The LA Timesasks what such a world would look like. I think it's a difficult question to answer -- it will depend a lot on our policy response. Clearly, if we keep spending priorities and regulations in place that were formed when oil was cheap, but then oil becomes massively more expensive, then the results will be terrible. But not only would that be a bad idea, I'm fairly confident it won't happen -- it just wouldn't make sense. The question in play is when will politicians stop offering McCain-style gimmicks and start recognizing that relatively expensive oil (I won't make specific predictions about $200 / per barrel or anything else) is likely to be the long term trend so we should respond accordingly.
I agree with Noam Scheiber that the Republicans probably should evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction and also that they probably can't evolve in a "Sam's Club" direction. But this seems way overstated:
Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something's got to give. I just think it's going to be the GOP--which will basically cease to exist--rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.
In the real world, it seems to me that in terms of the White House and governor's mansions, there's just a natural dynamic that leads the parties to more-or-less alternate in power since bad macroeconomic conditions are very bad for incumbents and yet not something that can be uniformly avoided. Beyond that, from 1933-1968 the GOP was almost uniformly shut out of power in congress, and rarely held the presidency, but even then it didn't "basically cease to exist." On top of all that, I don't think this is going to happen but you can easily imagine a scenario in which Barack Obama takes power in 2009, the country faces some kind of foreign policy fiasco followed by a terrorist attack at home, and the GOP comes roaring back in 2010 and 2012 without changing its ideological stripes much at all.
I'm a very "bad" tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way -- seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of my favorite paintings, well-liked enough that I swiftly made it the wallpaper on my iPhone when I get it. And then yesterday I was ambling around the Art Institute of Chicago and, unexpectedly, there it was! Naturally I then took a photo with the iPhone and set that to be my wallpaper. But wallpaper aside, the point is that not knowing what the collection's highlights are until you get a chance to look around preserves a certain element of the thrill of discovery even though obviously it's already a super-famous painting.
Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won’t be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes—pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority—the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective.
But of course one reason "libertarianism" tends to get defined as a very specific -- and extreme -- political program is that when you open it up the way Tim has it sounds a lot like "liberalism." Which isn't to say that Tim, who'd describe himself as a libertarian, and I, a liberal, agree about everything. But it's to observe that the sorts of things that separate modern liberals from the economic right-wing are of a whole different kind than the sort of things that differentiated socialists from classical liberals. It was once the case that a substantial body of opinion in democratic societies thought that vast swathes of the economy should be either run directly by the government or else run as tightly regulated monopolies. In Europe, huge industries were nationalized and run by the state.
Nowadays, few if any people think that. Instead, you have left-right debates about things like how generously funded should public services be (and consequently how high should tax rates be) or should we make regulations to curb air pollution (of which carbon dioxide emissions now loom as an important variety) or in the name of public health paternalism (restrictions on where you can smoke, bans on trans fats). Say what you will about the "left" position on those topics, but none of these are calling into question the idea that the basic organization of the economy should be as a capitalist free market. At the same time, a lot of these issues weren't really on the table in the first couple of post-war decades.
The result is just a political debate that looks very different and in which, in particular, different kinds of values seem salient. Most liberals probably wouldn't describe themselves as "pro-market" unprompted, but nor are liberals are proposing to get rid of the market economy so being "pro-market" doesn't distinguish anyone in contemporary politics from anyone else.
Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich are talking about the need for alternative modes of transportation. He rightly makes the point that there's a difference between designing a city for cars, and designing a city for people. Also makes the somewhat idiosyncratic point that with transit "you could at least be having a drink on your way home":
I'm not sure a drunken commute is really the ideal we need to be aspiring toward. But it's certainly true that walking or transit is the best way to get home after doing some drinking. The main alternative, after all, is drunk driving with the attendant car crashes leading to death, disfigurement, and disability. We take a certain level of that for granted right now but driving -- and especially driving after consuming even only a drink or two -- is a pretty high-risk behavior in the scheme of things and reducing its incidence would be a major boon.
John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. John McCain doesn't know when he last pumped gas or what it cost. John McCain owns seven homes and forgot to pay taxes on one of them for the past four years. But at least he's not an elitist like Barack Obama. He earned his money the old-fashioned way -- marrying an heiress.
This business about the Hold Steady not having any groupies seems tragic to me -- there are many worse bands out there, and not very many better ones. Surely they deserve a groupie or two.
Haven't done one of these in a little bit, and the schedule's going to be kind of hectic for the next few days between traveling to and from Aspen and trying to attend/cover the Ideas Festival but what are you guys interested in?
I haven't actually attended very much of the DLC's National Conversation (seemed more fun to go out and see Chicago) but I did catch most of Markos, the Great Orange Satan himself, on a panel with various other worthies. Not much of interest was said, really, but at one point he did call Joe Lieberman "an asshole" and received applause from many and no boos or dissent from anyone else.
Barack Obama's set to deliver a "major speech" on "what patriotism means to him and what it requires of all Americans who loves this country and want to see it do better." Since Americans do seem to have lingering doubts about the patriotism of Democrats in general and Obama in particular, and since Obama's very good at delivering setpiece speeches, this seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, I won't be able to see it live since I'll be traveling from Chicago to the Aspen Ideas FestivalThe Atlantic is co-hosting this week in Colorado.
So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”
I go back and forth on whether the low fertility rates in places like Italy or Japan is a real problem. Some folks predict all manner of ills stemming from the possibility of population decline, but it also seems possible that it might lead to rising standards of living and I'm not sure I've ever seen the issue given a really rigorous treatment with models and dull equations.
Photo by Flickr user Tedsblog used under a Creative Commons license
Various complaints can be raised against the extent to which various security organs of the United States remain somewhat fixated on a Cold War mentality. But all the relevant institutions have to some extent adapted -- and certainly the Army and Navy busy themselves with plenty of other things besides prepping for war with China. But the Air Force seems different, stuck in the past (USSR) or hypotheticals (China) rather than dealing with the world as it is. Robert Farley has an interesting hypothesis as to why:
The larger problem for the Air Force is that both the Army and Navy have long traditions to borrow from, such that they are capable of "re-inventing" themselves while retaining a sense of identity. Both the Army and the Navy can also borrow from the histories of foreign military organizations; the Navy rather self-consciously styles itself as the modern equivalent of the nineteenth century Royal Navy. The Air Force lacks historical traditions to borrow from, both because it is such a new service, and because it has been a worldwide leader since its inception. Put briefly, the Air Force only knows the Cold War; it only understands conflict in terms of great power struggle, and as such all future planning (in contrast to short term compromises) will be oriented around that organizational purpose. To ask the Air Force not to think in terms of great power war is to ask it not to be the Air Force, but rather some other organization born at some other time for some other purpose. As such, Gates cleaning out of the brass isn't really going to amount to much; it is literally in the DNA of the Air Force to act in this way.
On another level, though, I think it reflects the fact that our current national security issues, while troubling, really don't rise to the level of enormous national emergency the way the Civil War or World War II or in a different way the outbreak of the Cold War did. Iraq or even Afghanistan just isn't a "do or die" situation that's going to create unstoppable political pressure on institutions to adapt. The fact that our country is objectively less threatened than it has been at various times in the past is, naturally, a good thing. But it also means that adaptation to the contemporary environment isn't as snappy as one might like.
Joe Lieberman on Face The Nationsays "our enemies will test the new president early. Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration." This sounds more like a coincidence to me than a deliberate strategy. If congress had repealed the 22nd amendment and Bill Clinton had won a third term in 2000 (which he surely could have done) then would al-Qaeda really have abandoned its plans?
But if you think Lieberman's right about this, then it's not really clear what follows. If terrorist attack frequency is a function of the efficacy of counter-terrorism policies, then clearly you want to pick a president who has good counter-terrorism policies. I say that's Obama, Lieberman says that's McCain and then we have the argument. But if Lieberman's right and an attack is just going to happen one way or another because the enemy wants to "test" the new president, then what's supposed to determine our choice? What counts as passing the test? I guess Lieberman wants to imply that we haven't been attacked again (except, of course, for the thousands of Americans who've died in Iraq) because Bush passed the test of 9/11, but do we really think al-Qaeda works this way? They're just kind of probing us, testing, checking us out, and then giving up their efforts?
It doesn't make sense and it's a big deal. I'm sure there's political calculation here and a view that talking about terrorism, no matter how nonsensically, helps conservative candidates. But there's also a very real underlying incoherence in the conservative conception of how to think about the al-Qaeda phenomenon, an unwillingness to understand efforts to destroy the enemy and secure the United States as a practical problem that requires actual knowledge and reasonably crafted policies. Instead, they prefer to see it as a kind of grown-up version of a staring contest or a power ring battle.
But the fundamental thing to recall about al-Qaeda is that they're not in a position to "test" us. We are a giant country full of huge cities with a GDP of over $13 trillion, a population of around 300 million, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, tanks, etc. and allies that include such major countries as Japan, Britain, France, etc. They are a smallish band of maybe thousands with no heavy weapons whose allies include some tribal leaders in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. Horrible as 9/11 was, they can't seriously harm the United States except by baiting us into doing incredibly stupid things like responding to fear of their pinpricks by resolving to endlessly prolong a wasteful and pointless military engagement on the other side of the world.
It's a bit late to be commenting on this, but hasn't Kevin McHale pulled off a great deal swapping O.J. Mayo, Antoine Walker, Marko Jaric, and Greg Buckner for Kevin Love, Mike Miller, Brian Cardinal, and Jason Collins? Of the eight players in this deal, there are two prospects, five scrubs, and one good player. McHale got the good player. And while I wouldn't be shocked if Mayo turned out to be a better player than Love, I wouldn't be shocked if things turned out the other way. And the Timberwolves didn't take any kind of financial hit on this in terms of contracts.
Basically the Wolves exchanged one plausible #3 draft pick for another totally plausible #3 draft pick and snagged Mike Miller in the bargain. That's still not a playoff team in the West, but it's a pretty damn solid trade.
Longtime troll TLB wants me to write about the announcement that the Democratic Convention will be simulcast in Spanish. Unlike anti-immigrant obsessives, I don't necessarily regard this kind of thing as a huge deal, but I actually do think there's something lamentable about the trend toward a greater volume of Spanish-language political communication.
It's just common sense that many jurisdictions provide services in Spanish or whatever other languages may be commonly spoken in any given area. But to me it makes a lot of sense to say that we should work to maintain a monolingual political conversation that expects citizens to be able to deliberate with their fellow citizens in English. Many countries have no realistic alternative other than to try to make bilingualism (or more) work but it's really difficult in practice (Will Kymlicka says some smart things about this in Politics in the Vernacular as I recall) and we shouldn't move in that direction.
Via Kevin Drum, I see that "A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say." There's more to the war than this kind of thing, but it's naive to deny that this kind of thing plays a large role in providing the impetus for a continued American involvement.
But more important, it's crucial to recall that this sort of thing renders the US military presence in Iraq a destabilizing force in that country. Our troops aren't merely a destabilizing force, it's clear that in many respects they're providing order -- especially local order. But at the same time the fact of American occupation generates a structure cause of disorder that saps the Iraqi government of illegitimacy and given our poor relations with Iraq's key neighbors turns the country into a field for proxy battles.
Turns out the Denver Airport has an indoor smoking lounge, a sign that despite Barack Obama's lead in the polls Colorado's not yet a truly blue state. But the fact that I immediately interpret the signal that way is a reminder that it's a bit strange that relatively smoker-friendly public policy is typical of both middle America and the dread Europeans.
Steve Harrelson represents District 1 in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He's also Majority Leader of the Arkansas House. And he also writes a very comprehensive Arkansas politics blog called "Under the Dome." This, to me, is a kind of fascinating development that potentially has a lot of promise for state and local officials who don't necessarily have big staffs. So I was glad to see that yesterday at DLC's National Conversation he was one of the panelists on a "breakout session" for state and local elected officials talking about "new social media."
Unfortunately, it seemed that there was virtually no interest in this from the audience. All anyone wanted to talk about was fear about what might go wrong on the internet. Could one of my kids write something on their Facebook page that embarrasses me? What if I become the victim of unfair attacks from anonymous people writing online? What about journalistic standards? Wither truth? The whole litany of internet-related fears. And I think you have to admit that these concerns have at least some validity. With any new significant technology you have your pros and your cons, your positive developments and some negative ones. But to me it's just fundamentally crazy to look at the brilliant new communications tools of the internet and primarily see something to be frightened of rather than new opportunities to take advantage of.
The good news, I suppose, is that at least as far as elected officials are concerned we should see a Darwinian process. Harrelson and others who start thinking about what new things they can do to communicate and connect with people should see more and more success, while those who want to recoil in fear will see less and less. But this also speaks to a real potential opening for institutions -- state and local government has enormous weight as a whole, and I suspect that whichever party or ideological tendency acts first to develop programs to make its people comfortable with new technologies and its possibilities can secure a real advantage.
So as it turns out my flight had DirectTV on it and I did get to see Barack Obama's speech on patriotism after all. I thought it was a little bit lame and defensive, frankly, though certainly not nearly as lame as the campaign's decision to hang Wes Clark out to dry for making a clearly true observation.
All that said, I read at the end of last week that McCain had "won the week" and I read the same thing after the week before that and yet despite all these winning weeks McCain is losing the election by a comfortable margin. And on some level I think this accounts for some of the lameness of the Obama campaign which, I'm now recalling, had a marked tendency to lapse into prolonged stretches of lameness during the primary only to raise it game at moments when Hillary Clinton's attacks seemed to be getting traction. The organizational elements -- field and fundraising -- were brilliant throughout, but on the messaging level it was kind of a judo campaign that only really looked good when it looked like they were about to get buried. Right now, McCain's flailing around and not getting traction with anything, and Obama seems to have retreated into a super-cautious mode just focused on parrying McCain's feeble blows.
“Senator Obama had a terrific conversation with President Clinton and is honored to have his support in this campaign. He has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
Two:
Statement by Matt McKenna, Director of Communications, Office of President Clinton, on President Clinton's Discussion with Senator Barack Obama:
President Clinton had a very good conversation with Senator Obama today. He renewed his offer to do whatever he can to ensure Senator Obama is our next President.
President Clinton continues to be impressed by Senator Obama and the campaign he has run, and looks forward to campaigning for and with him in the months to come. The President believes that Senator Obama has been a great inspiration for millions of people around the country, and he knows that he will bring the change America needs as our next President.
I think Chad Ford amptly sums up Gilbert Arenas' free agent status:
The biggest issue for Arenas is the same one that plagues all the free agents: Who else has the money to pay him? I can't see the 76ers or Grizzlies spending the cash. The Clippers would have interest, but Arenas already spurned them once.
That's why I find things like this so hard to understand: "According to a league source familiar with the situation, Wizards President Ernie Grunfeld plans on soon offering Arenas a lucrative long-term contract, one that could cover up to six years and could be worth more than $100 million." It would be one thing if the Clippers had actually offered Arenas, say, a $90 million contract and the Wizards were countering. That kind of money would still, in my view, be a mistake but I could understand it on some level. But why make a pre-emptive bid like that.
Charles Krauthammer is looking for a research assistant. Should be a pretty good gig, because this isn't the kind of research assistant position that requires you to get accurate facts or anything.
Chad Ford repeats a common assessment of Andris Biedrins: "Biedrins falls a little bit into the Anderson Varejao category -- energetic big man whose stats don't tell the whole story in terms of on-court contributions."
But here's the thing: Unless by "stats" you mean "per game scoring average and nothing else" the story Biedrins' stats tell you is that he's a very good player. His stats tell me that he average 9.8 rebounds per game in 27.4 mpg. They tell me that his 10.5 ppg came on an extraordinarily good 63 percent field goal percentage. They tell me that the Warriors defense was better with Biedrins on the floor. These contributions are perfectly quantifiable.
Not quite sure how to feel about Antawn Jamison's new contract. It sounds like folly to offer a big money contract to a 32 year-old, but there's been no deterioration in his skills so maybe it'll pay off. But who were the Wizards bidding against here?
Well I’m on the ground in Aspen now at the Atlantic Ideas Festival that Just Happens to be Taking Place in Aspen (it’s been renamed...) and it’s really beautiful though I kind of wish there was more oxygen in the air. But they didn’t bring me out here just to enjoy the view, I’m supposed to write about the ideas in play at the festival. So here goes.
Shelby Steele offered some interesting thoughts on the subject of “white guilt” observing that in post-white supremacist America it can be very damaging to a person or institution’s reputation to be labeled as a racist. Consequently, people and institutions put a lot of emphasis on avoiding having that happen. This, according to Steele, often crowds out pragmatic consideration of issues like “is this actually helping people.” He gives vintage AFDC and affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples -- practices aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of elite institutions rather than aimed at actually solving problems of poverty and structural inequities in education.
That all seemed pretty plausible to me, actually. Then I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war recently for reasons of white guilt and that this is why we’re bogged down in Iraq -- too much focus on the legitimacy of our efforts, and not enough focus on “winning.” I think this mostly shows that Steele has a lot more background in social policy than in military policy. I’d say, as the counterinsurgency manual says that legitimacy is absolutely vital in a modern war-fighting situation.
What may be Obama's authentic position on gun rights was revealed in early April when he told a closed-door Silicon Valley fundraiser that "bitter" small-town residents "cling" to the Bible and Second Amendment. That ran against his public assertion as a former constitutional law professor that the Constitution guarantees rights for individual gun owners, not just group rights for state militias. But his legal opinion forced Obama into a political corner.
Journalists, like biographers, try to go out and discover information that's not already widely known. One habit of this, on full display here, is a tendency to privilege the secret and unknown as "real" and the public and known as artifice. Thus, to Novak the real key to understanding Obama's thinking on gun regulations is not to consult his record as a legislator, candidate, and academic but rather to put all that to one side in favor of a not-really-on-point remark made behind what Obama thought were closed doors.
But when you get right down to it, there's no reason to accept this epistemology. Of course it's useful to add more information to the knowledge base. But to a very substantial extent the "real" John McCain is John McCain, the politician and public figure, just as the "real" Barack Obama is Barack Obama, the politician and public figure.
ClaudeB asks: "If Dubya decides to go in Iran before Jan. 20, 2009, is there anyone in Washington who can stop him, since even the Joint Chiefs have trouble restraining him?"
I get asked this question now and again, and as best I can tell it's not a very difficult question -- if Bush orders air strikes against Iranian targets, nobody can stop him. A plain reading of the text of the US Constitution would seem to suggest that it would be unconstitutional for the military to follow any such order absent a declaration of war or some other form of congressional authorization. But the settled precedent, ratified by key Democratic Party leaders as recently as the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, is that no such authorization is necessary. I'm not happy with this situation and think it's crazy that we as a country have moved away from the constitutional procedure, but the cat's been out of the bag for a while now and if Bush wants to bomb Iran Bush will bomb Iran.
Andre Bacevich has a brilliant op-ed in the Boston Globe. I'll quote two paragraphs:
Bush's harshest critics, left liberals as well as traditional conservatives, have repeatedly called attention to this record. That criticism has yet to garner mainstream political traction. Throughout the long primary season, even as various contenders in both parties argued endlessly about Iraq, they seemed oblivious to the more fundamental questions raised by the Bush years: whether global war makes sense as an antidote to terror, whether preventive war works, whether the costs of "global leadership" are sustainable, and whether events in Asia rather than the Middle East just might determine the course of the 21st century.
This is absolutely right. At the moment, we're constructing our political spectrum almost entirely along questions like "what do you think of the surge" which, though important don't really speak to the big theoretical questions in play. You might think that a 16 month timeline for withdrawal is too hasty, but also be fundamentally opposed to preventive war and I'd say that'd be better than having the reverse positions. But we're not really talking about this stuff. More Bacevich:
The burden of identifying and confronting the Bush legacy necessarily falls on Obama. Although for tactical reasons McCain will distance himself from the president's record, he largely subscribes to the principles informing Bush's post-9/11 policies. McCain's determination to stay the course in Iraq expresses his commitment not simply to the ongoing conflict there, but to the ideas that gave rise to that war in the first place. While McCain may differ with the president on certain particulars, his election will affirm the main thrust of Bush's approach to national security.
The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.
Exactly. This is a major theme of Heads in the Sand and I thought all throughout the primary season that Obama was the Democrat most likely to be able to do what's necessary. Thus far he hasn't really, for reasons that are a little bit his fault and to a large extent just the fault of the broader politico-media complex for being frighteningly indifferent to the big-picture questions.
But there are the issues we need to be talking about. There are light-years of difference between the proposition that "circumstances might arise in which we need to deploy military forces to pursue a counterterrorism objective" and "9/11 means we should define our role in the world as a highly militarized quest for coercive world domination." But thus far both the unpopular Bush and the somewhat popular McCain have managed to elide the difference.
They say you should drink a lot of water to help acclimate to high altitudes. Apparently, at past Ideas Festivals that's meant handing out a lot of plastic water bottles. Not very sustainable. So this year, the good people at Chevron gave everyone durable water bottles and set up water stations like the one pictured above where we can fill up. Between that and their investment in geothermal energy (they're the world's largest producers) I can't imagine what complaints anyone could have about their environmental record.
Some scattered notes from Sean Wilentz's talk on his new book, The Age of Reagan that focus on his somewhat unusual periodization choice in which the age runs from 1974-2008: “long, prolonged era of conservative political domination of American political life” “last 35 years or so have seen conservative politics dominant in national political life” “a lot of the history that had been written of this period was locked in hagiography or demonology” “possible as a historian to lay aside one’s political views and write as a historian” “not the conventional periodization beginning in 1968” “1974, with the fall of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal” “regardless of who wins the presidency we’re at the end of a political era” “the disruption of American politics as we had known it since at least 1945” “people tend to forget how demoralized the Republican establishment was in 1974 . . . there was talk of changing the party’s name” “Republicans were increasingly divided between a beleaguered establishment and a new post-Taft conservative movement coming out of the west”
“indisputable that Ronald Reagan was the major political figure in American politics during this period” “many efforts to try to put the center back into American politics, Jimmy Carter tried and failed . . . George H.W. Bush . . . the center-right wouldn’t hold . .. Bill Clinton . . . could not recreate the center-left, the terms of politics had been transformed”
Periodization strikes me as an intrinsically problematic task for a historian. Nobody's better-positioned to recognize that these are semi-arbitrary and yet it's the historial who needs to actually write books and that positively requires you to pick beginning and end points.
An interesting contention from Wilentz is that Reagan got it right in a big way on the so-called "Euromissile" controversy (the subject of the memorable "99 Luftballoons"). Wilentz says not only that the predictions of the naysayers proved wrong (which is clearly true) but that this was no sideshow. Rather, it "was a very important showdown in the history of the Cold War" and "may have played a role in Gorbachev’s emergence in 1985." I'd be interested in learning more about the evidence here. It's plausible enough that a failure of the Soviet hardliners in 1983 could have played an important role in Gorbachev's rise, but then again it might not be true. You'd really need to be a Soviet specialist to understand its role fully.
Either way, as Wilentz says the key move came later, when Gorbachev did come to power and Reagan broke with the bulk of the conservative movement to decide to cooperate in good faith with the Soviet reformers. Wilentz attributes this to the fact that Gorbachev had more experience with the left going back to the 1930s and 40s and thus was more sensitive than a typical conservative to changes within the Soviet leadership.
As you can perhaps tell from my dyspeptic response to some of our Ideas Festival sponsors' efforts to brand themselves as "green," (see also Boeing's hilarious hand-crank powered flashlight) I don't see the "corporate social responsibility" movement as having a ton of promise. I think large firms will more-or-less inevitably seek to maximize profits and the role of the state is to ensure that that profit maximizing behavior takes place in a larger framework such that its impacts are beneficial. But this is a practical concern, and I absolutely agree with Brad DeLong that the "strong" anti-CSR position outlined by Milton Friedman and others doesn't make much sense and actually seems blind to the non-coercive genius of capitalism.
Jessy Tolkan from the Energy Action Coalition opened a climate change session with a brief kind of pep talk, urging people (correctly in my view) that rather than try to unite the country around a sense of crisis and doom, we need to try to unite people around an appealing vision of green jobs, clean energy, etc. To me, this is completely right. Next up was Dr. John Holdren of Harvard and Woods Hole who opened by remarking that he had little in the way of optimism or good news to report -- noting that things have actually changed faster than people predicted, and that we're now at a point where substantial climate change is inevitable and the issue is how much can we adapt and can we avoid absolute disaster.
Another thing Holdren said answered a question I'd been wondering about for a while -- why have the cool kids stopped using the term "global warming." Holdren said this phrase wrongly implies to people a uniform change and that, in turn, makes talk of a single-digit change in temperatures sound like no big deal. After all, lots of places experience a seven degree temperature swing in a single day. The point that needs to be gotten across is that the temperature change will produce all kinds of large, but somewhat localized changes as climate patterns shift about. He likes the phrase "global climactic disruption" though I think we'll probably have to stick with "climate change."
I had realized that deforestation, particularly in the Amazon, is a contributing factor in climate change. What I hadn't realized was that climate change is also contributing to Amazonian deforestation. But according to Holdren, the rainforest hasn't just been burning lately because of people clearing forests. Rather, climate change has altered rainfall patterns and the forest is actually drier than it used to be and more susceptible to burning. In short, there's a frightening feedback loop at work.
Ben Cardin, Maryland's junior Senator, is emerging as one of our great transit advocates in the United States congress and he gives good interview to Grist's Kate Sheppard. It's great to see mid-Atlantic legislators like Cardin and Delaware's Carper repeatedly showing leadership on these topics. But what about DCCC honcho Rahm Emmannuel with his Chicago district, or his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer of New York? In a country where most legislators don't represent transit-friendly areas, transit-friendly policy is always going to be a tough sell but I'm pretty sure it could be done (the total amount of money involved in realistic policy changes isn't that huge) if legislators who do represent such areas would all start pulling.
Not Ideas About the Festival, But the Thing Itself
Ross had a big idea driven by watching Sandra Day O'Connor talk:
Over the past few years of court-watching, I've gradually moved from supporting some version of Scalia-style originalism to a much more radical judicial minimalism, in which the Court would show far greater deference to the other branches of government than either liberal or conservative jurists show today. (I have, of course, no qualifications to argue seriously for any theory of jurisprudence, but set that aside.) Of course, judicial nominees' fine-sounding theories of minimalism have a way of collapsing upon contact with the kind of power the Supreme Court wields, so perhaps we ought to consider enforcing it - for instance, by requiring a supermajority of the Justices (either 6-3 or 7-2) to deem any existing legislation unconstitutional.
When he explained that idea to me verbally yesterday, I liked it quite a bit because I, like Ross, increasingly think that the very strong system of judicial review we have in the United States is a bit of a problem. But the more I think about it, the less workable this proposal seems to me to be. Among other things -- where does this leave the Circuit and District Courts? And I'm not sure we can really define "deem any existing legislation unconstitutional" in an appropriate way, since our Court reviews cases rather than laws.
Meanwhile, to do this you'd have to change the constitution. Which is extremely hard. Indeed, it's essentially impossible. And as long as we're changing the constitution, I'd like to change that and make it easier to amend. It should, of course, be difficult to amend the constitution. But not as difficult as it is. And it's the difficulty of changing the text that helps make the stakes of Supreme Court jurisprudence so absurdly high. Other changes I'd like to see would including ending lifetime tenure for judges (something like 12 years give or take would be adequately long) so as to make it reasonable to expect presidents to nominate highly experienced people, and the inclusion of something like Canada's "notwithstanding clause".
[headline for this post doesn't really make sense, but I like the reference too much to let it go]
Religion and the Modern World Who Speaks for Islam? Irshad Manji, Dalia Mogahed, Reuel Gerecht Moderator: Jeffrey Goldberg
Wouldn't it be weird if the correct answer turned out to be that American Jews speak for Islam? Meanwhile, as a secular person myself I find myself very sympathetic to Irshad Manji's point of view but it's kind of odd to have only one practicing Muslim on the panel. Mogahed's work on Muslim public opinion is extremely useful factual information on a subject that tends to attract a lot of hot air.
Via Matt at Think Progress, an awful lot of people are concerned that John McCain will continue Bush's policies. This, clearly, rather than any "move to the center" is the key to Barack Obama's election strategy. Given the substantial edge McCain continues to have over Obama on national security issues, it seems that the main challenge is to get people to see that McCain will, if anything, govern to Bush's right on foreign policy.
One paradox of these kind of events is that normally the panels you're most interested in attending mostly feature experts telling you things you already know -- these, after all, are the issues you're interested in. But at a panel on nuclear proliferation, Bruce Blair from the World Security Institute told me that far more nuclear weapons than I'd realized -- about 2,500 -- are still on hair-trigger status in the United States and Russia. That means these weapons could be launched within minutes with no advance preparation on the part of the White House or the Kremlin.
It's a remote possibility, of course, that those weapons would be launched on accident or in some fit of madness from Bush or Medvedev. But considering the extent of the downside risk, and the lack of big-time US-Russian tensions this seems crazy. Surely we could dial this back such that in case a crisis developed we could consider shifting the weapons onto this kind of status.
Martin Sherwin at the nuclear panel puts forward the provocative idea that Israel ought to call for the creation of a conference on "First Steps to a Nuclear-Free Middle East." The problems here are obvious, but I do think this points to an important point. Obviously, a nuclear Israel plus verifiably non-nuclear neighbors, is ideal from Israel's point of view. But a nuclear balance of terror where Israel has nukes, but so do Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey with programs under way in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria doesn't sound very good for Israel. They could probably count on deterrence to see them through there, but it would be a risky situation.
Alternatively, a world in which Iran and other Middle Eastern states are verifiably disarmed and Israel is disarmed as well would be pretty safe for Israel. They might or might not be threatened by katyushas and stuff, but we've seen that Israeli society and the Israeli economy can withstand that. And at the end of the day I do think we're either going to shift to a region (and at a slower pace, toward a world) where nobody has nuclear weapons or else to one where everyone of consequence has them.
I've been remiss in failing to wish a happy Canada Day to all my Canadian readers and to Canadaphiles around the world. Those of you from the states looking to learn a thing or two about our neighbor to the north should know that Canada Day celebrates not Canadian independence, but the passage of the British North America Act of 1867, which established the Canadian Confederation by uniting four separate British colonies -- the Province of Canada, the Province of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia -- into a single consolidated political entity. At the same time, the Province of Canada was re-divided into its constituent element of Ontario and Québec.
One motive for consolidation was that British and Canadian officials were concerned about a potential American invasion of Canada. We tried to pull this off during the Revolution and the War of 1812 and it continued to be a popular idea for a while. The feeling was that now that the US had put the Civil War (which heightened US-British tensions) behind it and the country had the experience of building a large and powerful military establishment, that our thoughts might turn to expansion. Consolidating Britain's North American holdings was thought to help make them more defensible.
To add to what Atrios says here while I of course think people should keep whatever problems they may have with Barack Obama in perspective, it's probably actually helpful to his political ambitions to have him be criticized from the left. According to the silly conventions that govern our political debate, if you're not to some extent provoking vocal criticism from your base, there's considered to be something wrong with you.
Several commenters and Scott Lemieux have convinced me that contrary to what I said here it wouldn't require a constitutional amendment to impose some kind of supermajority requirement on Supreme Court decisions.
UPDATE: Of course at the end of the day this would need to be litigated. In principle, the Court could vote 5-4 to strike the law down which would create awesome legal paradoxes.
Says on a panel "white Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in the history of the human conditions." I think this is the sort of thing that gets you invited back to tony gatherings at scenic resorts.
Arguably the panel I'm watching now, "Race and Politics in America: Where Are We in 2008?" with Richard Thompson Ford, Shelby Steele, Charles Kamasaki, and Ta-Nehisi Coates suffers from the opposite problem from the "Who Speaks for Islam?" panel -- all four participants are nonwhite. Surely white people have something to say about this. On the other hand, maybe you can actually get a broader range of views on an all-black panel, I have a hard time imagining a white person saying what Shelby Steele just said.
Charles Kamasaki from the National Council of La Raza makes a point near and dear to my heart: "we have a racial paradigm in this country that is largely built either on slavery or on immigration and when you have a population that is of many colors and comes from many different places . . . it’s very difficult to fit that population into a traditional paradigm."
Ironically, this had come to my mind just minutes before when Kamasaki asked the audience if any Hispanics in the house could raise their/our hands. I'm never 100 percent certain how to answer questions like that. According to the racial paradigm, I think I'm supposed to raise my hand. But at the same time, I have white skin, I'm a fourth-generation American, and my knowledge of Spanish is limited to a summer semester I took at NYU years ago.
Continuing with my Shelby Steele blogging, he went into what I thought was a really unfair attack on Barack Obama, drawing an invidious comparison between Obama and John McCain and Hillary Clinton on the grounds that we don't really know who he is. Instead, says Steele, Obama is running on a vague sense that he's a talented politician and a black guy. At first I thought he was going to take this in an unverifiably airy direction, but then he specifically said of McCain that if he's elected "we know what road that guy’s going to go down" whereas we don't know the same for Obama.
Now of course it's possible -- likely, even -- that many Americans don't know what road Obama would go down as president. But he's unveiled a fairly detailed policy record, and assembled a fairly consistent record in public life. It's John McCain, by contrast, who was against the Bush tax cuts before he was against them it's McCain who sponsored an immigration reform bill and then said he would have written against it. It's McCain who wants credit for tackling climate change but opposes all legislation aimed at curbing carbon emissions. It's McCain who's trying to run on an appealing biography while leaving cloudy impressions of his policy agenda.
I'm not going to blog anything at the moment on the panel Ross moderate on "is higher education for everyone" since I think there's going to be embeddable video soon and I'll save my remarks for then. That said, I found it kind of hilarious that amidst the opulence of the festival and the high-tech wonder of multiple digital video cameras recording the proceedings was a . . . cassette tape deck, a technology that I thought had been reconciled to the ash-heap of history some time ago.
Photo by Matthew Yglesias, available under a Creative Commons license
In a surprise move, looks like Baron Davis is going to sign with the LA Clippers. My understanding is that this means Elton Brand would have to take a small paycut for the Clippers to resign him, but if they can work out a deal that's a pretty damn solid inside-outside duo.
I've seen lots of commentary on the revelation that Bush administration torture techniques have been modeled on the work of the ChiComs but not much specific focus on the fact that the main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions. That's not very surprising as the main use of torture in interrogations has always been to elicit false confessions.
But still, to literally rip your techniques off from a study called "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War" requires some level of obliviousness I wasn't aware of. Or else maybe they were looking for false confessions?
I have no real ability to write about food, so I wasn't going to say anything about it but Ezra wants to know how I liked my dinner at Alinea the other day. Long story short, it was really good. It was the best I'd ever had by a substantial margin. Not only did it taste great, but the inventiveness level was off the charts -- the food is very abstract in a way that makes the flavors all the more mind-blowing. Also, apparently it's possible to combine chocolate and duck to good effect.
Sara and I went because Restaurant magazine told us it was the 21st best restaurant in the world and I've never been to any of the other contenders on their top fifty list so I'm in no position to judge it relative to the relevant competition. At the moment, though, I'm full of regret that I'm not nearly rich enough to go off and tour the even higher-rated options.
Carl H. Lindner Jr. is a businessman who recently co-hosted a big dollar fundraiser for John McCain. He also oversaw the payment of about $1.7 million to a terrorist organization. But that's okay because (a) the terrorists were Latin American rather than Arab, (b) the terrorists were right-wing Latin Americans rather than leftists, and (c) McCain is a straight-talker and the candidate of honor so it's not actually possible for any number of sleazy associations to taint him.
Barack Obama's set to deliver a big speech on national service later today. I'm not a huge fan of the "national service" concept, but whereas on many issues the devil is in the details on service I think it tends to be the reverse. Because the underlying idea is bad and illiberal, the people proposing national service schemes tend to avoid proposing specific policies that really match the rhetoric. Consequently, the details tend to be some good-to-harmless policy proposals yoked together with some fuzzy talk. The Obama campaign emailed around the following bullet points:
Encourage national service to address the great challenges of our time, including combating climate change, extending health care, improving our schools and strengthening America overseas by showing the world the best of our nation.
Expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 slots and double the size of the Peace Corps.
Integrate service-learning into our schools and universities to enable students to graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of service experience under their belts.
Provide new service opportunities for working Americans and retirees.
Expand service initiatives that engage disadvantaged young people and advance their education.
Expand the capacity of nonprofits to innovate and expand successful programs across the country.
Enable more Americans to serve in the armed forces.
That's very vague, but as I say seems harmless enough and we're not really in "Service Guarantees Citizenship" mode:
It seems worth noting that the best "service" initiatives around, like the PeaceCorps and Teach For America, aren't so much "service" as they are public sector jobs that are simply structured as to operate outside the normal contours of recruitment and employment. There's nothing wrong with that, but the relevant test should be effectiveness of outcomes (does TFA help kids learn, does the PeaceCorps help build the American brand) not whether or not it's creating an awesome servicey spirit.
Page Six goes where the Ideas Festival dares not tread declining attainment for America's wealthiest children: "In the past, it wasn’t unusual for as many as seven students to be accepted through early admission to the top Ivy League institution, says a guidance counselor there. But for the first time in memory, inside sources say, no Dalton students will be shipping off to Harvard come fall. And some parents—who shell out $31,200 a year for their kids’ private school education—are pissed."
I believe I was actually one of eight members of the Dalton Class of 1999 who wound up in the Harvard Class of 2003. Apparently fairness is to blame for causing the problem:
As a result, it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”
Having people fly in to Aspen from around the country for vacation is never going to be the most ecologically sound practice, but it's worth mentioning that the city seems to have a very forward-thinking set of transportation policies. For one thing, the town is walkable with sidewalks, reasonable traffic lights, and there seems to be some effort to make parking facilities relatively unobtrusive. On top of that, the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority runs an extensive and reasonable frequent bus network and there's lots of people (myself included) getting around on bikes.
Now of course being a ridiculously wealthy community has got to be helpful in terms of putting together a high-quality bus network in a somewhat unlikely situation. But by the same token there are very few countries that are as rich as the United States of America so we ought to be able to afford to construct one of the world's best comprehensive multi-modal transportation networks.
This is a picture of Aspen's health care panel, not pictured due to sloppy photography is Rep. Dianne DeGette (D-Colorado) who made some eloquent remarks about the failure of incremental reform in the congress. Incrementalism, she said, has been a "band-aid approach" which she then described (more like whack-a-mole) as simply causing new problems to appear in new areas in a way that makes structural problems worse. Under the circumstances, comprehensive reform is needed. What kind of reform? She didn't quite say other than that "everything must be on the table."
More to the point, her remark that what we need to do is "bring all the comprehensive and myriad interests in and begin to craft a package that will be portable, affordable, and universal" sums up why I'm not super-excited about the prospects for health care reform. After all, missing from the list of desiderata is improving public health. And I think that if we make our goal putting a package together that satisfies all the "comprehensive and myriad interests" then it's unlikely that we'll really get much in the way of improvement. Portable, affordable, and universal would be an improvement over the status quo but I think that even if it gets done people will wind up ultimately disappointed.
Meanwhile, Mark Ganz from the Puget Sound Health Alliance says he doesn't necessarily think it makes a difference who wins the presidential election. Either one could get the job done, he says, "if they chose to make this a central focus have the political skills and the ability to appeal to the American public." That seems a little blinkered to me. It's true that they're both talented politicians, but the relevant variable here isn't just how much does McCain or Obama care but what do McCain or Obama think. As best I can tell, they actually have substantially different opinions about health care! It's a fallacy to think that there's a "problem" here and that everyone is trying to "solve" it. There are actually different views about what the nature of the problem is.
Ganz then follows this up with music to my ears talking about the serious problems in quality and cost-effectiveness and name-checks this Peter Orszag slide:
Orszag himself will speak later. Ganz quotes Nelson Mandela "things are impossible until you do them" which is a slogan I like.
CBO director Peter Orszag talking about the problems with the current health care financing system says that "we need much more information about what works and what doesn’t.” With that in hand, we need to “pay for the stuff that works” as opposed to the system where “right now we have financial incentives for more care rather than better care.” To a large extent, our current system doesn't deliver quality care because it's not designed to elicit quality care, “we should align [financial] incentives so that we are seeking better care, then that’s what we’ll get.” Long story short, you need to pay health care providers for helping people rather than for treating them irrespective of efficacy.
On public health more broadly, he says "we need to be doing a lot more to help people lead healthy lives" which means we ought to "dial down a little bit the excessive reliance on narrow financial incentives to influence behavior" and pay more attention to the extensive psychological and sociological research on why it is people do things that aren't in their long-term health interests and what we could do to push them in a healthier direction. Also this interesting fact -- "we are experiencing a dramatic increase in life expectancy inequality in the United States . . . at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution, life expectancy is either flat or declining . . . a lot of that has to do with health behavior."
One oddity of this panel is that there hasn't been any real mention of the main proposals put forward by actual politicians -- John McCain's plan, Barack Obama's plan, or the Wyden-Bennett bipartisan bill. Then along came a woman who I slowly realized with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) who took advantage of the Q&A period to ask the panelists to give their views on Wyden-Bennett. It was an interesting moment, but perhaps not the optimal method for America's members of congress to be getting their information. Chris Jennings and Mark Ganz both made basically favorable noises, though both are skeptical that such a frontal assault on employer-based insurance is feasible.
Orszag said "it’s not my job to say whether something is good or bad, but Senator Wyden and Senator Bennett worked very hard to make their proposal budget neutral.” Budget neutral is, I believe, the highest praise a CBO director is allowed to give to proposed legislation.
Barack Obama's decision to come out against efforts to amend the California constitution to overturn the marriage equality ruling there has naturally raised questions as to how Obama squares this with his claim to be opposed to gay marriage. I think both Julian Sanchez and Josh Patashnik show that you can reconcile Obama's various views on the matter and there's not a logical inconsistency here.
That said, I just don't find those accounts especially persuasive. I can't peer into Obama's mind and see what he's thinking, but this looks like a political strategy rather than a logically coherent set of statements. Contra Andrew, I don't think chalking this up to "cowardice" is the most reasonable interpretation. If you want to see the cause of marriage equality advanced, you need sympathetic politicians to win elections. If the sympathetic politicians all say things that are politically toxic, they'll just lose and nothing will be accomplished. But of the sympathetic politicians hew to the more politically tenable line that special anti-gay constitutional amendments are wrong and discriminatory, and also appoint the sort of progressive jurists who are likely to look sympathetically on gay rights causes, then you'll get to equality.
To make an analogy, anti-miscegenation laws were a horrible injustice but it wasn't "cowardice" of the politicians who favored civil rights to avoid running around the country losing elections left and right over the issue throughout the 1950s and 60s. You want to ask a politicians to take some risks on behalf of a controversial cause, but not so many risks that they lose. Backing the California referendum would have been pure cowardice -- surrendering any opportunity to advance the cause of gay equality in the name of political expedience. What Obama's doing is clever, hard-nosed practical politics.
At a panel on "Climate and Sustainability: Fueling the Future: Sustainable Choices for a New Transportation Landscape" neither the guy from Mercedes-Benz nor the guy from Chevron seems to think measures to reduce energy demand have any role whatsoever to play. Instead, it's exclusively about awesome new kinds of cars and new sources of fuel. As they say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
Vinod Khosla says of the energy/climate situation, "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." I like it. Of course there's the common saying that the Chinese character for crisis combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" but unfortunately this turns out to not be true. Khosla, however, manages to capture the same sentiment. He says we need good biofuels. Certainly taking Richard Lugar's advice and dropping the insane tarrif on Brazil's delicious sugar ethanol would be a good idea.
Michael Wirth from Chevron brings to the table an interesting perspective on the biofuels issue that I hadn't heard before -- namely that from a business point of view you want to refine oil in a small number of giant facilities that reap economies of scale. The costs of transporting the biomass that you would turn into fuel, by contrast, are such that you would want to have lots and lots of much smaller facilities. That, in turn, would require changes both in business practices but also probably policy shifts about where you're allowed to build things since the opening of a new refinery is the kind of thing likely to prompt a lot of NIMBY objections.
David Sandalow argues that we ought to put a regulatory cap on allowable horsepower. He notes that 30 years go, the average car could go 0 to 60 in 14.1 seconds, now it's 9.6 seconds. Average horsepower in 1980 was 100, today it's 220. And of course we don't actually get around faster because the limiting factor in real world speeds is traffic congestion and safety rather than engine size. Regulation, he plausibly argues, could get us out of a horsepower arms race in a way that would have little negative impact on anyone's life while allowing us to capture technological gains in engine efficiency in terms of reduced fuel consumption rather than in terms of faster cars that let you get to the traffic jam more quickly.
I liked Tim Fernholtz's gloss on the whole issue of whether or not Obama needs to change his Iraq policy: "George Packer touched off a discussion yesterday with a comment suggesting that conditions in Iraq might be improving so much that Obama won't able to see through his ambitious withdrawal plan."
Right. To surge optimists the surge has gone so well that to contemplate the war ending at any point is to court disaster. I've favored leaving Iraq for years now. I'd like to start doing as soon as possible. But of course I'm not a crazy person -- if some gambit was on the table that stood a good chance of "working," in the sense of creating a sustainable dramatic improvement in conditions in Iraq, over a year-long time horizon I'd be happy to endorse that rather than leaving so soon. But the definition of "working" I'd be working with, the common sense one, is that after your policy "works" the war ends on relatively favorable terms.
But surge-working isn't "everyone relax, the troops will be home by Christmas once they finish their job"-working. Instead it's "this is working so well that the war can continue indefinitely but our troops will be killed at a slower rate"-working. It's not, "be a bit more patient and this thing will end" it's "we think we've enhanced the political sustainability of an expensive and pointless effort to dominate Iraq."
Like the evil Wes Clark, I'm a bit unclear on what it is about the physical and moral courage John McCain showed while captive in Vietnam that indicates he'd do a good job of managing US national security policy. The key point I'm missing seems to be that "military background = awesome" irrespective of specifics. Thus, when the NBA tells us it's going to clean up officiating by hiring retired Army Major General Ronald Johnson we raise no eyebrows at the news that Johnson "was commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers, Gulf Region division, from 2003-04, responsible for overseeing $18 billion of reconstruction in Iraq." After all, it's not like half that money went missing or anything.
Marc Ambinder attended a Chevron-sponsored dinner last night and came away with an answer to the question of what oil companies hope to gain from trying to position themselves as green -- it's an opportunity to present efforts to gut climate change legislation as good-faith efforts to cope with the problem:
Everyone seems to agree that a carbon tax, or, more likely, the indirect carbon tax that is a cap-and-trade system, is the next step. The cap-n-trade system will include a "safety valve," a term of art that refers to a mechanism whereby government promises that, once carbon emissions prices reach a certain level, they'll cap the price but allow for more emissions credits to be purchased.
Now Marc cunningly made his "safety valve" link to a Climate Progress article explaining why it's a bad idea. But to put it briefly, a safety valve is a great provision to add if you don't care at all about mitigating climate change. Call it "John McCain environmentalism" -- you'd like to be associated with the climate change issue, but you also want to rake in huge dollars from polluters and you don't actually care accomplishing anything on the issue other than advancing your own political career.
In a different world, what you're trying to do is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There are two ways to do this. One is that you can put a price on carbon (a "carbon tax") and then increase that price over time so as to generate the kind of emissions reductions you're looking for. Another is that you can set an economywide level of allowable carbon emissions and make it such that firms need to obtain emissions permits in order to emit CO2 ("cap and trade") thus allowing the market to raise the price of carbon emissions up to a level commensurate with your goal. Either way, the idea is that higher prices for emitting carbon will lead to less emissions -- it creates financial incentives to switch energy sources (coal and oil to natural gas, fossil fuels to nuclear and renewables) to switch to more energy-efficient end-uses (SUVs to minivans, conventional engines to gas-electric hybrids) and to simply use less energy (movie theaters air conditioned to 72 degrees instead of 60) overall.
But either way, the mechanism is higher prices for carbon emissions. If you add on a provision that prevents the price of carbon emissions from rising too high, then you're not taking action to reduce emissions.
I've known since this morning, but it now appears that the word is out that my friend Brian Beutler was shot three times last night around 17th and Euclid back in DC. He's expected to make a full recovery, for which we're all thankful.
Higher-density, transit-friendly development possibly coming to a small town in California wine country. One thing we don't necessarily give enough thought to is the extent to which increased density and small town living may be compatible. After all, it's not as if classic small town America was built during the era of the automobile. A small town can be small without being super-sprawly or organized in such a way that the only way to buy anything is to drive 30 miles to a mall.
Aspen's finest political reporter notes on the McCain campaign shakeup: "In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other." Is that how fathers and sons normally interact? I feel like it doesn't describe my relationship with my dad very well.
In a larger sense, having one of the main architects of Bush's re-election campaign become McCain's campaign manager seems like a good way to demonstrate that a vote for McCain is like a vote for a third Bush term.
I did a panel this afternoon with Marc, Ross, and David Brooks at which Brooks, Marc to some extent, and also Fred Malek (yes this Fred Malek) were sort of harping on the idea that Barack Obama doesn't really have a McCain-esque background of breaking with his party's leadership and cutting deals with those on the other side of the aisle. This is, as best I can tell, totally true -- Obama has worked with Republicans on various issues, but never done anything comparable to McCain's work on, say, the McCain-Feingold bill.
To which I more-or-less say: shrug.
A sign of the long era of political dominance is that to a lot of people, I think the idea of a progressive Democrat running and winning as a progressive Democrat and going on to govern as a progressive Democrat just doesn't really scan. If you're going to win, and you're going to be a Democrat, then you have to be a "different kind of Democrat." And Obama sort of isn't. He's not the most liberal Democrat in congress, but then again most Democrats (by definition) aren't on the party's leftward fringe. He's a pretty ordinary Democrat, but much more charismatic and much better at giving big speeches about why his ideas are awesome.
And while he might lose the election, I and everyone else think he'll probably win.
The other day, Jonah Goldberg was complaining about the left's alleged long history of anti-American sentiment:
The Nation ran a famous series then called "These United States," in which smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the "backward" attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country. One correspondent proclaimed that in "backwoods" New York (i.e. outside the Big Apple): "Resistance to change is their most sacred principle." If that was their attitude to New York, it shouldn't surprise that they felt even worse about the South. One author explained that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal "missionaries" so that the "light of civilization" might finally be glimpsed down there.
The trouble here, as Jon Chait points out, is that sometimes sneering condescension is warranted: "despairing about the political culture of the South in the 1920's, where disenfranchisement, lynching, and even slavery were routine practices, is a sign of insufficent patriotism? If that doesn't show the deficiencies of the right's style of patriotism, nothing does."
Now that's not to say that sneering condescension is always and everywhere a good thing. Even specifically on this point, it turned out in later decades that northern whites were a lot more interested in lecturing southern whites about the need to treat African-Americans better than they were in improving their own standards of conduct. But still, the real limits to the kind of sentiments Goldberg is complaining about mostly highlight the need for more self-scrutiny not, as he would seem to have it, more obliviousness to very real problems.
I think studying philosophy as an undergraduate is excellent preparation for being a political pundit -- it's a lot of arguing, a lot of playing with words, and a lot of learning about how to make a contribution to a discussion without a lot of factual background on the subject at hand. At the same time, these shared attributes of the disciplines can lead to some dangerous wrongheaded conclusions about specific things. Here's Chris Betram thinking about philosophy:
I’ve recently had to advise some students who wanted to write papers on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Not for the first time, it brought home to me how strong the disciplinary pressures towards a particular perspective can be. Political philosophy (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) isn’t an entirely fact-free zone, but the way we often discuss matters of principle tends to push us towards favouring policies independently of the way things actually are. So we might ask, what should be the foreign policy of a just liberal state and what attitude should such a state have to “outlaw regimes” which are engaged in systematic human rights violations. And, in the light of such thinking, what would the laws of a just international order look like? What rights against interference would states have? When would there be a duty to intervene? And so on.
Straightforward answers come easily and slickly along: states don’t have any immunity to intervention as such, since they only exist for the protection and benefit of their citizens. If they are actively harming their citizens and we can act to stop this, then we, the just liberal state, should do so. And maybe there should be special permissions granted to bona fide democracies, giving them more extensive rights of intervention than other states. Etc etc. (I rather agree with some of this in the abstract, but it is not hard to see how one might thereby build up enthusiasm for the Iraq war—to pick an example at random—without ever troubling to acquire further information about the country, its history, people, society etc.)
To some extent I think Iraq, which generated a lot of discussion over a prolonged period of time, suffered less from this in the punditsphere (the trouble was more that a lot of people were operating with made up facts rather than with no facts per se) than have a lot of other issues. But I think discussion of Darfur, and then the brief moment of hype around invading Burma, and then again Zimbabwe from time to time tends to partake of rather a lot of this. Robert Mugabe and his regime have no real ethical claims on anyone, so, hey, why not invade?
And of course since it's all non-specialists out having the argument it's difficult to say with authority in detail what would likely go wrong with an invasion of Burma. What's needed is to recover the time-honored sense of a very strong predisposition against attacking other countries.
Democrats can be very successful at the state level here -- they have the governorship and both Senate seats -- but the presidential vote has historically been much tougher to crack. The state has voted Democratic only twice in the last 50 years: The Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964, and Bill Clinton narrowly winning its three electoral votes in 1992.
What's interesting to contemplate here is the role of effort. Democratic Senate candidates in Montana campaign in Montana. Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Montana campaign in Montana. I don't believe that Democratic presidential candidates typically do campaign in Montana. But Barack Obama has been putting some resources into the state. And there's long been a real question in my mind as to how much of the gap at the presidential level can be made up merely by showing up. Now that said there's a good reason Democrats don't normally campaign in Montana, which is that in addition to having a conservative track record it has very few electoral votes so it's hard to imagine it being the pivotal state.
But this kind of thing does have governance institutions. If Obama were to win the election, but lose Montana by the same 59-39 margin that Kerry faced, then Senators Baucus and Tester are going to take that into account when considering how supportive of Obama's legislative agenda they ought to be. If it's close, or if Obama wins, then they face a different calculation. That kind of thing is the significance of playing for the landslide.
Someone in the comment thread for the post on national service mentioned the idea of a US Public Service Academy. It would be something like the military academies, except for the civilian jobs the government needs: "The Public Service Academy will provide a rigorous undergraduate education followed by five years of civilian service to the country." I'd heard this proposal before, and it sounded like a good idea to me then and still sounds like a good idea to me now. Maintaining a high-quality civil service is absolutely vital to our country's future, and this seems like one useful way to accomplish that.
I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office.
That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests.
And yet here we are in 2008. And I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy, also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon. And Bush, like Nixon, has become unpopular. But Bush won't be hounded out of office.
I'm not exactly sure what accounts for the difference. I wasn't alive in 1973-74. I have a vague sense that at that time America's elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn't just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it's taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don't really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can't see that something's gone wrong here, but I'm not happy about it.
One thing that I think's gotten a bit lost in the progressive blog grumbling about Barack Obama's recent efforts to put a more centrist foot forward is that he's a substantially more liberal candidate than we've seen in quite some time. On an optics note, he didn't show up to a DLC National Conversation that was held literally around the corner from his national campaign headquarters. John Kerry spoke at the '04 version, Al Gore spoke at the 2000 version, etc. His health care proposals, though somewhat less far-reaching than Hillary Clinton's or John Edwards', are substantially more ambitious than what Kerry or Gore proposed. His climate change proposals are better than anything Kerry or Gore proposed. His foreign policy proposals represent a more daring break with the status quo than anything from the Clinton administration or the Kerry or Gore campaigns.
This is all true pretty much all up and down the line -- whatever disappointments one has with Obama (and there are sure to be more to come) -- he unquestionably represents a leftward shift relative to the sort of national candidates the Democratic Party has been putting forward in recent cycles.
Americans oppose an open-ended US military involvement in Iraq. So do Iraqis: "Declaring that there will not be 'another colonization of Iraq,' Iraq’s foreign minister raised the possibility on Wednesday that a full security agreement with the United States might not be reached this year, and that if one was, it would be a short-term pact." I'll say again that I think it will be less politically problematic for the next administration to leave Iraq, if that's what it wants to do, than a lot of the smart set thinks -- they're be a very happy joint press conference and lots of supportive statements from folks like Iraq's Foreign Minister and Republicans will look like idiots when they complain.
Meanwhile, there's Ray Hunt, wildcatting oil man and Bush pal. When his oil deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government was announced, the Bush administration denied all knowledge of it since those kind of deals are deemed to undermine American policy in Iraq. But as Matthew Blake reports "Hunt, President of the company, talked to Bush administration advisers months before the deal was made. Also, officials at the Commerce and State departments encouraged the deal and even congratulated Hunt after obtaining the contract." Shocking stuff. And of course more recently the big players have been getting in on the act.
I don't have Jeffrey Goldberg's years of reporting experience in the field, but rather than Michael Gerson getting booed for criticizing Saddam Hussein doesn't it seem much more likely that Gerson was booed for being an apologist for a bloody and costly fiasco? The evil of Saddam Hussein can't just be waved about to distract attention from the giant errors of the American hawk camp.
As everyone knows, Democrats have struggled for generations with the perception that they're out of touch elitists. Barack Obama is no exception. He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago and ever since his book became a best-seller he's made a whole bunch of money. As a part-time professor at the University of Chicago he came to be acquainted with various pointy-headed professor types and he even ordered an orange juice at breakfast once which is the exact same kind of juice they serve at breakfast at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
By contrast, John McCain is an all-American regular guy who, like most people, earns his keep by marrying an heiress. Like average, everyday folks the McCain's rely on credit cards to make ends meet month-to-month "Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000." Yes it's true, one of McCain's dependent children spent approximately the median annual household income of the United States in a single month and that's how McCain knows how to connect with regular people.
Similarly, Mrs. McCain "favors suits made by the German designer Escada, which typically retail for around $3,000 a pop" so she understands that most Americans welcome Wal-Mart's discount prices. And like many Americans, the McCains are very effected by developments in the real estate market, since "trusts and corporations controlled by her and her children spent nearly $11 million between the summer of 2004 and February 2008 on three condominiums in Phoenix and a pair outside San Diego." The McCains understand that these days many young people graduate from college saddled with debt and need a helping hand, that's why they spent "$700,000 for a 1,900-square foot, three-bedroom loft condo for her then-22-year-old daughter Meghan McCain" after she graduated from Columbia. Similarly, they know all about problems with inflation since they "increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain’s tax returns."
There was lots of buzz in Aspen, and I believe also in the press, about whether the "success" of the surge will or should cause Barack Obama to re-evaluate his stated Iraq policy. I think it's clear that if Obama does become president in January 2009, he won't and shouldn't super-literally apply a policy that will by then be almost two years old. But I don't think he should or will meaningfully alter his platform. It's worth recalling that all throughout 2007 it really seemed like Obama was going to lose the primary and that getting to Hillary Clinton's left by sketching out a clearer and more unambiguous withdrawal plan would have been a plausible gambit to beat her.
But he didn't do it because he wanted to preserve some flexibility in the event that he became president, and I have every expectation that he'll stick with that built-in flexibility during the campaign. After all, Obama's stated position on Iraq is fairly conservative. He's calling for the withdrawal of combat forces on a 16 month time frame. Realistically, that would mean the last combat forces leaving Iraq in June 2010 or maybe a little bit later depending on how long it would take between inauguration and actually setting the wheels in motion. Substantively, that's plenty of time to continue to try to have a constructive influence on the course of events there. And politically, if John McCain wants to make a big deal about how two more years of war isn't long enough, then he's going to lose badly.
On top of all that, Obama has always had a pretty vague formulation about residual troops and liberals, myself included, have always criticized him for that. I don't think that's the correct policy, but it's one Obama's long maintained and it means he's always had a "centrist" Iraq position rather than a "bring the troops home" position.
But read between the lines, and it is clear that the administration is setting a predicate for substantially reducing the 155,000 troops now in Iraq ahead of the midterm congressional elections in November 2006. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top administration officials have been laying the groundwork for weeks, and Bush removed any remaining mystery when he said in Texas on Tuesday that the Naval Academy speech would outline "the progress we're making in training Iraqis to provide security for their country"—his central criterion for bringing U.S. forces home.
Bush advisers tell TIME that the speech and document are aimed at framing a graduated departure from Iraq in the President's own terms, so that he can make it appeared principled and deliberate, rather than a response to pressure from public polls or needling by Democrats. "People on the Hill say he has to get out of there," a senior administration official said.
But of course Allen was wrong, we didn't leave Iraq, and many Americans have died as a result.
I was watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope last night on television, and somehow it occurred to me for the first time that a new generation who watches the six movie cycle starting with The Phantom Menace is going to wind up with a very different perception of the story than the original audience got. This is true in terms of a few big plot points, like that whole thing about Darth Vader being Luke's father, but also in terms of some broader atmospheric points. The beginning A New Hope is cloaked in a sense of mystery. For all we know old Ben Kenobi really is just a crazy old man and Han Solo's skepticism about "hokey religions" is justified. The audience rides along with Luke throughout the film, learning to trust in the power of the Force. New audiences won't have that experience, they'll already know much much more than Luke does about the Jedi, the Empire, the Skywalker clan, etc.
I caught Obama's Iraq press conference, and I have to say that the media really earned itself an invitation to John McCain's next BBQ with their performance. Basically, unless Obama comes out and says something like "I'm a totally unreasonable person whose views on Iraq will in no way be influenced by anyone's advice or any possible factual developments" he's now a flip-flopper. Meanwhile, John McCain's views on Iraq receive no scrutiny whatsoever.
Via Justin Logan, John McCain on patriotism: "Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything."
Like Justin, I'm going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there's literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries.
This was one edition of the Allstate Ideas Exchange at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Before taping I was encouraging Marc to engage in some old-time radio plugs for our sponsors but he demurred so let me be the first to assure you that you're in good hands with Allstate.
Kevin Drum says Bush's lawbreaking on FISA is different from what Richard Nixon did with surveillance because Bush wasn't abusing surveillance for partisan or personal gains. To which I say: How do we know? The Washington Post published an editorial slamming opponents of retroactive telecom immunity that made the following pseudo-argument:
No one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored. The likelihood of prevailing — or even getting very far — with such lawsuits is low. The litigation seems aimed as much at using the tools of discovery to dislodge information about what the administration actually did as it is at redressing unknown injuries.
Benjamin Friedman observes that "you have to wonder why the Post thinks that dislodging information about an illegal wiretapping programs is nefarious." Meanwhile I have to wonder why so much of the elite press is so absolutely certain all this illegal surveillance was undertaken in good faith when, in fact, we have no idea what happened and the administration has been trying very hard to make sure we never do.
My sense every July 4 is that I could get more jazzed up about independence if it were more plausible for Americans to work ourselves up into a fury of anti-British sentiment. In the real world, however, America's two closest allies are the former colonial power and the segments of British North America that didn't join in our rebellion. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.
Nevertheless, we live in the world that is. Happy birthday, America! These lines from the Declaration of Independence still ring out as incredible wisdom hundreds of years later:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
If conservatives want to argue that Barack Obama's been flip-flopping on Iraq, I'll disagree but I could see what they mean. Charles Krauthammer, however, can't seriously believe that Obama's been "assiduously obliterat[ing] all differences with McCain on national security and social issues" since the end of the primaries.
Consider such non-obscure points as John McCain is pro-life and has said he wants to appoint judges who will restrict abortion rights, whereas Barack Obama is pro-choice. John McCain favors an amendment to California's constitution that would take back gay and lesbian couples' newfound marriage rights whereas Barack Obama opposes such an amendment. Barack Obama opposes a permanent American military presence in Iraq whereas John McCain favors it. Barack Obama thinks torture is wrong even when the CIA does it, whereas John McCain thinks it's great for the CIA to torture people. Barack Obama favors good-faith high-level negotiations with Iran, whereas John McCain wants to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." One could go on, but it hardly seems necessary -- the only question is why The Washington Post thinks it's a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way.
As best anyone can tell, Brian Beutler's post-shooting surgery was a complete success and he's going to be totally fine. Fine, that is, but saddled with medical bills (and, yes, we should have better health care policy in the United States and also fewer criminals roaming the streets shooting people and getting away with it -- consider those points made) for which Spencer Ackerman has set up a BeutlerAid fund in case you're interested in supporting progressive media (who's got the goods on FISA? Brian Beutler!) and humanitarian goodness and helping out.
I've never been 100 percent clear on why you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but suffice it to say that while there were many more vile politicians in the world than the now-dead Jesse Helms they were pretty much all brutal dictators and the like. For a late 20th century United States Senator, Helms was just awful -- a bigot who's incredibly retrograde foreign policy views managed to do a surprising amount of harm for a non-president and he's probably responsible for all manner of ills I don't even know about. Good riddance.
Here's Part II of "The Future of Party Politics" with Ross Douthat, Marc Ambinder, David Brooks, and yours truly (remember: you're in good hands with Allstate). Official description: "In this installment, Matt talks about the notion of an enduring Democratic majority, and David Brooks speculates on whether Hispanics are Jews or Italians. There's also an interesting discussion about whether parties have better ideas when they're out of office than when they're busy running the country."
As the world's premiere Jewish/Hispanic political pundit, I feel like I really should form a firmer opinion on the "are Hispanics like Jews" issue.
I don't really follow tennis and wouldn't claim that it's an especially thrilling sport to watch, but there really is something appealingly epic about yet another Nadal-Federer matchup and the rivalry between these two. There's really nothing else like it in sports right now.
Condoleezza Rice is "proud of the decision" to invade Iraq. This kind of sentiment, which John McCain has of course echoed, not only reveals a strange attitude toward the wisdom of the decision to invade but a profound gap in strategic judgment between mainstream American conservatives and normal people.
In three seasons with the trio of Arenas, Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler, the Wizards have won 43, 41 and 42 games and haven't made it past the first round of the playoffs. The three players are 26, 32 and 28, respectively, so it seems likely that we've seen about the best we're going to get from them. They're an average team, and without an infusion of vastly better players around them, they'll keep being an average team.
Yet instead of blowing that trio up, the Wizards took a Bob-Beamonesque leap of faith this week. First they extended Jamison for four years and $50 million, and then they offered Arenas a monstrous six-year, $127 million package. Given that Arenas is coming off a major knee injury that kept him sidelined nearly all of last season and is heavily dependant on his quickness to be an elite scorer, his offer in particular appears to be a reach.
The trouble is that I think the Wizards think our "big three" is really superb and the team is only average because they have a below-average supporting cast. I don't think the evidence bares that out, either if you look at certain fancy statistical metric or simply the commonsense observation that losing Gilbert Arenas didn't hurt the team very much. Brendan Haywood, Antonio Daniels, DeShawn Stevenson, and Andray Blatche aren't great basketball players but as 4-7 guys in the rotation they're totally fine. The issue is that Arenas, Jamison, and Caron Butler are all kind of borderline stars. In the case of Butler that's great since he's cheap.
But the kind of money they just committed to Agent Zero needs to be saved for a truly phenomenal player. If it wasn't possible to resign Jamison and Arenas on the cheap, then this summer was a chance to blow the team up and rebuild around Butler's excellent contract and the team's decent supporting players. Instead, we're going back to war with what we had, hoping Jamison never shows his age and Gilbert's knee doesn't hamper his effectiveness.
Noam Scheiber and Jonathan Chait debate whether or not John McCain's flip-flop attacks against Barack Obama will work. Since Chait seems to think these attacks are both effective and unfair, it might be nice for him to spend some time dealing with the unfair flip-flop charges coming from his colleague James Kirchick.
But beyond that, my thought on this question is that conventional wisdom radically misconstrues the nature of the relevant decision-making process. In my model of the electorate, the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of thing. And this is where the campaign comes in.
The main impact of campaign attacks, I think, is not to actually change anyone's mind but rather to familiarize everyone with the talking points of the side they agree with. In 2000, voters who valued "experience" turned out to favor Al Gore strongly. In the 2008 campaign, I think it's clear that voters who value "experience" will favor John McCain. That's not, however, because there's some coherent bloc of "experience" voters who shifted loyalties -- it's because "experience" was a Democratic talking point in 2000 and it's a Republican talking point in 2008 so people change which candidate attributes they value. In 2004, you could find a lot of Democrats who thought John Kerry military service proved important things about his fitness for office, whereas in 2008 Republicans are more likely to say that about John McCain.
I think that if Obama becomes unpopular and loses the election it'll be because a larger number of voters decide that having a "tough" foreign policy is the most important thing. But if they reach that conclusion, they'll find themselves suddenly agreeing with all manner of other attacks from John McCain's camp. By contrast, if voters continue to be focused on their desire for a sharp break with Bushism, voters will find pretty much anything Obama throws at McCain persuasive.
Alan Jacobs offers one about the late Senator Jesse Helms:
[A] story I heard years ago from a young man who as an undergraduate did an internship in Helms’s office. Senator Helms was a particular target of Bono’s persuasive powers, and indeed near the end of his career he threw his considerable weight behind increased funding for AIDS projects in Africa. This young man claimed that he was in the office one day when Bono came by with the Edge in tow.
“Senator Helms,” Bono said, “I’d like you to meet the Edge.”
Helms stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleashuh to meet you, Mistuh the Edge.”
Other wacky anecdotes include Helms' staunch support for apartheid South Africa, whistling "Dixie" in front of Carol Moseley Braun when she joined him in the United States Senate and how he enjoyed "railing against [Martin Luther] King, 'Negro hoodlums,' the media, 'sex perverts,' and anyone on welfare."
One strange aspect of the settlement of the Civil Rights controversy was that this social and political upheaval resulted in surprisingly little actual political turnover. Instead of segregationist politicians being defeated and hounded of out public life, in essence they agreed to stop challenging the core principles of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (gutting enforcement under GOP presidents was still okay) and in exchange everyone else agreed to sort of ignore their backgrounds. I've written about this before with regard to John Stennis and James Eastland but it's remarkable how little removed we are from the era when vast power was wielded in American politics by people with backgrounds as white supremacist politicians of which I guess you'd say Robert Byrd is the last.
And, of course, within that group there were considerable distinctions, with Helms holding distinction as amongst the very least-repentant.
He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.
Here's an ad Helms helped make for Willis Smith's 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Graham:
White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.
The "particular vision of civil rights" that Helms opposed was the vision in which African-Americans are permitted to work beside white people and in which the races are permitted to mingle.
Senator Mitch McConnell and Heritage Institute President Edwin Feulner both praise Jesse Helms for a career of work on behalf of "free markets and free people." Of course, if you were a right-wing Latin American dictator, Helms was also for you. For example, Alex Massie reminds us of Helms' support for Argentinian aggression against the Falklands Islands:
"The tilt toward Britain will destroy the coalition we must have if we are to prevent a Communist takeover of Central America," said North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, the lone opponent of a Senate resolution endorsing a pro-British policy.
Elsewhere in Republican presidents thankfully not being nearly as crazy or stupid as Helms in national security matters, he also "condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as 'appeasing Red China.'"
Why is John McCain in Colombia? The most reassuring theory I can come up with is that McCain intends to bring back a couple of sixty pound suitcases that the Secret Service will hustle for him through Customs. And soon Obama's big lead in campaign finance will have vanished. And there won't be anymore questions about McCain being too old to have the energy for the job as he starts campaigning 96 hours straight.
On the other hand, there are more alarming interpretations, such as that McCain is taking a serious interest in the geopolitical situation in Northern South America -- i.e., he wants to get us involved in a war there.
Given John McCain's legendary openness to the press, one might think that someone on the "straight talk express" would want to ask McCain which Latin American states, if any, fall under the scope of his "rogue state rollback" scheme. Cuba, presumably. But also Venezuela? Bolivia?
I've been known to complain about the judgment of The Washington Post opinion pages before, but major kudos are due to Fred Hiatt for publishing this brave piece in which we learn the disturbing fact that some American college students are not only learning the Arabic language, they're simultaneously being exposed to an Arab point of view on political issues. Given that in the United States there are virtually no outlets aside from major newspaper and magazines, broadcast and cable television networks, and hugely popular books in which pro-western or pro-Israel interpretations of Middle Eastern politics are available, it's absolutely vital that we eliminate this scourge of Arabism from our campuses.
But beyond the brilliance of the piece and its insights, the bold gutsy guttiness of the editorial call is what really comes to mind here. Way to speak truth to weakness and stand up for the view that as narrow a range of opinions as possible should be expressed in America.
Exactly so. There are of course an important array of tactical option any of which could constitute "staying" or "leaving" but there's a fundamental strategic divide between McCain and Obama and there consistently has been.
In response to some new Spanish-language television ad from the McCain campaign, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) put out this statement (in English, as best I can tell) that the Obama campaign is sending around:
There's one thing Latinos have learned all too well after eight years of George Bush: politicians can say one thing, but it's what they actually do that counts. Senator John McCain's newest attack ad uses 'friends' to say one thing, but the facts show otherwise. If Senator McCain wants what's best for our families, he would not have voted against increased funds for our children's healthcare. And he would not have flip-flopped on his own legislation to firmly and fairly reform our broken immigration system. But he did. Senator Barack Obama has stood firmly with our families on all of these crucial issues. He did not flip-flop like Senator McCain. Bottom line: what's best for America and Latino families is a leader who won't flip-flop when it counts most.
I think that there's an important insight lurking amidst this campaign rhetoric, namely that I think the press and politicians often overstate the significance of the immigration issue to Hispanic politics. US politics mostly operates along a "culture war" dynamic with racial, ethnic, or religious blocs voting in highly divergent matters and this has long been the case. So as the Latino share of the vote increases, there's a tendency to seek out the key hot button issue for Latino voters and the view is that it must be immigration. McCain has (before flip-flopping and saying he would vote against his own bill) been a leader on pro-immigration reforms, ergo McCain should be able to appeal to Hispanic voters by emphasizing that fact.
If you look at it in detail, though, the Hispanic electorate mostly seems to vote the way Thomas Frank suggests everyone should in What's the Matter With Kansas -- poorer Hispanics vote Democratic, richer ones vote Republican, and social and cultural issues just don't seem to play very much. Because Hispanics are poorer-than-average this leads to a big pro-Democratic tilt. I think it's clear that Republicans can hurt themselves with the immigration issue by acting like racist demagogues but the GOP's primary problem with this voting group really is things like S-CHIP rather than a lack of sufficient immigration-related pandering.
Apparently as energy costs rise, there's a renewal of interest in zeppelin technology. I'd say that investing in proven, workable high-speed rail where we know the technology works fine and just has high star-up costs makes more sense.
Via Robert Farley and Tbogg, it seems Roger Simon didn't really understandThe Bridge on the River Kwai. Either that or Simon really is dissing John McCain's military service in a much more profound way than I've ever seen any Democrat do.
It seems that back in 1998 when Osama bin Laden was outlining his objectives one of them was that oil should cost $144 a barrel just like it does now. Of course one assumes OBL had real rather than nominal prices in mind, so we still do have a bit of a ways to go.
I saw this album on sale at Starbucks yesterday and damn if I wasn't tempted to buy it. At the end of the day, the inherent ickiness of buying an album at Starbucks wasn't even the tipping point -- I just haven't bought a physical CD in years and it seems too late in history to start doing it again. In particular, buying a physical compilation CD just doesn't really make sense -- I have a lot of these songs already and could assemble the playlist easily enough by just buying a few additional tracks.
Ackerman, lost in his archives, remarked that "the Germans must have a word for the heartbreak you experience when you see that some of your favorite music is on sale at Starbucks."
One fascinating thing about the death of Jesse Helms is the conservative reaction. One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism. But instead conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.
And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.
As a July 5 observation on patriotism, it's become increasingly common to think that there's a liberal form of patriotism and a conservative form, and that the liberal form has something to do with a self-critical spirit whereas conservatives take on a more of a "my country right or wrong" attitude. You can see Peter Beinart for some well-done thoughts along these lines.
Increasingly, though, I think this is wrong and would instead describe the liberal attitude toward patriotism as a special case of the kind of thing Richard Rorty deals with in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Up on a terrace yesterday with a bunch of somewhat buzzed people watching fireworks and shouting taunts against England and Canada and extolling the virtues of America as seen in explosions, loud noises, old TV theme songs, and grilled meats it seemed to me that the liberal experience of patriotism is really just the same as the conservative one.
And that's as it should be. American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics. Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there's something arbitrary about it -- we're just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don't see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren't.
All of which is to say the liberal doesn't, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it's also a sentiment that's much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can't understand the full implications of that then you're going to go badly wrong.
If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.
It's a good line. But of course if Democrats are really counting on responsible, substantive news coverage to hand them the election then John McCain has things in the bag. It's clear that the press, and thus the campaign as mediated by the press, will be dominated by some mix of fake scandals just as it always is (and if a fake scandal requires made up facts about Obama's record, then the facts shall be made up). The question is how much does this matter? Presumably it does matter at the margin.
And I think most of us liberals are pretty traumatized by the 2000 election when the press coverage was willfully horrible and things that made a difference at the margin turned out to be hugely important. But I find it hard to believe that, in general, the overall tenor of the media's coverage of silly campaign stories has a huge impact on election outcomes. Indeed, that's probably one reason why the quality is so low -- the stories are being produced by people who don't really think their work matters
A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn't George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher? Wouldn't it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How's that for a model? Who needs Harvard visiting chairs and high-end lectures? How about Crawford High? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young before they are jaded, or break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he's a likable guy in love with his country with some history and experience to share.
The best part will be when he explains to kids that the president does not, in fact, have an obligation to follow the law and can just order arbitrary detention and torture willy-nilly because, hey, we're a nation at (undeclared, neverending) war. "That's right kids, if President Obama wants to have your testicles crushed no law and no treaty can stop him -- that's what the constitution says!" But of course if those kind of opinions are good enough for Berkeley Law School then why not high school civics?
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Heads in the Sand
