regress so far.
The Said Factor
I like the thought, but I'm skeptical that Kathy G. is right to think that more widespread knowledge of Edward Said's work would have posed some kind of substantial stumbling block to the effort to sell the country on the Iraq War. The main intellectual drivers behind America's post-9/11 approach to the Middle East were, if not Said experts, at least broadly familiar with the general thrust of his work (I'd put myself in that category as well) which is precisely why you see things like The Weekly Standard publishing an Edward Said takedown piece by Stanley Kurtz on their October 8, 2001 issue.
Then they took another whack at Said in their November 12, 2001 issue. And Frank Foer offered a sweeping dismissal of Middle East Studies as a discipline in the December 3, 2001 issue of The New Republic tracing the field's flaws to none other than Said. In general, this was a period when "Arabist" became a term of disapprobation and it temporarily became conventional wisdom that foreign service professionals' judgment was mostly corrupted by excessive solicitousness of the opinions of foreign governments. Elites were generally familiar with the broad set of ideas that called the wisdom of invading Iraq into question -- from Middle East studies thinking to the realist tradition of international relations analysis to the mainstream opinion of the U.S. Army officer's corps -- it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken.
The Most Exciting Week of the Year
Did you know that this week is National Charter Schools Week. I know I'll be celebrating!
Seriously, though, charter schools are great. Parents ought to have some diversity of options when considering where to send their kids to school, but the public money shouldn't be spent without a measure of public accountability and the charter school framework is a good way in which to accomplish that.
I Don't Care if I Ever Get Back
Hillary Clinton shows off her deep connection with the common man:
"We're going to knock balls out of the country's park," [Mrs Clinton] says, standing in a minor-league baseball stadium, "for the home team, which is America".
Glad we cleared up which country we live in.
While You Wait
For results to come in from Indiana and North Carolina, check out Spencer Ackerman interviewing David Petraeus.
Indiana
I'm calling this one for Clinton, the official exit polls have her winning women and narrowly winning men. That means Clinton wins.
North Carolina
Called instantly for Obama, must be a big win.
UPDATE: Obama wins men and Obama wins women. And look at this --
For comparison, George Allen got 15 percent of the black vote in 2006.
Obama-Clinton
I'm seeing Harold Ford, Jr. on television talking about how maybe an Obama-Clinton ticket would be the best way for Obama to appeal to white working class voters. I think there's no doubt that enhancing his appeal to white working class voters should be an important considering in thinking about a VP choice. But when you consider all the possibilities, does anyone seriously think that Clinton is the politician with the most appeal to white working class voters? I think the evidence is clear that she has more appeal to them than Barack Obama does but she hardly seems like the best possible choice.
Narrow Wins
As we wait to hear from Indiana, it's always worth recalling that there's no real substantial difference between a narrow win in Indiana and a narrow loss in Indiana. A lot of our primary punditry has proceeded as if this is the electoral college and there's a huge difference, but the Democrats' rules for delegate allocation assures at this point that Indiana's going to be a push while Obama picks up a nice parcel of delegates out of North Carolina.
National Security as Social Policy
One observation is that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are giving foreign policy issues extremely short shrift in their campaign. Instead of discussing them, both are making reference to the idea that the Bush administration hasn't done enough in terms of providing services for veterans. It's true, I think they haven't done enough, but I also think it's a dangerous trap for Democrats to think that talking about this issue is a substitute for talking about the substance of national security policy.
May 7, 2008
The Other Race
Okay, let's talk basketball. I missed the game because of the stupid election. This seems too close for comfort if you're Boston. What happened?
Now We Know
Tim Russert just said "we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be." I certainly agree with that, but I do wonder why it's just now dawning on the TV talking heads. March 4 was Clinton's chance to make up the ground she lost in February, and she wasn't able to do it. We knew as of March 5 who the nominee was going to be.
Oh well. Glad to see more folks are realizing, and maybe we can wind this thing down. I guess I should try to go to bed before flying to California tomorrow for the Nixon Library event (be there!).
My Head Blogs
Here I am bloggingheadsing with Reihan Salam mostly talking about HITS but the New York Times liked the part about Iran.
Outdated
John McCain doesn't seem to realize that there hasn't been a country called "Czechoslovakia" for about fifteen years. One wag joked to me that we should cut him some slack since "When he was studying geography, the place was called Bohemia." In fact, however, the Czech Republic is to this day composed of two provinces, one of which is Bohemia and the other is Moravia.
My First Day
On Day One is a neat initiative where they ask people to outline what they would advice the next president to do on day one of their administration. I recorded one last week and said we should recommit to nuclear disarmament and the multi-lateral non-proliferation process:
Of course in reality the savvy president will spend day one thinking about the decorating and putting outlandish demands on the White House chef. There are plenty of days left after that to worry about things like nuclear proliferation.
Means Matter
Yesterday, Andrew linked to some skepticism from Hampton Stephens about Barack Obama's alternative to Bushism:
To replace neoconservative democracy promotion by force, Obama seems to be proposing a different kind of crusade. He and his advisers seem to believe that American foreign policy can deliver the human race from indignity and want. Even if their strategy for achieving this goal doesn't rely on military force, such an expansive view of the capabilities of U.S. foreign policy is dangerously unrealistic. It seems particularly overly ambitious in light of the growing evidence about what traditional forms of development aid have actually accomplished. (Not to mention that Obama's agenda seems too hostile to a form of global development and economic uplift that often proves rather more effective than aid: trade.)
I don't really think this holds water. The rhetoric of American foreignpolicymaking has always been suffused with grand -- some would say grandiose -- aspirations and professions of lofty ideals. And yet the actual substance of policymaking has differed enormously over the years, decades, and centuries. That's because methods -- what's dismissed here as "their strategy for achieving this goal" -- are essentially the entire ballgame. Practical American politicians will always commit themselves to a set of basically similar highest-order goals of spreading wonderfulness throughout time and space. Even in our "do not seek out monsters to destroy" phases we're supposed to be a model the rest of the world will emulate.
Are these aspirations "dangerously unrealistic" and "overly ambitious?" I think it depends on what you mean. To say that the short-run policy objective of the United States is to wage war on tyranny is dangerous and unrealistic. But to say that the long-run goal of the United States is to do what we can to foster the conditions of international peace and prosperity that are most conducive to the spread of liberalism and democracy seems eminently sensible.
Tiering Iron Man
WaPost derides Iron Man as a "second-tier" super hero. Jonathan Last tries to defend his first-tier status, but I think that's a mistake. The problem with the article is that it doesn't do due deference to the significance of the second tier. At the end of the day, the first tier of costumed crime fighters is limited to just three members -- Superman, Spiderman, and Batman -- truly ubiquitous figures who any American could recognize even if they don't know anything about them.
Iron Man belongs firmly to a second-tier of major comic book characters who'd be instantly familiar to anyone who was, at any time in his or (less likely) her life a reader of superhero books.
Where a lot of folks surprised about the success of the Iron Man film seem to me to have gone wrong is just in underestimating how big the audience for the second-tier is. But the reality is that while current-and-former comic book fans are a minority of Americans, it's a pretty big minority, and it doesn't really take that many people to make a hit movie. A third- or forth-rate hero like Elongated Man could never carry the day, but the second tier is fertile ground if you just manage to put a decent film together.
Pill Kills
Jessica Valenti draws our attention to the latest initiative from the American Life League -- the Pill Kills campaign dedicated, it seems, to complaining about the Griswold decision that overturned bans on contraceptives. That's a terrible, terrible agenda the League is pushing but you've got to give them credit for seriousness of purpose -- all too often you see social conservatives aiming at what amount to marginal targets like gay marriage and abortion when the logic of their critique is aimed at stuff like divorce and basic birth control.
Editing Anyone
Bill Kristol's column from Monday:
In a New York Times/CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John McCain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times/CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out yesterday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.
As Noam Scheiber notes it's a bit curious of Kristol to have left out the precise numbers from the new poll. But what it says is that Obama hasa lead of 51 to 40 which is identical to Obama's previous lead. I'm hardly shocked to see Kristol playing some funny games, but shouldn't there be some kind of editing of the Times columnists? Surely the NYT has it within its powers to be aware of the results of its own polls and get its writers to characterize the trends accurately.
Who's Afraid of STV?
The other day, I suggested that the single-transferrable vote method they use to elect the Cambridge City Council in Massachusetts might help other cities out with the problematic lack of competition in local elections. Reihan Salam told me that STV "used to be in the model code for cities, and was used (in similar form) in New York city, Cincinnati, and other big cities. It was abandoned due to fear of Communism and the threat (gasp!) of minority mayors." Well, now that we don't have to worry about Communism anymore, it seems like more cities should go back to this.
Note that adopting STV needn't mean that other cities would need to emulate Cambridge (and many other smaller cities) in abandoning strong mayors in favor of a council/manager system where mayor is a mostly symbolic post. The two issues are different and, in general, I think most American cities should have stronger mayors because there's generally more accountability at that level.
I also actually think that STV could ameliorate some of our gerrymandering issues. Most states could get by with 1-3 multiple-member constituencies which would simply reduce the significance of the precise contours of the district boundaries. People often don't seem to realize this, but the constitution doesn't actually mandate that we elect members of congress in the way that we do. Single member constituencies elected with first past the post voting happens to be the method every state uses, but like the proliferation of bicameral state legislatures this is just blind adherence to misguided tradition and not an actual rule.
Photo by Flickr user Allan Patrick used under a Creative Commons license
The Feminist Wedge
Betsy Reed has a shrewd piece in The Nation complaining about blind support by the more institutionalized, establishmentarian arm of the feminist movement for an increasingly appalling Clinton campaign.
Purple Toupee
I'm no longer convinced that John McCain should make a one term pledge. After all, as commenters to the previous post argued there are other ways to make TMBG relevant to the McCain campaign. Consider, for example, "Purple Toupee" which I think he should use as a theme song.
First, McCain's desire to see heightened China-Taiwan tensions in order to prompt a new Cold War and inflate his own sense of self-importance:
Chinese people were fighting in the park
We tried to help them fight, no one appreciated that
Martin X was mad when they outlawed bell bottoms
Ten years later they were sharing the same cell
I shouted out, "Free the Expo '67"
Till they stepped on my hair, and they told me I was fat
Now I'm very big, I'm a big important man
And the only thing that's different is underneath my hat
And more broadly, a an anachronistic authoritarian streak:
Purple toupee is here to stay after the hair has gone away
The purple brigade is marching from the grave
We're on some kind of mission
We have an obligation
We have to wear toupees
Don't say you weren't warned.
Nixon Library Event
Just one more reminder about tonight's Nixon Library event for Heads in the Sand. I realize there are a lot of folks in L.A. proper for whom the time/location's no good but this is all I've got in terms of travel to the area (the terms of the trip are that I can't use the Nixon Library dime to come out west and then do events at other places) so try to come if you can.
Burma
I keep realizing I haven't mentioned the horrifying tragedy in Burma and then realizing I'm not sure what I could possibly say about the horrifying tragedy in Burma. But I suppose one thing to say is that, as is usually the case in these situation, you've got a natural disaster which is then compounded by bad, unaccountable government (sort of like Katrina amped-up by a few orders of magnitude) of the sort that really only an autocracy can bring you. It's a reminder that we should be fairly confident that, over the long haul, democratically governed nations can survive and prosper in ways that it's very difficult for dictatorships to do.
SoCal Tragedy
The thing you really forget about the deplorable land use and development patterns in southern California (and the Soutwest more generally) until you come back out here is how goddamn nice the weather is, a fact that takes the situation out of the realm of farce and into tragedy. You know what a good place to never walk anywhere would be? Boston or Chicago in the winter. Or maybe DC or New York in the summer. That's some nasty weather to be walking around in.
But LA would be a great place to walk or ride a bike to work all year 'round. But it's our bad weather belt that has the walkable cities, and our sunny and temperate all the time region that barely has sidewalks.
After Gas Tax
Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but it seems to me that the failure of the Hillary Clinton gas tax holiday gambit may prove to be something of a watershed in the politics of climate policy. A lot of thinking by political people over the years has been dominated by the idea that the public is absolutely fixated on cheap gasoline by any means possible. We seem to be seeing, however, that that's not necessarily the case. Obviously, that's not to say that the public is now going to run to embrace Yglesias-esque schemes overnight, but it does show that the boundaries of political possibility may not be quite where most folks thought they were.
Meanwhile, I think it continues to be noteworthy that most of Barack Obama's most impressive moments have been essentially counterattacks to silly gambits from Team Clinton -- not just this gas tax business, but the "naive and irresponsible" diplomacy, etc. -- and I'm not really sure if it's noteworthy in a good way or noteworthy in a bad way.
The MI/FL Excuse
Yesterday, Marc Ambinder reported "Another strategist, Harold Ickes, has told colleagues that he does not believe that she should think about dropping out until, at the very least, the questions of Florida and Michigan are resolved." It's worth pointing out that this makes no real sense. Nothing would do more to help resolve the Florida and Michigan issue than for Clinton to drop out and endorse Obama. If she did that, the only remaining issue would be to strike a balance between representing FL and MI at the convention and slapping FL and MI on the wrist hard enough that states don't pull this kind of stunt again. That's a needle you can thread any number of ways.
It's the fact that the campaign is continuing that makes the question difficult to resolve because it has both campaigns focused on maximizing their delegate counts rather than dealing with the aforementioned issue. Which, I suppose, is part of what makes it such an appealing pretext for staying in the race -- as a rationale it has a nice circular logic where the campaign can't end 'till MI and FL are resolved, but the issue can't be resolved until the campaign ends, so on and on we go.
May 8, 2008
Obama and Affordable Housing
I think Ezra's giving short shrift to Barack Obama's housing policy commitments. It's true that, as for every president, affordable housing issues aren't going to be priority number one in the Obama administration. But his support for creating an Affordable Housing Trust Fund isn't just boilerplate, this is actual legislation that's a top priority for affordable housing advocates.
Note, conversely, that programs conservatives claim to believe in like Section 8 housing vouchers suffered a lot under the GOP congress and would suffer much, much, much more under John McCain's proposed cutbacks of domestic discretionary spending.
Good for Carper
Delaware Senator Tom Carper does the unthinkable and talks about the vital importance of rail and transit to building a coherent national energy policy. Good for him!
Photo by Flickr user mllerustad used under a Creative Commons license
Word Count
Rob Goodspeed analyzes how many words each candidate's website dedicates to each issue. You can see that John McCain has very little to say outside his security/Iraq/veterans comfort zone. To me, that means it's vital for Barack Obama to try to hit McCain early in that comfort zone since that's where it'll be hardest to build an argument that convinces people, but I think Democratic strategists have a bad habit of preferring to stay within their own comfort zone.
Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran
Say what you will about John Bolton, I think he has an admirable tendency to avoid mincing words and just say what he thinks:
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.
“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”
That's about a hundred times better than all the kvetching you hear from certain quarters about Iran -- Bolton wants war and he's not afraid to say it. Nor has he been afraid in months past to say that he loves John McCain because he thinks McCain agrees with him about the need to start a war with Iran. I think Bolton's right about this, but McCain's the kind of guy who'll want to start a war with Iran, and who'll say things that sort of indicate he wants to start a war with Iran, and who'll even joke about how eager he is to start a war with Iran, but then get pissed off if you suggest that's his policy.
Defending HRC
I think the waves of outrage washing throughout the Obamasphere over this remark from Hillary Clinton reflect an echo chamber mentality more than anyone else. Here's what Clinton's quoted as saying:
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
As quoted, that's a dumb thing to say which seems to imply that non-white voters or perhaps all Obama supporters are lazy. But add a pinch of charitable interpretation into the dynamic, and I think Clinton's meaning is perfectly clear -- she really does do better than Obama among white working class voters in Democratic primary elections. I don't buy the argument, often made by Clinton supporters, that this edge among white working class Democratic primary voters indicates a substantial Clinton electability edge in the general election (it's one part fallacy, two parts baseless speculation, and then a grain of truth) but it's a common argument and not an offensive one.
Meanwhile, just from a tactical posture the closer this thing gets to being over the less point there is in Obama supporters getting super snarky and indignant about everything the Clinton campaign does. At this point, Obama's job is to start making people who find this sort of argument plausible like him more, not to crush Hillary Clinton.
Rush to Judgment
Um . . . I guess I'll follow the Philly PD's lead and avoid a "rush to judgment" about this video:
That certainly doesn't seem open to a wide variety of interpretations.
War on Islam
John McCain's "spiritual guide" explains that we need to understand America's purpose as waging a broad-brush campaign against Islam:
A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn't nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don't get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes' and Rod Parsley's of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain's foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this'll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.
The PBR Candidate
Barack Obama gets fake in touch with the working man:
At the Raleigh Times bar in downtown Raleigh yesterday, Mr Obama arrived in the late afternoon with his wife Michelle only to find himself momentarily beerless.
"Where's my beer?" he asked, loud enough for the reporters to hear.
"PBR," he said, choosing Pabst Blue Ribbon, an inexpensive lager, before working the crowd.
Zeroed in, that is, on the inexpensive mass market lager of . . . elitist hipsters. Jonathan Kulick calls our attention to this relevant clip:
Now what's fascinating and terrifying about the country we live in is that were it to happen to be the case that Barack Obama had tasted amber Maharaja IPA in the past, really loved amber Maharaja IPA, and therefore decided to order an amber Maharaja IPA that fact would have featured prominently in cable news coverage for days and doubtless been the subject of at least one Maureen Dowd column.
The Reminder
John McCain wants Hispanic America to remember that he's not from the "I hate you and blame you for all the country's problems" wing of the GOP:
I think it's a pretty shrewd ad. Unlike white or black Anglos, Latino voters tend to eschew culture-based voting and instead act the way Thomas Frank thinks everyone should act with the poorer ones being Democrats and the richer ones being Republicans, and so the overall edge going Democratic given the income distribution. The risk for Republicans is that the orgy of hate we saw from their side in 2006-2007 will push many more prosperous Hispanics over to the Democratic side. McCain's mission is to communicate "I'm not a racist" to his most likely Hispanic supporters, and given the tendency of small business owners everywhere to love the GOP a specific focus on small business seems smart.
Nothing to See Here
Michael Calderone and Avi Zenilman: "'Deafening silence' from networks on military analysts". It's as if The New York Times' famous ability to set the agenda for TV news magically evaporates when wholesale corruption on the part of TV news becomes the story. They were complicit in lying to the public, they got caught, and they're not even slightly embarrassed or ashamed.
Good Old Socialism
You read stuff like this and really feel sorry for University of Tennessee students (see also). It's fine for Glenn Reynolds to have as low an opinion of Barack Obama as he likes, but it seems to me that law professors should have some idea of what a "socialist view of government" consists of. I'm pretty sure Reynolds knows that Obama's not proposing the nationalization of industry or collective ownership of the means of production, so he must be confused about socialism.
Taxicab Journalism
It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked as we cruised toward LAX that there'd been less congestion in Orange County recently. He attributed this to the high price of gasoline, and said that people were car pooling more on the way to work, having one friend pick up another en route to socializing rather than everyone taking separate vehicles, and even taking the bus (though he limited this option to "poor Latinos") in order to save money.
They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes" but in journalism school you learn that there's a cab driver exception to this rule. This is especially the case when cab-based anecdotes fit the writer's preconceived political views. Ergo, people actually have somewhat more flexibility in terms of how much they drive than is often realized. So let's hear it for higher gas taxes, and for Orange County to spend money building bike lanes and providing more frequent bus service.
Whose Mistake?
An odd bit from an article on the housing bust in Maricopa, AZ (via Atrios):
Many people blame the bubble and bust on investors — both amateur and professional — who speculated in new homes. "I think that was part of the mistake that the builders made, was that they allowed investors to come in and buy," Abdullah said. "Allowed them to buy tracts of homes, you know, five, six, 10 houses, and they bought them on speculation."
What's the mistake here. Builders bought a bunch of cheap land, then built houses on it, then resold the houses to speculators willing to pay a premium above construction costs despite the lack of objective supply constraints. That's a savvy business strategy, not a mistake. The people who made the mistake were the ones who bought the houses, not the ones who sold them.
Nice House
I'm sure the Metropole condo will be lovely, and I do like the location at 15th and P, but who's really going to want to spend $6 million on a five bedroom Logan Circle condo? It just doesn't seem plausible to me; DC doesn't really have the young rich hedge fund demographic that might buy something like that.
Good Title
I have no idea whether or not S.V. Date's analysis of whether or not Barack Obama can get Florida Jews to vote for him is correct (makes for an interesting read, though) but I was interested to see that according to his byline he wrote a book called Jeb: America's Next Bush. Isn't that a great title? I wish I'd thought of that.
The New Nixon Library
Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was named director. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.
If you read, say, this you'll get a sense of where Tim's coming from politically.
May 9, 2008
Goldfarb: Who Cares About Recruitment?
Watch in amazement along with Justin Logan as The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb says Americans ought to be indifferent to the impact U.S. policy has on al-Qaeda recruiting.
Dripping to the End
After Tuesday's results, I kind of expected a Wednesday superdelegate flood to Barack Obama. It didn't really materialize, though he did pick up some ground. And Thursday was the same way. And now looking at my inbox, it seems like more of the same as Rep. Peter DeFazio endorses Obama while Rep. Donald Payne switches from Clinton to Obama. Stuff on this scale doesn't -- and can't -- lead to a knockout blow, it's more of a death by a thousand cuts thing with the handful of superdelegate defections being especially damaging.
Food for Thought
Ambinder says that Barack Obama's fifty state voting drive is more than a voting drive: "On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC."
One incredibly interesting question is to what extent the organizing tools Obama has put to good use thus far in the campaign can be made to work as tools of governance that put pressure on congress and so forth.
Against Unity
Ed Kilgore's case for an Obama-Clinton ticket has made me like the idea even less. He canvasses various things Clinton would allegedly bring to the ticket, but in almost every case I can think of better people to bring the quality in question. Then there's this -- "She would also bring some national security street cred to the ticket, which is an Obama vulnerability that I suspect is being underappreciated at the moment."
This reflects, I believe, an incredibly damaging mindset that's been crippling the Democratic Party for years and the prospect of excising this mindset is the single most appealing thing about the prospect of Obama being the nominee. Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.
I say good riddance to that. I got the war wrong, and I think that gives me less "cred" than I would have had had I gotten the war right and I think that, politically speaking, it makes sense to put people forward who aren't tainted by the war. But most of all we need to ditch the mindset