“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”
Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.”
At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.
Not to get too pedantic here, but neither Drudge nor Politico are blogs and "RealPolitics" doesn't even exist. The thing I assume he's talking about isn't a blog either. Not that I necessarily expect a presidential candidate to spend a ton of time reading blogs, but maybe he should know what one is and if he doesn't read any and is asked about it could say that. Then on religion:
Asked if he considered himself an evangelical Christian, Mr. McCain responded, “I consider myself a Christian.”
“I attend church,” he said. “My faith has sustained me in very difficult times.” Asked how often he attended, he responded: “Not as often as I should.” He has recently been photographed going to church as his campaign has begun to make public the times he attends services.
Does he attend church when he's not campaigning for president? It sort of doesn't sound like it. Did you know McCain hasn't been baptized into the church he nominally belongs to? Again, I'm obviously not opposed to the idea of a non-observant president anymore than I'm opposed to a president who doesn't read blogs, but surely the straight-talk brand should require some honest answers to these questions.
It's a little bit mysterious why exactly this is the case, but which party controls the White House sure does seem to have a large effect on a variety of macroeconomic variables. Might I suggest that figuring out what explains this is a pretty important area for research? Smarter people than I are going to have to get on the case.
In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”
After 9/11, our government emphasized “interrogation over due process,” Ms. Mayer writes, “to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized.” But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced “confession” to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.
The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”
From the "things that don't sound true to me" file, Ezra Klein reports some data that suggests that replacing beef consumption with pork consumption could have some dramatic environmental benefits.
Relatedly, I was in Baltimore yesterday at the Lexington Market where they had this odd kind of pan-ethnic deli, selling pastrami, "Jewish salami," etc. like a kosher deli but also featuring tons of Italian pork-based cured meats. Kosher deli is a good thing, and so is salumi but the combination is weird. Point being -- less pastrami and more ham = a healthier environment.
Am I the only one who thinks it's strange that precisely at the moment when we're seeing punditocratic cries for Barack Obama to acknowledge the "facts on the ground" in Iraq, and reject his timetable plan the actual facts on Iraq are developing in the direction of Iraqi insistence on a timetable? Well, I can't be the only one. Meanwhile, more facts on the ground include what appears to be the definitive breakdown of SOFA/SFA negotiations. And as Dr. Irak explains, this failure is plausibly the result of the Bush administration's opposition to timetables:
Because talks were not occurring against the backdrop of negotiating a U.S. withdrawal and a clear signal that we did not want to have the rights and prerogatives to stay in Iraq indefinitely, two things happened:
1. Iraqi sovereignty and nationalist anxieties were exacerbated by the perception that we were negotiating a permanent occupation (regardless of how many times the administration asserted it wasn't seeking permanent bases). This made it difficult for Iraqi officials--including those that wanted a long-term agreement negotiated under Bush--to sign on to anything.
2. U.S. negotiators framed the whole thing to the Iraqis as us wanting to negotiate a way to stay in Iraq. This reversed the leverage in negotiations, making us appear increasingly desperate to give the Iraqis concessions so we could stick around indefinitely. This made it look like we needed them more than they needed us, which is completely back-ass-ward.
I'm not sure I would chalk this all up to appearances, but by and large that's the right way to think about it. In the context of a framework for withdrawal, US military cooperation with the Iraqi government during the interim is viable. But in the Bush/McCain context with the shadow of endless occupation on the table, it's not possible to work anything out. Now that said, the United States is a huge rich powerful country and I'm sure a McCain administration determined to stay in Iraq indefinitely could prevail upon the Iraqi government to see things their way. But that approach cuts against the grain of the actual situation.
On the question of how problematic it is that you typically need some kind of an "in" to get a job, I think you need to distinguish between some different cases of connections. After all, a lot of the people I know are people I got to know through work. If you get in touch with someone because you're working in the same field and admire/respect each other work, and that becomes a semi-social relationship, it doesn't seem at all problematic for that kind of "in" to perhaps pay off in work terms down the road. The only alternative would be for people to deliberately avoid social interaction with people whose work they admire.
Still, I think Peter Suderman is understating the scope of the problem, particularly in fields without clear metrics of quality. People obtain positions of some power/influence/whatever and then use those positions to build, in effect, patronage networks wherein they get to hand out favors to friends and hope that the ability to hand out favors will help shield then from critical scrutiny. I think a lot of journalism needs to be understood in this vein.
Not only is Ali Frick write to point out that John McCain wasn't nearly as strong a dissenter from Bush's tactical vision in Iraq as his campaign likes to say, but it can't be emphasized enough how purely tactical his criticisms of the Bush administration were. Tactics are, of course, an important subject. But Iraq represents a fundamental error of strategy -- in short, a bad idea, not a good idea that was poorly implemented -- and on the strategic issues McCain has differed from Bush only insofar as McCain got to these ideas first and adheres to them more rigidly than Bush does.
He was the original political defender of "rogue state rollback" as the centerpiece of America's approach to the world, after all, and as best one can tell he still sees things this way and still sees the specter of appeasement lurking behind every effort to deal with problems constructively.
Washington Posttakes a look at DC's looming streetcar construction. I'm excited about this but, as they say, "Streetcars share lanes with automobiles and ride on rails built in existing streets."
We should really be aspiring to have our streetcars run at least substantial portions of their routes in dedicated lanes. A streetcar in a dedicated lane not only can hold a lot of people but will hold a lot of people -- running quickly and reasonably frequently, thus presenting itself as an attractive option that takes a lot of cars off the roads. A streetcar that spends a lot of time stuck in traffic isn't necessarily going to be a very useful option, but the routes most prone to heavy congestion tend to be the routes where it makes the most sense to consider locating a line.
Just remember to accuse John McCain of being like Bush is to slander his war service or something. Anyways, he's Wolf Blitzer talking to McCain surrogate Mark Sanford:
BLITZER: Are there any significant economic differences between what the Bush administration has put forward over these many years as opposed to now what John McCain supports?
SANFORD: Um, yeah. For instance, take, you know, take, for instance, the issue of -- I'm drawing a blank, and I hate it when I do that, particularly on television. Take, for instance the contrast on NAFTA. I mean, I think that the bigger issue is credibility in where one is coming from, are they consistent where they come from.
Ooops! I'm not really sure what Sanford's trying to say here about NAFTA but there's no contrast there. There once upon a time was a substantial contrast on tax policy, but in order to win the nomination and court the GOP sociopathic donor base he's no firmly pledged himself to not only continue but intensify the Bush course on tax policy.
Hank Paulson's announced some dramatic measures to prevent a Fannie/Freddie collapse where, among other things, he's going to ask congress to approve an increase in the debt ceiling so that the government can buy up a lot of their stock. Basically, it seems like a quasi-nationalization to me though I'll be interested to see what more serious econ types think in the morning.
Meanwhile -- the shocking true tale of how these companies managed to evade oversight is worth a read. Chuck Schumer done bad.
"I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption."
I think that's a great argument against allowing gays and lesbians to steal children from happy two-parent heterosexual families, but why on earth is the importance of both parents a good reason to prevent gay couples from adopting orphans?
Oh, good, the LA Times decides that we need to run the 2000 election all over again with headlines like "Obama, McCain agree on many once-divisive issues." See Jonathan Zasloff for a reality check.
And let’s be clear: Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.
That seems about right. But it's one thing to say that the enterprises can't be allowed to fail and it's another thing to say that the shareholders' investments in the enterprises can't be allowed to fail. Why can't the whole thing be nationalized? There seem to be sound economic reasons for letting the executives press the big red "Come Save Us" button, but surely there should be consequences.
Ryan Lizza goes long and deep on Barack Obama's background in Chicago politics and his rise to the US Senate. I keep reading people debunking the idea that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure and people criticizing the idea that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure. Indeed, I've read so much commentary on the subject of how people shouldn't believe that Obama is a messianic, saint-like figure that I've become convinced that nobody actually believes that he is. But if they do exist, they'll be disillusioned by Ryan's article!
But in terms of worries I actually have seen expressed, I think the picture you get here tends to dissipate worries that Obama might turn out to be a Carter-esque failure or somehow who otherwise doesn't know how to get the job done. He's an eminently practical person -- practical enough to understand that to advance you need to stand a bit outside and above the systems you're operating in, but also very much operate in them. And not just to understand that (which is pretty easy) but to do it, which I think is very difficult.
So John McCain has promised to balance the budget, but has also promised a series of lavish tax cuts for the rich, defense spending hikes, and endless wars that makes balancing the budget impossible. So far, so good, just a little of the old straight talk. But then for some reason he actually provided the Washington Post editorial page with a budget plan, perhaps counting on their love of Bush/McCain-style foreign policy to cause them to forget how to add, resulting in an editorial about how their numbers are nonsense.
In a reality development, the video professor is offering to help McCain learn how to use a computer:
Between the built-in calculator, and widely available spreadsheet and financial planning software, maybe once the professor's through with him McCain will have his budget problems figured out.
Photo by Flickr user Akash_k used under a Creative Commons license
I think this is well-said. I suppose I'm pessimistic that the actual point -- that a timeline for withdrawal is the right strategy for America -- will get heard over additional controversies over whether or not this constitutes a flip-flop.
Supreme Court ruling aside, it actually seems extremely unlikely that DC residents will be able to buy handguns any time soon. Why? As Rob Goodspeed explains it's all in the zoning. You can't legally buy a gun in DC because there are no gun stores here. And to sell a gun to an out-of-state resident, a gun shop needs to actually ship the weapon to an in-state store that accepts responsibility for background checks, etc. And, again, there are no gun stores in DC. And there never will be gun stores in DC unless some part of the city is zoned so as to allow a gun store. And the city has no intention of doing any such thing.
Most DC residents will be happy with this substantive outcome, but either way it points to the larger lesson that zoning is really important. Most people I know find it idiosyncratic, at best, that I make efforts to familiarize myself with elements of DC's zoning and business license rules. But this is really something that people should do wherever it is they live. A lot of the sort of questions people ask semi-rhetorically about why things are the way they are in Town/Neighborhood X turn out to come down to zoning and business licensing rules that people do well to have some understanding of.
Photo by Flickr user kcdstm used under a Creative Commons license
How might political blogs and their readers affect the presidential campaign?
They will not change many voters' minds because the vast majority of their readers are already members of the choir and hold strong opinions about politics. So don't expect political blogs to make Democrats vote for John McCain or Republicans embrace Barack Obama. If political blogs change opinions, they will more likely do so indirectly -- by uncovering new information that is then amplified and discussed in media that reach a broader, and less partisan, cross section of the public.
This is all true enough but also, I think, an unduly limited way of looking at things. For one thing, having a relatively unpersuadable audience is, I believe, common to all explicitly political media. Only people who like following politics would tune in to Meet The Press and people who like following politics usually have strong views about politics and are thus unlikely to be swayed by things they watch there. But there are more questions to be answered than "should I vote for the Democrat or the Republican in November?" Blogs are much more likely to persuade people on issues like "John Edwards or Barack Obama" or even more so "as someone who doesn't even live in Maryland, should I care about the Al Wynn versus Donna Edwards primary?" or "is the telecom immunity provision of the proposed changes to FISA a big deal?"
Blogs are a niche medium for political obsessives, so they tend to impact readers' opinions on questions that normal people just wouldn't bother having opinions about at all. That's not the same as saying that no persuasion happens and it's all preaching to the choir. It's more like the members of the choir talking about choir-related issues that others may not really care about.
Photo by Matt Stoller used under a Creative Commons license
We all know that President Bush has given up on golf as a gesture of solidarity with the troops over in Iraq, but it seems he hasn't given up on hosting golf-themed fundraisers for John McCain.
The housemates were watching boxing yesterday evening when I came home, and during the broadcast I had occasion to learn of the existence of the boxer Nikolai Valuev who's over 7 feet tall. Why isn't he playing basketball? Maybe he never learned the game? But no "When I was on the fifths form I started to play basketball. Finally, I moved to the boarding school ?1of Leningrad specialized in sport. When I was a member of combined team of Frunzenskoi children sport school I was managed to be the basketball champion of country among the junior boys."
Obviously, I'm a basketball fan. But that aside, it features more money and less brain damage -- what's not to like?
Marc Ambinder makes the relevant point about an Obama-Hagel ticket: "There's a much simpler way for Obama to reap the benefits of having Hagel endorse him -- and that is to have Hagel endorse him."
Right. Any prospective Obama-Hagel partnership would be premised on shared ideas about foreign policy, so the natural thing would be for Obama to tap Hagel for some kind of foreign policy job. I don't think it would be a bad idea to have an internationalist Republican representing us at the UN, say. But ultimately Hagel just needs to decide whether or not thinks his old friend John McCain's foreign policy views are so unsound that he wants to endorse his Democratic rival.
Here I'd been pessimistic about the outlook for the Wizards in an Eastern Conference where Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, and Orlando are still clearly superior while Atlanta and Philadelphia seem poised for improvement while we tread water. But I hadn't been paying attention to the Dee Brown signing. Now we're set!
The other day, Publius at Obsidian Wings suggest ed that we retire the whole "sister souljah" concept from our political lexicon. I beg to differ. The "Sister Souljah moment" idea may be tired cliché with dubious political implications, but in this crazy new world of the 24/7 news cycle doing campaign punditry is harder than ever and we therefore need our lazy clichés more than ever. Will nobody think of the journalists? If anything, people need to try harder to more rigorously fit their discussion of all events into a handful of predetermined frames.
James Fallows, meanwhile, suggests "maybe we can also agree that no future book about China need include the cliche 'the Dragon' in its title." I agree to no such thing!
Paulson made clear last night that he favors a minority stake. But from a purely financial perspective, it would be better to buy the whole caboodle. If the government is going to supply a rescue, why share the upside? The worry about adding to the federal debt turns out to be a digression. Although Fannie and Freddie owe an astronomical amount, they are owed a roughly similar amount. The net effect of nationalization on the federal debt would be modest. [...]
As long as Fannie and Freddie retain their private/public form, private managers will invent reasons to grow courtesy of public assistance. The best shot at taming them is to bring them into the government. Then, once financial markets have stabilized, the government should shrink the institutions radically and spin them off in pieces, creating maximum space in the mortgage market for smaller private players.
This sounds good to me and if Mallaby can say it then why not progressive politicians, too? Meanwhile, based on his column this didn't seem to me to be where Paul Krugman was heading, but he writes in a followup "So what should be done about the GSEs? If they must be rescued, the stockholders should be cleaned out — which would, in effect, return us to the situation pre-1968."
Obviously, like all red-blooded Americans I'm outraged by the idea of a Belgian company with the silly name InBev purchasing our beloved Budweiser. Still, wouldn't it be kind of great if the Belgians started turning Budweiser into something more like the, um, vastly superior product they have in Belgium? Just saying. Relatedly, wouldn't it kind of suck to be Claire McCaskill and duty-bound to endorse absurd claims about the quality of mass market American beer?
Fannie Mae didn't start out as a "GSE," it started out as a government agency. It can go back to being a government agency if the government needs to further the economic goals of liquidity in the home mortgage market--and maybe it can go back to doing business with Podunk National, rather than lavishing its capital on mega-lenders who aren't going to be subject to regional liquidity crunches. All this uproar over "nationalizing" the GSEs seems to me the part that is really overblown. If they can't raise enough capital as shareholder-owned entities to prevent the necessity of periodic bailouts, then let's end the experiment with "GSEs" and make them agencies of the government. Any "rescue" that doesn't wipe out the shareholders is simply making a bad thing worse.
Brad Delong says this is the "Laura d'Andrea Tyson line on the GSEs" as well which reminds me that I've been meaning to wonder aloud if she's going to be our next Secretary of the Treasury.
At any rate, I'm only a lowly blogger but the idea of "government sponsored entities" doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. The things we need government agencies to do should be done by government agencies, other things should be done by market actors who are subject to ordinary risks.
The ACLU says the terrorist watch list added its millionth member today. Given that there aren't even close to a million dangerous international terrorists in the world, I think it's safe to say that this is yet another example of our counterterrorism policies gone badly awry -- this kind of large-scale harassment of innocent people isn't making anyone safer.
Paul Krugman wrote in today's column that the vote this week on Medicare (that Ted Kennedy returned to take part in) encouraged him to believe that universal health care stands a good chance of becoming a reality should Obama win and the Democrats increase their majority in both Houses. If this is true, and you can comment on this, what are the chances of us ever seeing single payer? I would think the greatest obstacles to this would be the Socialist, Government Medicine charge (gov't selects your doctor, the gov't can't run anything right) and the "loss of jobs" from the insurers.
I think the odds are really bad. And I think that the greatest political vulnerability a single-payer scheme would face is not so much the "socialist, government medicine" charge as it is desire among liberals to do something to ease the plight of the uninsured. Substantively, the most likely route to a single-payer health care system would be something along the lines of what John Edwards proposed during his late presidential campaign. That would have built upon the current system with the mandate/regulate/subsidize troika but would also have created a public sector health plan modeled on Medicare. The idea, then, is that if liberals and conservatives both have the courage of our convictions, we'll see over time whether or not people like the public plan. If they do, we transition over time to a single payer system.
I've been shocked by how little play John McCain's recent remarks on Social Security have gotten, especially considering his record of support for the Bush administration's unpopular privatization scheme. Maybe that's soon to change:
On Tuesday, a coalition of Democratic strategists, labor unions and liberal activist groups that helped defeat Bush's efforts in 2005 plans to launch a similar campaign. They intend to target McCain and dozens of GOP congressional candidates who have supported proposals to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes out of the Social Security system and into private investment accounts.
If this can soften McCain formidable support among his fellow seniors, that'd be a big deal for obvious reasons. We've rarely had a presidential nominee who's been so openly contemptuous of America's retirement security programs.
I think I'm violating some kind of rule by going so long without blogging on this subject. I found the image to be neither especially funny as satire, nor especially outrageous as bad satire. The problem, though, is that the actually existing whispering campaign against Obama is so severe that it doesn't really admit of satire-by-exaggeration.
For second time John McCain forgets that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist anymore. I would suggest that he look up the "Velvet Divorce" on Wikipedia but of course he doesn't know how. Might be the sort of thing people will want to refer to in case the endless political crisis in Belgium results in a separation.
Obama has proposed a timetable to withdraw most U.S. forces from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office. McCain has opposed a specific timetable and said events should dictate when troops are withdrawn. Which approach do you prefer - a timetable or no timetable?
Opinion on that question comes out 50-49 which goes to show mostly that it'll be deadly for progressives to let that kind of framing stand. The implication here is that McCain is hewing to some kind of agnostic middle ground about troop departures, letting the schedule be dictated by events. In fact, what McCain is hewing to is the goal of a permanent military presence in Iraq, and thus a military and political strategy in Iraq geared toward making a permanent presence possible. Given that such a presence is broadly unpopular in Iraq, and also a specific source of inter-factional tension and also a large incentive for Iran to play a destructive rather than constructive role in Iraq, it's a strategic objective that makes stability and substantial troop withdrawals essentially impossible for the foreseeable future.
The idea of a 16 month timetable sounds a bit arbitrary because it is a bit arbitrary -- why not 15 months or 17 months? But a certain level of arbitrariness is inherent in the idea of setting a fixed schedule. And a fixed schedule for withdrawal is the only context in which it's possible for US forces to accomplish something constructive during the remaining time, will let us reallocate resources away from this wasteful war, and with some luck will actually reduce the level of internal tensions in Iraq. There's no choice between setting a timetable and taking a "wait and see" attitude, there's a choice between putting down a marker (in the real world, more likely negotiated with the Iraqi government than inside a presidential campaign staff) of where the exits lie, and a costly and pointless open-ended engagement.
One thing to keep in mind when considering John McCain's bogus balanced budget plan is that the wound here is entirely self-inflicted. Given the present circumstances, I can't think of any good reason for a presidential candidate to be promising to that we'll be at balanced budgets in four years. It would be nice to see the deficit on a decreasing trajectory rather than an increasing one, but achieving short-term balance isn't necessary or even necessarily desirable.
But since there's a supply-side faction on the right and also a deficit hawk faction on the right, and since McCain doesn't really seem very interested in whether or not his proposals make sense, he seems to have just decided to do both -- flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts and propose large new tax cuts and promise to balance the budget even though he has no way of doing it.
Via a livid Robert Farley, Michael O'Hanlon is livid:
Michael E. O'Hanlon, a Democratic defense analyst at the Brookings Institution who has been an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq, said he could not believe that Obama would put such a definitive timeline into print before a trip to Iraq, where he is to consult with Iraqi leaders and U.S. commanders.
"To say you're going to get out on a certain schedule -- regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground -- is the height of absurdity," said O'Hanlon, who described himself as "livid." "I'm not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn't be president. I'll leave that to someone else."
The good news is I think we can say for sure that O'Hanlon won't be getting any jobs in the Obama administration. The bad news is, well, I dunno what it is. You can see the Armchair Generalist for more on the specific points.
I'll just note that any time a politician offers a medium-term plan -- 16 month withdrawal timeline, treaty to reduce global carbon emissions, health care reform, whatever -- you can make it sound absurd by saying it would be crazy to stick with the plan under absolutely any circumstances. Maybe a race of alien lizards will land in Mosul and commence their program of world conquest, in which case it would be odd to stick with the 16 month withdrawal timeline and I assume John McCain would revisit his plan to kick Russia out of the G-8 in the interests of human solidarity. But under a range of realistically likely sets of "facts on the ground" a timeline for a phased withdrawal of forces from Iraq would improve the strategic context in which we're operating and free up resources for use on other problems.
It seems the hugely expensive DDG-1000/DD(X)/Zumwalt class destroyer is going to have its procurement halted at 2. You can see Robert Farley and the Danger Room for more on this, but I think it's a smart decision. The ship is an impressive weapons platform in search of a serious rationale at a time when the focus of the Navy's procurement budget needs to be on acquiring a sufficient number of ships to execute its core mission. It's only a shame that so much money has been sunk into this project already, money that could have been spent on more practical endeavors.
Barack Obama, out of touch with the working man as usual, has an aggressive program for carbon emissions reductions and has spoken of the need for such frou-frou measures as increased investment in transit infrastructure, intercity rail, and even bicycling. The McCains, by contrast, dole out such homespun wisdom as "in Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small private plane" and understand that in this crazy modern world where the typical family owns eleven homes and spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on household staff, you can't possibly expect transportation alternatives to gain popularity.
Not since John demonstrated that he was a true "man of the people" by riding first class on the Acela has his family's fundamental in touchness been so underscored, and the fundamental elitism of the Obama's been laid bare so clearly.
I decided to break with precedent and actually attend Barack Obama's "major foreign policy address" this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building Whose Name Contains More Words. As an official member of the press, you get a view of the action that's radically worse than what you could see on C-SPAN large because our seats are located behind the TV cameras. You do, however, have the opportunity to watch the speech alongside a bunch of other reporters, so that your coverage of it can reflect a pack mentality rather than independent judgment.
More to the point, even though the speech hasn't begun, the question must already be asked -- can America trust Barack Obama? After all, the advisory announcing the event clearly says "Limited workspace will be available on site. There is no wireless internet available." And yet, there is wirless internet available on the AWOW Reagan Ctr Atrium Hall network. If he'll mislead America about WiFi networks, what else will he mislead us about?
Photo of MSM by me, available under a Creative Cmmons license
No speech yet, but I do have speech excerpts. I liked this one:
Our men and women in uniform have accomplished every mission we have given them. What's missing in our debate about Iraq – what has been missing since before the war began – is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy. This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.
In short, Barack Obama wants you to attend the Iraq in Strategic Context panel on Thursday at 1:30 PM at Netroots Nation. It features your humble blogger, Spencer Ackerman, Ilan Goldenberg, and Alex Rossmiller.
Alex Tabarrok explains why even if disaster is somehow averted this time around, a Fannie/Freddie bailout is essentially inevitable:
A government bailout of the GSEs should not be a surprise. After all, for a long time the markets have been predicting that sooner or later there will be a very expensive bailout. What do I mean? According to Freddie Mac (quoting the OMB) "mortgage rates are 25 – 50 basis points lower because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exist in the form and size they do." Now, that is almost certainly an exaggeration but to the extent that interest rates are lower due to the GSEs some significant part of that is due to the market valuing the government's implicit guarantee. In other words, interest rates are lower because the market is valuing the implied insurance. Now, the whole point of insurance is that sometimes the insurer must pay. Thus market has been telling us all along that sooner or later the taxpayer was going to pay.
Meanwhile, it's of course nice to have mortgage interest rates be lower rather than higher. But as a policy objective to devote actual resources to, this seems like a pretty poor choice of priorities. For the most desirable homes, cheaper mortgage rates is only going to bid up the price. And for every person at the margin who's able to afford a home this way, but wouldn't otherwise, you have a large number of people who are simply buying somewhat larger homes than they otherwise would have (and, concurrently, developers building somewhat larger homes).
A big house is nice, obviously, but that kind of thing is substantially a positional arms race. But beyond that, houses -- unlike most kinds of comparably durable infrastructure -- aren't really productive investments that do anything. If we had fewer schemes to subsidize home purchasing then, over the long run people would buy smaller cheaper homes and more of the country's capital would be devoted to productive investments making us all wealthier (on average) over time, albeit without quite so many extra rooms.
If I ruled the internet, there would be a strict rule against writing that one was "moving to Boston". Instead, the right move is shipping up to Boston to facilitate the posting of Dropkick Murphys videos:
Also, while I've said bad things about Boston in the future and will doubtless say them again in the past, after my most recent visited I wanted to congratulate the MBTA on demonstrating good humor in coming up with the CharlieCard name.
I liked Barack Obama's summation of the big strategic picture in late 2001, and the massive lost opportunity of the Bush/McCain strategy:
Imagine, for a moment, what we could have done in those days, and months, and years after 9/11.
We could have deployed the full force of American power to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all of the terrorists responsible for 9/11, while supporting real security in Afghanistan.
We could have secured loose nuclear materials around the world, and updated a 20th century non-proliferation framework to meet the challenges of the 21st.
We could have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in alternative sources of energy to grow our economy, save our planet, and end the tyranny of oil.
We could have strengthened old alliances, formed new partnerships, and renewed international institutions to advance peace and prosperity.
We could have called on a new generation to step into the strong currents of history, and to serve their country as troops and teachers, Peace Corps volunteers and police officers.
We could have secured our homeland—investing in sophisticated new protection for our ports, our trains and our power plants.
We could have rebuilt our roads and bridges, laid down new rail and broadband and electricity systems, and made college affordable for every American to strengthen our ability to compete.
We could have done that.
Instead, we have lost thousands of American lives, spent nearly a trillion dollars, alienated allies and neglected emerging threats – all in the cause of fighting a war for well over five years in a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Looking forward, Obama outlines five goals for our post-Iraq foreign policy: "I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
John McCain things so. Matthew DeLong says no, that "according to to the American Psychological Assn., research shows "that children of gay or lesbian parents are just as mentally healthy as children with heterosexual parents," and there may even be some positive effects. Also, the sexual orientation of parents has no impact on that of their children." But the facts are a small price to pay for the sake of discriminating against gay and lesbian couples.
If you haven't seen it yet, go read the transcript of Barack Obama talking to Fareed Zakaria about foreign policy. I think Zakaria's hit the sweet spot right now on the continuum between IR wonk and Tom Friedman where he's accessible but also making sense and Obama shows that smart people look much better answering smart questions than silly ones. He's got a sensible appreciation for the realpolitik tradition and also for how international institutions play a vital role in the contemporary world. Plus at one point he sounds like he's been reading The Prosperity Agenda or, more likely, getting briefed by its authors.
Marc Ambinder has an excellent rundown of the right's dishonest efforts to label Barack Obama's tax plans as a huge hit to small business owners:
The Republicans and John McCain in particular are trotting out a tiresome and thoroughly debunkable claim about Barack Obama's tax plans -- namely, that could hit as many as 23 million small businesses. The McCain campaign credulously cites the obviously self-interested Chamber of Commerce, which counts as a small business any entity or individual who reports any income under Schedule C of the federal income tax return or anyone who organizes a Subchapter S corporation. Hence: 23 million. As Factcheck.org says, that's misleading -- generously put. The real pool of small businesses with employees is around six million, and an estimate of the number of proprietorship paying into the top two income brackets is less than 700,000 -- a lot, but about 2.5% of 23 million.
The Bush campaign did this throughout 2004 and I believe also a few years before that when selling the initial tax cuts and it's just a simple, easily disproven lie. The sort of thing that would, one would think, lose a man his reputation for straight-talk. As far as these things go, it doesn't even really make sense as 23 million is incredibly large relative to the American population -- once you threw in the high-earners who aren't small business owners, and the small businesses that aren't organized as Schedule C or Subchapter S, and the people out of the workforce there'd be nary a waitress or construction worker or chain store manager or professional blogger in sight.
Reviewing Eric Patterson's Just War Thinking over the weekend, Robert Farley said:
Of course, the reasons for the presumption against war are fairly obvious. War has always been a destructive activity, and has become more so in the modern world. It is hardly pacifist to say that accomplishing a goal through peaceful means is preferable to accomplishing goals through war; as James Fearon notes, war always has ex ante costs. This is not to say that good things can't be accomplished through war, but accomplishing such things by war will always be more costly than achieving them by negotiation. As such, unless one assigns a positive value to the fighting of war, negotiation will always be the preferred course for a rational actor, until it is clear that these efforts will fail. The only way around this is to assign a positive value to the fighting of war, and this is something that democratic societies don't do; indeed, Patterson doesn't bother to make the argument that war, in and of itself, has positive value.
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, McCain appears to be grounded not only in dangerous ideas about international relations but also in an active hostility to prudence. In David Brooks’ 1999 McCain-lauding essay, “Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain,” Brooks writes that McCain and others worry “that we have become a nation obsessed with risk avoidance and safety.” The cure? To follow Roosevelt who “saw foreign-policy activism and patriotism as remedies for cultural threats he perceived at home.” De-euphemized, Roosevelt saw war as a positive good; in his years as New York City Police Commissioner he yearned for a now-obscure 1895 border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony of Guiana to turn into a great power conflict. “Let the fight come if it must,” Roosevelt wrote to Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. “I don’t care whether our sea-coast cities are bombarded or not; we would take Canada … the clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.” Only three months later Roosevelt mused that “it is very difficult for me not to wish a war with Spain, for such a war would result at once in getting a proper Navy.” The indifference to questions of national strategy here is a bit frightening, but to Brooks’ way of thinking, it’s a small price to pay to combat cultural threats at home.
"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Conservatism, Kristol complained, "is so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the Left." Kristol confessed to a deep yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role? It's unheard of in human history. The most powerful nation always had an imperial role." But, he continued, previous empires were not "capitalist democracies with a strong emphasis on economic growth and economic prosperity." Because of its commitment to the free market, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. Not what we're doing now but to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world—Africa in particular—where an authority willing to use troops can make a very good difference, a healthy difference." But with public discussion dominated by accountants—"there's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what? Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything." Kristol thought it unlikely that the United States would take its rightful place as the successor to empires past.
This is, needless to say, a dangerous attitude for people to have. But it seems to have some non-trivial sway on the right.
J Street's got a petition going where you can tell Joe Lieberman how you feel about the idea of one of America's most prominent Jews going to hang out with Pastor Hagee who thinks Hitler was God's agent.
One problem in US foreign policy is that we tend to focus our resources on addressing various kinds of crises -- security, humanitarian, etc. -- while letting our eye wander from festering problems that might tip over into crisis situation. This even thought an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Andrew Sweet and Natalie Ondiak have a report out for CAP in the context of foreign assistance programs and looking at five specific cases (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sudan and Ethiopia) "to explore how the off-and-on pattern of aid delivery undercuts our aims and the long-term sustainable security needs of these countries." Needless to say, recommendations for improvement are offered.
One major problem with bombing Iran as a means of disarming them, is that even if we bomb Iran this won't prevent them from building a nuclear weapon. But it seems John Bolton has answered this objection:
If successful, such highly risky and deeply unattractive air strikes or sabotage will not resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. But they have the potential to buy considerable time, thereby putting that critical asset back on our side of the ledger rather than on Iran’s.
With whatever time is bought, we may be able to effect regime change in Tehran, or at least get the process underway.
Justin Logan points out some of the serious problems with this strategy but it's worth also noting that it's really hard to say whether or not bombing Iran would really delay anything at all. You can think of the timeline as driven by a few different variables. Destroying some equipment and infrastructure and killing some people would definitely be a setback for the program. But an American bombing raid might lead the Iranian government to boost funding for the program. It might lead the Iranian government to restart work on weaponization. It might lead foreign countries to look more sympathetically on the Iranian predicament and become less helpful to efforts to prevent Iran from getting a nuke. For all we know, airstrikes could make the Iranians get a nuclear weapon sooner by making us look like an irrational actor that needs to be balanced against.
Now maybe not, maybe it really would produce a delay and maybe that delay could somehow be used to locate the regime change pony and maybe the new regime in Iran would have no interest in nuclear weapons, but that's an awfully long string of "maybes" to use as a pretext for starting a war.
In order to afford extending Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, plus his own new proposed tax cuts for the wealthy, John McCain has proposed some unspecified cuts in Social Security. Why won't he specify? Well:
"The lesson of history is that too many specifics at this point polarize the debate, that is the argument Carly was trying to make," Taylor Griffin said. "However, John McCain does believe that we can fix Social Security without raising taxes. As president, John McCain will call on Congress to develop a bi-partisan solution to Social Security — and if they won't, he will."
As Mark Kleiman says "'Too many specifics at this point polarize the debate' translates into English as 'If we told the retirees how completely we plan to shaft them, they might not vote for us.'"
I hasten to add: Not just retirees! One common scheme is to try to propose cuts that exempt current retirees and the soon-to-be-retired from any pain in favor of huge planned cuts for folks my age down the road on the theory that we don't really care about our future.
Here comes Bush, echoing John McCain by conceding that offshore drilling won't actually do anything to reduce oil prices but saying it's a good idea for psychological reasons:
The Green Lantern Theory as applied to foreign policy is wrongheaded, but as applied to energy supplies it's downright bizarre. Demand for oil is growing faster than supply, leading to high prices and over the long run global demand will probably keep growing. The smart strategy would be to start reorienting our infrastructure to build a less oil-dependent country. Psychology has nothing to do with it.
Then here’s the question. Why hasn’t the Obama campaign opened their Christmas gifts and made use of them? Why haven’t they gone after McCain’s “disgrace” remark regarding Social Security? Have they said anything at all about that? Why haven’t they hammered away at some of his statements and the inconsistencies surrounding them about carve-out privatization plans? Will they do anything with the implication identified above that McCain must be planning to cut benefits? Why so much silence from the Obama campaign on the Social Security issue?
He's not the only one. All I'd observe is that I recall Obama supporters having very similar sentiments about Obama's campaign against Hillary Clinton about 12 months ago. People wanted to see hard-hitting attacks and they were disappointed. Attacks came eventually, of course, but not until substantially later. And beyond that, the attacks mostly came as counterpunching efforts, a kind of judo. Now maybe this means that Obama's team has a brilliant strategy of patience that they're implementing. Or maybe it means that they made the wrong decision last summer and wound up getting lucky and winning anyway by accident and have no learned the wrong lessons.
I sometimes feel like "bomb Iran" is just a policy proposal walking around in search of a solution. Mostly, it's supposed to solve something related to their nuclear program but nobody can ever quite say what. Sometimes, it's for something to do with their "meddling" in Iraq. Here via Tyler Cowen we see Shmuel Rosner confront the fact that bombing Iran isn't a good way of preventing them from getting nuclear weapons, and come around to favoring bombing Iran anyway:
According to this line of thinking, which has adherents...focusing on the tactical questions surrounding such an operation -- how much of Iran's nuclear program can Israel destroy? how many years can a bombing campaign set the program back? -- is a mistake. The main goal of a hit would not be to destroy the program completely, but rather to awaken the international community from its slumber and force it to finally engineer a solution to the crisis...any attack on Iran's reactors -- as long as it is not perceived as a military failure -- can serve as a means of "stirring the pot" of international geopolitics. Israel, in other words, wouldn't be resorting to military action because it is convinced that diplomacy by the international community cannot stop Iran; it would be resorting to military action because only diplomacy by the international community can stop Iran.
This, honestly, would be downright silly if not for the fact that bombing countries is per se a serious business. One likes to think that Israel hasn't managed to survive this long in a dangerous neighborhood by being run by morons and, thus, this policy is going to be rejected. Meanwhile, as one can see here, what's needed here are fewer rumors of war and more direct engagement by the United States in a serious diplomatic effort at a rapprochement with Iran. Israel's soi disant friends in the United States seem to get antsy at the prospect of anything resembling a real diplomatic initiative, but it would clearly be the best thing for Israel as well as for the US, Iran, Iraq and the world at large.
I keep meaning to write this, but in my view the big flaw with Grand New Party qua book is that its analysis of why the GOP is the way it is struck me as very superficial and shallow. The book is very good on the nature of the GOP's predicament and on possible ways out of the predicament, but it seems to view the "how did we get here?" issue as just coming down to random luck -- Bush wasn't very bright or something.
I think that's wrong. And importantly wrong. Chris Hayes and Noam Scheiber both make arguments along the lines of what I would want to say, but I think they both weaken their argument by pitching an overly broad point. It's not the case that the Republicans literally only care about their super-rich financial backers. But what is true is that any other impulses Republicans might have are ultimately undermined by the stranglehold that the tax cut jihad holds over the party.
At the end of the day, a political party whose politicians all need to portray themselves as "tax cutters" is going to be very limited in its ability to do anything constructive. A lot of the models Ross & Reihan point to in their book were governors or mayors during the 1990s who, thanks to the robust economy, were able to cut taxes while also spending non-trivial amounts of new money on programs. That goes to show, I think, that Republicans aren't congenitally incapable of doing useful domestic policy stuff. But in order to do useful domestic policy stuff on any kind of consistent or responsible basis, they would need to be freed from the iron grip of tax cut mania.
How hard would it be to do this? I don't know. As recently as the George HW Bush administration, it was possible for prominent Republicans to act in a responsible manner with regard to tax issues. But John McCain's primary defeat in 2000 and his primary win in 2008 appears to confirm the idea that the GOP is first and foremost a tax cutting party. Maybe this is wrong, maybe Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth are paper tigers. Certainly I hope they are. But while Grand New Party is quite implicitly critical of the tax cuts uber alles forces, its authors seem to believe that those forces are sufficiently powerful that they shouldn't be taken on in a head-on manner. But unless they can be, it's hard to see how the kind of things Ross & Reihan would like to see happen could happen.
Via Kevin Drum, Business Week says they've got the goods on Saudi oil reserves and there's not as much goo down there as the Saudis want us to believe:
The detailed document, obtained from a person with access to Saudi oil officials, suggests that Saudi Aramco will be limited to sustained production of just 12 million barrels a day in 2010, and will be able to maintain that volume only for short, temporary periods such as emergencies. Then it will scale back to a sustainable production level of about 10.4 million barrels a day, according to the data.
Now I imagine there's some uncertainty about this and other documents that back up the Saudis' official line that they can go up to 15 million barrels. But this reporting is hardly the first slice of evidence to suggest the Saudis are exaggerating and it indicates that we should really expect the price of oil to keep going up over the long haul.
So yesterday John McCain said that thanks to the success of the surge in Iraq we can withdraw brigades from there and launch a new surge in Afghanistan, and also Barack Obama is a communist appeaser surrendercrat even thought his is precisely the policy he's been calling for for months. But now it seems McCain didn't really mean that and instead his plan is to ask NATO nicely to send more troops to Iraq.
Back in the real world, the question of enhanced allied contributions is yet another reason to favor a withdrawal timeline from Iraq. No European government that's at all concerned about public opinion wants to be seen as doing anything that amounts to facilitating the war in Iraq. Sending troops to Afghanistan so that President McCain can keep his 100 year occupation force at full strength for as long as possible isn't going to fly in Canada, Paris, Germany or anywhere else. But given a firm commitment to withdraw, and a real determination by the United States to focus on our Afghanistan/Pakistan issue in a serious way, you could see some allies stepping up and pitching in.
I'm in National Airport getting ready to fly to Austin for Netroots Nation. If you'll be there, please check out my panel and ignore that other panel at the same time with losers like Krugman, Perlstein, Digby, and Atrios.
On a related note, I have a new candidate for "worst bagel ever" -- Jerry's NY Pizza and Subs in National's Terminal A.
Inflation up, or as the NYTputs it "Consumer Prices Surge 1.1% in June." This leads me to once again wonder whether we haven't been seeing a surge of "surges" ever since Bush announce the surge back in early 2007. My sense is that people didn't used to use that word very much, but now it's everywhere.
Can I just note that I seem to live in some kind of mirror universe where the fact that Barack Obama has, for months, maintained a modest lead over John McCain in every public poll constitutes bad news for Obama and that the specific reason it constitutes bad news for Obama is that the larger political climate is favorable to Obama. The trouble of course is that given the favorable climate the expectation is that Obama will lead, so in order to "really" win, he needs to win by some gigantic margin -- merely being the first Democrat in over thirty years to secure a majority doesn't cut it. Or something.
But wouldn't it be interesting to visit an alternative reality in which the goal of a campaign is to win the election rather than to beat arbitrary media expectations? In this world, a modest-sized but stable and consistent lead would count as an indication that you're winning. And the existence of favorable background conditions for your candidacy would assuage doubts that the lead is likely to vanish over time.
Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half — hopefully more)
James Kvaal and Robert Gordon note that this only adds up if you assume a total withdrawal. For one thing, "U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan totaled $171 billion in 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office – and that includes money for Iraqi security forces, foreign aid, and veterans benefits." Similarly, "According to CBO, rapidly reducing the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 would save only $55 billion in 2013" and "Obama’s own, more aggressive plan to withdraw forces from Iraq will save only $90 billion a year, according to his campaign."
To obtain the sort of savings McCain is counting on, in other words, would require a much more aggressive withdrawal plan than the one he opposes as too aggressive.
Ezra Klein has an interesting TAP article looking at some of the social science on why there are relatively few women holding elected office in the United States. It turns out that women who run for office do just as well as male candidates, but women are much less likely to run. There are various sources of this, but the most easily fixable one is that women are much less likely to be recruited.
This is a particular problem for liberals, since most liberals in America are women, meaning that sexist biases in candidate recruitment are going to deprive liberalism of a lot of possible recruits.
K-Lo proclaimed a "Dubya-Love Moment" over this answer to a question about why he doesn't support a federal energy conservation program at yesterday's press conference:
"The American people are smart enough to figure it out. They know the price of gas. They're already driving less and seeking smaller cars. I don't need to tell them; they can balance their checkbook."
This is pretty silly. When I go to National Airport, I take the Metro -- an energy efficient option. That's a personal decision I make based on assessing the relevant factors. But one of the relevant factors is that there's a Metro station near my house and another one right by the airport. And of course more people would live near the U Street / Cardozo Metro Station were there more housing units located near the U Street / Cardozo Metro Station which there would be if more residential density were legally permitted. And I would take the Metro to Dulles Airport if there were a Metro line that went to Dulles Airport.
The point being, of course we all make decisions that are relevant to our energy consumption. But the choices we make are affected by public policy decisions in dozens of different ways. To suggest individual action as an alternative to changing policy is to ignore the fact that different policies would produce different individual choices.
Ilan Goldberg says this was the most important result from yesterday's ABC Iraq poll:
Do you think the U.S must win the war in [Country] in order for the broader war on terrorism to be a success, or do you think the war on terrorism can be a success without the U.S. winning?
Iraq: 34% must win. 60% can succeed without it Afghanistan: 51% must win. 42% can succeed without it
Frankly, I'm skeptical that expressed public opinion on such fine-grained questions as these is all that significant. John McCain will argue that we can "win" (whatever that means) both if only we put our faith in his leadership. The question is how credible do people find that.
Tom Friedman is really pissed off that people around the world take a dim view of the United States even though despite our flaws our government is less repressive than China's and we've had a much more constructive policy toward Zimbabwe than has South Africa. One wonders if he really doesn't understand this, but it's the hegemony, stupid. America has long sought to play a global leadership role, and under Bush has sought to play this role almost exclusively through methods of coercive domination. Under those circumstances of course America's sins and flaws look exaggerated. We can write self-congratulatory newspaper columns whining about this, or else we can try to put our policies and our position in the geopolitical structure on a more sustainable basis.
Somehow, I don't think the whining option is going to do anyone much good. Greenwald has more on this that's valuable.
Indeed; to the extent that the United States must devote years, billions upon billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of troops to "winning" in Iraq, the very purpose of the invasion is undermined. It does no good to "throw some little country against the wall" if in doing so our own capacity to act is severely wounded; other little countries that might have been intimidated take note of the fact that we are incapable of acting. This was, of course, why Don Rumsfeld bitterly resisted proposals to go into Iraq with substantially more troops, why he resisted the idea of increasing troop levels, and why he resisted the shift to counter-insurgency; he understood that such moves undermined the purpose of the invasion in the first place. To the extent that the war has been about the extension of American imperium, it has failed disastrously.
I would just emphasize that bit about Rumsfeld. To the extent that post-2006 tactics have proven relatively successful in stabilizing Iraq, this does not provide a viable tactical implementation of the strategy encapsulated in Bush's preventive war doctrine. That strategy requires that it be possible to subdue medium-sized countries in a sufficiently easy and uncompromising way that we could credibly threaten to do it over and over again.
What we've seen in the "surge" era is that not only is stabilizing an Iraq-sized country extremely difficult, but also that having any measure of success requires you to really lower the horizons for success. One of the most successful things we've done since General Petraeus took over was simply make peace with groups we were formerly trying to subdue. And of course the fewer people you try to fight the lower your costs get, but also the range of objectives you could achieve gets narrower. Bushism was founded on the presumption that we could accomplish a great deal, with ease, through the use of force unrestrained by law or institutions and it failed miserably.
I, for one, am absolutely shocked to see a pro-life administration taking action to reduce the availability of contraceptives. Up until now, I had always thought that the pro-life movement was a totally sincere effort to reduce the incidence of abortions by any means necessary. This makes it look like their convictions about the metaphysical status of the fetus are really just of a piece with a whole set of reactionary attitudes about women's sexuality and gender roles.
Meanwhile, does anyone else find it interesting that yesterday's Washington Post poll showed that people prefer Obama over McCain on "Social issues, such as abortion and gay civil unions" by a gigantic 56-32 margin? That's not even close, but the conventional wisdom usually holds that these topics give the GOP an edge. Social conservatives like to say they do, of course, but economic populists tend to say the same thing, too. But that's a bigger lead than Obama has on, say, "the economy" as an issue.
It seems that African-Americans and whites have, on average, different opinions about Barack Obama, leading The New York Times to report "Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race". Here, I guess, is there evidence:
Note that if we restrict our attention to white people, views are pretty similar -- 31 percent like Obama, 35 percent like McCain. The main difference is that black people are really enthusiastic about Barack Obama. Meanwhile, there's no sense of history or comparison here -- hows does this compare to other elections?
I would say -- Barack Obama has assembled a large army of paid staffers and volunteers, many of whom are black but most of whom are white. He's assembled an unprecedentedly large base of donors -- black and white. A plurality of Americans say they plan to vote for him for president and though Obama's coalition includes the vast majority of black Americans, whites outnumber blacks within it. I can't think of other examples of a comparable number of white people supporting a black candidate. Given the country's history, it's all pretty impressive if you ask me.
The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome -- that Iraq 'distracts us from every threat we face' and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That's an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world's largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq's future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.
Oops, did I say democracy promotion? I meant to say that Iraq has a lot of oil so we need to try to micromanage its future. And yet it's precisely this impulse -- the belief that we desperately need to retain "influence" in oil-possessing parts of the world that got us into the corrupt bargain with the Arab autocracies that produced the conditions under which al-Qaeda arose and began targeting us. Remember when Iraq was supposed to be part of a drive for reform that changed that dynamic? Oh for the heady days of the Arab spring.
Since Marc posted on this, I guess I should too. I recently accepted a new job at the Center for American Progress where I'll be working with the team that puts together ThinkProgress, the Wonk Room, and the Progress Report. From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference -- the blog will have a different URL and a different design so it'll fit in with the ThinkProgress family, but the blog has changed URLs and designs several times in the past so that's nothing new.
Some people have been asking me questions about why I'm leaving the Atlantic, but really I'm just leaving the Atlantic because that's what you need to do to take a new job. I think CAP is a great organization, I miss the sense of collegiality that comes from working with like-minded colleagues on a shared enterprise, I think I can help advance their mission and when it turned out they felt I could too and were willing to make me an attractive offer, I was thrilled to take it -- no beefs with existing employer required. The new site should launch in early August.
Here's a weird result Al pointed out from yesterday's NYT race poll. They asked "Just as your best guess, about what percentage of all Americans are black: less than 10%, between 10 and 20%, between 20 and 30%, between 30 and 50%, or more than 50%?." You get these ranges:
White: 1 21 33 33 8 5 Black: 4 24 26 24 17 4
In short, blacks and whites are both massively overestimating the number of black people in the country. That's interesting. And I also think it's interesting how little racial divergence you see in the answers here. My guess would have been that thanks to residential segregation blacks tend to overestimate the proportion of African-Americans in the population while whites would underestimate it. But that's not how it goes.
Ah, yes, the old 9/11 could have been prevented if only we'd had a Republican president line. And yet I seem to recall that George W. Bush was president, putting al-Qaeda on the back-burner and telling people who tried to sound the alarm that they were just trying to cover their asses.
There had been some signs that Barack Obama's fundraising might be falling short of what the campaign needs to implement its strategy, but with the news that they raised $52 million in June that doesn't seem to be the case. Still, it's worth pointing out that despite Obama's edge over McCain, the RNC's enormous edge over the DNC means that it's by no means clear that Obama will really have a financial advantage in an overall sense. The McCain campaign and the RNC, recall, are working in a sufficiently hand-in-glove manner that the RNC ran an ad lauding McCain's willingness to break with the Republicans over climate change.
David Plouffe's email to supporters below the fold:
Guardian reports that the Bush administration is getting ready to establish a "US interests section" in Teheran, a kinda sorta embassy that would suggest an intention to begin engaging in serious diplomacy.
Interesting NYT article about the MTA's MetroCard and how farecard policy shapes things. One policy idea I've never seen anyone but me propose but that I maintain would be a good idea would be for the federal government to pony up the relatively small amount of money it would cost to start constructing a nationwide transit farecard system that local rail and bus authorities could join if they were so inclined (and they should be encouraged to be inclined).
Actual fares would still be different in DC, Boston, Chicago, New York, LA, etc. but the idea would be to make it the case that over time a single card and single account could get you on the train or the bus all across America. Just like how these days EZ Pass works on highway systems all over the place. It wouldn't work for things like unlimited ride weekly passes, but it should work great for single ride trips, and would make it much easier for visitors to this place or that to take advantage of local transit offerings.
Jumping off a Steven Medvic post, Phil Klinker rounds up data from the 2004 NES which shows that about half of white people think African-Americans are lazier than whites, almost 40 percent say that African-Americans are less intelligent than whites, and again about 40 percent of whites say that African-Americans are less trustworthy.
Think about the implications of that for, say, a black job applicant for a position for which there are also some white applicants who seem reasonably qualified. It'd be interesting to see something about the age structure of adherence to these stereotypes, or else a time series presentation of this information, so we could get a sense of how much things are likely to change over time.
You should, naturally, check out Sara Mead's take on John McCain's recent education speech and the policy proposals therein. She notes, among other things, that his ability to get behind meaningful reforms is constrained by the fact that he doesn't want to propose any net increase in funding (thus, he thinks school choice will solve all our problems, but doesn't propose doing anything to boost school choice for the vast majority of Americans who don't live in DC).
I would only extend that to note that once again his nonsense budget figures are being constrained by his unwillingness to propose the sort of specific, massive cuts in domestic spending that are implied by his combination of tax and defense policies. If you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, and add new tax cuts, and continue an aggressive posture in Iraq, and increase the overall defense budget, then we need to cut domestic spending a lot. And the McCain campaign has proposed doing this in various hand-wavy ways but doesn't really put the rubber to the road anywhere. He doesn't want to gut federal education spending, which is nice, but he would more or less have to gut it -- along with everything else -- to implement his big picture ideas.
I kind of thought Jamie Kirchick had a good point here but then I looked closer at the cartoon he's criticizing. In his view, Rolling Stone ran a cartoon that "propagates the smears directed at John McCain -- that he's an unhinged warmonger rendered mentally unfit because of his experience in Vietnam, a meme that's been repeated by a number of high-profile Obama surrogates over the past few months." But look at the cartoon:
That's not an attack on John McCain at all, and certainly not the kind of attack Kirchick construes it as. The cartoon depicts various obstacles to McCain's political aspirations -- George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama -- as his North Vietnamese captors. I don't find this to be a funny or successful cartoon, but surely nothing that depicts McCain's political adversaries as war criminals can seriously be considered a smear against McCain.
Bruce Bartlett argues that black voters should give the GOP some consideration in November since, after all, "Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats". There is, of course, a lot of truth to that. Certainly a black voter circa 1860 would have been slightly insane to vote against Abraham Lincoln. And if the Grant-Greeley matchup of 1872 were for some reason to be re-run in the modern day, you'd expect blacks to strongly back Grant.
But of course the fact that the Republican Party was, in the past, more in tune with the interest of black people is precisely why black people, in the past, tended to support Republican candidates. During the New Deal the picture became more complicated, and in the 1950s you had non-trivial levels of black support for both Democrats and Republicans. And starting in the 1960s, Democrats became the party that better-served black interests while the conservative movement incorporated white supremacists as a pillar element of their coalition. So since then, African-Americans have overwhelmingly backed Democrats.
In short, things are about as you'd expect -- the GOP used to be the better party on race, and they were rewarded for it. As the Democrats moved toward a pro-Civil Rights posture and the Republicans abandoned that posture, things changed. If John McCain were to go back in time and become Thaddeus Stevens while transforming Barack Obama into Theodore Bilbo, I'm sure black people would vote for him. But barring that, black voters are likely to do what white voters do and assess the parties based on their present-day positions rather than how things were back in the day.
I know what you were thinking, "if only I, the blog reader at home, could read some kind of aggregator of Twitters from Netroots Nation participants." Well, okay, the odds that you were thinking this are low. But someone at the Huffington Post thought it would be a good idea and asked me to participate, which I may or may not actually be set up correctly to do. Check it out. Or not.
Meanwhile, Austin: very hot, full of bloggers and inexpensive alcoholic beverages.
People seem to have been more upset about my support for market-based water pricing than anything else I've written in a good while. And they found it particularly egregious that I dared take a stance on this questions without being a full-time expert. Well, if you want a full-time water expert who agrees with me check out this blog Aguanomics.
Of course Ryan Avent is right to say that you can't fully grasp the stupidity of the Bush line against energy conservation without mentioning the subject of externalities. When you burn coal or oil, or take up space on the road, current policy lets you get away with not paying the full cost of those endeavors. Under the circumstances, there are more coal plants and cars on the road than is socially optimal. Price this stuff correctly and people will use it less and we'll all be better off.
I didn't witness it firsthand, but Jonathan Signer reports that on teevee Obama badly beating McCain's fundraising is . . . good news for John McCain because Obama didn't beat him badly enough. Merely having a lead in the polls and in money just isn't good enough these days, I guess.
J Street has a very comprehensive look at American Jewish political opinions. You'll see that Jews massively disapprove of George W. Bush in general, and his foreign policy in particular, and his approach to the Middle East in particular particular. Jews are overwhelmingly backing Barack Obama and Democratic congressional candidates. Jews overwhelmingly favor more aggressive US diplomatic involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, clearly believe that only a peace agreement can provide real security for Israel over the long run, and recognize the need for the United States to exert meaningful pressure on both sides to get a deal.
Kay Steiger writes about one somewhat hidden problem facing women looking to get ahead in academia:
Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various "service" commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research.
I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.
Something similar seems to be true in other professions and also for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. Because there are relatively few women (or black people or whatever) working for Organization X and there's a desire to make sure that women/minorities are included in this that and the other thing, the smallish number of members of the underrepresented group wind up overburdened with peripheral tasks rather than focusing on their core competencies. It's one of several ways in which the underrepresentation of women in certain fields just makes it per se more difficult for women to get ahead with the whole thing stuck in a bad equilibrium.
I'm generally sympathetic to policies aimed at opening up the teaching profession, because it seems clear that success in the classroom is a function of multiple factors (experience, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical skills, training, work ethic, verbal ability, general smartness, innate talent for teaching) some of which are given undue weight under the current system and some of which are basically ignored. The world's greatest teacher would have all of these qualities in spades, but of course such people are few and far between and it's apparent from the track record of initiatives like Teach for America and some of the better alt-cert programs that people can be reasonably successful with less of some things (experience, training) if they have enough of the others.
That said, I hate this sentence: "They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it." Putting words like theory and methodology between contemptuous quotes (shouldn't we invent a new punctuation mark to distinguish those from regular quotes?) is ridiculous. Teaching is an extremely complicated endeavor. A teacher's ability to share knowledge (which is in itself an extremely reductive conception of what teaching actually means) is naturally going to be improved by a solid understanding of theory and methods. Of course some ed schools teach those things badly or over-emphasize them, but that's no reason to dismiss them out of hand.
As Kevin says, this sort of ugly anti-intellectualism doesn't give you a ton of confidence about McCain's approach to formulating policy. Running against eggheads has been a longstanding conservative trope, but one gets the sense that in recent years it's more and more come to play a corrosive role in preventing conservative politicians from engaging in any kind of serious thought.
Two years ago, I wrote a profile arguing that there were reasons to believe that McCain was more pragmatic than his support for the Iraq debacle suggested ("Neo-McCain," October 16, 2006). In the interviews I conducted with him in 2006, he repeatedly distanced himself from neoconservatism, reminding me that he talked regularly to realists like Brent Scowcroft. I thought there was a good chance that there was a peacemaker lurking beneath McCain's warrior exterior--that a President McCain might be able use his hawkish reputation to, say, bring Iraq's warring parties together or to lure Iran to the bargaining table.
I wasn't the only one. Since McCain secured the Republican nomination, I've heard echoes of my ambivalence from foreign policy experts, including some who plan to vote for Obama. "McCain has Nixon-goes-to-China credentials," one told me. But, based on McCain's actions over the last two years and conversations I've had with those close to him, I have concluded that this is wishful thinking. McCain continues to rely on the same neoconservative advisers; he still thinks U.S. foreign policy should focus on transforming rogue states and autocracies into democracies that live under the shadow of American power; and he no longer tells credulous reporters that he consults Scowcroft.
Matthew DeLong reports that John McCain says the Iraq War is already over and yet that means we need to . . . keep fighting the war forever:
]I repeat my statement that we have succeeded in Iraq, not we are succeeding we have succeeded in Iraq. The strategy has worked and we now have the Iraqi government and military in charge in the major cities in Iraq. Al Qaeda is on their heels and on the run, but the success that we have achieved is still fragile and could be reversed, and it’s still – if we do what Sen. Obama wants to do, then all of that could be reversed and we could face again the chaos, increased Iranian influence and American loss and defeat.
It's an intriguing perspective, I guess.
It's worth noting that minimizing Iranian influence in Iraq as a war aim is a pretty tough cookie. Iran, unlike the United States, is adjacent to Iraq. Unlike the United States, in other words, Iran doesn't have any plausible way to be indifferent to what happens in Iraq. Iran can have a friendly relationship with the Iraqi government, or it can have a hostile relationship with the government of Iraq, but it can't be indifferent -- the Iranians don't have any other continents to live on. So if we are determined to keep large forces in Iraq checking Iranian influence, then the Iranians are going to do their best to undermine that. And the only way to keep checking that influence over the long-run is going to be for us to be continually meddling in Iraqi affairs. But no need to worry about that since we've already succeeded.
I had to resort to time travel scenarios to try to make sense of Bruce Bartlett's contention that African-Americans should like the GOP on the grounds that "Historically speaking," -- though, crucially, not currently or at any time in the recent past -- "the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats." John Holbo, however, sees zombies as the relevant issue:
But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.
It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.
Meanwhile, I'm hoping the reanimated corpse of Jesse Helms won't be haunting us, but the hosannas directed at him by the leaders of the conservative movement should remind us that the contemporary Republican Party has little continuity with the racial legacy of the pre-Goldwater, pre-Buckley version of the thing.
Here courtesy of WalkScore is a nice map showing the "walkability" of different DC neighborhoods:
If you know the city at all, you'll see that being pedestrian-friendly is a strong correlate of being prosperous. This reality sometimes tends to confuse the debate over planning for walkers. Because walkable neighborhoods tend to be inhabited by well-off people, the whole topic gets construed as a concern "for" well-off yuppies. But really that's backwards. Walkable areas tend to be full of relatively rich people because they're relatively rare and relatively desirable -- their scarcity means that the less prosperous are priced out of these areas, but if we shifted policy to increase the supply of areas with good pedestrian access, people of more modest means would be able to afford them.
That, in turn, would be a serious blow for socioeconomic equity because at the end of the day while yuppies may like a nice walkable neighborhood, it's poor people, seniors, and older kids who are mostly likely to really be unable to drive where they want to go.
A friend described Netroots Nation as like a giant family reunion with Howard Dean as the crazy uncle. I thought that was about right as I watched him yesterday addressing a crowd outside the convention center as part of Barack Obama's "register for change" voter registration drive. On another reasonable view, however, Dean is more like a patriarchal figure, the foundational character from which all else flows. Ultimately, though, I think that's wrong -- Dean is not a blogger himself and is, at the end of the day, a bit besides the point when it comes to the larger movement.
He and his 2004 candidacy happened to be the point around which a lot of the early netroots energy coalesced. Over time, however, it's become clear that the real leaders of the movement were include a large number of folks who were early Dean supporters or followers, but that Dean himself plays an essentially peripheral, symbolic role in the whole thing. And it's to his credit, I think, that he's basically accepted that role and done it well while also focusing diligently on his job as DNC chief. I recall being skeptical at the time that Dean would work out well in that task, but I think he has.
Mark Kleiman seems a bit confused about this. When Hillary Clinton proposed a silly gas tax holiday during the primaries, the press widely reported the fact that every knowledgeable expert regarded this as absurd because the idea was (a) absurd and (b) endorsed by Hillary Clinton. When John McCain proposes a somewhat more pernicious version of the same bad idea, its badness must be ignored because it's being proposed by John McCain and nothing is more vital to the future of the American public than for John McCain's flaws to be covered up.
After all, if the press were to start reporting that bad ideas are bad ideas even when proposed by John McCain the next thing you know they'd be talking about McCain's repeated flip-flops on the central issues of our time, characterizing Wesley Clark's attacks on McCain correctly, etc. And we can't have that!
The Air Force has really been a service adrift in the "war on terror" era, getting into all kinds of fights with other players and generally having difficulty endearing itself to the rest of the security establishment as a useful tool. I suspect the news that top Air Force generals have been wasting not only money but an absurd amount of time on installing "comfort capsules" on "military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world" with an eye to making sure "that leaders can talk, work and rest comfortably in the air."
In partial defense of the Air Force, I suppose, I would say that semi-abusive use of military planes as private jets in circumstances when commercial vehicles would work fine seems to have become one of the most cherished perks of civilian officials in both the executive branch and the congress. Under the circumstances, one can sort of understand how the Air Force came to feel that it's air taxi mission required this kind of high-level attention. Long story short, in addition to cutting this specific BS out, we really ought to reform the whole way the use of military transportation works. See here for some examples of dubious practices that cost taxpayers a remarkable amount of dough.
Interesting Elisabeth Bumiller look at the sprawling group of 300 people who are in some sense "foreign policy advisers" to the Obama campaign. Marc Ambinder remarks:
The McCain response to all this -- John doesn't need daily talking points -- is a reflection on Obama's learning curve, although McCain is also very clearly learning as he is going, too.
I think that's a pretty revelatory passage. It's true that, in some sense, McCain doesn't need daily talking points. But the reason he doesn't need daily talking points isn't that he can talk about national security issues with fluency and skill without them. Lacking daily talking points, he's repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite, repeatedly forgotten that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist, changed his position on Afghanistan twice in 24 hours, etc. In short, he's made a ton of gaffes just as you would expect from an underprepared candidate. But he's allowed to get away with a lack of adequate preparation because, in the mind of the press, his years in captivity decades ago are adequate demonstration that he understands national security issues even though there's no real basis for that view.
So far so bad, but what's doubly frustrating about this is that not only does McCain get kid gloves treatment about his national security gaffes, but his campaign then gets away with bragging about it as if it's proof that he's some kind of tough guy. "John doesn't need daily talking points," they say. And he doesn't -- because the press lets him get away with egregious errors.
Rob Goodspeed says that "n aspiring planner I met with yesterday asked me whether there’s a massive effort afoot to make every American city more bikable" and offers some thoughts. One thing to note about this is that part of the nature of biking is that having more people bike around your city is one of the things that does the most to make your city more bikable. When cyclists are relatively common, cars become conscious that cyclists may be on the street and adjust their behavior accordingly. When bikes are rare, nobody expects there to be a bike on the road, which is a very dangerous situation.
And of course the safer biking becomes, the more people will do it, which makes it safer. And, again, just socially speaking people generally prefer not to be weirdos and so if you see more people riding bikes, you're more likely to think that's a reasonable way to behave. Higher gas prices naturally lead to some increase in the number of bike trips around the margin, which in turn has some positive feedback effects. Which is why this is a great time for cities to take the opportunity to take some pro-bike steps in terms of lanes, parking, etc. -- the present circumstances of expensive gas are an opportunity to shift to a new, more bike-friendly equilibrium, that will have benefits for public health and the environment while leaving the roads less congested and more open for high-value car and truck trips.
I went to see a panel on the National Popular Vote and before things started, prominent blogger Rick Hertzberg thanked me for helping to "paper the house." Naturally I thanked him in return, but I had no idea what that means. The good news is that these days it's a Google and we learn that "'Papering the house,'" for example, is a common producers' practice to fill unsold seats. It's done during previews -- to start buzz about a new play, and assure a full house when critics are in attendance -- or when a show is past its prime and ticket sales dip."
I suppose I should explain the basic mechanics of the national popular vote campaign. The animating idea is to take advantage of the fact that states have, under the constitution, essentially unlimited authority to allocate their electoral votes however they want. NPV encourages states to pass laws saying that their electoral votes will be allocated to the popular vote winner if and only if enough states to comprise a majority in the electoral college also adopt such laws. In short, when a state passes an NPV law nothing happens at all in the short term. But if enough states do it to "win" 270 electoral votes, then suddenly there's a gestalt shift and the country has, in effect, a popular vote system.
It's a good idea and it's made a lot of progress in recent years. Chris Pearson reports, however, that somewhat oddly this has become a partisan issue at the state level with Republicans usually in opposition. This he plausibly speculates is the legacy of 2000 where people see NPV as not much more than an effort to degrade the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. In fact, though, this should really just be seen as something that pits state against state. The currently "uncompetitive" states -- places like California and New York and Vermont and Massachusetts but also places like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi and Utah -- are the ones mostly clearly disadvantaged by the current system and that goes for Democrats and Republicans alike.
To me, the case for getting rid of the electoral college is so straightforward as to hardly need articulating. Arguments about a straight first-past-the-post popular vote versus some other kinds of systems involving runoffs are things where reasonable people can disagree, but the electoral college is just an absurd anachronism rooted in an 18th century understanding of the nature of the country that hasn't been applicable for a long, long, long time. But if you want a really exhaustive account of the harm done, check out FairVote's report "Presidential Elections Inequality: The Electoral College in the 21st Century".
I'm glad that armor piercing attacks against US forces in Iraq have declined but attributing this to the success of the Basra offensive which was supposed to have somehow -- and nobody in the article explains any causal mechanism -- to have crippled Iranian capabilities is a bit bizarre. It's not clear how much of these attacks ever had anything to do with Iran, but insofar as Iran is playing a role the obvious cause of a decline in the tempo of attacks is efforts at "appeasement" like the Bush administration's somewhat renewed interest in diplomacy with Teheran and so forth.
I keep forgetting to blog about Denver's salary dump trade sending Marcus Camby to the Clippers even though the Center for American Progress primarily hired me because John Podesta felt they had to beef up their NBA coverage to prepare for the looming era of having a hoops fan in the White House.
Camby is, though kind of old at this point, still really good. This is going to make Denver much worse and yet their payroll is still going to be high and they don't seem all that well-positioned to rebuild. For the Clippers, by contrast, I'd say this is about as good as resigning Elton Brand would have been -- they'll be in the playoff mix but not among the West's elite.
Michael Slackman notes that across the Middle East, European countries, Israel, and even the Bush administration are looking to engagement and diplomacy to try to resolve outstanding issues, rather than counting on futile policies of "isolation" and coercion.
Which is, in my view, all to the good. But it's also a reminder of an important extent in which John McCain would not be merely an extension of the Bush administration. Bush, never one to admit an error, hasn't made a big deal about it but since at least Israel's failed invasion of Lebanon in 2006 the administration has substantially crawled back from its previous lunatic policies in favor of something more resembling a pragmatic approach to the Middle East (and of course North Korea). McCain, however, gives every indications of wanting to go back to an earlier, purer phase of Bushism when neocons were riding high and Robert Gates was nowhere to be seen in the halls of power.
Plausibly, the weird combination of McCain's traditional dislike of and contempt for Bush, combined with their objectively similar opinions on policy matters, is making things worse here. On some level, the Bush administration has gotten less crazy because they've seen the results of their earlier blunders. But McCain seems to think poorly enough of Bush as a man and as a leader to believe that Bush rather than Bush's ideas are to blame for these problems. Thus, in his view, if only we'd had John "I know how to win wars" McCain in the White House earlier, everything might have been fine. So if he's president, we might go and try the whole thing over again, reliving the policies of 2002-2005 until McCain can prove to himself that, no, even the legendary Awesomeness of John McCain can't make unworkable policies work.
Meanwhile, I'd say Sean-Paul Kelly is probably too optimistic that recent Iran-related developments mean there's really going to be a Bush-era breakthough, but I hope he's right.
The centerpiece of John McCain's talking about education policy is the need for more "choice" (i.e., vouchers) but as voucher advocate Neal McCluskey is noting there's really no there there:
All that McCain’s plan offers in terms of specifics is that he’d reapportion federal money slated for attracting, rewarding, and training teachers; somehow give principals more control over their budgets; and expand the use of online education. Oh, and importantly(though most voters, concerned primarily about their own kids, probably won’t care), McCain would increase funding for D.C.’s school-choice program.
This is just really odd. You can believe whatever you want about vouchers and still obviously a proposal for a modest increasing in funding for a pilot voucher program in the District of Columbia is neither here nor there in terms of really improving education in America. This basically reflects what I was saying the other day about Grand New Party -- if you're committed to the kind of tax and budget policies that McCain is committed to, it's just not possible to put meaningful domestic policy reforms on the table. I don't think vouchers are the solution to the problems in American schools, but whatever the solution is -- even vouchers -- would require some real fiscal muscle to actually change anything.
Photo by Flickr user lkbm used under a Creative Commons license
For the past 24 hours or so I've been annoyed by some inconveniently located construction that makes it hard to get into the Convention Center. But I looked closer and it turns out to serve me right -- they seem to be laying track for a streetcar system.
Rick Perlstein, on a panel about the media, describes The Boys on the Bus as a book about politics on a level with Machiavelli's Prince or John Locke's Second Treatise on Government. Obviously, that's deliberate hyperbole. But still, I think it reflects a common disagreement I have with the netrootsian perspective on things -- a tendency on their part to vastly overstate the significance of media issues in terms of their impact on the real world.
People working in a medium should do things that the medium is well-suited to. And blogs are very well-suited to complaining about media coverage. So blogs spend a lot of time complaining about media coverage. Which is all, I think, perfectly fine. But the tendency to make the leap from "complaining about the media would be a good thing to do with my blog" to "objectively speaking, complaining about the media is hugely important to creating political change" is a mistake. If anything, I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage.
I wanted to talk a bit more about my proposal for a standard nationwide farecard system. The main objectives to this, interrelated, are that changing all the transit systems to have a new farecard system would be expensive and that the actual benefits of doing this would be rather modest.
I completely agree. I wasn't really envisioning a massive outlay to totally change existing systems. But I do think that more uniformity would be better. What I would have in mind would be the creation of a new standard "federal system" that would be based on the existing system of some large city that was willing to cooperate. Then one would hope to see the new standard spread over time. Cities that don't currently have rail systems but are building them could adopt the new standard, as could any city that for whatever reason is considering changes to its bus or rail network that would involve making the switch.
As I'll happily concede, the benefits of doing this would be non-enormous. But I think there would be some benefits, and the cost would be low.
Are we going to need a South Africa-style truth commission to find the facts and clear the air after Bush-era war crimes? To me it more and more looks like that will be the case:
But I'm basically pessimistic that anyone will be held accountable for anything at all. The relevance precedent is probably Iran-Contra where the guilty parties just . . . came back into government a bit later and anyone who mentioned that they were crooks was dismissed as shrill. I recall that during the telecom immunity fight the Washington Postspecifically denounced immunity opponents on the grounds that they were interested in "using the tools of discovery to dislodge information about what the administration actually did." Can't have people know what happened!
Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it's actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it's primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.
And, of course, I would add that the broader logic of the internet is toward disaggregation of content -- the fact that newspapers cover such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads probably won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere. On the other hand, there may be a corrupting impact of some of this cross-subsidization -- I can't help but suspect that the importance of real estate advertising to papers may have distorted their coverage of the housing bubble on the way up.
Atrios asks about rumors that Kit Seelye was/is at Netroots Nation. Indeed she was, and I snapped this photo of her sitting near some hippie at the national popular vote panel:
The dude, if I understood him correctly, thinks the real answer to the problems with our electoral system is smaller congressional districts.
U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.
It's unremarkable on its own terms for someone to tell a periodical that they think Barack Obama is basically right about Iraq, but in this case the person talking is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki being interviewed by Der Spiegel so that seems pretty noteworthy. We shouldn't slavishly adhere to whatever the Iraqi government happens to want (if they say we need 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for the next 20 years, we need to tell them no way) but as even John McCain and George Bush used to admit if the Iraqis want us to leave we really have to leave.
Maliki here -- and for the past couple of weeks more broadly -- is addressing himself to the most fundamental "facts on the ground" in Iraq of all, the gross unpopularity of the American military presence. Under those circumstances, only real desperation (such as the terrible situation prevailing in 2006) makes it make sense for Maliki to uncritically endorse an open-ended presence. Whatever it is he would like to get from US forces (and you've got to believe it's plenty, given that plenty of security issues still exist for Iraq) the larger imperative is to get it in the context of also getting a plan to get Iraq's sovereignty back.
To me one of the oddest aspects of endless discussions about affordable housing is how little emphasis there is on the fact that many areas have straightforward rules in place that just make it illegal for housing to be affordable. For example, in Arlington County Virginia you might own a nice big house. And maybe you're an empty nester who doesn't need as much space in the home anymore now that the kids are out of the house. So maybe you want to modify the structure somewhat to create a so-called "accessory dwelling" in the garage or the basement that you can rent out to people looking for a cheap place to live.
Well, you can't. It's illegal. But there's a proposal on the table to make it legal as long as no more than two people live in your accessory dwelling. That'd be a good idea, though of course families need affordable housing, too, so I wouldn't favor that kind of arbitrary restriction. Still, babies steps, babies steps.
Wow. I hadn't realized that Al Gore gave a speech recently calling on us to move to 100 percent renewable sources of electricity in ten years. That's audacious seemingly to the point of madness. Why focus so exclusively on cleaner electricity generation rather than on a balanced approach that involves efficiency (i.e., using less electricity) and also the transportation, heating, etc. sectors. After all, replacing a conventional car with an electric one -- or a bus with a trolleybus or tram -- reduces emissions regardless of how you get your electricity.
In that sense, it makes way more sense to put some of our existing dirty electricity infrastructure to use in the short-term as a substitute for our currently lamentable transportation infrastructure, while we switch the nature of our electrical infrastructure on a more tempered pace. Of course there's nothing wrong with big ideas to expand the overton window, so I don't think it's terrible to see some folks pushing radical ideas, but on the other hand I do worry about the public becoming polarized between a "holy shit we need to do something crazy and extreme" faction and a "that sounds crazy and extreme so let's do nothing" faction. It's more important to start taking some concrete steps down the path to mitigation than to spend too much time drawing up the outlines of ecotopia.
I'm up outrageously early on a Saturday because I'm about to head off to see Nancy Pelosi talk to the Netroots Nation. I don't attend 8:30 AM events on a Saturday lightly, so I think it's time to once again remind people that whatever disappointments they may have with the new Democratic congress and its leadership that, at the end of the day, among real liberals in Washington, DC Pelosi is by far the most powerful. And among powerful elected officials in Washington, Pelosi is the real liberal. There's a reason she's the one who shows up to an event like this even when she's not courting the base in a primary.
We haven’t won the Iraq war, of course, which is why the debate over it is so consequential. Obama took to the pages of the New York Times Monday to explain, “My Plan for Iraq.” He reiterated his support for a 16-month pullout. We think — and certainly hope — that somewhere deep inside Obama realizes how unworkable and risky this timeline would be.
U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes [...] The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't.
This barely seems to be getting any play in the American press thus far, but at a minimum it deserves to dominate tomorrow's Sunday shows.
It seems that the rising number of people who don't own landlines is having only a very tiny impact on political polling. But this looks like something that may be a real problem in 2012 or 2016.
Normally, I go weeks -- months, even -- at a time without anyone mentioning Benjamin Disraeli. But here's David Brooks (via K-Drum) and here's The Economist (which is at least British) and here's Reihan Salam. Suddenly it seems one cannot understand contemporary politics without a sound grasp of . . . 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Everyone needs a usable history, but this kind of seems like a weird reach.
The Speaker prefers to bargain from a position of strength: "The bigger our victories, the more bipartisanship there'll be in the congress." I think that's about right -- you see a lot of bipartisanship when one party's running scared.
Nancy Pelosi referring to Maliki's increasingly insistent calls for a timeline for US withdrawal from Iraq says "the end could be in sight" and calls for "a high-level meeting with the Iraqis to work out the terms of our redeployment from Iraq" but cautions that this "will not happen without the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States."
As for Disraeli, whose new conservative party was created out of opposition to free trade(!), his second premiership may indeed have led to the introduction of numerous social reforms. But voting was so restricted during that time--and the issues of the campaign so far removed from those of our own time--that to imply "the people" of the 1870's wanted incremental change from "conservative" politicians is almost absurd (Disraeli actually lost the popular vote in the crucial 1874 election). Disraeli's imperialism and nationalism are interesting to compare to Roosevelt's, but any comparison to modern-day America is downright silly.
This is perhaps a good time to note that I'm not really a fan of historical analogies as a mode of argument. The reason is that accuracy in historical characterization is rarely particularly relevant to the point the analogy-maker was trying to make. But under the circumstances, there's actually not much need to make the analogy. At the end of the day, I think I understand what Brooks is saying here perfectly well and I don't know anything about Disraeli. To me, the interesting thing about the use of the analogy is simply that for whatever reason modern-day conservative reformers don't like to site Eisenhower and Nixon as predecessors even though they would make more familiar references.
Players who want to enter the NFL draft need to take a modified IQ test called the Wonderlic that's scored on a 0-50 scale, with a 20 representing an IQ of about 100. Consequently, one can do things like assemble the graphic above which show the average IQ by position. "The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score" is one common way of familiarizing the results, though in fact the tackles on the offensive line seem to score higher than the guards. Long story short, being the quarterback demands intelligence and so does executing blocking schemes on offense.
Last week, both the Bush administration and John McCain found themselves shifting in the direction of positions Barack Obama had long espoused in terms of talks with Iran and in terms of the need for more troops in Afghanistan. More recently, Bush seemed to be edging toward embracing a timetable for withdrawal and now Maliki has explicitly embraced the Obama position on the need for a timetable.
This leaves us with two questions -- one is whether McCain will make this the third issue on which he's following Obama's lead, and the other is whether the press will note that his constant flip-flopping undermines the two core themes of his campaign, "straight talk" and alleged national security expertise.
To perhaps make Ezra Klein's point a bit more briefly there's no reason to frame the question of whether or not we should reduce meat consumption for environmental reasons as a question or whether or not we should all become vegetarians. Most of us who eat meat in the developed world eat a sufficient amount of meat that we could eat less meat without giving meat up entirely. And since people eat food multiple times every day, this is the kind of thing where small reductions in the meat content of the average meal would have a substantial impact over the course of a year.
Every once in a while I toy with the thesis that someone ought to make a big deal about the fact that a lot of the standard statistical data about the United States that we track is of a kind of low quality. One noteworthy example is the poverty rate formula, which is basically nonsense. Apparently Barack Obama believes we should change it. This is a good idea on many levels, though one issue any time you change anything like this is that you don't want to lose the ability to track trends across time.
Marc Ambinder has the best analysis of the devastating impact of Nouri al-Maliki's statements to McCain's arguments about Iraq:
This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing. Obviously, our national interests aren't equivalent to Iraq's, but... Malik isn't listening to the generals on the ground...but the "hasn't been to Iraq" line doesn't work here.
"His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The military says 'conditions based' and Maliki said 'conditions based' yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders."
Even granting the premise that Maliki's statements are purely about Iraqi domestic politics, all this amounts to is the fact that Barack Obama's plan for Iraq is, according to both the Maliki government and the McCain campaign's analysis, the only way forward that's politically viable in Iraq. Meanwhile of course the US military has more credibility with the American people than does the Iraqi government, but given the particulars of this case it's just a no brainer that if the Iraqi government doesn't want us to stay we have to leave. McCain even said so himself before conceding the point became damaging to his campaign.
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Heads in the Sand
