At my reunion, they distributed the results of a survey of the Class of 2003 that's based on a healthily sized, though not-really-random, sample of the class. On the politically relevant points, 66 percent call themselves Democrats, 13 percent say Independent, 8 percent say Republican and the rest have sundry other self-descriptions. 19 percent are very liberal, 44 percent somewhat liberal, 27 percent in the middle, 8 percent somewhat conservative, and just 0.9 percent very conservative. A staggering 93 percent say they're "dissatisfied" with the way things are going in the United States. And in a poll of candidate preferences taken before Obama locked up the nomination, 59 percent preferred him, 18 percent liked Hillary, and 13.1 percent liked McCain.
Basically -- it's a liberal group. Perhaps not so surprisingly. Somewhat more surprising, though, is that the margin of people who say they've become more liberal since graduating (15 percent) is bigger than the margin who say they've become more conservative (12 percent). That's in line with one's sense of where the country's moved over the past five years, but goes against the stereotype of students shifting right when they encounter the "real world."
Mr. Obama’s aides said some states where they intend to campaign — like Georgia, Missouri, Montana and North Carolina — might ultimately be too red to turn blue. But the result of making an effort there could force Mr. McCain to spend money or send him to campaign in what should be safe ground, rather than using those resources in states like Ohio.
That's the normal account you hear, but I think in some ways it's the least-compelling reason to try and run a geographically broad campaign. The best reason, it seems to me, is probably just that it's an appealing electoral strategy to be seen as running a broad-based, nationwide political campaign. Bush talked in 2000 about the problems of poor minority children in school not so much because he thought he was going to get huge numbers of black people to vote for him, but to signal to voters everywhere that he was "a different kind of Republican," caring, etc. Even if Obama doesn't have any realistic prospect of winning North Carolina or Montana he certainly wants to win in places like Minnesota and Virginia and parts of Minnesota are like Montana, parts of Virginia are like North Carolina and an image as a broad-minded person who campaigns everywhere can be helpful. After all, Obama's eruption onto the national stage was a critique of the red/blue politics of cultural division, so it's good to dramatize that by running a nationwide campaign.
Beyond that, the more places you campaign the more places you're in a position to take advantage of unexpected good fortune. If for some reason McCain commits some kind of horrible gaffe that alienates the people of the big empty square states, it's good to have laid the groundwork to take advantage of that. Or maybe Bobb Barr will catch fire in the Deep South. In a narrowcast campaign, you need to guess in advance how things will unfold over the next several months and that's just difficult to do. If you have the cash to run a wide-focus campaign, then you can simply try to respond competently to events as they unfold however they unfold.
Another long HRC campaign postmortem in which the word "Iraq" does not appear. For that matter, neither does "Iran" or "Kyl-Lieberman." But it's a bit perverse to look at this race wholly as an election Clinton lost. But these topics were integral to Obama's critique of Clinton and you can't understand the more purely tactical issues in the race without having some grip on the issues the candidates were debating.
In 1967, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley told President Lyndon Johnson that he needed to remove the 500,000 U.S. troops then involved in Vietnam’s civil war. When Johnson responded by asking how he could do that, Daley replied, “Put them on a [expletive deleted] plane and bring them home.”
It is time to follow Daley’s advice [in Iraq]. These multiple conflicts cannot be resolved by American military power. In fact, every time we deal with one conflict we make another worse.
That's from Larry Korb's article on getting out of Iraq, and I say: Indeed. Obviously, any large military operation is logistically complicated. But a lot of people seem to have developed mental blocks -- real or imagined -- around the fact that yes we can actually decide that Iraq is going to become one of any number of troubled countries that gets along for better or for worse without 130,000 American soldiers hanging around. All it takes is a president who actually wants our forces to leave.
Another thought on these Clinton campaign postmortems is that there's a tendency in them to overstate the extent to which changes in the Clinton campaign account for her better performance at the end of the primary process than at the beginning of it. As best I can tell, the real cause of the change was just a change in which states were voting -- the schedule shifted to places where the sort of older working class white voter who formed Clinton's base were a larger proportion of the electorate. Holding demographics constant, there was little change in either candidate's performance over the course of the primary season.
Most current speculation on a mismatch between the popular vote and the electoral college currently focuses, for various reasons, on the prospect of McCain winning the election with fewer votes than Obama gets. Nate at 538, however, points out a significant way in which the electoral college is disadvantaging the Republicans -- it's based on where people lived during the 2000 census rather than where they live today.
If you re-did the allocation based on 2007 Current Population Survey data you'd give three electoral votes to Texas and one each to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah. Most of those are solid GOP states, and the two that aren't (Nevada and Florida) have a distinct GOP tilt. Meanwhile, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania would each lose one electoral vote and Ohio would lose two. So consider that a reason for conservatives to want to get behind the National Popular Vote movement.
Meanwhile, there's obviously a problem here for Democrats in 2012. The good news is that as some of these states gain population -- especially Arizona, Nevada, and Texas -- they seem to be becoming less solidly Republican. But we're probably still quite a ways from Texas being a competitive state. So you see further evidence that the Democrats' future (or lack thereof) is in the Southwest and the party's ability to start reliably getting electoral votes out of Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico to replace some of the ones that are going to be taken away from the Northeast.
Armando says: "I'd like to interrupt this Unity Day message with a small reminder to the Barack Obama campaign and the Democratic Party — unless he picks Hillary Clinton as his running mate — the day he announces his Vice Presidential candidate will be a day of disunity."
I think Kevin Drum raises the right issue about this, namely the near-total lack of evidence that Hillary Clinton (as opposed to some number of her retainers) has any interest in the vice presidency. It's certainly true that if Clinton has a strong desire to be vice president, she arguably has it within her power to make a "I'm on the ticket or there's no unity" play. But if she doesn't want to be VP, then how disgruntled can her supporters really be about that?
Like all cities, Washington DC tries to take various steps to ensure that vacant or abandoned properties don't fall into disrepair and become a source of blight in neighborhoods. But as The Washington Postpoints out today, DC has to deal with one class of property that other American cities don't worry about -- abandoned embassies that exist outside the legal jurisdiction of the city and, indeed, the country.
Mark Goldberg notes that the Senate Intelligence Committee seems to have forgotten all about Hans Blix and the IAEA too when discussing pre-war intelligence. After all, wouldn't want to pay too much attention to the guys who got this right! That, after all, might lead to taking the IAEA's assessments of Iranian nuclear activity seriously.
There are a whole bunch of interesting contributions to the NYT's "what went wrong" symposium on the Clinton campaign, but Kathleen Hall Jamieson's short but sweet offering comes the best of nailing it: "key groups of Democrats tagged her as a candidate who abetted a Republican president’s unwarranted pre-emptive action." Jamieson thinks this is an unfair tag, but I still think it was a fair one, and Clinton's inability to convince me and other people like me that I'm wrong is why she lost.
The death of the American newspaper continues apace with sharp cutbacks planned for Tribune Company papers. To me as an outside observer one striking thing about these newspaper cutbacks is how indiscriminate they seem. The NYT's account of the cutbacks includes this:
“The problem is the papers aren’t producing ad revenue, and diminishing the journalism isn’t going to solve that,” [James O'Shea] said. He said it was wrong to think that a paper could cut staff without reducing output and quality.
Literally speaking, I think O'Shea is probably wrong. For example, Michael Phillips did a review for The Chicago Tribune recently of You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times ran a different review of the same film by a different reviewer. But Zohan is Zohan in Chicago, LA, Orlando, and wherever else the Tribune owns papers. Reducing staff such that the entire Tribune company only reviews each film once, and then runs that review in all its different papers, seems like a way to cut costs without compromising quality. Indeed, in principle you could cut costs while increasing quality by keeping on staff the best critics across the company while ditching some of the dead weight.
And similarly, it's not as if running "Exiting race, Clinton solidly backs Obama" by Janet Hook and Noam Levey in the LAT and "Hillary Clinton steps aside, urges supporters to back Obama" by James Oliphant in the Tribune is some huge advance for journalism as opposed to running just one article in both papers. But you never see any kind of serious effort to identify possible efficiencies and rationalize operations. Instead, these mandates for sweeping cuts (eliminating 82 pages of news per week from the LAT) come down as owners are apparently content to preside over dwindling operations stuck in a death spiral of declining revenue, cutbacks, declining quality, declining audience, declining revenue, cutbacks, etc.
James Joyner has a very good rundown. Personally, I miss the old more amateurish days in a lot of ways. But then again, almost by definition everyone's going to enjoy a hobby they do on the side more than they enjoy their job, and as far as jobs go I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to turn my hobby into one.
I think Michael Goldfarb very adequately spells out the case for disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters to join him in lining up behind John McCain -- if what you liked about Clinton was her support for the Iraq War and the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, McCain may be your man.
But if, like most Clinton supporters I'm aware of, you liked her work on expanding access to health care and building a more generally equitable United States of America, then it seems to me you're going to want to vote for Obama.
I was trying to look something up about public opinion on trade issues, and particular recent trends in opinion, and saw this paragraph in a Public Agenda survey:
Attitudes have also become more negative about international trade. In previous rounds of the Index, the public showed great uncertainty over the benefits of trade—fully half said they were unsure who benefited more from trade, the United States or other countries, compared with about one-third who thought other countries benefited more. Now roughly as many say other countries benefit more (42 percent) as are unsure (41 percent). Only 14 percent think the United States benefits more from trade.
That's just a terrible way of looking at the situation. My read of the way the world works is that the United States has a much larger economy than do most countries. Consequently, trade is just a much bigger deal for other countries than it is for the United States. For example, if all US-Canadian trade ceased that would be terrible for us but much worse for the Canadians. Consequently, I'd say that other countries benefit more from trade than the United States does. If the world ever shifts to autarky, that'll suck for everyone, but it'll suck less for us than it does for, say, tiny subarctic Iceland.
But that's not me having a "negative attitude" about international trade. But in Public Agenda's conception of how trade works, it seems to be a zero-sum activity such that if some other country benefits more from trade than we do, then we're getting ripped off.
There was a bizarre editorial in the LA Times yesterday about how Obama and McCain are really pretty similar dudes and it's awesome that they're both so centristy and the same. One could debunk this contention, but the editorial itself doesn't really argue for it. They concede, for example, that McCain and Obama have serious disagreements about:
Iraq
Iran
Health care
Taxes
Trade
Abortion rights
Gun control
That's a lot of disagreement! They also concede that the two candidates "have different plans to solve the mortgage crisis." What's more, after asserting that Obama and McCain "support the same policies" on the environment, they immediately acknowledge that they support different policies, "Obama's would reduce them to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, while McCain's would cut them by 60%" though they fail to note the difference between auctioning permits and giving them away. In the course of acknowledging disagreement about abortion, they note that Obama and McCain would appoint different kinds of judges, but they don't seem to consider the fact that the federal judiciary actually deals with all kinds of issues other than abortion. Nor do they mention Social Security, which is kind of a big deal.
One could go on like this, but I'm not sure what the point would be. Clearly, though, there's a substantial difference between the candidates and I have no idea why the press would think that obscuring that is a good idea -- conflict sells papers! And it's true!
The most traditional location to reach the political establishment, the Washington Post opinion section, is brazenly male-dominated. Seventeen of the 19 columnists are men; only three of the columnists are racial minorities. Guest op-eds could present more voices, but they rarely do. This year, only 12 percent of the Post's guest pieces came from women, according to a May count by ombudsman Deborah Howell. At the New York Times, eight of the ten weekly columnists are men; one is black.
I'd say this is especially egregious with regard to the op-ed pieces. The major papers seem to pride themselves on the glacial pace of turnover and total lack of quality control with regard to their regular columnists, which limits one's ability to diversify with speed. But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?" I'm sure someone would say yes.
Austan Goolsbee, speaking in part on behalf of Barack Obama, says that since recent events have shown that the Fed may need to step in and rescue failing investment banks those banks should be regulated closely in much the way that commercial banks are. Greg Mankiw seems upset about this but he doesn't mount much of an argument beyond the query "Here's a question for Austan: Can an investment bank avoid such regulation if it promises never to use the discount window?"
My first read on this was that a "promise" would be no good. A bank can't "promise" not to fail. Nor can a bank promise not to be bailed out if it does fail. A bailout, when justified, isn't a favor you do for the bank. It's something you do because it's necessary to avoid larger negative consequences throughout the economy. So a promise to avoid the discount window would be valueless. But if the public is going to need to guarantee that financial institutions that grow "too big to fail" don't fail, then the public is going to need to regulate those institutions. Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong say much the same thing, with some added professional economisting and the added insight that Ben Bernanke appears to be on the side of more regulation here.
Photo by Flickr user Epicharmus used under a Creative Commons license
Here's some coverage of John McCain's deplorable treatment of his first wife. Basically, she got into a horrible car accident that left her disabled, at which point he had what seems to have been several affairs with different women before embarking on a months-long courtship of his current wife. Then he divorced his first wife, and married number two -- who conveniently enough happened to have been a wealthy heiress.
Now I have ample other reasons for thinking Barack Obama would be a better President than McCain, so I'm not going to pretend that this is my key driving force. But I'll agree with Nick Beaudrot that "I'm really curious what the more explicitly family-values-oriented conservatives like Ross Douthat think of this particular story."
Via Farley and Nexon, an instance of what Nexon terms NATO issuing "checks it probably can't cash" in the Russo-Georgian conflict over Abkhazia. Quite so.
It would be appallingly stupid for the United States or our other key allies to put anything whatsoever on the line for the sake of Georgia's efforts to reassert control over its rebellious province. The question of maintaining a good relationship with an important country, Russia, versus standing up for the independence of Russia's neighbors poses some tough dilemmas. But when the issue is Georgia's effort to rule over a province that by all indications doesn't want to be ruled by Tblisi, the dilemma really isn't difficult at all. We should just stay far, far, far away from this dispute and try to make it clear to our friends in Georgia that we don't encourage them to do anything stupid.
It's very strange that John McCain can baldly lie to the press about a nationally televised speech he delivered last week and not get called on it by reporters. This wasn't some obscure address -- I watched it live, as did political junkies all across the land since McCain scheduled it so as to come amidst coverage of the SD and MT primaries.
Tom Friedman had a good column on Israel's fundamental strengths vis-à-vis Iran, it's leading regional rival: "Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs."
To me, though, the natural followup to this is consideration of Israel's real strategic vulnerability -- the country is ruling over a population of several million Arabs to whom it refuses to grant either independence or citizenship. That's a recipe for big trouble, and it's trouble that economic dynamism and technological prowess can't overcome. Independence for these Arabs, by contrast, would pose some direct security risks but as Friedman argues Israel is a very successful country and society that gives every indication of being able to whether the security challenges of a very difficult region. But how long can Israel persist as a successful country while contravening basic democratic norms and denying rights and electoral participation to a huge proportion of its de facto population? There are good and obvious reasons for Israelis to want to resist incorporating millions of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians into their country, but the only realistic alternative to doing that is create a viable state on those lands for the Palestinians. On one level, this is well understood, but on another level it's often hard to detect any understanding of it at all when you look at the policies of Israel and "pro-Israel" groups in the United States.
If you think we've got energy policy problems, just consider China, where as Art Pine points out "Chinese motorists are paying only $2.50 a gallon for gasoline" and prices have "risen 9 percent since early 2007, compared to 80 percent in the United States." That's thanks to planet-destroying subsidies that in a world of rapidly rising oil prices are becoming hard to afford. Similar subsidies are very common in the developing world, and they're very destructive -- the world would be a much better place if the money spent on this was left in people's pockets or directed at something productive.
But cuts in fuel subsidies tend to lead to the sort of political unrest that no government likes to see but that authoritarian governments like China have particular reason to fear lest a protest about reduced subsidies turn into something bigger.
Photo by Flickr user Robennals used under a Creative Commons license
This time the Hewitt/Patterson duo really have Barack Obama and Trinity United Church of Christ nailed as Pastor Wright congratulates some young parishoners on their graduation from college. The madness! When the public finds out about these newsletters, Obama's toast.
Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution argues that "McCain continues to embrace Bush policies on the most important issues, relying on a reputation for independence and moderation that could be lost in the heat of battle with Obama and the Democrats.... At the end of this long interlude, the only rationale for his election that has emerged is that Obama cannot be trusted to lead the country at a time of great danger because he is too inexperienced, naïve, liberal, elitist, and out of touch with American values. 'Elect me because the other guy is worse.' Not much of an argument in the face of gale-force winds blowing against the Republican Party."
I think that nicely frames some of the ways in which McCain and his supporters are talking past his critics. McCain can boast, accurately, that he's been substantially more personally independent of Bush and the Bush administration than have most of his congressional colleagues. He's not a die-hard Bush loyalist. But what he is doing is promising to continue Bush's policies on the most important issues -- on Iraq, taxes, health care, the economy, Iran, etc. he's not saying anything that wasn't in Bush's last State of the Union address.
That's not because Bush is controlling McCain's mind, it's just that despite the animosity between Bush and McCain their opinions about public policy are similar and they're beholden to a similar set of interest groups.
In the course of critiquing a Richard Cohen column, Publius says:
In April 1865, [Robert E.] Lee had a fateful choice. Sure, the war couldn’t be won in the traditional sense. But Lee could have turned his battle-hardened army into a guerrilla outfit that could have harassed federal armies for decades. To his eternal credit, he declined to do so. Choosing guerrilla war would have made post-war North/South tensions even more poisonous than they were (with longer lasting effects).
I'm not sure that reflects a correct understanding of the strategic conflict during the Civil War. It's true that in a conventional war of national liberation, this kind of guerilla strategy would be the expected line for the Confederacy to take. But the rebels had a very specific goal in mind -- they seceded from the Union after Lincoln's electoral victory because they wanted to preserve slavery. It's very hard to see, however, how a guerilla strategy could have been consistent with the goal of maintaining slavery or the plantation economy. The strategy Southern elites did pursue, of seeking to re-establish first white control over southern state and local governments (including in the states and counties where blacks were a majority) and then total exclusion of blacks from the political process, was, by contrast, a good way of hanging on to half a loaf.
Meanwhile, though the Confederate military didn't pursue guerilla war against the Union Army, it should be remembered that southern whites did launch a large-scale, years-long campaign of terrorist violence against their African-American neighbors.
Ross Douthat responds to queries about John McCain's mistreatment of his first wife:
As for my view of the matter - well, I tend to agree with James Poulos that an America in which politicians had a more difficult time recovering from flagrant private misbehavior would be a better place to live and vote and marry in. It's not that I think an adulterer can't be an effective political leader; it's that I'd like to see the social costs of sexual misconduct go up, at least on the margins, and having certain avenues to prominence closed off to you if you decide to ditch your family and take up with a younger, richer, healthier woman seems like a reasonable cost to impose on would-be divorcees. All of that said, though, we're obviously a long, long way from that state of affairs, and things being what they are, I'm not going to argue that social conservatives should deliver the White House to Obama in order to make a futile protest against the decline of masculine honor among our politicians.
That's cogently argued. But note that it's a cogently argued brief for the view that cultural conservatives ought to deploy the marital indiscretions of liberal politicians as a political issue while ignoring the indiscretions of conservative politicians. Just note that what looks like hypocrisy from the outside can often have a perfectly coherent explanation to the believers.
"Say what you will about the MSM, but they still have their uses," says Kevin Drum pointing to LA Times coverage of vanishing tomatoes. I actually got the scoop on this from a woman working the cash register at a Wendy's in Logan Airport (she was explaining why my spicy chicken sandwich would have no tomato slice) yesterday. But being a lowly internet pundit rather than an awesome Real Journalist, I didn't think to write up my reporting -- I figured if they Wendy's people knew all about it, then everyone must know.
Harry Truman was hugely unpopular when he left office, but people love him now. This seems to give a lot of comfort to George W. Bush and other members of his administration, but Spencer Ackerman makes the excellent point that Truman still isn't admired for his handling of the Korean War. It's that, in retrospect, other things Truman did came to look really smart and far-sighted.
But what the Bushites want to get out of their Trumania is vindication for what they did in Iraq. There's just nothing comparable to Truman's work on post-war institution-building in the non-Iraq portions of Bush's legacy. I think he's done an okay job in regards to some things like our relationship with China and so forth, but all the action's been in Iraq and it's been a disaster.
Dave Alpert reports that Gerry Connolly's your man in tomorrow's VA-11 Democratic Primary if you're interested in transportation and smart growth questions. Unfortunately, I think his opponent is more progressive on other issues so there's not necessarily a clear choice here.
I should have posted a thread on this earlier, but: NBA Finals, woo! I think last night's game was an example of what a fallacy it is to think that only the fourth quarter matters (or whatever) in the NBA. Given the way LA outplayed Boston near the end, they clearly would have won the game if not for the fact that the Celtics managed to build up this huge lead earlier.
At any rate, I fully expect the Lakers to come on strong when the series shifts back to California. LA has, I think, a somewhat better team but Boston has home court advantage so I think we should continue to expect a very competitive series.
Adam Kushner wonders (via Dana Goldstein) will Facebook put college reunions out of business, since they make it easy to stay abreast of what's happening in other people's lives. I would imagine the reverse impact -- that Facebook will make more people feel vaguely in touch with a wider circle of other people, and therefore more interested in seeing them face-to-face after a five or ten year absence.
Benjamin Friedman notes that with his new picks to run the Air Force, Secretary Gates is breaking with the longstanding tradition of letting the service by run by people with a background as fighter pilots. Everything Gates is doing seems like steps in the right direction, but the problems he's trying to address stem from the fact that the separate Air Force is a fundamentally misguided idea.
Looks like the permanent occupation plan may not go through as intended:
Faced with stiff Iraqi opposition, it is "very possible" the U.S. may have to extend an existing U.N. mandate, said a senior administration official close to the talks. That would mean major decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq could be left to the next president, including how much authority the U.S. must give Iraqis over military operations and how quickly the handover takes place.
Leaving decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq up to the next president sounds like an awfully good idea to me. It'll let us, among other things, debate this issue in our presidential election. My understanding is that Barack Obama, like most Americans, and like most Iraqis, wants American troops to come home pretty soon. John McCain, by contrast, like George W. Bush, wants them to stay for 100 or 10,000 or whatever years irrespective of the cost and irrespective of Iraqi opinion. It seems like a disagreement worth airing.
Pretty much all the evidence shows that demographic and socioeconomic factors have huge implications for student achievement. This fact, in turn, sometimes leads people to take a very strong "demographics is destiny" view of kids' outcomes. That, however, is far too simple. At my reunion over the weekend, I met up with a good friend who now works at the Excel Academy in East Boston and they get very impressive results:
Excel Academy students — 64 percent of whom are Latino and 73 percent of whom qualify for the Federal free and reduced lunch program — outperformed their local and state peers as well as their state-wide Caucasian peers on the 2007 math and English MCAS exams at every single grade level, thereby reversing the achievement gap. Furthermore, Excel Academy’s eighth graders were ranked third out of 280 Massachusetts school districts and fourth out of 461 Massachusetts public middle schools, placing them in the top one percent statewide.
Adequate resources, deployed correctly, can achieve great results even with disadvantaged kids. The trouble, however, is that when you look at the schools that are having success it's not as if they're slight variants on the education we're giving to most poor kids -- it costs more money, it involves more hours, it's more staff-intensive, etc., etc. Basically, to make up for the disadvantages that come from being disadvantaged, you need to give poor kids more and better instruction than middle-class kids need. In this country, however, our general practice is to give them less and worse.
Eye-opening video from the Women's Media Center rounds up some of the sexism in recent campaign coverage. But what's on cable is nothing compared to some of the garbage in the comments section of the video.
Linda Hirschman had a somewhat puzzling op-ed calling on feminism to "focus" more and, I guess, abandon efforts by the movement to be open to more diverse people and concerns. Less intersectionality, more single-minded focus on middle-class white women trying to climb the corporate ladder. Mostly, I agree with Jill Filipovich's take on this but I thought I might also say that the alleged lack of progress to which Hirschman's recipe of "focus" is supposed to be the solution doesn't actually seem to me to have been happening.
If you think of the long trajectory of Western society, you have women being totally excluded from the main positions of economic and political power for hundreds of years. You also have a situation where since most people are women, you can't achieve equality by simply opening the doors of existing institutions to a new group of people. Institutions actually need to be rethought, reconfigured, and in some instances remade. That's, you know, hard to do. So I don't think anyone should consider it a shocking sign of things gone wrong that thirty or forty years hasn't proven to be enough time to eradicate every problem. Nor do I think the fact that many problems remain should make people think that progress isn't being made. On the elite issues dear to Hirschman's heart, we saw our first woman to anchor the nightly broadcast news starting in 2006. We saw the first woman to be Speaker of the House of Representatives sworn in in 2007. Things keep changing, which is as it should be. It's okay for people to be impatient with the pace of change, but not so impatient that they develop a false sense of crisis and decide that throwing people of color under the bus is the way to move forward.
McCain promises to "veto every beer" which can't go over well with the white working class.
He also promises to veto every bill with earmarks in it. This is certainly something he likes to talk about, but it seems like a potential disaster to me. Isn't the crack Obama organization going to be able to send out customized mailers to everyone in America featuring a list of locally popular projects that McCain's promised to get rid of? Seems like something a good database and a dozen interns could pull off.
Via Brendan Nyhan, John McCain may not have invented the internet, but he sure does know how to use the lingo:
"You know, basically it's a Google," he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. "What you can find out now on the Internet -- it's remarkable."
That's not change you can believe in! [horrifying grimace]
I didn't really care for Central Michel Richard when I went there (not that it's terrible, but I had an "it was fine, but..." reaction to it) and ever since I've been eager to condemn it as "overrated." But I've been unsure how highly rated it is. Ezra Klein doesn't like it either! But now that it's won a James Beard Award I can officially proclaim it underrated [UPDATE: by which, of course, I mean "overrated"].
By contrast, the Bagaduce Lunch in Brooksville, ME, which apparently also won an award of some kind, offers absolutely delicious fried seafood baskets in a delightful outdoors setting for just a fraction of what Michel Richard is charging for his pretentious take on unpretentious food.
You can tell it's general election time because Barack Obama's shifting his message back toward the center with yesterday's economic policy speech, with Austan Goolsbee re-emerging from the doghouse to take part in conference calls, and with Jason Furman -- a more veteran political operator than Goolsbee but someone with substantively similar views -- coming on board as a paid staffer. From the text of the speech, a shift away from the "I hate NAFTA more than you" rhetoric of the Ohio primary to something more like the center-left consensus view:
And because we know that we can’t or shouldn’t put up walls around our economy, a long-term agenda will also find a way to make trade work for American workers. We do the cause of free-trade – a cause I believe in – no good when we pass trade agreements that hand out favors to special interests and do little to help workers who have to watch their factories close down. There is nothing protectionist about demanding that trade spreads the benefits of globalization as broadly as possible.
This is all essentially fine by me because I'm a trust-fund scumbag the "center" wing of Democratic Party economic thought has shifted substantially left over the past few years. You can see that as many members of Clinton's economic team have grown more populist, in Bill Galston deciding that the era of big government is back, in any given Paul Krugman column, etc.
As of ten minutes ago, this is what I knew about Kathleen Sebelius: She's governor of Kansas, she endorsed Obama, she has lady-parts, nobody seems to have very strong objections to making her Vice President. Sam Stein, though, offers a more thorough look. Adding more details doesn't really change my strong-strong feelings about Sebelius who continues to seem like a totally plausible choice.
A Bloomberg story notes that declines in home prices have hardly been uniform. Thanks to the rising cost of gasoline, things are much worse in far-flung exurbs than they are in closer-in territories. This is one of several factors that could lead, as Christopher Leinberger predicted, to the far-out suburb being the next slum. The trouble of course is that under a scenario like that, high energy costs will disproportionately bite the poor to an even greater extent than they do today.
The solution, as Ryan Avent says, is to build denser communities. We ought to build more transit infrastructure, of course, but it's cheaper to use what we already have more intensively. And, of course, it's more practical to build new infrastructure if there's a reasonable expectation that it will serve intensive development. Beyond that, density also serves to make walking and biking more practical for more trips. And best of all, getting denser could be accomplished mostly through growth-enhancing relaxation of regulatory burdens.
In that spirit, it's worth noticing some stuff about the math of density. Back when I was in college, I never thought of Cambridge as a particularly high-density place -- it's certainly not dominated by skyscrapers or large apartment towers or anything of the sort. But it turns out to have over 15,700 residents per square mile. If DC were as dense as Cambridge, we'd have about a million people living here. And if Fairfax County were as dense as Cambridge, it would fit six million people. And of course if the supply of housing in central cities and nearby suburbs were radically higher, then it would be much easier for people to afford to live in them. Instead, restrictions on the supply of conveniently located housing lead to high prices and the "drive until you qualify" phenomenon that's currently leaving many Americans in deep trouble as they try to pay for fuel.
It seems the World Food Program's Humanitarian Air Service needs to cut relief activities in Sudan thanks to countries being unwilling to pony up the $77 million that's needed.
I expect, naturally, that every conservative and liberal hawk writer who's penned dozens of articles bemoaning the fact that the UN has stopped unilateral militarism from rescuing Darfur will also speak out against this. After all, it's not like this is a group of people who just likes macho posturing and is only interested in helping other people when the method of helping them is killing someone. Not like that at all. Doubtless all the folks who editorialized in favor of an invasion of Burma just haven't spoken out about this helicopter problem yet because they're too busy. Or maybe they have a principled objection to cost-effective, logistically feasible methods of humanitarianism.
I wonder sometimes whether inequality of status -- as opposed to wealth -- is greater in Western Europe or in the United States. In this country you can love NASCAR and be proud of it. Millionaires won't look down on you much for that taste. In Europe you are expected to dress well and be educated and not watch too much TV. So the egalitarian left is in an odd position here. On one hand it wishes to elevate the European system over the United States. Furthermore it also wishes to claim that wealth isn't a final determinant of happiness (i.e., Europe is worthy), while at the same time circling back to emphasize inequality of wealth as a prima facie fault of the American system.
That's a nice story, but I don't see any evidence whatsoever that the United States actually is a snob-free country where rich people don't do any looking down at their social inferiors. I feel like I live in a country where, as in European places I've visited, we have our snobs and our racists and all the rest along with some nice people. But even if it is true that Europe has more snobs, this is really neither here nor there in terms of any particular policy debate. To take the idea that the American left wants to make the country "like Europe" too literally is silly -- there are a lot of elements of European society that couldn't possibly be replicated over here (old cathedrals) or that wouldn't be reasonable to replicate (tons of languages) or that are downright undesirable.
But there are things we can learn from Europe. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are examples of cities that have done a lot of work to make transportation policy work for people, rather than for cars. France has a health care system that a lot of people deem admirable, and at least lets us think about what a very different approach to public education (where I think they're on to something) and the work/leisure tradeoff (where I think we're on to something) would look like. I don't see why we can't become more like some European countries in some respects (and there are other respects in which some European countries ought to become more like the US) without abandoning wholesale the parts of American culture that are broadly appealing to many people around the world.
From page 208 of America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 911 the Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier:
Some officials recall having reasons to second-guess what they were reading and hearing. "Up until Desert Fox, I believed that [Saddam] had WMD," says Anthony Zinni, the Marine general who commanded the air assault and who emerged as a leading skeptic of calls to overthrow the Iraqi government. "Then Clinton said we would bomb the WMD sides. I asked the intelligence community for the targets, but they couldn't give me any. Nothing they gave me was definitively a WMD target. They were all dual-use. That's when my doubts began."
One reason the Bush administration was able to get away with massively over-interpreting the Iraq/WMD intelligence is that they weren't exactly the first administration to do so, they built upon earlier trends in questionable analysis. Of course things got even worse later. Inspectors from UNMOVIC and the IAEA were back on the ground in Iraq, saying their findings didn't confirm American suspicions. The administration pushed back. So UNMOVIC and the IAEA sensibly asked the Americans to share intel with them and they'd check out whatever leads Bush wanted them to check out. But there were no leads to check out! The press not only managed to completely ignore this, but to continues ignoring the fact that this ever happened up until this very day.
It became clear over the weekend that some elements in the press are going to attempt, in spite of all the evidence, to suggest that Obama and McCain are "really" the same. The centerpiece for any such argument would have to be climate change, where McCain genuinely has broken with the Bush administration's horrible record and come out in favor of reducing carbon emissions. And it should be conceded up front that reducing emissions by any amount, however inadequate, would be a big improvement over the Bush plan of ever-increasing emissions.
But lurking within McCain's agenda is a striking level of vacuity. Right now, the federal government spends a lot of money on roads and very little money on railroads. Moving freight on railroads emits less carbon than does moving freight on roads. And moving people on railroads emits less carbon than does moving people on roads. Ergo, one good way to reduce carbon emissions would be to shift some of our spending off of roads and onto rail. This needn't entail any increase in overall spending levels so there are no reasons of fiscal tightwadery that conservatives would need to oppose such a measure. And yet, McCain doesn't seem to favor it.
What's more, McCain doesn't seem to favor any changes in federal policy that would lead to reduced carbon emissions. He has no proposals to reduce driving and no proposals to increase energy efficiency. What's more, he opposes subsidies to clean sources of electricity. This last he nominally does on the conservative grounds that we shouldn't be interfering with the normal operation of the market. That seems like a plausible view to take, except McCain isn't opposed to nuclear subsidies. Indeed, he very strongly favors them. Favors them, Dave Roberts points out, to the extent that he said he would vote against the most moderate cap-and-trade plan in the congress on the grounds that it doesn't include sufficient subsidies for nuclear power.
That's the kind of position you would expect a lobbyist for the nuclear energy industry to take -- not someone who's serious about reducing carbon emissions. Anything that puts a price on carbon, whether or not in includes explicit subsidies, will be good for the nuclear energy industry. And if additional subsidies on top of that are the price it takes to convince unprincipled Senators -- like, apparently, John McCain -- to vote for an overall good bill then that's a price worth paying. But on the merits the McCain position, "yes to cap-and-trade if and only if it contains large subsidies for nuclear power" verges on the insane. Or, rather, it makes a lot of sense in terms of McCain's prodigious fundraising from the energy industry but it's very hard to understand on the merits.
Photo of Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power by Flickr user Mandj98 used under a Creative Commons license
Ross posts a classic ad, with Jason Alexander pitching McDonalds' McDLT. To the modern environmentally conscious consumer, the styrofoam packaging may be a bit shocking:
This comes via Vic Matus who commenting on McDonald's announcement that it's going tomato-free says "Hold on a second. There were tomatoes at McDonald’s? I think the last time I had a tomato at McDonald’s was when I ordered a McDLT." The "premium" chicken sandwiches (Premium Grilled Chicken, Premium Grilled Chicken Club, Premium Crispy Chicken, and Premium Crispy Chicken Club) are all normally served with tomato. What's more, a sandwich identical to the McDLT is still served under the name Big 'N Tasty.
They're having an election over there, too. And Dr. Irak and Ilan Goldenberg see things breaking down into two blocs -- a nationalist bloc of Sadrists and Sunnis who favor nationalism and a strong central state, and a competing bloc of Kurds, ISCI, and Dawa who favor decentralization and collaboration with the U.S. and Iran.
It's an interesting turn of events. Interesting, in particular, because it's kind of paradoxical for ISCI and Dawa, in particular, to be both so close to the United States and so close to Iran. And even more interesting because it seems odd for the in-power coalition to be in favor of decentralization while the out-of-power coalition is skeptical of it. And last it's interesting because in an abstract sense you'd think the Sunnis, as a minority, would generally line up with the Kurds and be in favor of decentralization. To some extent I think what you're seeing here is that the presence of a huge American occupying army as a political issue in Iraq is distorting the lens through which some parties see their interests.
But of course lurking behind all this is the question of what the United States wants to do. The Bush administration has consistently used its considerable ability to influence Iraqi politics in order to try to bring to power leaders it regards as friendly to the American troop presence. An Obama administration looking for a graceful way to exit would have different incentives.
Stephen Power runs down McCain and Obama on energy. In a first-for-me, I think I'm just going to steal the remarks of the guy who's Google Reader Shared Items feed directed me to the story:
Good comparison of McCain and Obama on energy policy. Although McCain is concerned about the environment, he doesn't plan to do much about it - except for support subsidies for nuclear energy. Except for that he opposes subsidies for renewable energy because it's a market distortion. Inconsistent much?
That's good analysis. And I hate to see good analysis in people's Shared Items feed. Write that stuff up as blog posts!
Like Ezra Klein I think there's something to be said about the idea of Joe Biden as a VP candidate. In terms of his record on national security issues, he's neither the best nor the worst Democrat in the Senate. But he does have one thing that sets him apart from most Democrats in terms of talking about foreign policy -- confidence. When given the chance to talk foreign policy he's eager to do it and confident that he'll win the argument:
Democrats have a tendency to get timid, get defense, or get high-minded (condemning the "politics of fear" or "politicizing" this or that) when attacked by Republicans. Biden, though, just responds in kind as if he's obviously right, and his opponents are obviously wrong and stupid. There's real value in that. At the same time, I think putting someone on the ticket who voted in favor of the 2002 AUMF would prove problematic. I don't see an open and shut case for or against Biden or most of the other people I've seen. But certainly he should be used as a national security surrogate in a high-profile way, one way or other -- it's simply useful to have someone up there who's hungry and eager to deride Republicans on national security issues.
Well, he's probably still evil. But it is nice (and kind of funny) that Weyrich is a big fan of large-scale investments in rail. I'm not really sure that bus rapid transit is so bad as he says, when done right it can be a useful option. What I primarily fear about BRT is that we'll get into a "defining BRT down" scenario since it lacks a very clear definition.
Here's the start of that Obama bump, per Gallup. It ain't gonna be 15 points by the time of the convention, but there are some in McCain's world who legitimately believe that McCain will NEVER be ahead in the popular vote (but will still win the election.)
For one thing, I agree with Josh Patashnik that the popular and electoral votes are less likely to diverge in this manner than many people believe. But for another thing, isn't it pretty shocking for a campaign to be that pessimistic about its odds? If I were running for president, I'd want the people who work for me to be thinking "once the American people hear our message and learn the truth about our opponent, they're bound to swing to our side." You don't want your staff to be totally divorced from reality, but a little optimism never killed anyone.
I am concerned that repeal of the estate tax would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country. A Treasury Department study found that almost no estate tax has been paid by lower- and middle-income taxpayers. But taxes have been paid on the estates of people who were in the highest 20% of the income distribution at the time of their death. It found that 91% of all estate taxes are paid by the estates of people whose annual income exceeded $190,000 around the time of their death.
Another of my disagreements with Senator Obama concerns the estate tax, which he proposes to increase to a top rate of 55 percent. The estate tax is one of the most unfair tax laws on the books, and the first step to reform is to keep it predictable and keep it low.
Kevin Drum recommends David Brooks' column on America's seduction by the culture of debt and then says "I doubt that I'd end up agreeing with Brooks 100% about how to address this problem." I actually tend to think that Brooks (and Drum) are overstating the problem somewhat, but Brooks' proposals seem like good ideas to me:
Foundations and churches could issue short-term loans to cut into the payday lenders’ business. Public and private programs could give the poor and middle class access to financial planners. Usury laws could be enforced and strengthened. Colleges could reduce credit card advertising on campus. KidSave accounts would encourage savings from a young age. The tax code should tax consumption, not income, and in the meantime, it should do more to encourage savings up and down the income ladder.
The idea of trying to establish some kind of non-predatory mechanism that would soak up some of the demand for "payday loans" seems especially promising to me.
UPDATE: Let's also put a bracket around "tax consumption, not income." There are a ton of different ways that could be done. Some of them are decent ideas, and others (things like the FairTax, for example) are very bad ideas and one doesn't really know what Brooks has in mind here. Needless to say, completely redoing the tax system would be a complicated undertaking on a very different scale than enhanced credit counseling.
As expected, Agent Zero is opting out of the final year of his six year, $65 million deal. He's hoping to get a big raise, but it's hard for me to see how he gets it. There are only a couple of teams with the cap space to give him big money, and I don't envision either of them doing it. Wizards management says they'd like to resign him. I'd like to see him resigned, too, but I hope they drive a hard bargain with him. Arenas is a player worth having on your team, but not a player worth paying any price for -- if someone else offers him a giant contract, let him walk.
The White House never wanted to have the way the case was made, the way the intelligence was used to sell the war to the American people looked into by Congress. This was delayed for quite some time and Senator Rockefeller pushed this forward to get to the truth. And, the White House can continue to bury their heads in the sand but the reality is still the same.
Did somebody say Heads in the Sand? I think somebody did! Come see me talk at the Strand in NYC Thursday at 7.
Fred Hiatt's preposterous editorial denouncing anyone who accuses Bush of having "lied" about Iraq has sparked renewed interest in this question. On some level, though, it's completely absurd that this question has dominated our national debate with, in particular, the "serious" and "grownup" position being that you can never say Bush lied. After all, we're right now in the middle of a major presidential campaign. The campaign, as campaigns tend to be, is waged by big league politicians. And I've heard Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the rest all try to mislead the voters on a whole variety of subjects over the course of the months.
Nobody finds this particularly shocking. Indeed, anyone who doesn't recognize that there's a lot of BS and hocus pocus out there on the campaign trail would be dismissed as a naive child.
Meanwhile, the war sales pitch was deeply dishonest. No fair-minded person could possibly deny that the overall effect of the way the administration talked about Iraq was designed to get people to believe that there was a short-term threat that Saddam Hussein would transfer a nuclear weapon to al-Qaeda for use against the United States of America. It's equally clear that this was not supported by the evidence. But more to the point, it's perfectly clear that the whole pitch was made in bad faith. The administration had a different, more nuanced and more medium-term set of concerns about Iraq. It believed that preventive war was the best way to deal with those concerns. And it also believed, correctly I think, that the public would not support an action of pure "anticipatory self-defense." Thus they took bits and pieces of real intelligence plus some very flimsy stuff plus some made up stuff plus some rhetorical excess and they weaved their dishonest tapestry.
The reason a lot of people seem reluctant to admit that this is what happened is that they were in on the scam. No doubt Fred Hiatt understood perfectly well that the administration was presenting an alarmist account of the Iraq issue, calculated to induce panic and misunderstanding rather than accurate assessments of the situation. It's just that Hiatt believed, as did most elites on the right and the hawkish segment of the left, that the sheeplike American were insufficiently attuned to the genius of aggressive warfare and that a good scare story was needed to roust them from their isolationist slumbers.
But then it turned out that the war was a disaster, and the much-feared "isolationist" impulse which said that war is a tool to be used to counter bona fide aggression rather than on speculative ventures was vindicated. So now everyone wants to pretend that it was an honest mistake, some kind of whacky mix-up like the time I took a huge gulp of vodka thinking it was water then spit it out all over the table, rather than a serious ideas-driven blunder that deserves to discredit the ideas that motivated it.
Looks like Chellie Pingree wins the primary in ME-1 and Gerald Connolly wins the primary in VA-11. Both Democratic nominees shouldn't have much trouble winning in November. Pingree's clearly the right choice over her main rival, and I have mixed feelings about the result in Virginia. Connolly's rival was generally more progressive, but Connolly had better ideas on transportation and planning and since Connolly will wind up having influence over the region in which I live I'm not too heartbroken to see him prevail.
Ultimately, though, it seems to me that these races usually come down to local or candidate-specific factors in the end and thus wind up disappointing ideologues and political junkies who like to see broad national controversies play out.
LA takes the game and we have a series. Boston was 8-18 on three pointers but only 29-83 from the field overall. That means they made 21 two point shots out of 65 attempted -- just 32 percent, way worse than the shot from behind the arc. That can't happen often.
The McCain campaign is evidently convinced that it can win a debate about Iraq policy, but the basis for their confidence remains elusive. Here's a Democracy Corps analysis of 45 Republican-held but maybe winnable congressional districts:
More importantly, when forced to choose between Obama’s proposal for a responsible troop withdrawal and a shift of resources to the U.S. and McCain’s commitment to stay the course but have most troops out of Iraq by 2013, Democrats win the argument by double-digit margins. Engaging in the Iraq debate allows Democrats to reach out to independents and winnable voters well beyond their electoral support.
Given that this is a somewhat right-of-center set of districts, that's very very bad news for McCain. Under the circumstances, insofar as McCain's heavy recent focus on
Iraq reflects any kind of political strategy, it seems to me to be a kind of confidence game. Republicans are hoping Democrats will fear the issue and shift the conversation elsewhere. Then they'll point to the shifting and say, "see! they're afraid! they know they're wrong!" And I do think that kind of dynamic might change some people's minds. Whether or not it's a good idea to put him on a national ticket, I do think a lot of Democrats running for office could stand to learn from Joe Biden's confidence and recognize that there's nothing to be afraid of.
One of the big problems with the boom in enthusiasm for Jim Webb as a candidate who can appeal to Scotch-Irish Appalachians is that he doesn't appear capable of doing so, as Eve Fairbanks writes:
Thanks to their analogous symbolic roles, Webb and Obama have one more politically important and bizarre similarity: They appeal to the same voters, wine-track Democrats who come out in unprecedented droves to vote for a black man or a hillbilly white because they want their party to be bigger than themselves. While you'd expect Webb to attract poor, rural beer-trackers, in his 2006 Senate race he didn't do any better than the previous Democratic candidate had among Appalachian voters in southwestern Virginia; instead, he was propelled to victory by Northern Virginia suburbanites — Obama's base.
Basically, Webb and Obama despite similar personalities and personae both get the votes you would expect anti-war liberals to get. Possibly related, check out this map (taken from here):
What's that a map of? Well, recently the Census Bureau started asking people about ethnicity and ancestry. So you might say you were "Irish" or "Italian" or "German" or "Chinese" or "Cuban" instead of just white or Asian or whatever. But about seven percent of people identified themselves as "American." And as you can see, that "American" bloc is really concentrated in Appalachia and the southern highlands. Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness.
Henry Farrell quotes an Inside Higher Ed article about Owen Cargol, until recently the head of American University in Iraq:
The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East. [...]
Cargol’s 2001 resignation stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.”
That'd be the creepy assaulter kind of guy, I guess. This information literally comes up on the first page of results if you Google the guy's name, so it's pretty puzzling that you'd let him slip through the cracks. But given the general conduct of the operation in Iraq, I suppose it's not all that surprising.
This is stunning stuff. Having convinced a swathe of the press that it was unfair of Democrats to accurately quote McCain as saying he had no problem with American troops being in Iraq for 100 years, he's now back saying it's "not too important" whether or not our troops ever leave Iraq:
"The Americans are making demands that would lead to the colonization of Iraq," said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician on parliament's foreign relations committee who is close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "If we can't reach a fair agreement, many people think we should say, 'Goodbye, U.S. troops. We don't need you here anymore.' "
And those are the friendly ones, opposition Iraqi politicians have even stronger feelings. Given Iraqi sentiment about this topic, McCain's vision of a long-time but utterly peaceful presence since extremely difficult to realize. It's just really, really, really hard to station your troops where they're not wanted. Meanwhile, amidst his analogies to South Korea and Germany, McCain seems to be missing the part where he explains why making permanent bases our key war aim is a good idea. We maintained our garrison in West Germany because of the Warsaw Pact across the border and you can't understand why our troops are in South Korea without thinking about North Korea.
But what are they going to be doing in Iraq? Fighting Iran? That seems like a recipe for ensuring that Iraq never becomes peaceful and stable, since if our goal in Iraq is to create a platform for anti-Iranian activities then the Iranians would seem to have no choice but to stir up as much trouble as possible.
Excellent essay from Rasmus Fleischer on the history of copyright, and the tendency for the inability to perfectly enforce one regime to simply lead to demands for an ever-more-expansive vision of what needs to be enforced:
A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined. [...]
This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development undermines the freedom of choice that Creative Commons licenses are meant to realize. It will also have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.
For a long time the whole question of how we deal with intellectual property has been relegated to something like fourth-tier status, decided in backrooms by a clash of special interests with almost no public debate or understanding. At the same time, it's become cliché to observe that we're now in an "information economy" and America is more and more becoming a country that exports media, ideas, design, software, etc. than one that exports planes and cars. Consequently, it's less and less viable to think that the regulation of ideas and content is irrelevant or unimportant -- these are key economic functions, and whether or not they'll be organized to serve the narrow interests of people who current control certain channels of distribution is a huge issue.
UPDATE: Case in point this terrible bill that the House just passed to its discredit, which is supposed to step up enforcement of copyright by, among other things, establishing civil forfeiture penalties for devices that "facilitate" the violation of IP laws.
Hot new social science says yes, specifically that the presence of oil rents in a country is associated with a low level of women's rights and that this accounts for some of the retrograde conditions in the Middle East.
As with much of the "resource curse" literature, this seems to be research you can't use since the oil is there one way or another. Still, interesting findings.
I haven't been following the situation in Zimbabwe super closely, but the fact that Desmond Tutu is weighing in and calling on Mugabe to step down seems noteworthy. Mugabe's regime has clearly been getting a big boost over the years from loyalty that ANCers feel thanks to the help he gave them back when Mugabe's western critics were mostly on the side of the apartheid government, so it means a lot as we see more and more of the key anti-apartheid leaders breaking with their old ally.
Sorry, Professor, but we will get over the high prices of energy, or we will adapt to them. But suburbs will not die, for this is where middle income families go to pursue the American Dream - a home with a backyard and nearby ball fields, places of worship, and other amenities. There’s less crime in the suburbs, less congestion, less polution, less . . . er, disease. And suburbs are more affordable than central cities. Much more affordable.
Note the tension here between the grandiose talk of the American dream and the banal ending which notes that people live in suburbs because it's cheaper. Now obviously both price and preference play a role in these decisions. And some suburbs -- these days typically ones with walkable downtowns and transit access like Evanston or Bethesda -- are super-expensive and some cities (Detroit, e.g.) are really cheap and undesirable. But in general, central cities are substantially more expensive per square foot than are suburbs and especially far-flung exurbs. Which reveals, of course, that there's lots of demand for urban space.
And on top of that demand, there are lots of practices that (a) artificially reduce the supply of urban space, and (b) subsidize suburbs at the expense of cities. If we changed (a) and (b) then the relative price of cities and suburbs would shift, and you'd see a shift in the population balance. Now maybe you think that's a bad idea, which is fine. But you can't point to the lower prices of sprawl and count that as evidence that people don't want to live in cities. Urban areas are expensive because people like to live in them and given that high demand we ought to shift policies in such a way as to allow more of them to be built.
I think I'm going to start stealing a page from Ezra Klein and doing a daily requests thread. I put up the thread, you guys suggest topics you'd like to see me blog about or questions you'd like to see me answer, and then the next day I answer the request. It seems to me like a feature that's worked well for him, so why not here? So -- what would you like to read about?
Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.
While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.
That's about the result you would expect once you stop to consider the issue, but it's not something I'd really given thought to previously. Of course it's going to be difficult to get a truly apples-to-apples comparison here since same-sex couples are going to vary in some other demographic directions. Serious biological determinsts are going to say that heterosexual couples just can't be as egalitarian as gay or lesbian couples would, but count me as very skeptical that the differences here are all in the genes rather than the longstanding social norms. One could, presumably, look in detail at the differences between lesbian couples and gay male couples to gain some further insights.
My assumption is that as committed same sex couples become more visible, their egalitarian-by-necessity example will start to have more social and cultural influence. And of course it'll be interesting to see what happens as children raised by same-sex couples grow up.
Last week, Michael Goldfarb kicked off his official blogging gig for the McCain campaign by observing "Attention disaffected Hillary supporters, John McCain is a huge ABBA fan." True or not, it's led to a brilliant series of Abba/McCain parodies at Jezebel.
With the nation facing sky-high gasoline prices and the public hungry for viable alternatives to driving and flying, the Bush administration's decided to veto Amtrak funding citing, hilariously, the notion that the bill doesn't provide enough "accountability."
The cool kids of the conservative movement have long since moved on to much more complicated rationalizations for why coal and oil companies should continue destroying the planet unabated, but National Journal's poll of members of congress (respondents are anonymized except for their party affiliation) reminds us that for most conservatives lying and ignorance are still the key to the politics of global warming. Note this staggering remark from one GOP stalwart: "If there's one thing poll after poll indicates, it's that the science is not settled on this issue."
Because when I want to understand whether or not science is settled, I leap straight for a public opinion poll! Are ghosts real? The science is unsettled!
The officiating in the 2002 Lakers-Kings series was definitely problematic. That said, I think the very fact that that series is so well-known for its dubious officiating casts some doubt on Tim Donaghy's allegations of rigging. What he's done is basically take two conspiracy theories that are already well-known and say they're true. It's exactly what you would do if you were making something up. I would expect a real whistleblower to not only confirm some already widespread suspicion but also bring me something totally unknown or obscure.
But whatever the truth of the matter, as with everything surrounding Donaghy the league wouldn't be in this position if not for the fact that the overall quality of NBA officiating is legendarily low. In large part, that's simply because it's an objectively difficult game to officiate correctly. But the league rarely seems to me to show a ton of interest in improving things, or to be even slightly disturbed by refs' biases in favor of home teams, or even just of the general sentiment that it's fine and proper to use different standards of officiating in different games or at different points in the game clock.
Madeleine Albright's penned a not very enlightening op-ed bemoaning the return of sovereignty and the "death of intervention" in the wake of Iraq. Near the end she says:
The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.
At the heart of the debate is the question of what the international system is. Is it just a collection of legal nuts and bolts cobbled together by governments to protect governments? Or is it a living framework of rules intended to make the world a more humane place?
I think that second paragraph would do well to take the previous paragraph more seriously. The issue at stake is much, much, much less a question of principle than it is a question of practice. I think it's very easy to conclude that the abstract moral logic of sovereignty-over-all is grossly wrongheaded. But the real issue of how U.S. government policy should be impacted by moral universalism is a practical problem. In the wake of Iraq, few people around the world think "America is sovereign, and also can invade other countries whenever it wants to, but other countries can't do that" is a viable governing principle for the world order. So insofar as people would like to see certain international norms enforced, actual work needs to be done to make that possible.
Meanwhile, it's always worth resisting this impulse to identify humanitarianism with the cause of invasions. Being open to immigration and imported goods helps foreigners, costs us nothing, and tends to advance the cause of peace. Preserving good relations between the great powers has major humanitarian benefits as the post-cold war decline in global conflict continues apace. Programs to hand out mosquito nets help people. It's a kind of madness to assume that military coercion is the be-all and end-all of human betterment.
Analysis: The question is: On which issues do Bloomberg and McCain agree? Not that many...
I concur. I tend to think that this, like the idea of Barack Obama running with the much more conservative Sam Nunn, is just kabuki designed to make both candidates appear less orthodox than they really are. But this is especially acute in the case of Bloomberg who would seem to be a much better fit with Obama (not a good idea either) than with McCain. Let's just also note that a McCain-Bloomberg ticket would be incredibly short. However, in the unlikely event that McCain undergoes a magical transformation and adopts all of Mike Bloomberg's substantive views, I'll like him much better.
UPDATE: Ben Wasserstein has a definitive exploration of why Michael Bloomberg shouldn't become anyone's VP.
Labor union officials and some liberal activists were seething Tuesday over Barack Obama's choice of centrist economist Jason Furman as the top economic advisor for the campaign. The critics say Furman, who was appointed to the post Monday, has overstated the potential benefits of globalization, Social Security private accounts and the low prices offered by Wal-Mart -- considered a corporate pariah by the labor movement.
Furman has definitely taken stances on Wal-Mart and trade policy that are at odds with what "labor union officials and some liberal activists" tend to want to hear (I do, too). But what I remember from the Social Security fight was that there were a number of wonks who anti-privatization journalists and activists were leaning heavily on to beat back the tide of pressure from the White House and the press. I require Furman as having been one of the very most effective such wonks. Here's one example of many. I'm not sure exactly what the LA Times is referring to, but anyone who thinks Furman was or is a supporter of Bush's privatization plan is badly mistaken.
John McCain, on the other hand, is a person like that and yet somehow I haven't seen any press coverage of his plan to destroy America's largest and most popular domestic program.
Along with more personnel, our military needs additional equipment in order to make up for its recent losses and modernize. We can partially offset some of this additional investment by cutting wasteful spending. But we can also afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates -- far less than what we spent during the Cold War. We must also accelerate the transformation of our military, which is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist.
So on the one hand, defense cuts will pay for tax cuts. But on the other hand, we need to substantial increase defense spending as a share of GDP to something more like Cold War levels.
In an interview he gave to the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes in 2006 for Hayes’s biography, “Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President,” McCain said: “I will strongly assert to you that he has been of enormous help to this president of the United States.”
Going further, McCain even told Hayes in comments heretofore unpublished that he’d consider Cheney for an administration post.
Asked whether he’d be interested in Cheney had the vice president not already have served under Bush for two terms, McCain said: “I don’t know if I would want him as vice president. He and I have the same strengths. But to serve in other capacities? Hell, yeah.”
McCain's just a guy who wants to continue most of Bush's policies and admires Bush's key henchmen and wants to keep them serving in government office. But that doesn't mean he represents more of the same. It's just a different kind of change -- hell yeah!
The style and approach of general election campaigns are often conditioned by the method of victory in the primaries. The Obama team ends the season like a battle-worn Army division -- organized, relentless and skilled at fundraising, registering voters and getting them to the polls. Members of the McCain team feel more like survivors of a near-death experience -- convinced that the virtues of their candidate and the blessings of the political gods matter more than the money, phone banks and door-knocking of traditional politics.
This worries some Republican strategists. One recently described the McCain campaign to me as the political equivalent of a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie: Every morning a few guys get together and say, "Let's put on a show!" McCain's state campaign organizations, coalition outreach and get-out-the-vote efforts are weak or nonexistent. But McCain campaign officials are convinced that they will win -- if they win -- in a different manner than the methodical Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. McCain will either catch fire, or he won't -- and traditional efforts to boost turnout, in this view, are not likely to make the difference. Given its history, the McCain campaign is understandably proud of its stripped down, seat-of-the-pants, insurgent campaign style. But it may eventually be useful to have a serious campaign organization in, say, Colorado.
As Noam Scheiber says, it's hard to see any comparison in the merits of these approaches. If Gerson's take on the McCain campaign is accurate, then McCain is just doomed -- you can't run a nationwide, one-on-one, months-long campaign in the kind of seat-of-your-pants way that worked for McCain in the primaries.
This sounds like hubris born of a staff and a candidate that are unwilling to admit how much factors outside their control (namely, the Rudy collapse and the Huckaboom) played in delivering them a win in the primary.
Ilan Goldenberg spends some time listening to some folks who have experience dealing with Iranian officials and with difficult negotiations, and it turns out that nobody thinks table-pounding threats to keep military force "on the table" are a useful negotiating tool. Weirdly, it turns out that these experts believe the Iranian government is capable of realizing that the U.S. could, in principle, drop bombs on Iran based on their ability to perceive objective reality. They also claim that leading with idle threats to launch wars makes you look unreasonable, and tends to poison the wells for productive talks.
Strange stuff -- sounds like appeasement talk to me.
This kind of reporting from Deborah Solomon at The Wall Street Journal is the kind of thing we're going to miss when Rupert Murdoch gets around to destroying the paper:
Both John McCain and Barack Obama promise to cut taxes for the majority of Americans. But an Obama administration would redistribute income toward lower- and middle-class households, while a McCain White House would steer the bulk of the benefits to the wealthiest families, according to a nonpartisan analysis of the still-evolving tax plans of the presidential candidates.
What's more, the story's not in the tank for Obama, either, correctly noting that his tax proposals, though better in distributive terms, are also kind of bad:
Both plans risk causing more economic damage than improvement, according to the detailed study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center. While some of Sen. McCain's tax cuts could lift economic activity, the "adverse effects of the resulting increased deficits may make the net effect of the plan economically harmful," the report says. Sen. Obama's plan similarly "would substantially increase the deficit" and could create "additional complexity" to the tax code by offering a range of targeted breaks.
Here's a link to the Tax Policy Center's analysis. Long story short, both candidates have deficit-increasing proposals that will likely reduce economic growth. But McCain's take a bigger hole out of the budget and the benefits are much more concentrated among the wealthiest Americans.
Amtrak funding now has a veto-proof majority in both the House and the Senate, though it looks to me like there may be some reconciliation issues. The die-hard nature of the Bush administration's opposition to this broadly supported measure is a little puzzling, but he's a really bad president so this is what you get. There's much to criticize in the Amtrak status quo, but it's not as if the White House has come up with some visionary alternative strategy for passenger rail in the United States.
Meanwhile, I'll be hopping on a train soon to go to New York for tonight's book talk and signing at the Strand.
Barack Obama courting Hillary Clinton's big dollar fundraisers. What happens here is, I think, the best test of to what extent the Clintons are really behind Obama. When Howard Dean took over from Terry McAuliffe at the DNC, the Clintons seem to have indicated to their donors that there was no need to keep supporting the Committee. Obviously, the Clintons couldn't make anyone donate to the DNC, and they can't force anyone to give Obama money, but what they say behind closed doors will carry a lot of influence here.
Obama campaign launches new Fight the Smears website dedicated to knocking down sundry lies (about the pledge of allegiance, about Obama being a Muslim, etc.) floating around in chain emails slash Fox News broadcasts.
Karen Tumulty has the story. Will this work? I dunno. But it seems smart to get out in front of these things rather than pretending that they'll go away if decent people ignore them.
If, for example, Obama successfully withdraws from Iraq, passes a climate plan that looks something like his campaign proposal, and implements his healthcare plan, that would constitute a stunningly successful first term even if you think he's too much of a milquetoast in every one of these areas. But are these the three things he's most likely to fight hardest for? I don't know. He's consistently solid in almost everything, but that very consistency makes it hard to figure out what he's really passionate about. Now that the primary is over, maybe we'll start to find out.
I kind of wonder, too. Still, I've also felt throughout the primary process that an undue amount of attention was being paid to this kind of question. In general, I think there's a tendency to overrate presidential character attributes and skill in determining what happens. Over the years, for example, I've read dozens of accounts of what the Clinton administration "did wrong" in trying to get their health care bill through. And Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as having been an "ineffective" president even by those who don't buy the History's Greatest Monster view of his administration. But in both 1993-94 and 1977-80 a big part of the problem was just the congressional Democrats.
If Obama wins the election, marginal Democratic members of congress will face a basic choice. They can decide that their political interests will be served by making the Obama administration a "success" and agree to pass stuff that resembles what he's proposed. Or they can decide that their interests will be served by distancing themselves from every controversial administration initiative. If they choose the former, marginal Republicans will feel pressure to get on board. If they choose the latter, marginal Republicans will stand firm. What will happen? I'm not sure. The ideological distance within the party is much narrower than in 1977 and 1993, but I worry that the incentives are still bad and encourage defection rather than discipline. Either way, though, I think the key decision-makers will be in congress rather than in the White House.
What would you like to see me write about? It's okay to repeat suggestions from yesterday, and also okay to repeat/refine suggestions made earlier in the thread since intensity of preferences counts.
Albeit by a narrow 5-4 margin. I bet all those dirty hippies who said that John Roberts would be another Scalia feel sorry now completely vindicated. Just remember, when John McCain gets to replace John Paul Stevens with another member of the Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Thomas school then all your individual rights are belong to the U.S. government. Unless, that is, you're a polluting corporation!
For our inaugural request blogging, I take the question: "Which candidate's positions are more compatible with Parfit's philosophy, and why?" Parfit is, of course, Derek Parfit the distinguished philosopher and author of the brilliant Reasons and Persons. Were I Real Journalist I could, of course, just ask him. But instead I'll tell you what I think. For these purposes, I'll take "Parfit's philosophy" to mean "the views espoused in Reasons and Persons" since I haven't read the unpublished Climbing the Mountain and don't know what it said.
Parfit's philosophy is notable for its lack of direct engagement on public policy questions about the distribution of wealth, etc. But I'd say that from a Parfittian point of view, the key facts are that, on the one hand human civilization could plausibly persist for thousands of years (or more) but on the other hand it could plausibly be wiped out much sooner than that. Under the circumstances, the key priority is to avoid the Very Bad Outcome of total destruction. This tends not to get discussed in our political debates because it's also a Very Unlikely Outcome but one key point Parfit makes is that there's no ethically defensible reason to indulge the human psychological penchant for ignoring small chances.
Thus, I think you'd have to say that thought the odds of a McCain administration blundering into a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange with Russia are quite remote, they're also much higher than the odds of an Obama administration doing so. Relative to Obama, McCain puts a low priority on avoiding conflict and a high priority on the potential gains of toughness and resolve. It can be plausibly (though I think wrongly) mistakenly argued that the most probable outcome of a bias toward "toughness" is superior to the most probable outcome of a more conciliatory approach, but I don't think it can be denied that the anti-conciliators are increasing the chances of disaster. This pertains not just to Russia, but also to the fact that McCain is more likely to set into motion a chance of events that leads eventually to a Sino-American superpower standoff and a revival of 1950s-1980s situation of an elevated risk of total global destruction.
Similarly, on climate change the worst you can say from a pro-McCain point of view about Barack Obama's approach is that he may be hampering economic growth to an unnecessary degree. McCain, by contrast, is increasing the risk that we'll be exposed to an out-of-control climate feedback mechanism that renders the planet uninhabitable. In both the climate and the geopolitical case, it's conventional in U.S. politics to ignore the difference between a 0.001 percent chance of something happening and a 0.00001 percent chance of it happening, but Parfit warns us that when the consequences of the Very Unlikely Outcome are also Very Bad that we ignore these kind of differences at our peril.
Another one from yesterday's requests thread: "Implications of the Mormon grassroots mobilization if Romney gets picked to be McCain's VP. I say it makes Nevada and Colorado tougher for the Democrats to pick up, and Michigan also, though not so much for the LDS factor."
I think that's right. There's also the potential that Mormon mobilization could put Oregon back in play. You saw from the McCain-Clinton matchup polling that McCain's not per se unacceptable to Oregon and the state has a much larger Mormon population than people realize. On the other hand, given the fact that evangelicals are already less-than-ecstatic about McCain, adding Romney make that problem even worse and hurt McCain in Ohio, Virginia, and elsewhere that the GOP counts on mobilizing these voters. More generally, Romney seems to be a figure who most Americans find despicable, which makes him a problematic VP choice.
Wonks of the world are still waiting for John McCain to come out with some kind of proposals on education policy. It's well known that, in general, McCain isn't interested in domestic issues. Still, on broad economic policy he at least manages to (a) admit that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and then (b) start getting his advice from corrupt crank Phil Graham. Similarly, on health care he groped his way to the conservative orthodoxy. On energy and the environment, he's taken the nuclear industry's talking points.
But on education, there are really two different kinds of conservative orthodoxy and they point in different directions, so McCain has decided to give us . . . nothing whatsoever.
“The 200-pound ball and chain around McCain’s foot is George W. Bush,” Hart says. “Unless he figures out a way to cut it loose, he’s going to be dragging it throughout this election.”
This tends to get discussed in quasi-mystical terms, like nobody can say what would suffice to cut McCain loose from Bush. But it would really be quite easy. The crux of the matter is that most voters think Bush has been a bad president and would like to see different policies implemented. Obama goes out on the campaign trail, says Bush has been a bad president, and then proposes policies that are different from Bush's.
John McCain could do this, too!
But he doesn't say Bush has been a bad president. He campaigned for Bush in 2000 and even more so campaigned for his re-election in 2004. He seems to have no regrets about that. On the trail, he's made continuing Bush's Iraq policies the centerpiece of his campaign. At the heart of his economic agenda is extending Bush's tax policies and his health care agenda is the same as Bush's. He joined Bush in opposing the Climate Security Act, endorses Bush's approach to Iran, and agrees with Bush that no action should be taken to provide people with viable alternatives to driving. Consequently, he's got this 200-pound ball and chain around his leg. But he could cut it off easily enough. The trouble is that his substantive views seem to be very similar to Bush's and he's dependent on the financial and logistical support of a very similar interest group coalition to the one behind Bush.
Wow. Barack Obama is literally relocating huge swathes of the DNC to Chicago. Ambinder points out that this is more like a continuation of trends from previous cycles than a sharp break with the past, but it's still a noteworthy change.
In general, I think it's smart for campaigns to get out of the DC/Arlington that McCain (and Clinton before him) are operating in. Political junkies have a very distorted view of events (usually massively overrating the importance of everything that happens), and I would imagine that shifting to a location that's not lousy with 'em helps people keep some perspective on things.
This table from a Gallup article on Barack Obama winning women over but as has tended to be the case in recent cycles the marriage gap seems to be at least as big a story as the gender gap. As usual with this question, though, it's hard to say how much of the difference between single and married voters reflects the fact that singles are younger or racial differences in marriage rates.
At least 14 Republicans won't endorse John McCain for president, though some say they "support" him and I guess nobody's gone the full Lieberman yet and said they're voting for Obama.
The interesting thing is that McCain has a remarkably diverse group of detractors. Some are in vulnerable districts and running scared, some are anti-war Republicans with safe seats, and some are conservative movement dead-enders who can't stomach the traitor. It's an impressive coalition.
It seems that David Broder takes money from business groups whose interests he covers and doesn't tell anyone about it in his columns. That's the kind of thing that gets you labeled "dean" of the Washington press corps, since the name of the game is to get ahead while being self-righteous about your ethics.
In defense of bad newspaper columnists, I bet most of them would write very similar bad columns without any payola -- the point is less that there's a payoff for any particular opinion expressed than the simple fact that becoming an adequately well-entrenched member of the establishment can be quite lucrative if you reach an adequate plateau, but to do it you've got to be oh so polite to them that pays the bills.
Pew reports on the National Popular Vote movement gaining steam, with NPV proposals having passed in Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois with bills on the move in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island.
The way this works is that an NPV state commits to giving its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote if and only if states possessing a total of 270 electoral votes agree to do the same. This will, if enough states sign on, provide a "backdoor" way of transitioning to electing the president via popular vote without going through the all-but-impossible Article V amendment process. Thus far, obviously, you're seeing NPV pass in liberal states. But some cycle or other something will happen that gets conservatives worried about this. And there are plenty of right-wing states -- Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina -- that are too big to benefit from the electoral college's overweighting of small states, and whose interests currently get ignored in presidential campaigns since they're not "battlegrounds."
Maybe I'm just out of touch or something, but I haven't heard much of anything about Death Cab for Cutie's newish album Narrow Stairs that they released last month. Indeed, I didn't even realize it had been released at all until about a week ago when a friend offered me a ticket to their show earlier this week at Merriweather. Well, I got the album, I went to the show, and it all makes you recall that Death Cab is a really band!
Pitchfork, in full-on hater mode, gives it a 6.0 and makes remarks worthy of ninth grade like "surely Death Cab's awkward position as one of the few indie rock groups with a platinum record would be enough to drive anyone to drink" but it's a good record. I promise! One doubts anything here will convert non-fans, but decent folk will like it fine. "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is the best, the extended intro to "I Will Possess Your Heart" was annoying to watch live but, to me, works on the album.
Boston goes way down then comes back to win, going up 3-1 and making themselves pretty prohibitively favorite to win the series. Nice performance by the much-derided Lamar Odom, though. Lakers fans, meanwhile, have nothing to complain about as the Bynumful future of their franchise seems very bright.
I'm not sure I really share his broader concerns, but Hendrick Hertzberg really is right about JFK Airport:
I’m less happy about John F. Kennedy Airport, partly because its old name, Idlewild, was so beautiful and romantic. J.F.K. obviously deserves a New York memorial of some sort—a statue in some prominent place, such as Grand Army Plaza, the square at the southeast corner of Central Park, would do nicely—and he certainly deserves an airport. But the right airport would have been Boston’s Logan, currently named for a Boston statehouse pol who died in 1939 and on whom the statute of limitations has surely run out.
Right. Kennedy's a Boston guy from a Massachusetts family, his airport should be there. On the other hand, I sort of like it when well-known things end up named after obscure politicians -- it leads to better trivia. Who was the Shea of Shea Stadium? That sort of thing.
Photo of Boston Logan Airport by Flickr user Beige Inside used under a Creative Commons license
Ross Douthat, while acknowledging that there's little chance John McCain will pick Mike Huckabee, and even that picking Huckabee stands a decent chance of being a fiasco, says McCain should pick Huckabee. I think that's all probably correct, but it points to a larger issue that McCain is facing.
The issue, basically, is that the odds are that McCain will lose. But thanks to realignment and so forth, the odds are very strongly against a true blowout. Consequently, McCain needs to choose between playing it safe and piloting himself to landing at 47 percent of the vote, or doing some outside-the-box that risks blowing up his coalition and leaving him with only 40 percent but also provides an outside chance that the gamble will pay off. The rational choice is for McCain to play to win. But his problem is that his campaign is going to be run by professional political operatives. If these guys run a respectable campaign and lose at 47, nobody's going to blame them -- McCain was facing an ultra-charismatic opponent in an adverse political climate. But if they run an outside-the-box campaign and wind up losing in a landslide, then their reputations might be badly hurt.
For McCain's staff, it makes sense to kick field goals even though it's the fourth quarter and they're down by 20. They just need to keep the score close and live to fight another day. But to win, McCain probably needs to play to win and go for longshot conversions and risk getting blown out.
Everyone knows that print journalism is in a state of economic crisis, and Sam Boyd may have the answer -- a GQ/CQ merger to produce your ultimate guide to men's fashion and legislative arcana. Lord knows congress could probably use more fashion advice.
Nouri al-Maliki says no deal with the Bush administration:
He says the initial framework agreed upon was to have been an accord "between two completely sovereign states." But he says the U.S. proposals "do not take into consideration Iraq's sovereignty."
The prime minister said Friday "this is not acceptable." The American demands "violate Iraqi sovereignty. At the end, we reached a dead end."
Which is as it should be. Given that we're clearly not going to withdraw troops as long as Bush is in office, the only reasonable thing is to have the U.N. extend the resolution governing our presence there and let the bilateral relationship be formalized after the U.S. presidential election. Then we can have a debate between one candidate whose Iraq policy will be centered around trying to leave in a responsible manner, and another candidate whose Iraq policy will be centered around Bush-esque efforts to set ourselves up there permanently.
Meanwhile, some attention could be paid to Iraq's upcoming provincial elections where one suspects some shenanigans are likely in play and the U.S. and the international community should be trying to see if it's not possible to achieve a reasonably fair outcome.
A Fox News gig seems like a decent way for Huckabee to lay the groundwork for a 2012 presidential campaign, in terms of staying in the public eye. If he takes time to do some homework and kiss ass to a few major donors over the next few years, I think he'd be a formidable contender for the nomination.
I'm an unabashed internet fan and internet booster, but I do think there's a lot to the concern Nicholas Carr voices in our current issue. Certainly I share this experience:
When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
All things considered, I think digital media is unquestionably a boon, but this is an issue. I should say, though, that since my dad bought be a Kindle for my birthday, I've been going back to reading books more. Somehow, taking the book and replicating some of the computer user experience has re-engaged me. And in an odd sense, the fact that it's hard to flip through a Kindle book has also been useful in this regard -- I'm going through Brothers Karamazov one page after another in an patient, orderly manner that I wouldn't have thought possible three months ago.
The people want discussion of currency prices: "I'd like a bit of coverage on the policies that have made the U.S. dollar so weak, what either candidate has to say about those policies and the dollar, and the impact that the weak dollar has had on the price of a barrel of oil." And also, because it's actually related: "I'd be interested to see more attention given to the future structure of the US economy, particularly whether we will continue to do any manufacturing at all. Everyone talks about specific policies like NAFTA or the FTA with Colombia, but a wider perspective would be worthwhile."
My understanding is that the right way to think about the currency situation is that for a long while the value of the dollar was being kept high by the fact that foreigners were eager to invest in American assets. This strong dollar was good for Americans looking to take a vacation in Europe, and also made it cheap to buy things made abroad. Consequently, we found ourselves running a large trade deficit. Usually a trade deficit leads to a weak currency which leads to a reduction in imports and a rebalancing of the deficit. But because foreigners were buying American assets, it didn't happen, and Americans kept buying foreign-made goods (indeed, this is part of the reason the PRC was investing in so many American assets) and the deficit stayed high.
More recently, this process has halted. The dollar has declined in value, our imports of manufactured goods have slowed down, and we've started exporting more. Indeed, employment in the exports sector has offset a ton of the lost jobs in the building trades and prevented our economic problems from being worse than they were. Our trade deficit remains large mostly because we import so much oil (oil-exporting countries tend to plow the money back into western assets):
In the long run, I think we should expect Americans to continue manufacturing goods. The idea that manufacturing was shedding jobs primarily because of trade with low-wage countries is something of a misunderstanding. There's less cheap labor in Europe than in the USA but there's plenty of manufacturing over there -- rich countries just tend to manufacture higher-end goods. Even during the manufacturing drought, Americans were still "manufacturing" plenty of buildings. But the economics of cheap mortgages + construction boom + strong dollar + large trade deficit weren't sustainable over the long run and now we need to rebalance toward manufacturing fewer buildings and more stuff to sell abroad.
That will be fine over the long run. The problem is that the short-run involves lots of foreclosures, unemployment, income drops, etc. and the policy challenge is to make the short-run as short and painless as possible.
What would you guys like to read about in the future? Specific questions are easier to grapple with than general topics, though I will take topics under advisement.
Looks like Donna Edwards, the future of the MD-4 and hero of the internet, has sound views on the bus, telling The Washington Postthat: "When I drive on the highway now, and I see women with their strollers out there and their young children waiting on the side of the highway, still waiting on the side of the highway, years later, without any shelter, I think, 'That was me.' I just think surely we must be able to make an investment in mass transportation that actually works for people."
Lately, I've mostly talked about transit as an urban planning and energy policy issue, because I think it's good to get away from the "transit is for poor people" stereotype. Still, bus networks are a critical -- but often deeply inadequate -- lifeline for many poor Americans and improved bus service is a critical equity and anti-poverty issue. Go back and read Kate Book's celebrated New Yorker piece "The Marriage Cure" and you'll see that one of several serious problems holding people in welfare dependency is that it's hard to hold down a low-skill job if you're not on time consistently and it's hard to be on time consistently if the bus doesn't arrive on a reliable schedule.
Better buses is hardly a cure-all for poverty. But unlike a lot of other proposed solutions, like the "marriage-promotion" initiatives Boo's article discusses, there's not some giant policy mystery surrounding the bus: If you buy more buses and hire, you can schedule buses more frequently and so on and so forth. This wouldn't end poverty or make being poor an awesome experience, but it would reduce poverty and improve poor people's lives enormously.
Photo by Flickr user NateOne used under a Creative Commons license
Personally, I think this is a really good idea: give every print subscriber one Class B voting share of NYT stock, and then give them one more share every three months thereafter, assuming their subscription is still in good standing. The securities would automatically convert to Class A shares if they were sold or transferred, or if the subscriber let his subscription lapse.
The cost of such a scheme would not be great: NYT shares closed today at $16.59 apiece, compared to a standard subscription rate of $10.20 a week, or $530 a year. But the votes of the NYT subscribers would be a formidable force to be reckoned with for anybody seeking to shake up the company, and they could almost certainly be relied upon to vote for the best possible journalism, rather than the highest possible share price.
But isn't this just going to lead to some takeover artist somewhere buying a huge number of Times subscriptions, thus gaining control of the company at a discount? Presumably you could write a rule to get around this -- no more than one subscription per person. Probably the world would be more interesting with more whacky business schemes like this out there. I feel, though, that it wouldn't be good for Bill Kristol's employment prospects.
I think one of the big questions hanging out there in the campaign is how America's currently McCain-loving seniors will feel when they find out about McCain's passion for wrecking Social Security. I got some remarks from the Obama campaign in my inbox this morning that represent the first real effort I've seen to get people thinking about this:
Now, John McCain’s ideas on Social Security amount to four more years of what was attempted and failed under George Bush. He said he supports private accounts for Social Security – in his words, “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Yesterday he tried to deny that he ever took that position, leaving us wondering if he had a change of heart or a change of politics.
Well let me be clear: privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George W. Bush proposed it. It's a bad idea today. It would eventually cut guaranteed benefits by up to 50%. It would cost a trillion dollars that we don’t have to implement on the front end, permanently elevating our debt. And most of all, it would gamble the retirement plans of millions of Americans on the stock market. That’s why I stood up against this plan in the Senate, and that’s why I won’t stand for it as President.
Indeed, beyond McCain, Republicans have a bad habit of coming out in favor of privatizing Social Security and then denying they ever did any such thing. Obama, meanwhile, is positioning himself with Wallace-esque rhetoric as a Social Security die-hard, saying his retirement security agenda "starts with protecting Social Security today, tomorrow, and forever."
McCain's approach to this, naturally, is to lie:
In short, he stridently denies that he wants to favor privatizing Social Security. He just favors policies that are the same as the policies that were called "privatizing Social Security" before the GOP found out that privatizing Social Security is unpopular.
Last week, Tyler Cowen linked to some "Data from Wellesley; could be better, could be worse." Specifically it was a study of virginity rates by major. It put me in mind of my old days at The Harvard Independent and our annual sex survey where I found these factoids:
Most clearly, nerds have less fun as high GPA correlates with low levels of nookie. A piece of advice for undergraduates out there would be that no grade I ever received in any college course has ever had the slightest impact on my life. See more sexy data here and here.
I certainly agree with everyone who thinks our policy should be trying to create better plug-in vehicles. Still, an electric car needs electricity to power it. And electricity needs to be made somehow. It strikes me as unlikely that we're going to simultaneously be able to shift all our electrical production to clean sources while also massively increasing our overall use of electricity to power a nationwide fleet of single-occupancy cars.
Long story short -- futuristic electric cars? Good. Futuristic clean electricity sources and smart grids? Also good. But the killer ap is still reduced consumption. We have proven, longstanding technology that drastically reduces carbon emissions. To wit -- walking, biking, bus, trolley, light rail, metro, commuter rail, high-speed intercity rail. Unlike plug-in vehicles, there's nothing speculative about this technology -- we know that it works, it just costs money. And there's considerable reason to believe that investments in non-highway transportation infrastructure combined with a regulatory structure designed to encourage high-density development near key nodes would enhance economic growth rather than detract from it.
A reader wants to know: "I know you read Ambinder's blog. Do you think it's balanced? If not, which way does it incline?" I think it's very balanced. I have no idea what Marc thinks and, indeed, I sometimes think Marc is so committed to reporting and balance that he doesn't know what he thinks. A lot of his posts are reporting -- him telling us what people are telling him, so any given post like that will reflect a bias toward whoever he was talking to, but look at the thing as a whole and it's extremely fair.
But over the past 40 years the tendency has been for Republicans to win and Democrats to lose and for the Democrats who do win to be moderate Southerners. Consequently, I think real horse-race specialists are instinctively skeptical of the idea that liberalism can or will prevail. That's a bummer for liberals to read, but it will change if 2006 is followed up by another big year in 2008.
Rahm Has Ways of Making You Stick to the Talking Points
Rahm Emmannuel tells the HuffPost that he's sorting out whatever House Democrats may have had some trepidation about backing Obama. I like this part where he brainwashes David Boren best:
The famously acid-tongued Chicagoan may be right, Democrats like Ellsworth and Boren may not pose a problem. But the Republican National Committee is sure trying to make them one. GOP officials have blasted out press releases highlighting Boren's claim that Obama has the "most liberal" voting record in the Senate. "You go ask Boren," Emanuel says, "he'll tell you his view is that that was taken out of context, that he is going to support the nominee."
(He was right: "My comments were taken out of context and as I have said from day one I will vote for the Democratic nominee in November," Boren told The Huffington Post.)
Out of context is rapidly becoming my least-favorite politician tick. It's possible, of course, to genuinely take something out of context in an abusive way. But increasingly "context" seems to mean "you took the statement I actually made at face value without adding in a lot of caveats and so forth that I did not, in fact, say."
Virginia, amusingly, has decided to call its state public school tests the Standards Of Learning Exam. Even more hilariously, Ryan Avent reports that the SOL Exam is now going to ask third graders to understand opportunity costs, a concept that all-too-many adults seem to have a shaky grasp of.
BASH: As you know, right now in Iraq, there are negotiations going on about the U.S. presence there. And Iraqis are trying to say that they believe that American troops should be limited to U.S. bases, that their air cover should be limited as well. Limits, pretty much across the board. Would you leave U.S. troops there with severe limitations as to what they could do?
MCCAIN: Well — that's not going to happen. The Iraqis are engaged in negotiations with us. I know about those negotiations. They have been going on for a long period of time. They are achieving remarkable success. Malaki (ph) is becoming a very strong leader, much to the surprise of some, and very pleasant outcome of this. I believe we will reach a status of force (ph) this agreement with the Iraqis. It's a give and take. It's a negotiation. And I am confident that we'll be able to arrive at an arrangement that is in the best interest of Iraqi and Americans.
In what sense is Maliki declaring that the American proposals are an unacceptable infringement of Iraqi sovereignty a success? I saw on teevee yesterday that it's "ageist" to say that John McCain is being "confused" when he repeatedly makes statements that are at odds with reality, so maybe he's just dishonest or dim-witted. Or maybe the key thing here is "remarkable" as in "success" means succeess but "remarkable success" means "impasse and failure."
It seems that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was working for Kremlim-backed Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich and this is embarrassing to McCain on various levels. Certainly that's pretty sleazy work to be doing, but on some level it'd be a little reassuring to me for McCain to have a Putin crony or two hanging around since McCain's tendency is to err far, far, far on the other side.
On the other hand, Moira Whelan calls it "interesting" that "Davis never filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act that he did work for Yanukovich and today denied he ever did it." Given that context, there's surely going to be some more efforts to smoke out whether Davis is lying or not, whether he broke the law, etc.
Alex Tabarrok says that despite the recent headlines, the quantity of foodborne-disease outbreaks is actually on the decline of the past ten years. This strikes me as a pretty small and noisy data series to be drawing a trend line through if we don't know whether the decline continued through 2007 and 2008, but that does seem to be the trend on hand. At the same time, isn't the pattern of spiking in even years and declining in odd years sort of strange.
I went to the Mets game last night with my dad and brother, and for the first time it was brought home to me that Shea Stadium's replacement is being called "Citi Field" as in the giant financial services firm, rather than "City Field" as in the English language phrase. The very possibility of the confusion seems to me to indicate that the Mets are pretty lucky in the sponsor they got. How annoying a sponsorship deal is always strikes me as having something to do with how annoying the name of the sponsoring corporation is. A straightforward one-word brand name like' "Staples Center" isn't nearly as bad as "TD Banknorth Garden" so it seems to me that companies with relatively inoffensive names should get a discount.
Of course the other thing is that pure longevity can dignify any kind of name. It almost feels as if the gum is named after Wrigley Field rather than the other way around, whereas when something happens like mergers in the telecom industry force the MCI Center to become the Verizon Center, you're really getting your nose rubbed into the seediness of it all.
If the Lakers can't hold a 70-50 lead in a must-win game -- in a building where they were 9-0 in these playoffs -- how are they going to drag themselves out of a 3-1 hole?
Which has never been done in Finals history.
As he himself acknowledges, "I suppose you could counter with a reminder that the Celtics just pulled off their own Finals first." And, indeed, you could. Obviously, you'd be crazy to place an even odds bet on the Lakers at this point but the mere fact that no team has ever come back from a 3-1 hole in the Finals doesn't mean it's impossible. On the contrary, if the NBA survives for years and years at some point it's inevitable that someone will do it. And the current situation, where Boston has an older team coming off a grueling playoff run and currently suffering from a lot of injuries seems like as good a time as any. Certainly, I'll be watching game five with interest and not just assuming a Boston win.
I tend to agree with Ezra Klein that Bill Richardson would be a poor choice for Vice President mostly because you don't want to pick an ambitious politicians who seems like he'd be a bad president. And whether for that reason or for some other reason, Obama doesn't seem to be seriously considering him.
But it does seem to me that Richardson might be a good Secretary of State. Not only does he have a lot of experience in foreign affairs generally, but his experience is specifically relevant to Obama's controversial proposals to have high-level talks with "the bad guys."
Robert Mugabe sayshe'll never let the opposition take power, vowing "Never again shall this country come under the rule of the white man, direct or indirect." This might be a good time for, say, Nelson Mandela to speak up and note that the MDC is not, in fact, the pawn of some neocolonial white effort to recolonize Zimbabwe.
Brian Ulrich asks: "In moving from Illinois/Wisconsin to New York, I'm noticing that Amtrak has much more service on the east coast than on the midwest. Why is this, and what, if anything, can be done to get our national rail service serving such potentially useful routes as Chicago/St. Louis or Indianapolis/Kansas City?"
Several interrelated causes. The primary underlying issue is that in places where Amtrak depends on using rail lines that are owned by freight rail companies, it's difficult / impossible to provide frequent, reliable service. Also, clearly, in a place where the right-of-way is owned by a freight company, you're not going to build track optimized to the needs of high-speed passenger rail so you can't provide the speed of the Acela in the Northeast.
On top of this, the DC-to-Boston Acela corridor is the most densely populated part of the country, which makes it ideal for rail service, and also includes many walkable cities with transit infrastructure and substantial commuter rail networks. Transportation is always a network phenomenon -- part of what makes taking the train from DC to New York appealing is that when you arrive car-less in New York, that's fine. Indeed, driving from DC to New York would becomes an expensive/annoying proposition when you consider the difficulty/expense of parking in New York and a car's limited utility in terms of getting around. Even if you live in the suburbs, it makes sense to take Metro to union station and take the train up to NYC rather than driving. But if you took the train from Tucson to Phoenix you'd probably wind up needing to rent a car anyway, so why not just drive?
So in terms of what can be done, it's more a question of a thousand cuts than a single broad stroke. Every time any city anywhere does anything to make itself less auto-dependent, it's a step in the right direction. And then it's just a question of deciding that this is important to us. Building new high-speed rail lines is expensive. But it's not as if building new airport terminals or new freeways is cheap, either. Giving passenger rail more priority over freight rail would be a good idea since timeliness is more important to passengers than it is to giant boxes. But ultimately if we want to move more stuff by rail, we need to build more -- and more modern -- track.
I like asparagus. It's perhaps my favorite of the vegetables. But Via Adam Blickstein I see that the Germans seem to be taking things too far:
During its short season, asparagus features prominently on restaurant menus and café chalkboards across the country, reflecting Germans' obsession with the prized vegetable. In fact, they eat more white asparagus than anyone else in the world, chomping their way through 1.35 kilos (three pounds) per head.
It isn't difficult for gourmets to find fresh local asparagus, since with a production of some 82,000 tons, Germany is the biggest asparagus grower in Europe. The area under asparagus production in the country has doubled in the past 12 years to nearly 20,000 hectares, making asparagus the country's biggest vegetable crop in terms of area and value.
Something to keep in mind if you're having Germans over for dinner. Related.
With Great Power Comes Great Numbers of Angry Critics
It's a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn't really care for passes. But I think in a lot of ways it sells Tim Russert's legacy short to offer merely bland praise (it really is true, by all accounts, that he was a super-nice guy to those who knew him in person) for someone who really was a dominating presence in modern journalism who exercised enormous direct and indirect influence. Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert's passing, I thought I'd take a mixed approach that doesn't back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.
Meanwhile, in a BHTV episode Jane Hamsher and I recorded shortly before Russert died, Jane revisited her displeasure with Russert's handling of the Scooter Libby matter.
Chris Orr is very right about this utterly okay film:
In any case, at the screening I attended, the loudest cheers of the night by far were for an end-of-the-film cameo by Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark that closely parallels the post-credit Nick Fury scene in Iron Man. (Again, the purpose is twofold: To begin knitting Marvel's comic universe together, and to build buzz for The Avengers.) It was an odd moment, at once elating and deflating. For fans of the superhero genre--and of special-effect action movies in general--The Incredible Hulk is a perfectly solid addition to the canon. But its primary aftertaste is eager anticipation for Iron Man 2.
That said, I do think it's neat that as part of the Marvel Studios venture they seem eager to stitch together a semi-coherent Marvel Studios continuity to sit along side the "regular" and "ultimate" continuities of the books. It's always struck me as a weakness of the various DC or Marvel based films that they rip their characters out of the broader universes in which they've been embedded in their "native" medium.
The Atlantic's web video content is branching out past things directly related to articles in the print magazine to include, for example, David Lynch talking about where his ideas come from:
Saudi Arabia has a plan to boost their oil production in the near future. According to the NYT's Jad Mouawad that "was seen as a sign that the Saudis are becoming increasingly nervous about both the political and economic effect of high oil prices." But couldn't we just see it as a sign that you can make more money than ever selling oil these days so it became worth the Saudis' while to find ways to boost production? That's the market in action. The days of OPEC seriously enforcing production quotas on its members seem to be long gone in these days of rising prices and still steady demand.
Note, however, that though this kind of measure may well bring the price of oil down, it seems to cut against the notion that there's a speculative bubble in oil prices. The Saudis wouldn't be doing this if they thought an oil price crash was in the works.
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Heads in the Sand
