« May 25, 2008 - May 31, 2008 | Main | June 8, 2008 - June 14, 2008 » June 1, 2008 - June 7, 2008 ArchivesJune 1, 2008Dystopia is the BestIt's always fun when you see elements of dystopian visions of the future coming true. Arnold Schwarzennegger is a successful politician just like in Demolitiion Man and now in what seemed like the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report come to life some entrepreneurs are "equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard." Tomayto, TomahtoJohn McCain can't tell Sudan from Somalia but none dare point out that when it comes to foreign policy he doesn't know what he's talking about because to point this out would be to disrespect his military service. To The BankIf it's really true, as many people are saying, that Barack Obama has a "bank" of 2-3 dozen superdelegates prepared to endorse him then wouldn't this weekend be a good time to start making withdrawals? The literal impact of him getting a bunch of superdelegate endorsements today and tomorrow in order to ensure that the primaries on Tuesday and Wednesday put him over the finish line, and him getting a bunch of superdelegate endorsements that put him over the line on Thursday and Friday is identical, but on a symbolic plane it seems to me that you want to clinch things with an election result rather than an endorsement announcement. A Surge of RobotsThe defense department is recruiting thousands of new machines for a surge of robots (really). Robert Farley notes that these measures mostly seem "shift the cost of war from the blood side of the ledger to the treasure side." In the short run, this makes questionable military ventures much more sustainable in the United States since we're a rich country and the public's aversion to taxes doesn't extend to an aversion to spending, and the national elite's aversion to deficit spending doesn't extend to defense spending. If Blue Dogs and Concord Coalition types started applying normal budgetary scrutiny to military stuff, it's hard to see this working. But they don't, so it does. It makes me sad to think how much better off we'd be today if the past five years' worth of $100-$200 billion emergency appropriations had been spent on building a clean, economically productive 21st century transportation infrastructure rather than on Iraq. One important political question going forward is whether we'll continue to treat war spending in Iraq as some "doesn't count" black hole or whether the costs of an indefinite engagement there will actually get weighed against alternative uses of our resources. Where Facts are Made-UpClark Hoyt, New York Times public editor, has a devastating rebuttal to the NYT's Edward Luttwak op-ed on Barack Obama being a Muslim apostate: I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong. [...] Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. [...] Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable [...] All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. As a blogger, I'm hardly in a position to dispute Luttwak's right to opine on matters about which he knows nothing. But if I were the editor of an op-ed page and I were interested in publishing a provocative opinion piece grounded in an interpretation of Islamic law, I would try to get a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to write it. But of course if I were the editor of an op-ed page, I would think that one of my goals was to publish articles that inform, rather than mislead, my audience. The actual op-ed editors at the NYT and Washington Post have, however, made it abundantly clear over the years that they see misleading their audience as fine -- hence men like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer get hired as columnists. It does, however, make you wonder what these institutions are for. As means of acquiring information, they're useless -- the editors are indifferent to whether the author's purpose is to inform or to mislead. As entertainment, they're not very entertaining -- even a terrible movie like Crystal Skull is more fun than an op-ed column. Are they important profit centers for the failing businesses in which they're embedded? That seems unlikely. De-Troit BasketballBecause the Detroit Pistons have been in the mix for so long, there's a certain sentiment of finality around the squad once again falling short in the Conference Finals. But it does seem worth pointing out that their future actually looks pretty bright. They have no bad long-term deals on the books whatsoever -- they're two highest-paid players ('Sheed and Billups) are their two highest-paid players, and the two guys on long-term deals (Billups and Tayshaun Prince) are the ones you want on long-term deals. They have several talented young players in Stuckey, Jason Maxiell, and Amir Johnson who it's reasonable to expect to see improve and who could probably step up to play a bigger role if necessary. Consequently, can plausibly afford to trade part of its current core (most likely 'Sheed or Rip Hamilton) if a good opportunity comes along but can also plausibly afford to say "no" to potential offers and hold out for a better opportunity. All things considered, the extent to which this franchise has been well-managed continues to impress. One can't, however, help but wonder how things might have turned out if not for their unfortunate 2003 draft choice. Relativism and TimeWill Wilkinson rails against relativistic defense of Thomas Jefferson's slaveholding that posit that it was somehow okay to be a slaveholder in the late eighteenth century because a lot of other people were doing it too: Now it seems to me that you actually do want to incorporate a slightly relativistic approach to evaluating people. If you compare a dictator like Francisco Franco to a dictator like Charles V, I think it's got to be relevant that in Franco's time there was a viable and well-known alternative to dictatorship. As soon as Franco passed from the scene, a morally responsible leader like King Juan Carlos was able to shift the country to democracy rather than simply try to rule as a good dictator. But to blame the sixteenth century heir to a multinational empire for not embracing fundamental liberal political reforms seems silly as such reforms just weren't part of the consciousness of the time -- it wasn't within the realm of the possible. Somewhat similarly, when you look back at the record of Abraham Lincoln he said and believed a lot of stuff that would count as unforgivably racist were you to say or believe it today. But he lived in the middle of the nineteenth century and his views were clearly progressive ones relative to the times in which he lived as reflected in the fact that his policies were a boon to African-Americans even though the underlying sentiments didn't always reach the standards of contemporary egalitarianism. But this, to me, is really where Jefferson starts to look terrible. The idea that chattel slavery was morally wrong was in wide circulation in Jefferson's time. Outside of the southern states, it was conventional wisdom that this was a bad institution. And Jefferson was not only aware of the view that slavery was bad, he appears to have found the evidence convincing. But he was too selfish, personally, to make the sacrifices that would have been involved in freeing his slaves and he was unwilling to take any meaningful political risks on behalf of the anti-slavery cause. The SolutionAzadeh Moaveni writes about how Iranians are increasingly disenchanted with the failed policies of their current regime and are generally well-disposed to the United States. That said, "Starting in about 2005, Iranians' historic esteem for the United States gave way to a deep ambivalence that is only now ending." It seems to me that the ideal way for us to take advantage of this situation is for the United States to elect a president who thinks it's funny to joke about launching an unprovoked war on Iran, and who deems all efforts at diplomacy aimed at improving U.S.-Iranian relations as tantamount to appeasement. People love being threatened with air strikes, there's no more endearing way for a nation to behave on the world stage than to threaten them frequently -- ideally in a light-hearted manner that involves a Beach Boys reference. How Few RemainBaghdad used to be home to a large Jewish community that mostly emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s after the climate for Jews in Arab countries turned frigid. But a small number remained through the decades, and were able to keep at least one synagogue open until Meir Tweg "was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly." Now there's just a handful left, profiled by The New York Times's Stephen Farrell. Farrell doesn't make a big deal about it, but the upshot of the factoid about the synagogue seems to be that the U.S. invasion actually turned Iraq into a less hospital place for Jews than was Saddam Hussein's rabidly anti-Zionist rapacious dictatorship. June 2, 2008Against the WWII Memorial
It's true, the newish World War II memorial in Washington really is a stinker. It's a bit hard to illustrate the badness because part of its terrible-osity is that it's been designed at a scale where it's almost impossible to take the whole thing in and offer anyone a decent photo to illustrate what it looks like. But the aesthetics are bad and vaguely un-American, the efforts at symbolism are simultaneously over-literal and incomprehensible. All-in-all it's something that comes closer to belonging in a third-rate Soviet city than on the National Mall. Here's a lengthy complaint. I'll only note in the WWII memorial's defense that the Korean War memorial also sucks and nobody seems to mind. LeverageTom Friedman says we can't negotiate with Iran yet because we don't have enough leverage. We need to get the leverage first, and then we talk. Mostly, I find this whole line of argument wrongheaded for the reasons David Shorr outlines. But we also need to get real here for a moment and recognize that we're the United States of America and despite the damage Bush has done we have plenty of leverage. We're a giant rich country and they're a medium sized middle income country. We have military forces in two of Iran's neighbors, we maintain sanctions on Iran that hurt their economy. Our closest ally in the country is a rich nation with a power military establishment and nuclear weapons, their closest allies in the region are non-state militia groups. We have plenty to offer Iran that would be valuable to them insofar as they're willing to change their behavior in ways that are valuable to us. That's all the leverage you need to start a process of negotiation. Out and AboutThis whole business about the leader of the Pakistani Taliban running loose and making public appearances in Pakistan under the terms of a very lenient accommodation Pervez Musharraf reached with him kind of seems like a problem. I'm not sure statements like "there can be no deal with the United States" should necessarily be taken at face value, but it's clearly cause for concern. Now I don't think withdrawing a couple of brigades from Iraq and throwing them into Pakistan is necessarily the correct way to express that concern, but given that the Afghanistan-Pakistan area is where our biggest problem seems to be, it would be nice for that region -- rather than Iraq -- to be the main focus of not only our material resources but perhaps most importantly of the time and attention of folks at CENTCOM, the NSC, the White House and so forth. Instead, this whole area is getting treated like an afterthought. To Be Sure...I was walking earlier today thinking to myself, "you know, say what you will about John McCain, but he'll almost certainly be a better President than George W. Bush so we have something to look forward to no matter what happens in America." Then I thought to myself that to write that up, you'd need to include the all-important to-be-sure sentence. Specifically, something like "if, that is, he manages to avoid any catastrophic new wars that lead to massive bloodshed." Then you read something about how Michael Goldfarb is leaving The Weekly Standard's blog to go join the McCain campaign, and you recall that that's a giant to-be-sure. Some folks take comfort in the fact that up until 1998-99 or so McCain had reasonably reasonable views about foreign policy, but he's been way out in crazy-land for years now and all indications are that his administration will be staffed by neocons too fanatical or dim-witted to have served in the Bush administration and been discredited. Popular Vote
Noting that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be able to present arguments that they have won the "popular vote" (who won depends on how you count), Ed Kilgore observes "The two things no one can deny is that it was, in retrospect, an awfully close race, but one in which Barack Obama will finish with a lead in pledged delegates, and barring some implosion in his general-election standing, the nomination." All true. But given that the popular vote has no official standing, for an unofficial assessment of how Democratic voters feel about things it is instructive to look at the national polling. Here things are pretty close, but Obama's held a decisive lead for a long time. Roughly speaking, it seems to be the case that some of the states that voted for Clinton on February 5 now prefer Obama. So the person who wins the nomination by delegates will also be the person who most Democrats prefer. And that's as it should be. No doubt, had things gone different earlier in the campaign with Clinton moving out to a decisive lead in delegates, the polling would have coalesced around her, too. But that's what happened, and as things stand now there's a clear majority for Obama. Let's Talk
One point I've been trying to make in my book talks is that there's precious little evidence that public opinion is demanding a neo-imperial foreign policy for the United States. Nobody felt during the 2000 presidential campaign that the public was clamoring for a new Orwellian doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" (to repeat the phrase used in Doug Feith's book) in which the United States was going to launch aggressive wars against countries that hadn't attacked us or our allies and had no plans of doing so. September 11, clearly, had a large impact on public opinion but even then there was little public interest in doing this, which is why the Bush administration overstated both the scale and the immediacy of the alleged Iraqi threat while drastically downplaying the costs. And you see again that while it took a certain amount of courage for Barack Obama to stand up to the crusted-over notion that the United States should set itself up as too damn important to conduct high-level talks with regional adversaries, there's not some genuine avalanche of public opinion on the other side of this issue. What you have instead is a political and media system that's very vulnerable to hype, fearmongering, hysteria, etc. But calm political leadership that doesn't panic at the first sign of conservative self-confidence about the politics of warmongering has a real chance to win these fights. Inflation: EhPaul Krugman defends Bush appointee Ben Bernanke from what he sees as a misguided conventional wisdom alleging that Bernanke has been too lax about inflation. Not only do Krugman's arguments seem convincing to me on their own terms, but in the all important personal case there's been no wage-price spiral as political blogger nominal salary growth has fallen short of the rate of inflation over the past twelve months. Recommended ReadingThe New York Times asks sundry intellectuals to offer book recommendations to the presidential contenders. Daniel Drezner offers his own recommendations as does Ezra Klein. Sadly, nobody mentions Heads in the Sand. But if I were president, I think I'd really be trying hard to stay away from books about politics and public policy -- you get that all day! Plus I'd say one good thing about being president is that if you ever want some writer/thinker/analyst to explain his ideas and their implications for you, you can easily get him to stop by your office for a chat. I'd say the president should focus his reading energies on big, long nineteenth century novels. War and Peace, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment -- those are some good books! And with any luck, they'll remind you that there are crucial elements -- probably the most crucial elements -- of human life that transcend the domain of the political. Congratulations All AroundGood work, Joe Lieberman; Good work, AIPAC. Here's John Hagee on the antichrist: Hagee assures us that the Antichrist will be a homosexual who's also "partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx." Where Hagee got the idea that Hitler was Jewish, I couldn't quite say, but it seems that in the eyes of this "pro-Israel" (in the sense of urging Israel to start wars that he believes will lead to its destruction) leader, all evil stems from the Jews. Here's the website of the World Congress of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews so we can keeps tabs on them -- look for the Antichrist to emerge out of this website. Lakers-CelticsIt's the matchup the hater in me was dreading. Already the hiatus is filling with stuff about the top ten moments in Lakers-Celtics history and hearing how "Meaning no disrespect to 28 other teams, thanks for getting out of the way." But the good news is that we have a scenario where I think it's pretty clear that L.A. is the superior team, but they're not wildly superior and Boston has home court since the Lakers played much of the season without their current roster. Consequently, I think the outcome's genuinely in doubt. I'd give the edge to L.A. but I'm surprised to see nine out of ten ESPN.com people agreeing with that since my level of confidence in that pick is pretty low. Known UnknownsIt seems a bit weird to me that Todd Purdum's big Vanity Fair Bill Clinton profile is only coming out now, but as Kathy G. remarks it's a great refutation of the theory that since Bill and Hillary Clinton were so scrutinized in the 1990s there was nothing more that could have come out against the Clintons to make them look bad were Hillary to secure the nomination. It's hard for me to tell how much of the sleazy behavior that Purdum hints at here is actually true. Based on the record, it wouldn't at all be unlike Clinton for some of it to be true. And based on the record, it wouldn't at all be unlike the press to run with some of it even if it isn't true. But either way, the point is that if there really is such a thing as the candidate with no new skeletons to be chewed over by the right-wing (and I'm skeptical there is) Hillary Clinton isn't it, any more than Barack Obama is. Luck of the Draw
Karl Rove is facing contempt citations for his refusal to answer subpoenas to testify before congress. But lucky for him, he's gotten himself a friendly judge in Bush appointee John Bates: A former deputy independent counsel in Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation, Bates is the same judge who threw out a Government Accountability Office complaint against Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2002. Back then, the GAO's comptroller general, David Walker, was seeking access to internal documents from Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force, using arguments similar to those the judiciary committee is making today—namely that the White House's refusal to provide information to congressional investigators is damaging Congress' oversight mandate. Note, of course, that a background working for Ken Starr clearly does not in this case signify a strong belief in vigorous oversight of the executive branch. Rather, as Bates' previous rulings make clear, he's a believer in vigorous oversight of Democratic Party presidents while Republicans can do whatever they want. Bush clearly chose well when deciding to make this guy a judge. TechnologyIt seems the good people of ExxonMobil have seen fit to advertise on my blog, and far be it from me to question the sincerity of a giant oil company when it says it's interested in developing new technologies to generate cleaner energy. It is, however, always worth saying that using less energy is probably the cleanest energy option out there. One way to achieve that would be for our country to become much, much poorer, but there's a lot of variation among countries of comparable wealth. Denmark, for example, consumes 3832.8 kilograms of oil equivalent per capita, whereas Germany consumes 4203.1, France consumes 4518.4, Belgium consumes 5703.4, Finland consumes 7218.1, and the United States consumes 7794.8 over twice as much as Denmark. And the Danes and Germans aren't living in circumstances of abject poverty or anything. If every American lived in a somewhat smaller house and spent less money on both the house and heating/cooling/lighting it and more money on fancy shoes or platinum cable packages or expensive organic produce we'd be just as well off and the planet would be better off. We just happen to have a lot of public policy in place that encourages lavish energy consumption (big houses, low-density land use, many cars) when policy should probably discourage such consumption or, at a minimum be neutral about it. Bike ShortageHigh gas prices lead to a New York City bike shortage. Dana Goldstein has a nice column about cycling as well. Basic bike-friendly policies -- some lanes, some parking -- are pretty cheap for local government to implement and a pretty large number of people live in places that are sufficiently high-density for bikes to be a viable car replacement for at least some trips. Knowledge Not RequiredOne might think one would have to know what one was talking about to write an op-ed for The Washington Post but of course if that were the case then Robert Samuelson would be unemployed: Unless we find cost-effective ways of reducing the role of fossil fuels, a cap-and-trade system will ultimately break down. It wouldn’t permit satisfactory economic growth. But if we’re going to try to stimulate new technologies through price, let’s do it honestly. A straightforward tax on carbon would favor alternative fuels and conservation just as much as cap-and-trade but without the rigid emission limits. A tax is more visible and understandable. If environmentalists still prefer an allowance system, let’s call it by its proper name: cap-and-tax. We'll turn this over to Ryan Avent: Yowza. As any economist worth his or her salt will tell you, a cap and trade plan with auctioned permits is essentially identical to a carbon tax. That also happens to be exactly what Barack Obama is proposing. So, another way for Samuelson to have written this column would have been to title it, “Barack Obama has a good plan to reduce carbon emissions." This is, of course, also the view of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, leading congressional Democrats, and all the main environmental groups. But of course Samuelson's the kind of guy for whom environmentalists and Democrats are always wrong, so we have to ignore the facts. Troubled TimesIn response to my books post, commenter robert said: "Yes, it would be nice for politicians to realize that social problems are not so easily soluble, and that many are based in human nature and not changing political arrangements." I think of that as the traditional conservative point of view, and while I'd probably prefer it to the nihilistic bloodlust and weird busybodyism of John McCain, that's not quite what I meant. What I was trying to say about literature is that I think it's a reminder that even if we halt nuclear proliferation, prevent catastrophic climate change, vastly improve public health, and maintain strong economic growth people will still frequently feel sad (or angry or frustrated or jealous or bored or nervous or whatever else) about this or that. Not because social problems are irredeemable but because social problems have a limited relevance to people's actual lives. I feel like that's the kind of thing -- the bounded importance of the entire politics 'n policy game -- that one can lose sight of the closer one gets to the corridors of power. It's not that I think we can't solve our social problems, it's that even if we did life would still go on, just as it will still go on if we make our problems worse. My Kind of RepublicanHere's a story out of Colorado -- Republican state legislature candidate wants to build a monorail while his Democratic opponent "said mountain rail is secondary to basic road upkeep at this point." A Republican on the transit side of the angels? Apparently so. The Trouble With Sanctions"We should privatize the sanctions against Iran by launching a worldwide divestment campaign," John McCain said in his AIPAC speech, "As more people, businesses, pension funds, and financial institutions across the world divest from companies doing business with Iran, the radical elite who run that country will become even more unpopular than they are already." And then down comes Sam Stein pointing out that McCain's top strategist Charlie Black has been lobbying on behalf of Iran-linked firms: But, as demonstrated by the CNOOC anecdote, if choking off Tehran's economic lifeblood is McCain's goal, he could have personally started down that road years ago -- with his own advisers. But beyond the narrow hypocrisy point, the real moral of the story here is just to remind us of the limited practicality of a sanctions and divestment approach to Iran. In a highly globalized economy, it's difficult to try to hermetically seal off Iran economically. You start divesting from firms that do business with Iran, but then you still have firms that do business with firms that do business with Iran. Divest all you like, but Iran still has oil that people want to buy, which gives Iranians money they want to use to buy things with. Which isn't to say that economic pressure is totally ineffective, but how effective it is has a lot to do with how wide the network of pressuring entities is. A really global sanctions and divestment campaign can deliver enormous blows, while unilateral measures are difficult to really enforce in a serious way. This is one of several reasons why there needs to be a good-faith negotiations component to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. On the one hand, we ought to recognize the limited utility of coercion alone in changing Iranian behavior. And on the other hand, as we seek coercive measures, or credible threats of coercion, we need to make the coercing coalition as broad as possible and to do that we need to be seen by world opinion as approaching this subject in a serious way. Ultimately, international consensus against the idea of an Iranian nuclear weapon is the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to preserve and strengthen that consensus we need to act reasonably. Ideally, reasonable U.S. behavior will be met by reasonable Iranian behavior. If it's not, then reasonable U.S. behavior will set the stage for international cooperation that, unlike the all-bluster approach favored by conservatives, might actually accomplish something. June 3, 2008AlmostApparently key members of John McCain's staff were urging him to take a one-term pledge back in April of 2007 and the candidate was on board to the extent that such a pledge "was set to be the central thread of his presidential campaign, and Mark Salter, McCain's chief speechwriter, crafted an announcement speech around it." But at the last minute, McCain changed his mind. So I suppose this means that McCain's inner circle thinks he's not up for a second term? A Will and a WayI'm not sure my estimation of George W. Bush is quite low enough to believe this really happened: "Kick ass!" [General Ricardo Sanchez] quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal." On the other hand, Sanchez has no reason to make that up. Either way, though unusually juvenile in its phrasing, the underlying sentiment is typical of what I've called the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics -- the conservative conceit that willpower is the crucial variable in making our national security policy work. Thus, when resistance to national objectives is encountered, instead of dealing with them pragmatically the resistance is seen as a test of will. Since it's a test of will, the most important thing becomes not resolving the issue in a productive way, but demonstrating the implacability of our will. When strategies motivated in this manner fail to achieve their goals, that merely shows the need for more will because to change strategy at all would send the wrong sort of message about our resolve. The World's Most Impressive SubwaysThey're pretty impressive. William Odom, RIPI'm a bit late to the news that General William Odom, a former National Security Advisor as well as a military man, died over the weekend. Odom was one of the cohort of traditionalist conservative security policy thinkers who despised the direction in which George W. Bush has taken the country's foreign policy. That's very much to his credit. Even more to his credit is the fact that he was the kind of guy who used what credibility and influence he had to speak out against this stuff back when doing so was difficult. Can't Be Bothered With AccuracyGood piece from Jonathan Landay: Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Indeed. The IAEA has various complaints about Iranian nuclear activities, and it makes sense for the United States to vigorously pursue those complaints. It's also true that given Iranian history on this issue and the nature of the Iranian regime, it's smart strategy for the United States to seek nuclear concessions from Iran that go beyond what's strictly required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the Intelligence Community has assessed that current levels of scrutiny and pressure caused the Iranians to cease their weapons program back in 2003. It's worth considering how the refusal of American politicians to acknowledge this must look in Teheran. In the hawk faction of the U.S. politics you have radical clerics musing about the apocalypse playing a key role in the process to determine who the GOP standard-bearer will be. And even in the more dovish faction, the lead contenders won't acknowledge our own intelligence findings about the Iranian nuclear program. Someone, someone in Iran is penning a furious blog post or article or memo about how you just can't appease the Americans, how we're irrational and our political system is dysfunctional, about how we were determined to invade Iraq irrespective of the facts and we're not invading Iran right now just because it's not logistically feasible and that restarting a crash weapons program before it does become feasible is Iran's only hope. On the DLJulie Eilperin reports for the Post that "An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday." The IG's office looked into the matter at the request of several senators, "after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters." The Post writes about this as if it's a bad thing. But had the scientific data been made available to the public without political interference, that might have built political support for timely action to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. And that would have been contrary to the interests of the Bush administration's financial backers in the oil and coal sectors. Under the circumstances, it would have been irresponsible for them to do anything else. Photo by Flickr user benklocek used under a Creative Commons license Saunders SackedIt's the end of the Flip Saunders era in Detroit. I understand the Pistons' thinking here, but given that the guy only had one year left on his contract I'm sort of wondering who's the better coach Detroit thinks they're going to sign this offseason. If Mike D'Antoni were still in play or something (I envision him using Rasheed Wallace primarily as a Euro-style shooting center) that would be one thing, but what's the next move here? To me, at least, it's not as if there's been some huge stretch of egregious coaching errors holding the team back. Across the SeaApparently a lot of America's women's colleges are hoping to take advantage of the oil boom in the Gulf to recruit students from a part of the world where single-sex education isn't considered an oddity. For a long time while I was in college my girlfriend was a Wellesley student, and I remember that the student body there was an odd mix of mostly very feminist American women plus a smattering of foreign women from very traditionalist families who didn't seem to really understand that the remaining women's colleges in the U.S. tend to be less traditional than the co-ed ones. Clark for VPMatt Stoller makes the case for Wesley Clark as Vice President and it's a pretty good case. Indeed, it makes me wonder why I hadn't heard him randomly speculated about before since as far as speculation and case-making goes he's as good a choice as any. One idiosyncratic interest of mine in this would be that it would provide an opportunity for some discussion of how nutty the Kristol/McCain attack from the right on the Clinton administration's prosecution of the Kosovo War was. Speaking personally, though, I think I may have already lost interest in VP speculation. I'm ready to move on to cabinet speculation, except I fear I'll jinx things. Plus at some point in the next couple of months someone needs to write the inevitable column calling on Obama and/or McCain to name a "shadow cabinet." The Math
Chart borrowed from David Park relates the share of the vote going to Democrats to the share of House seats controlled by Democrats. You can see that starting in 1994 we entered an era when Democrats have consistently underperformed their vote share. If the current Democratic majority can stay in place past the 2010 census, one assumes that will change. Still, it should always be remembered -- but especially in these days of heady optimism -- that the structure of American political institutions provides a substantial bias in favor of conservatism and makes it difficult for small progressive majorities to accomplish very much. Bill Strikes BackI think Bill Clinton makes some fair points in his intemperate rant against Todd Purdum. But in a lot of ways, the flaws in Purdum's article (lots of innuendos about illicit sex) serve to obscure the valid points (we know very little about the financing of Clinton's lifestyle and his foundation) and the notion that the publication of a a single article on this subject far too late to impact the process represents a vast pro-Obama conspiracy in the press is laughable. It's GQ after all, that killed a critical story about Hillary Clinton because Bill threatened to freeze them out unless they did it. In general, coverage of Bill's post-presidency has been exceedingly respectful, even in the generally Obamaphilic Atlantic. The Gramm FactorExcellent Texas Monthly article on Phil Gramm, his influence in the McCain operation, and his sleazy dealings: While the nation’s investment bankers are paying a heavy price for their unbridled greed (in billions of dollars of write-offs), Gramm has fared quite nicely. He currently serves as a vice president at UBS AG, a colossal, Swiss-owned investment bank, the post, no doubt, a thank you for assiduously looking out for Wall Street interests during his 23 years in public office. Now, with the aid of his longtime friend Arizona Sen. John McCain, Gramm may be looking at a quantum leap in power and influence. [...] Viewed in one light, McCain's personal lack of interest in economics and domestic policy might generate okay outcomes -- lots of compromises with congressional Democrats. But viewed in another light, you can imagine it just opening the door to lots of corruption and shady dealings. Gramm is, in essence, what's lurking behind door number two. Count Every VoteChris Orr demands justice for Michigan and their Pistons: Once you abandon the artificial four-games-to-two framework that the media has tried to impose on the series, a very different picture emerges, with the Celtics leading by a mere 549 points to 539. Yes that’s right, the margin between the two teams is less than one percent—a tie, for all intents and purposes. This is probably the closest Conference Finals in NBA history, though I will thank you not to check on that. There's more at the link. The Not-So-High Price of Saving the PlanetCongressional debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act is moving forward, and as we can see taking action will have a price: A study by the Energy Information Administration found that the bill would set in motion an important environment benefit, cutting greenhouse gases by 45 to 55 percent by 2030. But it would come at a price: reducing economic growth by an estimated 0.2 to 0.6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. That's not nothing, but it's worth noting that it's also not all that much. Even if you assume the highest end of that projection, the United States in 2030 will still be a substantially richer country than the United States in 2008. And I think there's good reason to believe that a basic model like that is going to somewhat overstate the cost of adjustment since there will probably be public health benefits to a shift to a lower emissions economy. Meanwhile, check out Kate Sheppard for the details on the bill -- it's not a great bill, but I'd be thrilled to see it passed and then Bush follows through on his veto threat and then we've established a new baseline for action come 2009. Good IdeaRep. Bill Delahunt is one of those guys who you don't hear much about, but who's a solid progressive who's often tried to show leadership on issues that tend to get ignored. For example, according to Spencer Ackerman tomorrow he's hit on the bright idea of having two Iraqi parliamentarians opposed to the Bush/McCain/Maliki perpetual occupation policy come testify before his subcommittee: Live from the Rayburn building, Rep. Bill Delahunt's (D-MA) Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight will hear from Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan of the Sunni Accordance Front and Nadim al-Jaberi of the Shiite (and anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki) Fadhila Party. Both men oppose an open-ended U.S. troop presence, which is a rather popular position among the Iraqi people. I doubt parliamentary opposition in Iraq will, in practice, be a serious impediment to this policy since the local occupying power tends to have ways of making the occupied government see things its way if push comes to shove. Still, the parliamentary opposition, like the opposition in public opinion, is a token of how ill-advised this approach is. Unity?
Marc Ambinder writes about an RNC memo "that portrays the Democratic Party in a state of disarray and claims that legions of Hillary Clinton voters are poised to jump to John McCain." As Marc says, "privately, many Democrats would agree that that 'united' is not the best adjective to describe the party right now." If anything, though, I think this ought to give McCain serious pause. How is it that he's in a dead heat with an opponent who's party is an a maximum state of disunity? It's hard for me (or anyone) to know for sure to what extent currently disgruntled Clinton supporters will unite around Obama. But everyone knows that some of them will do so. Obviously events can occur that will change people's opinions of Obama and McCain, but one's generic assumption has to be that the Democratic Party will grow more united between now and November and given current polling that spells trouble for McCain. Bad MoviesI feel like these candidates for a list of 101 movies to avoid watching before you die doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of cinematic badness. I can't really speak to bad movies from before my time (I like to check out a highly-touted classic from before I was born, but I'm not going to seek out old clunkers) but of the films I've seen Congo and Absolute Power are the pits. Either way, it's a good discussion for a thread. As groundrules, I would say that we're looking for bad movies that are legitimate Hollywood studio releases -- no direct to video stuff. PredictionI think Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. Thoughts? UPDATE: All joking aside, as of 5:21 PM Eastern time, Obama was available at 94.4 on Intrade.
I'd rate that a "buy." McCain's SpeechA few points: One -- McCain is a very bad public speaker. Two -- it's interesting that he's shifted his aesthetic from his old black and white "fascist" aesthetic to a new green and white Islamofascist aesthetic. Three -- despite the general badness of his speaking manner, McCain does have highs and lows. You can tell that he gets excited, personally, when talking in a generic way about how America is awesome. But when he waxes about reforming government institutions, it's obvious that McCain is bored and not at all the kind of person who's inclined to immerse himself in the details of these kind of issues. Four -- even McCain's audience doesn't seem to like this speech. McCain and BushJohn McCain is clearly defensive about the allegation that his election would represent a third Bush term. And, obviously, as I've noted before McCain would represent a change from Bush. But still, on Iraq, whatever you make of the comparative Bush and McCain records, McCain is promising to continue Bush's policies. On Iran, he's promising to continue Bush's policies. On North Korea, he's promising to repudiate Bush's current policy in favor of Bush's earlier, failed policy. On judges, he's promising to continue Bush's policies. On taxes, he's promising to continue Bush's policies. This last one is important, because fundamentally it's going to be very different to make substantial changes in the domestic policy sphere as long as you're committed to Bush's tax policy. That does leave us with the important issue of climate change wherein McCain, though worse than Obama, would constitute a major improvement of Bush. That and mixed martial arts, where despite McCain's love of boxing and hatred of over-regulation, he thinks the government ought to step in and put a stop to Kimbo Slice. Harold FordI thought it was strange that Harold Ford's on MSNBC right now deliberately sabotaging the Democratic Party, lavishly praising John McCain and McCain's speech. Then I remembered that Ford took over as head of the DLC so boosting the GOP is part of his job. Clinton's SpeechI probably shouldn't write any more about this woman and her staff. Suffice it to say that I've found her behavior over the past couple of months to be utterly unconscionable and this speech is no different. I think if I were to try to express how I really feel about the people who've been enabling her behavior, I'd say something deeply unwise. Suffice it to say, that for quite a while now all of John McCain's most effective allies have been on Hillary Clinton's payroll. Obama's SpeechWell, suffice it to say that he's a lot better at delivering setpiece speeches than are his rivals. I feel inspired and disinclined to write anything embarassingly gushy. June 4, 2008Awakening By TalkingRich Lowry gets frighteningly reality based: "Part of the success of the surge is that we were talking to Sunni tribesmen and former Saddamists who were doing terrible things in Iraq. When conditions were right (they got sick of al Qaeda, the Shia were killing them, we were there in force), we flipped them. Would anyone now have it any other way?" I'd say this is an underappreciated point in several directions. But the beginning of wisdom here is to recall that the decision to start negotiating with insurgent leaders was not, in fact, "part of" the surge. It began chronologically prior to the surge and is, of course, logically independent of it. This is something that liberals had been recommending for a long time and conservatives, as is there want, tended to reject the idea out of hand as a form of appeasement. The troop surge was a different idea which, it seems to me, mostly served as a hawkish gesture with the right hand to distract attention from the left hand's dovish move to negotiate with foes. But be that as it may, the point stands. Even if you think that maintaining a large, indefinite American military presence in Iraq ill-serves our strategic interests, I think there's no denying at this point that the tactical shift toward cutting deals with insurgent leaders has paid dividends in terms of making the presence more sustainable and helping to damage AQI. And this is essentially what liberals are saying about Iran -- that the U.S. can often best advance its interests by setting clear priorities and preparing to negotiate (even with "bad guys") about how to advance our priorities in ways that are consistent with the priorities of other actors. Wednesday Goldfarb BashingJohn Schwenkler was none too happy with the news that The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb is off to the McCain campaign, got challenged on it by James Joyner, and offered this nice reply: What Radley Balko said, I guess, though let me add that my initial gripe was with what this appointment reveals about the kind of politics Team McCain is going to be engaging in, and whether or not they would be a break from those of "the past". And a quick look over the most recent weeks of Mr. Goldfarb's repertoire of "online activities" - Nancy Pelosi's observation that the Iranians helped to tame hostilities in Basra amounts to "glorification of the enemy"; the New York Times is "committed ... to fighting no wars at all" (Really? I didn't get that memo); Democrats concerned about the strength of the Iraqi government are "divorced from the reality-based community"; scummy campaign advisers are simply the result of "day jobs which may create conflicts of interests"; the Democratic party is "chicken"; and so on ad nauseam - suggests that his contributions to the McCain message may end up being ... how shall we say? ... less than statesmanlike. Is Goldfarb "qualified" to make such contributions? Of course. But I stand by my initial expression of disgust. Goldfarb, meanwhile, is only one of a pretty large number of people who've shuttled back and forth over the years between organizations McCain controls and organizations Bill Kristol controls. That's not to say that junior staff at The Weekly Standard are going to be controlling policy in the McCain White House, but McCain obviously has an affinity for a Standard-style approach. The Audacity of HopeThe fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5 has tended to obscure the fact that his primary victory has got to be the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics. In retrospect, whatever happens looks obvious and somewhat inevitable, but back in the day all that was obvious was that Clinton had the party locked down. Obama's entire meteoric ascent from the State Senate to the cusp of the presidency is just a very, very, very unlikely story. And it's a story driven by the fact that unlike a lot of other promising young politicians, Obama's been consistently willing to take risks. In both his 2004 Senate campaign and his 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama would have to count as a longshot. And, indeed, he was a longshot in his failed challenge to Bobby Rush. A lot of "promising" guys horde their promise so jealously that they never manage to actually deliver. It took a good deal of luck for Obama to make it to the top of the pack, but nobody succeeds without some luck, and nobody gets lucky unless they're in the arena. It's a fundamentally bold, hopeful brand of politics. And I think it's no coincidence that that theme's been at the center of his campaign. Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources. All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails. But in a deeper sense I find it incredibly appealing. To me, it's incredibly frustrating to hear that ideas "can't be done" not because they won't work, but because people know -- just know -- that they're not politically possible, even though they're things that have never been tried. I think almost every worthwhile accomplishment of progressive governance -- from the UN and NATO and the NPT to Medicare and Medicaid and Title I school aid to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to the ongoing feminist revolution that's completely transformed American society in a generation and a half with no sign of slowing down -- is the kind of thing that before it happened, a lot of people would have said that it couldn't happen. And of course sometimes the pessimists are right, but unless you sometimes assume they're wrong then nothing's ever going to happen. Revisiting McCain's SpeechSometimes in politics you get these scenarios where left and right seem to be living in different worlds. I worried that my sense that McCain's speech from last night was a fiasco was something like that -- groupthink driven by watching it in a room full of liberals. It's clear, however, from The Corner that the right feels the same way. Yuval Levin, who even recommended the themes that McCain used, is especially good on the problems with the address. On one level, this is just aesthetics, just the question of the delivery of the speech. But it does seem to me that McCain had trouble with the text largely because important swathes of it just aren't about stuff he cares about. He likes to talk about war, and steely resolve to continue prosecuting wars, but he's not into getting into the weeds of this person's tax policy versus that person's tax policy. Not that he can't talk domestic issues, but he likes to frame them as battles between the white hats of the public interest and the black hats of corruption. That's a limited frame for anyone to use, but it's an especially odd one for a conservative, which is presumably why all of McCain's memorable domestic crusades have involved him attacking Republicans rather than Democrats. It's the WarAnd, yes, to echo Atrios the tendency of many analysts to somehow forget about Iraq when talking about how Obama managed to topple the Clinton machine is pretty bizarre. Clearly, Iraq alone wasn't enough to carry Obama to victory. But had Clinton voted against the war in 2002 there would have been no Obama challenge -- it would have been a senseless and absurd thing to do. In short -- no war, no Obama. Denying this reality seems to be part of the continuing hawk effort to avoid any accountability for the war. At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton had (and has) much more credibility with the liberal base than does the average person who shares her position on the war. If she can be held accountable, and if John McCain (until very recently the most popular politician in America) can be held accountable, then the sky's the limit. McCain: I Love Illegal SpyingI'm not really sure how this fits into Jonathan Rauch's idea that John McCain is a Burkean conservative: If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday. That sounds more like a Bush conservative to me, full of casual disregard for the law, eager to trample on people's rights, etc. Combine Results
You can get your NBA draft combine results here. As reader DM observes, "not a ton of surprises, though both Rose and Beasley measured pretty short relative to expectations." At 6'2" 1/2 in shoes, though, I'd say Derrick Rose comes in at tall enough to play point guard, even if his size isn't super-impressive. Beasely, who's definitely looking short for a power forward at 6'8" in shoes, is a somewhat more interesting case. In recent years, there've been a series of undersized power forwards -- Craig Smith, Carl Landry, Chuck Hayes, Paul Millsap who slipped very far in the draft due to their small stature and then wound up having decent success in the league. One thing we've learned from that experience is that rebounding is one of the stats that's most directly projectable from college to the NBA -- guys good at pulling them down are good rebounders irrespective of size. Beasley certainly seems to fit the bill. What's more, he measured a 7' wingspan and a solid standing reach of 8'-11" and those factors often turn out to be more important than height. Obama FlashbackThis old post from my friend Catherine on Obama's 2004 convention speech, and especially the attendant comment thread, makes for interesting retrospective reading. The Endgame
Brendan Nyhan pronounces himself confused: I don't understand her endgame. One interpretation is that she's trying to solidify her position as the frontrunner for 2012 if Obama loses in November, but she's generating so much resentment among Obama supporters that it will arguably damage her standing within the party. I've heard a lot of political junkies reason along these lines over the past month or so, but it's borne out by the data. Clinton's favorability rating among Democrats has taken a hit, but it's been a small one, and she's still very well-liked by most Democrats (as is Obama). Whatever her subjective intentions, her past month of campaigning has succeeded in harming Obama's chances in 2008 without measurably damaging the prospects for an "I Told You So" primary campaign in 2012. For a long time, I've kept believing that Clinton's desire to run again in 2012 if Obama loses in November would get her to drop out of the race in order to avoid unduly alienating people, but as we can see her decision to drag this thing out doesn't seem to have actually alienated many people thus far. Good Stuff
The blogosphere would be nothing without complaining, but sometimes it's worth offering a little praise. Dave Alpert likes the proposal for the new Wisconsin Avenue Giant, which features an elegant solution to the dilemma wherein supermarkets like big, windowless walls full of shelving whereas urbanists like exteriors to have windows: South of Newark Street, the Giant will occupy most of the site. However, the project places several smaller stores in front of the store on both the Wisconsin Ave and Newark Street sides. On the Idaho Ave side, which is more residential, there will be townhouses fronting on the street. Basically, a substantial portion of the supermarket is tucked into the block, giving it less exterior frontage and allowing everyone to get what they want (this is common, of course, in Manhattan supermarkets but those stores are much smaller than the supermarkets elsewhere in the country). That's not going to work in every space, but it's the kind of thing people should be thinking about as they design these projects. Party Like It's 1928On the theme of Barack Obama as the candidate of optimism, John Judis' perennial pessimism about his chances in a general election is a useful corrective. In this edition, he breaks new ground by comparing Obama not to McGovern or Carter, but to Al Smith's doomed 1928 presidential run. Racism is supposed to be the 2008 version of the anti-Catholicism of 80 years ago. Historical analogies are always tricky, but I think it's very difficult to compare anything to the Democratic Party of the 1920s. Here's Al Smith's electoral map:
Bad stuff. But whatever the role of anti-Catholic sentiment in that race, Smith's performance was really a huge improvement over what the Democrats did in 1924:
All the Democrats got in '24 was the "solid south" because they faced massive defections elsewhere to Robert LaFolette's Progressive Party. But the GOP secured a solid popular vote majority even in the face of a three-way race. That was terrible. But even without a Progressive in the field, the Democrats did terribly in 1920:
That year the Cox-Roosevelt ticket secured just 34 (!) percent of the popular vote, to 60 percent for Warren Harding. That was a blowout on the scale of Nixon in '72 or Johnson in '64. Judis acknowledges in his piece that no Democrat could have won in 1928, but you really need to look at the 1924 and 1920 races to appreciate how true that was. It's not just that Smith couldn't have won irrespective of his religion, but that the inter-war Democratic Party was absolutely hopeless in presidential politics. That's a very different context from the one in which Barack Obama is currently operating. Long story short, I think it's true that Obama will be hurt in the fall by his race, but he's also operating in an environment where Democrats have some margin for error. Al Smith, by contrast, was operating from a position of hopeless disadvantage that had nothing to do with his religion. When Midgets ClashNate at 538 says: The largest remaining scheduled moments in the campaign between now and November are the conventions and the debates. Is there any doubt that Obama is going to deliver a better convention night speech? Is there any doubt that, the first time he and McCain appear on a stage together, the contrast in age, height, and tone is liable to be pretty striking? That's right in terms of convention speeches. So far as the debates go, I think the most noteworthy thing is that neither McCain nor Obama is very good at debating. To my mind, that's a stark contrast to 2000 and 2004 where we had matchups between two good debaters. I think this mostly reflects the fact that though debates are interesting media moments, they probably don't matter very much to outcomes, thus even though neither Obama nor McCain was especially impressive in their debates, they secured their respective parties' nominations. My suspicion, though, is that an Obama-McCain debate matchup will be really horrible to watch. The Clinton LegacyDana Goldstein looks at some important positive aspects of the legacy of Hillary Clinton's campaign: Over the course of this historic, thrilling, aggressive primary election, we've seen more female pundits than ever before writing and speaking about presidential politics. We've experienced unprecedented interest from male politicos in women's participation in the electoral process. And demands for women's leadership have been given their fairest hearing to date in the United States, with Democrats nationwide expecting Obama to give close consideration to female vice-presidential prospects -- not only because there are a few wildly successful and talented women who would be great at the job, but also as a gesture of good will toward the feminist energy that animated so many Clinton supporters. This is all true. Beyond the Vice Presidency, I would imagine that an Obama transition team is now really going to want to be able to say that it's appointed the highest number of woman to cabinet positions. If It's Good Enough for BaghdadHere's an innovative new anti-crime strategy: Can you say Police State? The Examiner has the scoop on a controversial new program announced today that would create so-called "Neighborhood Safety Zones" which would serve to partially seal off certain parts of the city. D.C. Police would set-up checkpoints in targeted areas, demand to see ID and refuse admittance to people who don't live there, work there or have a “legitimate reason” to be there. Wow. Just, wow. Megan McArdle does not approve. This is, as best I can tell, a modified version of the security plan General David Petraeus successfully implemented in Baghdad, except I guess Chief Lanier is going to do without building things like the "endless line of concrete blast walls" that separate Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods. So I say, look on the bright side! Bloomberg's FutureI think the on-again, off-again Bloomberg for President talk has been silly, but Michael Bloomberg's been an excellent Mayor for New York so I wouldn't at all mind seeing him take a crack at running for governor. But in other respects, what I'd most like to see as Bloomberg's legacy is more of his excellent work on urban policy and transportation issues rather than ginning up doomed plans for the economic revitalization of upstate New York. That means first and foremost doing what he can to sustain his legacy within the city. It'd be a shame to see his successor repudiate his strong pro-transit record, and I hope he'll focus on doing the best he can to ensure that whoever follows him in office will follow his lead on these policies. I'd also be thrilled to see his Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn go federal as Barack Obama's Secretary of Transportation (let the buzz begin!). Beyond that, as I've said before when you consider the extent to which Bloomberg's financial assets have been an important political asset for him, I'm not sure that deploying them on self-financied election campaigns is the best way to move forward with change. He could probably accomplish more as an accomplished ex-mayor, donor, and advocate for spreading the kinds of policies he pioneered in NYC to elsewhere in the country. More Like ThisPeople should listen to Robert Reich: Problem is, the nation doesn’t have nearly enough public transportation to handle the new demand. Even more absurdly, right now when it’s needed the most, public transportation across the land is being cut back. This is because transit costs are soaring by the same skyrocketing fuel prices that are forcing people out of their cars, at the same time transit revenues are shrinking because most transit systems depend largely on sales taxes, now dwindling as consumer purchases decline in this recession. A survey of the nation’s public transit agencies released last Friday showed 21 percent of rail operators now cutting back and 19 percent of bus operators. Obviously, though, we "can't afford" massive new federal investments in transit infrastructure. An indefinite expenditure of $200 billion a year in Iraq, however, is easy as pie. And anyone who suggests spending less on war and more on productive domestic investment is an isolationist. Just keep repeating that. McCain and Bush on IraqAs John McCain likes to say, he has at various points in time disagreed with George W. Bush's tactical approach to Iraq. But in the ways that matter, he's generally agreed with Bush's strategic vision. It's a little hard to capture that point in a series of video clips, but I think this thing makes the point that the extent of McCain/Bush disagreement was pretty limited: In some ways, I think McCain himself doesn't quite realize how Bush-esque he is. He clearly doesn't like Bush, and has been disliking him for a long time. But that kind of personalized, overblown disdain for Bush-the-man can wind up leading you to overestimate Bush-the-grand-strategist. To McCain, Bush's policies have failed because of Bush. Replace Bush with McCain and shift tactics around the margins, and the same basic ideas should work out fine. It's a nice theory, but I don't think it's a true theory. Ah Straight TalkOne virtue of having a reputation as a straight-talker is that you can get away with constant lying. For example, in response to a question about why he twice voted against a commission to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina, John McCain says he voted in favor of every investigation. In reality, just as the New Orleans local news reporter said, he twice voted against a commission to investigate the matter. Now there's probably some crazy strained reading of McCain's remarks so that his claims are consistent with reality. And since everyone knows McCain's a straight-talker, the press will read it that way. And because that's been the press's response each of the dozens of times in the course of this campaign that McCain's told bald-faced lies, his reputation for straight-talk never vanishes. A lesser figure who was in the habit of constantly lying and flip-flopping would develop a reputation as a kind of madmen, so invested in self-love that he thinks he has no obligation to political principles or basic factual accuracy. Dropping OutHillary Clinton to endorse Obama on Friday. If only she'd done this weeks ago. June 5, 2008Obstacles to UnityI hadn't thought of this, but it makes sense. Jackie Calmes reports for the WSJ: "Some in the Clinton camp also noted a possible problem for a party-unity ticket: Bill Clinton may balk at releasing records of his business dealings and big donors to his presidential library." You have to assume the Obama campaign wouldn't agree to an Obama-Clinton without without at least their own vetting team getting a crack at those books. And it seems very unlikely that Obama would want to fight Bill's battle for non-disclosure to the public. How Long in Iraq?
Here's CBS's poll on how long Americans would like to see our troops stay in Iraq. John McCain's supporters can try to spin his 100 years remark any way they'd like, but it's clear enough that McCain's one of the thirty percent who think longer than two years is acceptable. Sam NunnSteve Clemons isn't buying former Senator Sam Nunn's efforts to tiptoe away from the anti-gay record of his time in the U.S. Senate. To me, the interesting thing is that he's bothering at all. I'd heard Nunn's name tossed around for a potential appointment in an Obama administration, but I'd seen that as mostly idle talk -- Nunn seems to me to have reached that semi-retired eminence grise phase in his career where he co-chairs panels of various sorts and gets mentioned sometimes as an example of The Kind of Statesman We Don't Have Any More. Efforts to reposition his profile on gay rights, though, seems to indicate that he really would like to get a job. But I'm not even sure what kind of job that would be. He seems like one of several people (Chuck Hagel also comes to mind) who would be a good choice for a position as some kind of high-level nuclear proliferation stopping guy. Something like that, with a narrow-but-important portfolio would be a good post for a conservative Democrat or a moderate Republican who was smart on the relevant issues, the kind of thing that would be all about putting disagreements on various other issues aside to focus in on this one grave problem. Polling Iran
We've seen in earlier polling that the public has no problem with Barack Obama's idea of high-level meetings with the leaders of "bad guy" nations. Now comes along this set of polling from Public Agenda (via David Shorr) that likewise shows specific support for a liberal approach to Iran -- diplomacy aimed at improving relations between Washington and Teheran is by far the most popular option, and it's popularity has only grown. Lurking elsewhere in the polling, a strong 65 percent correctly say that it's not realistic to expect the government to be able to deliver cheap oil. At the same time, this poll and every other poll I've seen shows that people view the high cost of energy as a major problem in their lives. It's almost as if the public might be drawn to a serious proposal to develop alternatives to massive oil consumption. Ista?Have you noticed that throughout the course of this campaign, the proper noun "Clintonite," used since the 1990s to refer to Bill's supporters, became the simultaneously girly and threatening "Clintonista?" Just sayin'. That seems paranoid to me. The Sandinistas and Zapatistas aren't girly, they're Spanish-speakers. The switch from "ite" to "ista," if it's even real, surely just reflects the growing influence of the Spanish language on American English, as in the growing popularity of "¡si se puede!" as rally chant. Undivided JerusalemBad on Obama, I didn't notice that when scanning the text of his AIPAC speech. This is the kind of thing that makes American pretensions to global leadership look more than a little ridiculous. Nobody thinks this is a smart position for the U.S. government to take on the merits, and I suspect a healthy swathe of AIPAC knows it's the wrong position too, but they'd like to see American politicians be willing to say it, and American politicians are very willing to do what AIPAC wants in this regard. Meanwhile, 6 million Palestinians, plus hundreds of millions of other Arabs and Muslims around the world, are watching the candidate of "change" in American politics outline a patently unreasonable vision for the final status of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And all for what? Would it really have been so horrible from a "pro-Israel" point of view if Obama had proclaimed himself absolutely committed to Israel's security and just not mentioned anything in particular about Jerusalem? Security Framework ParadoxIlan Goldenberg ably summarizes the current Catch-22 of Bush administration Iraq policy, which involves both pushing through a very unpopular (in Iraq) permanent basing agreement and pushing Iraq to hold parliamentary elections. In the face of the looming elections, however, it's very hard to get ISCI and Dawa politicians to support the basing agreement lest they get creamed by the Sadrists. It's worth noting that the same basic dynamic could easily prove to be the Obama administration's saving grace. A huge proportion of the people I talk to seem to feel that following through on promises to withdraw troops will prove incredibly politically problematic for Obama come January/February of 2009. It seems to me that this neglects Iraqi dynamics. All he needs to do is to take advantage of the fact that the American presence in Iraq is wildly unpopular to negotiate some kind of timetable for withdrawal with Iraqi political leaders that will then be jointly announced and celebrated in both countries. The Bush administration has not only consistently battled anti-war political forces in the United States, it's also expended an enormous amount of energy in preventing anti-occupation sentiment in Iraq from coming to dominate Baghdad politics. But an American president who wants our troops to leave will be in line with both U.S. and Iraqi public opinion, and should have little difficulty finding Iraqi politicians willing to embrace his vision. Hawks, meanwhile, would be left looking incredibly foolish condemning a withdrawal schedule jointly approved by the American and Iraqi governments. The Shadow Knows
On Tuesday, I wrote that "at some point in the next couple of months someone needs to write the inevitable column calling on Obama and/or McCain to name a 'shadow cabinet.'" In doing so, I failed to appreciate the marvels of internet time. Thus Tom Schaller blogs "now that Barack Obama has won the nomination, my initial reflex is that he ought to choose quickly—not rashly, of course, just quickly—and build a shadow cabinet of sort outward from there." Now nobody genuinely offers a shadow cabinet when running for election, but one could imagine Obama doing something like what Bush did in 2000 when he made it pretty clear in advance that Colin Powell was going to be his Secretary of State. Of course here in 2008 there's no figure of Powell-like popularity to anoint. What's more, that served a very specific purpose of trying to (falsely) reassure people that the inexperienced Bush would pursue a calm, modest, moderate course in foreign policy. Normally, I think it's more advantageous to a politician to stay vague. The list of plausible Obama Secretaries of State and Defense has a lot of overlap with the list of people who might plausibly be quoted on TV and in the newspapers talking about the Obama foreign policy. You want, as much as possible, all of those people to be thinking to themselves "if I'm as helpful to Obama as possible, then maybe he'll pick me!" You want all the wannabes wanting to be as strongly as possible. But for McCain this is a more interesting proposition. My assumption when Al Gore was running was that there would be a lot of overlap between the Gore cabinet circa 2001 and the Clinton cabinet circa 2000. Some people would leave, of course, as is always the case during an administration, but you could easily imagine some people staying on in their jobs and also many instances of things like Assistant Secretaries becoming Undersecretaries and Undersecretaries taking over as Secretaries. But what about John McCain? We know he's truly, madly, deeply in love with Bush's choice to head up CENTCOM, General David Petraeus, but what about other Bush appointees? Will William Luti, formerly a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and currently a Special Assistant to the President have a role in a McCain administration? Will Zalmay Khalilzad? Ryan Crocker? The question of whether or not a McCain administration would amount to a third Bush term has gotten a lot of play lately. Some clearer indication from McCain of how he intends to staff his administration, and what he intends to do with the hundreds of current Republican political appointees in office would shed some light on all that. Will he fire the overwhelming majority of them the way a Democrat would, or will he keep the majority on the way Bush would in a third term? A New DayEzra Klein remarked yesterday on an interesting contrast between the 2000 and 2008 campaigns: My hunch is that because Obama and McCain keep saying, in speeches, that they disagree, the press will actually report on their disagreements. The media is perfectly happy to be led around. The problem in 2000 was that Bush insisted he was a moderate and the press had no interest in questioning that. That's true. There were a number of specific issues in 2000, most notably concerning the "patients' bill of rights" and the question of balanced budgets where Bush went out of his way to pretend he and Gore had the same position. The press largely reported Gore's efforts to point out that this was false as a kind of petty hair-splitting. That probably won't happen again this time around. Unfortunately, however, no force on earth is going to get your average campaign reporter to pay cursory attention to McCain's claims about fiscal policy and realize that his proposal on taxes and spending are nothing but smoke and mirrors. People ought to keep complaining about this sort of thing, but they also ought to recognize that it's part of reality. One thing I never really understood about Paul Krugman's coverage of the Clinton-Obama fight is that he clearly believes that press coverage of candidate personalities is crucial to election outcomes, and that in particular media swooning over Obama's charisma is the key to his political success. But if that's true, then isn't a a good thing that the Democrats went with the charismatic guy? I'm kind of skeptical that press coverage and personae as politically influential as some people think they are, but insofar as they matter they're not going to stop mattering, and smart political movements will pick charismatic leaders. Phase IIThe headlines out of the Senate Intelligence Committee's "phase two" report into the administration's use (and abuse) of pre-war intelligence:
Going forward, I merely urge people to recall that the administration didn't make all this stuff up for fun. They did it because they know that the public is not, in fact, particularly jazzed about preventive war and unilateral militarism. It's a lesson I wish more Democratic politicians would learn. Annals of GOP Doom
I'd say public opinion findings like this are why America is poised to elect the black guy with a funny name instead of the white war hero: "A majority of Americans say they are worse off financially than a year ago, marking the first time in Gallup's 32-year history of asking the question that more than half of Americans give this pessimistic assessment." Nobody under 40 really remembers it, but the recession around the middle of Reagan's first term was really, really, really bad. It licked inflation, but at the cost of sky-high unemployment and the worst recession since the Great Depression. And even then the public's view of their personal finances was rosier than it is now. The Power of CharismaI suppose I was heartened, in a partisan sense, to read Sebastian Mallaby proclaim Barack Obama the candidate of growth, but this part of the argument isn't really very convincing (other parts, I think, are pretty much right) now is it: Provided that Obama finds a way of crawling back from his embarrassing talk of reopening NAFTA, the gap between his trade views and McCain's doesn't much matter. One could say much the same about all the areas of dispute between Obama and McCain -- if we assume that one of the candidates doesn't actually mean what he's proposing, then there's not much daylight between the two of them! To me, though, the widespread belief among Obamaphilic free traders that he doesn't really mean what he says about trade policy is a curious phenomenon. You look at Hillary Clinton's anti-trade rhetoric and you see it coming from a woman with a long association with the free trade faction of the Democratic Party and maybe think, "well, she doesn't mean that." But Obama's trade-skeptical rhetoric is perfectly consistent with his record. Admittedly, it's a pretty short record. And maybe he doesn't mean what he's saying. Or maybe he does mean it, but could be talked out of it once in the White House. But maybe not! Really, who among us is in any position to say? But he's a charismatic guy, so people see what they want to see. FlashbackFrom Benjamin Wallace-Wells' "The Great Black Hope" in the November, 2004 issue of The Washington Monthly: Four years ago, the same could have been said about Cory Booker. And so, the most compelling question about the politics of race right now may be this: Is Booker the next Barack Obama? Or is Obama the next Cory Booker? [...] And of course what we're seeing from Obama is that it's hard. The sort of politician who can appeal to white voters -- an Obama or a Booker -- tends to run into trouble with black voters early in his career. And as Reverend Wright has made clear to all of us, a politician who threads that needle successfully can wind up haunted by his associations from back when his primary political problem was convincing black people that he was sufficiently authentic. Majority-minority districting is to blame for some of this, but it's an intrinsic issue for black politicians as long as black and white perceptions of America remain pretty far apart. Education and the Electorate
Here's Obama versus McCain by educational attainment. It's close in every bracket except those with graduate degrees, where Obama has a big edge. When you look at these numbers it's important to recall that the largest bloc of people with grad school diplomas are public school teachers. It sometimes gets glossed as a cohort of college professors, but overall the number of people with professionally oriented degrees (teachers, lawyers, dentists, journalism school graduates, etc.) far, far outnumbers PhDs in the United States. Gates Goes Nuclear on the Air ForceOne fascinating second term subplot that will likely linger into a new administration of either party has been the high levels of conflict between Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and the Air Force brass, something kicked into higher gear today as "Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne were forced to resign Thursday during hastily arranged meetings with their Pentagon bosses." Moira Whelan has some useful commentary here and also see Robert Farley. I suppose one can question his methods, but Gates is fundamentally right on the merits in his various disputes with the Air Force and nobody else has had much success in bringing the service to heel and getting them to focus on the realities of the post-Cold War world. Finals ThreadIt's really too bad that ABC has the whole NBA Finals and we won't be able to get any of TNT's wildly superior broadcasting teams. My pick is Lakers in 6 and thought I'm not happy about my choices I'll root for LA. June 6, 2008All About the PantiesTo Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, the debate over torture is really all about women's underwear, with which he seems to have an unseemly obsession: An exasperated Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., reminded Rohrabacher that interrogators were also seen physically abusing detainees. If we don't engage in fraternity-style pranks against suspected terrorists, then the terrorists have won. Bush Administration Tools of Iranian IntelligenceTo me, the best thing about this story is that the Defense Department's reaction to the news that American counterintelligence operatives were concerned that Pentagon officials were being manipulated by Iranian intelligence was to shut the investigation down. Because, hey, that's not the sort of thing you'd want more details on. Depends on What the Meaning of "Undivided" IsLooks like Obama's not as unreasonable on the final status of Jerusalem as he tried to imply when talking to AIPAC: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama did not rule out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem when he called for Israel's capital to remain "undivided," his campaign told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. [...] It's never really been clear to me if the AIPAC, Union or Orthodox Jewish Congregations, etc. crowd really means what they're saying about this. If they had an otherwise solid deal that they felt would ensure Israeli peace and security while removing the stain of occupation from the country but it required them to give up the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, would Nathan Diament really be so crazy as to see that as the deal-breaker? Meanwhile, for Obama this seems much worse than simply going to AIPAC and saying something more honest. We Have Ways of Making You Agree to Our Permanent Basing DealPatrick Coburn: "The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent." This exemplifies the Bush/McCain madness. To the majority of people, whatever they think about the details of getting out of Iraq, being in Iraq isn't desirable. What we need to do is create conditions where leaving is viable. But to the people running our country, the goal is to stay in Iraq forever. It's insane. UPDATE: Some have written in to say that the actual cause of the holdup here is the Iraqis' inability to reach a revenue-sharing agreement about what to do with their oil money. It's just an issue that's become more and more pressing as high oil prices mean that Iraq's oil money is skyrocketing. "How Do We Beat The Bitch?"Mark Kleiman suggests that revisiting this appalling episode in McCainiac misogyny might be a useful party unity exercise: John McCain -- kind of an appalling guy. The Trouble With PorkbustingJohn McCain's getting in some hot water in the must-win state of Florida for his opposition to a bill that would have provided $2 billion in funds needed to clean up the Everglades. McCain says his opposition is driven not by opposition to spending that money, but to spending some other money on some other projects that were elsewhere in the bill. Be that as it may, the bill he opposed was the bill that was on the table and he opposed it. You see here, obviously, some of the problems with a political persona that's so defined by opposition to "wasteful" spending. This is an easy posture to maintain if you're a Senator from Arizona who's never faced a competitive re-election challenge. In a vague and general sense, everyone's against "wasteful" spending, and a willingness to make a pain-in-the-ass out of yourself on these topics can earn you good press. But the way American political institutions work is that legislators represent specific geographical constituencies. And things that look "wasteful" to people outside the constituency often look vital within it. So various projects get funded, sometimes as the price that needs to be paid to fund other, more important, projects. And it's easy enough to be against all this stuff if you're just trying to be a crank senator known for his opposition to other people's projects. But take things nationally, and suddenly you're in hot water with voters everywhere. Meanwhile, this sort of raises a larger question about a McCain administration -- would a President McCain really make it impossible to get anything done legislatively until some sea change in the American political system eliminates legislators' proclivity for funding local projects? A principled stand can be a nice thing, but you can't have a president who's so in love with his principles that he can't accomplish anything. They say you don't want to see the legislative sausage getting made, and I can personally sympathize with the idea of not wanting to get involved in the grubby compromises of the political process, but if you want to be president you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and make some sausage. DIscussion TopicThesis: If Barbara Boxer had run for President in 2004, she would have caught some of the Dean '04 antiwar fire, and some of the Clinton '08 feminist fire, and defeated a field split between the Gephardt/Kerry/Edwards/Lieberman tetrarchy of pro-war white guys. What does the internet think about that? "Street Organizer"Stay classy, RNC! Ryan Crocker
In response to yesterday's post on the likely political appointees in a McCain administration, Nathaniel comments: Matt I would point out that Ryan Crocker is a Foreign Service officer not a political appointee. He served as Amabsssador in some pretty harsh posts before Bush came into office and less he chooses to retire, which he may due to the length of his service, he will be serving as an Ambassador in whatever adminstration is after Bush. Very fair points. Still, I think the overall point stands. It's reasonable to believe that many of the people who've served in noteworthy positions in the Bush administration would also serve in noteworthy positions in a McCain administration. And it would be interested to know what McCain's thoughts on that matter are in a more specific way. Like most administrations, Team Bush has had its share of feuds and so forth. An incoming Republican administration that wants to bring back Richard Armitage is something you'd look at very differently from an incoming GOP administration that wants to bring back Doug Feith. Phase II, Part IIOne addendum to yesterday's release from Jay Rockefeller about the administration's misuse of intelligence before the war is to say that it sure would have been nice for Rockefeller to have been so on the ball about this stuff before the war. Instead, in a floor speech explaining his decision to vote "yes" on the AUMF resolution, he gave us this: There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources -- something that is not that difficult in the current world. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction. It's much easier for the president to mislead people when the erstwhile opposition party is doing more to echo his rhetoric than to debunk it. How Obama Did ItGood rundown from Karen Tumulty. I'll just say as I've said before, though, that the whole campaign dogfight is irrelevant if not for their contrasting positions on the war five years ago. This is an interesting tidbit: Consider the salaries: Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson was paid almost twice as much in a month — $266,000 went to his firm, according to her January campaign filing — as the $144,000 that Obama paid Gibbs for all of last year. That's a huge difference. I wonder why Clinton would pay that much? Surely recruiting staff wouldn't have been a problem for her. Money being handed out on that level tends to re-enforce my suspicion that she was pushed to stay in the race in part by senior staff whose primary motive wasn't necessarily the good of the Clinton brand, or the Democratic Party, or the country. You want to pay your advisers enough to hire good people, but you don't really want to pay so much that their motivation becomes mercenary. Take the Mac TrainWell it turns out that you can't take the Mac train since he's spent years as a passionate opponent of Amtrak. That's just one piece of the larger, somewhat odd, McCain puzzle on climate change. He's adopted a cap-and-trade proposal, but not really one that's far-reaching enough according to most scientists. And he doesn't flesh out his vision of a low carbon America very much -- there's nothing about increased transit ridership or any other explanation of how emissions will be reduced. Nothing, that is, except a love of nuclear power. All told, it looks a bit like what you might come up with if you decided you wanted to break with your party on the sexy issue of global warming, but do it in a distinctly conservative way, and then decided that having gamed out the optics you don't need to think any further about the substance. Don't Tell Larry SummersI'm heading up to Cambridge, MA for my fifth reunion and what do I see via Jessica Valenti but an ars technica item about how " new study suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores." Flattery Will Get You SomewhereVia Spencer Ackerman, an intriguing passage from Elizabeth Bumiller's book on Condoleezza Rice: [Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life. It's nice to know that we're governed by a dim-witted man of limited life experience who lets his key personnel and policy decisions be driven by his massive insecurities. Just a few months left to go. By Another Name
Yesterday, I picked up Douglas Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. It's fantastic so far. But what's really striking about the subject is that despite how central the story of racial conflict is to the story of America, and despite how well-known certain key episodes in that history are, the shocking story that Blackmon has to tell here is virtually unknown. I assume that this kind of thing forms part of the basis of black-white gaps in perception in the United States. The white version of American history certainly admits to the existence of racial oppression, but it's a very optimistic "up from slavery" story where the key figures are the heroes and the key episodes are the ones in which the good guys lost. But for fifty-five or sixty years following the collapse of the Confederacy, the cause of racial equality suffered nothing but setbacks. African-Americans are no doubt largely ignorant of these obscure episodes in a formal sense, but since it's literally part of their family background the history of backsliding and abandonment is going to color the black community's perception of progress made thus far. It's one thing to recognize that America once tolerated great injustices and then put a stop to them. It's another thing entirely to recognize that the injustices came back and the whole period in which they did so has been expurgated from our official narrative. Conspiracy TheoriesAm I the only one who thinks Lisa's made it to the Top Chef finale not despite the fact that she's an inferior cook to several of the people who've gone down in recent weeks but precisely because the producers like the idea of building up a villain. A Richard-Antonia-Stephanie finale would be all good people and talented chefs -- who wants that? But with Lisa in the mix, we can root for her downfall. Great Moments in CounterterrorismLeft Sudan as a refugee when you were a little kid and grew up in Canada? Well, no visa for you: Shooting guard Bol Kong has drawn interest from a number of universities and recently received a scholarship offer from Gonzaga. It is the defense he has met off the court that has slowed him -- and could prevent him from ever playing for the Bulldogs or anyone else in the United States. Kong, 20, is originally from Sudan, which is listed by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. Although he has lived in Canada since age 7, he does not hold citizenship there. He has been denied a visa to study in the United States three times, and it is unclear if he will ever satisfy the requirements for entry. I'm sure this kid's a huge threat and I, for one, am glad that he'll be wreaking his havoc north of the border. McCain Hates WarDoes anyone else find it a bit absurd that we've reached a point where a major party presidential nominee needs to protest defensively that he hates war: At any rate, as is often the case the issue here isn't John McCain's subjective attitude toward war. The issue is the likely consequences of his policies. McCain's stated policy toward Iran is likely to lead to war. McCain has in the past called for a policy toward North Korea that he admitted at the time might well lead to war. McCain's Iraq policy will lead to a prolongation of an ongoing war. McCain's vision of a "League of Democracies" would create a Cold War-style standoff which would likely fuel proxy wars around the world. Whether or not McCain hates war, if you would like to see a president likely to try to avoid getting the country into further wars, you don't want McCain in the White House. What She SaidPeople should listen to Michelle Goldberg. June 7, 2008Luster LostI'm sure Hamid Karzai has some problem, but it strikes me as intuitively a bit absurd to hold him personally responsible as being "not up to addressing Afghanistan’s many troubles." It's not, after all, as if Afghanistan has some long record of troubles being well-addressed and everything going smoothly until Karzai showed up. Meanwhile, neither the United States nor the Europeans have done as much as they/we should or even said we would to help out. Shifting the blame onto Karzai is just a low blow. KSM Endorses Federal Marriage Amendment“I consider all American constitution” evil, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] said, because it permits “same-sexual marriage and many other things that are very bad.” Unsolicited AdviceAll my liberal friends think the proverbial right-wing noise machine is going to go after Barack Obama in an even more demagogic and irresponsible manner than they went after the Clintons, and I’d have to say that the early evidence suggests they’re right. But not that conservatives care what I think, it seems to me that this is actually a substantial mistake. Crazy stuff about how Obama’s a ”marxist” a former ”street organizer”, a Muslim, and most of all blackity black black black mostly seems to me to obscure attention from a much more plausible campaign strategy. Every liberal I know is really excited about Obama because Obama’s a very charismatic, politically savvy guy who’s also got a substantially more liberal record that the successful Democratic nominees of the recent past. Not “substantially more liberal” in the sense of “secretly worships Mao,” but in the sense of “like many people, but unlike most Americans, found Bill Clinton too moderate for his tastes.” Go read Chris Hayes’ case for Obama in The Nation and you’ll find an argument that was very convincing to me. But then again, I’m the kind of guy who reads Nation articles, I’m not the median voter. The liberal contention is that given the current state of the country, and given a charismatic candidate, the median voter is prepared to vote for a more liberal candidate than he’s been voting for over the past few decades. But that’s hardly an airtight case, and the GOP has their own well-liked nominee and one who, for good measure, is actually somewhat less conservative than the people the Republicans have been nominating recently. They’ll probably lose one way or the other, but I think they’d be better off giving the convincing argument their best shot rather than opting for what seems like a flailing strategy of desperation. Fog-Like SensationsAce reporter Spencer Ackerman tells me over IM that he's experiencing "extreme fog" delays at Dulles Airport this morning. Yesterday at National they told us a flight was delayed because of fog. The thing of it was that you could look outside and there was clearly no fog. I attempted to vent about this to a fellow passenger, but he sheep-like took the view that if they say there's fog there must be fog. I tried to gesture to the numerous large windows, but to no avail. The experience put me in the mind of Michael Frayn's "Fog-Like Sensations". If You Ignore the Differences, They're the SameFred Hiatt calls out a friend of mine in the WaPo's lead editorial, and I expect he'll have something to say about it. But let me just note this: In essence, Mr. Obama promises an improved version of the Bush administration's three-year-old strategy of offering, in conjunction with European allies and Russia, economic and political favors to Iran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program and threatening it with sanctions if it refuses. All this proves is that if you describe policy ideas at a sufficient level of abstraction, then everything is identical. But the difference here is pretty clear. Obama would like to work, in good faith, for a diplomatic agreement that would achieve America's key security goal (verifiable Iranian disarmament) in exchange for us offering some kind of concessions to Iran. Bush and McCain, by contrast, come from a school of thought which regards it as essentially impossible to reach stable agreements with "bad guy" regimes. Thus, their diplomatic approach to Iran amounts to repeatedly shaking their fists at Iran and demanding that they capitulate, followed by stern proclamations about how "unacceptable" a nuclear-armed Iran would be. It's not clear if the Bush-McCain policy is going to lead to war (as a literal read of their rhetoric would suggest) or to Iran possessing nuclear weapons (if they flinch from launching a war) but what it's not going to do is produce a diplomatic agreement to achieve verifiable nuclear disarmament in Iran. Obama, by contrast, wants to pursue good-faith negotiations aimed at achieving that goal. That's the difference and it's a huge difference -- to brush it all away because both candidates agendas involve "Europe," "Russia," and "Iran" is silly, especially given that both McCain and Obama say they believe they're disagreeing it ought to take compelling evidence before anyone concludes otherwise. [The less said about Hiatt's concluding pitch for endless war in Iraq, the better] Cost and Quality in MedicareVia Brad DeLong, one of Peter Orszag's health care slides is a scatterplot of state per patient Medicare spending and state Medicare quality:
As you can see, we're having some serious problems with getting good value for our money in health care spending. The standard account of this, that I have no reason to disbelieve, is that geographical areas with a high supply of health care services -- especially specialist MDs -- wind up recommending to patients a lot of useless or even harmful additional treatments. And this occurs at the same time as restrictions on the supply of general practitioners and on the permitted scope of activities by non-doctors (nurse-practitioners, etc.) artificially raises the cost of the sort of very basic health care that really would be useful to people. Long story short, substantial progress on the health care costs problem will probably require the crushing of the doctor's lobby. Reforming to the method of financing health care can shift the fiscal burden off financially struggling people in a helpful way in the short- or medium-term but absent some kind of doctor-crushing initiative to change the system of health care delivery the fiscal burden will soon enough drown whoever's tasked with the responsibility of paying for it. Oh Noes! Charity in a Church!Hugh Hewitt's lackey Duane Patterson has an odd post up introduced thusly: This is from the "Pastor's Page" from the April 9, 2006, Trinity United Church of Christ bulletin. Barack Obama was a member of the church at the time. It is unknown if he attended services that day. Click on the image to enlarge. You read that and you're expected to see some scandalous stuff. But what follows is incredibly unremarkable:
Yes, that's right, Pastor Wright tried to help one of his congregants get a kidney transplant and if you put his former parishoner Barack Obama in office, next thing you know churches all around the country will be, um, trying to help people. The same post also has this shocker:
Yep, there Wright goes again trying to help Katrina victims and help poor people receive the federal tax credits to which they're entitled. He's like the second coming of Elijah Mohammed, this guy. Can you imagine a white church being able to get away with engaging in charitable endeavors? Never! This comes to me via an equally baffled Andrew Sullivan. Mostly these circular letters seem me to be a reminder of why one might have long been a member of Trinity -- most of the church's activities seem to be basically unremarkable, socially conscious engagement with the community, precisely the sort of institution a rising local politician would want to associate himself with. Clinton's SpeechI think this is very good stuff and certainly explains better than I could why her supporters ought to line up behind Obama. Genuinely moving, and excellent overall -- really a total home run. InfrastructureBuilding a really good mass transit system is terrifyingly expensive. And yet, cities that have such systems can derive huge benefits from them. The construction of Metro laid the groundwork for Washington, DC's current renaissance and cities like New York and London continue to reap enormous benefits from transit infrastructure investments that were initiated far, far in the past. Politicians, however, don't get appointed to 50 year terms that allow them to take credit for the long-term benefits of their decision to spend big money up front in the short run. Consequently, there's been a lot of discussion recently in the political world of tweaking the way we finance infrastructure so as to make long-term investments more viable in budgetary terms. Rob Goodspeed has a good rundown of the current state of play. Speech ReduxI'm hearing that some people feel Clinton spoke too much about herself and her campaign in her speech. I think that's totally wrong. It's the very fact that the speech dwelled at length on the Clinton movement, its meaning, and its accomplishments that it becomes an effective endorsement of Obama. Absent that stuff, it's just another speech about why you should vote for Barack Obama. With the Clinton-specific stuff, it becomes specifically a speech about how, given the outcome of the primary, the logic next step for Clinton supporters is to join Clinton herself in supporting Obama. Far from an egocentric outburst, the talking about herself and her supporters made the speech the great speech that it was and helped a lot, I think, to break down the mutual barriers of bitterness that had built up. Something nominally more focused on Obama might well have come off as half-hearted. What she delivered was perfectly sincere and utterly in keeping with the main themes of her campaign, but also led to the desired conclusion. I think it was very skillfully put together. McCain's Schedule
I grabbed this shot from his website yesterday. There's literally nothing on the agenda except fundraisers. That shows one of the advantages that Obama's money edge is going to give him -- constant fundraising can help McCain close the gap, but it requires him to engage in constant fundraising. Meanwhile, much as McCain prizes his reformer persona, it's simply very difficult to be a real reformer when you're spending all your time begging big-dollar donors to write you checks for $2,300. Either you can grow a massive base of small donors (Obama) or you can stay in office without facing competitive election battles (McCain pre-2008) or else you become just another money-grubbing politician. The "Whitey" VideoCheck out Dave Weigel's debunking of Larry Johnson's smears. My sense is that when the CIA rigged elections in postwar Italy and Japan, they showed a little more finesse than this. |
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