Responding to increasing indications that John McCain is looking seriously at Mitt Romney as a VP choice Noam Scheiber rounds up the evidence that Romney doesn't exactly have huge appeal to swing voters. Stepping back, though, before McCain does this I would urge him to recall what happened back in the primaries. Romney had a lot of advantages -- solid conservative positions on the issues, a lot of institutional support, and a ton of money.
But he wound up losing because, basically, people find him loathesome. Some find him loathesome because of his religion, some because of his flip-flopping, and others just because he's loathesome. But whatever the reason, people just really don't like Mitt Romney. Putting him on the ticket seems like an obvious recipe for disaster, but a potential boon to progressive bloggers who are really in need of a mockable choice.
When you think about the stunningly dishonest ad John McCain is running, falsely accusing Barack Obama of not meeting with troops during his trip abroad and falsely accusing Obama of some scheme to deny money to the troops, you have to recall the breathtakingly unprincipled way in which McCain has been pursuing the presidency from the beginning. Jon Chait writes about the audacity of flip-flopper allegations coming from the McCain camp:
If one needs any final proof of the ridiculousness of this quadrennial exercise, it is the fact that John McCain has embraced the flip-flopper attack. John McCain! I've said this before, I'll say it again: This is a man who, in his quest to make himself an acceptable GOP nominee, reversed his political philosophy (crusading anti-business progressive in the Teddy Roosevelt mode); his political orientation (frequently siding with, and nearly joining, Senate Democrats); and almost every particular undergirding it (taxes, the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, his own immigration bill, etc.). But if you actually think that flip-flopping is a sign of flawed character, and not just a handy partisan cudgel, then, sure, Obama might be slightly cynical, but McCain must be a dangerous sociopath.
And I might add his couple of years spent as a moderate Republican was, itself, a reverse from his earlier orientation as an orthodox conservative. And with recent reversals to try to bring his thinking on Afghanistan closer in line with Barack Obama's, the floppery's not limited to domestic policy either. He's a guy who really wants to win the election, and he's willing to adopt pretty much any policy position and launch pretty much any dishonest attack on his opponent that he thinks will help him get there. If that means totally fictitious ads about Obama refusing to meet with soldiers, then fine.
Photo by Flickr user marcn used under a Creative Commons license
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote a self-satirical op-ed in the New York Post slamming the Obama health plan. These authors went on for several hundred words about how wrong it would be to offer undocumented immigrants the same health benefits now offered to the United States Congress when this would require rationing care to elderly Americans.
I noted one problem with their argument: The Obama plan does not cover undocumented immigrants—a fact that was debated at some length during the Democratic primaries. I noted that one could uncover this fact, by entering the words “undocumented immigrants Obama health plan” into a website called www.google.com.
Of course if being accurate were a requirement for op-ed pieces, then more than one national newspaper columnist might be out of a job. So given the current economic downturn, I think it's important to keep letting people make stuff up.
Via Frank Rich's column, a USA Today article on the growing prominence of the terrorist fist-jab greeting in business circles that scores very high on the unintentional comedy scale. If Obama wins, I think this could wind up being like JFK and men's hats.
Once again, John McCain has an unfortunate run-in with a straightforward effort to quote his words, and protests to George Stephanoupolous "I didn’t use the word 'timetable'" when, in fact, he called Nuri al-Maliki's plans for Iraq "a pretty good timetable" just days ago. Perhaps he meant to say "general time horizon."
Friday's Washington Post had an article by J. Freedom du Lac about Max and the Marginalized who were coming to DC to play a show on Saturday at the Velvet Lounge with Spencer Ackerman's band, the Surge. The Marginalized sound is glossed thusly:
Imagine Frank Rich fronting Ted Leo's group, or maybe a Matthew Yglesias mash-up with Husker Du, Bob Mould's old punk band whose logo Bernstein has tattooed on his left forearm.
Meanwhile, in case you had any doubts as to whether or not the media was a closed inbred elite, not only did I go to the same high school (and summer camp) as Frank Rich's kids, but it turns out that Max Bernstein, frontman of the Marginalized, went there as well. Meanwhile, here's some Husker Du:
Meanwhile, do we think that "Josh Freedom du Lac" is a real name? It's arguably the best name ever.
The health policy reform world has, in my view, a tragic if understandable tendency to get bogged down in the swamps of the politically viable so I'm always glad when someone puts something obviously unpassable on the table. Here's Robert Waldman:
One politically unfeasible approach to this would be to assign people randomly to HMO's and pay the HMO's based on their health but have the HMO's pay for their health care. Then the HMO decides incentives. You have to decide how much a life is worth (and eyesight and all that) but it doesn't depend on individual income and the decisions are made by an organization with tons of data.
No way this is going to fly in the real world. But unlike a lot of other state-market hybrids that are really just a way to try to buy off the interests of incumbent firms, this really would capture some important benefits of market competition. Firms would become more profitable insofar as they promoted better health outcomes and also become more profitable insofar as they avoid costly medical expenditures. Importantly, the HMO is rewarded not only for delivering effective medical care (though they are rewarded for that) but also for getting their patients to do things that aren't strictly "medical" (walk more, stop smoking) but do improve health.
It's a total non-starter for a whole bunch of reasons, including most notably that nobody is going to accept the total lack of consumer choice this involves, but thinking about infeasible plans serves a useful function in terms of structuring our thinking.
"Can minority journalists resist applauding Obama?" asks Jesse Washington of the Associated Press. Say what you will about Michelle Malkin, but I'm pretty sure she can resist applauding Obama. Meanwhile, can white journalists resist applauding John McCain? I'm sure a handful of them can, but McCain's received some instances of favorable press coverage over the years and the vast majority of that has come from white journalists.
I've had a Kindle for a couple of months now and my reactions largely follow James Fallows' first impressions right down to the fact that at this point I've become very attached to my Kindle and don't want to give it up, but at the same time have no intention of eschewing traditional books entirely.
One added observation, however, would be that the Kindle actually suffers from several ridiculous flaws. James refers to the inability to "flip" multiple pages at a time. It also doesn't let you cross-reference Kindle "locations" with brick-and-mortar page numbers. And you can only highlight whole lines at a time rather than starting with specific words. There are various other things like that. They're annoying. But at the same time, these are problems that I'm sure have solutions. When the basic technology of the Kindle Reader and Kindle Store are married to a design team (either at Amazon or at a competing firm like Apple) that's somewhat better at thinking this stuff through then I think you'll have a product a lot of people want to buy.
John Quiggin calls attention to the fact that Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, the President and General Secretary respectively of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, are going on trial July 30 on trumped-up charges launched by the Mugabe regime. The We Are ZCTU website is seeking gestures of support from readers abroad.
Obama was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if Obama becomes president. The issues include Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as well as new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on U.S. poultry imports.
And it's true, Obama was so busy talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, international terrorism, climate change, and human rights policy that he didn't find time for the long-festering chicken issue. Similarly, I didn't here President Sarkozy mention anything about America's ban on the import of unpasteurized soft white cheese. So basically nothing of substance transpired.
Photo by Flickr user Fuzzy used under a Creative Commons license
For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think the two proposals were impossible to estimate, or understand, or in any way summarize. But they're not.
Right. The article is over 1,400 words long and mostly consists of moaning over how the candidates lack specifics or like to distort their plans or distort other people's plans. But the article itself actually contains perfectly clear-cut information about the plans it's just buried amidst tons of other verbiage.
Obama's tax plan would result in somewhat higher overall levels of federal revenue and somewhat lower tax rates for middle income people than would McCain's. McCain's tax plan would result in somewhat lower overall levels of federal revenue and substantially lower tax rates for high income people than would Obama's. The details of the plans are somewhat complicated, but the overall impact on revenues and income distribution is very easy to summarize. And, indeed, the Tax Policy Center has already done the summary in a report I know Time is aware of because it's referenced in the article. They even went through the trouble of making a chart:
Unlike Ezra, I'm willing to speculate and to be somewhat generous to author. If you read a concise, accurate summary of candidate's proposals you come away being a little bit smarter about what's happening in American politics. But if you read a cynicism-laden thing about how it's all incredibly murky and dishonest and everyone's using fuzzy numbers then you come away feeling smarter than all those clueless partisans out there yelling on behalf of McCain or Obama.
Many analysts believe that the incidence of the gas tax falls mostly on oil companies rather than on gasoline consumers and that, therefore, a "gas tax holiday" as proposed by John McCain would do much more to increase the profitability of oil firms than to help out average Americans. Michael Cohen notes that when McCain was asked about this he gave a notably unimpressive answer not disputing the analysis, but instead underscoring that he really has no capacity to discuss domestic policy:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Not a single economist in the country said it’d work.
MCCAIN: Yes. And there’s no economist in the country that knows very well the low-income American who drives the furthest, in the oldest automobile, that sometimes can’t even afford to go to work.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But they all say that . . . the oil companies, the gas companies are going to absorb … any reduction.
MCCAIN: … they say that. But one, it didn’t happen before, and two, we wouldn’t let it happen. We wouldn’t let it — Americans wouldn’t let them absorb that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How would you prevent that?
MCCAIN: We would make them shamed into it. We, of course, know how to — American public opinion. And we would penalize them, if necessary. But they wouldn’t. They would pass it on.
Yes, that's right, McCain will combine a tax cut with a program to shame oil companies into cutting prices.
Meanwhile, though it's true that lower income people generally spend a higher proportion of their income on gasoline, the claim McCain is making here about poorer people having higher absolute levels of gasoline consumption is wrong. Cars are pretty expensive (obviously) and consequently the carless is a disproportionately poor group. Beyond that, a relatively low-income family is more likely to be getting by with one car whereas a well-off family will have two cars for the grownups plus one for every driving age kid.
But all that aside, McCain's total non-response to this critique of one of the main elements of his energy policy is really staggering.
Photo by Flickr user North Bay Wanderer used under a Creative Commons license
To be a bit flip, you could say that rather than thinking in a serious way about public policy the conservative movement debates issues by asking "what would Reagan do?" Either that or you could flip over to the home page of the Heritage Foundation, the flagship policy outfit of the right, and find a prominent banner advertising Heritage's new What Would Reagan Do? website. At the moment, they seem to be having a special focus on energy policy.
Might I suggest that Reagan, having been a prominent political figure in the 1960s through 1980s, wasn't in a position to avail himself of 21st century research into the problem of global warming and the risks of catastrophic climate change. If Reagan were both alive today and actually possessed of the God-like powers that Heritage attributes to him, I like to think he would have taken that research into account. Alternatively, if he were alive today and just plowed ahead with policies that take no account of post-Reagan research, then he'd be nicely in line with mainstream conservatism but that would hardly be a very responsible way to behave.
The New York Timestakes a look at Senator Tom Coburn and all the legislation he's single-handedly holding up under the Senate's weird rules where one member can block a bill unless it's Chris Dodd trying to maintain some limits to presidential surveillance power. Tim Fernholz comments on efforts to put a stop to Coburn's obstructionism:
It'll be interesting to see how Harry Reid handles this one (the Times seems pessimistic about his chances for success) since it will be a preview of his ability to handle obstructionist Senators in 2009.
This is very right. During the Democratic primary there was a lot of emphasis on the relative level of commitment and general hard-core-ness of the different candidates as the independent variable in terms of what happens legislatively in 2009-2010. Realistically, though, if Barack Obama wins an enormous amount will depend on the procedural rules of the Senate and how the leadership and the Democratic rank and file interpret them. If a health care bill is handled through the budget reconciliation process (which you can't filibuster) then many things become possible that wouldn't otherwise be. More broadly, though I highly doubt this is going to happen, there's nothing stopping the Democrats from doing something along the lines of the proposed "nuclear option" and simply repealing the filibuster rule altogether. Alternatively, Tom Coburn could be allowed to hold up vast swathes of legislative activity. It really just depends on the extent to which Democratic members are interested in subordinating their own personal prerogatives as Senators to the larger effort to pass an ambitious legislative program.
The military is fessing up about a bad shooting in Iraq a little while back:
The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.
The thing you need to remember when you hear this kind of story of misconduct is that literally hundreds of thousands of foreign personnel have served in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. In that context, it really and truly is just a small handfull of bad apples who've done this kind of thing while the overwhelming majority have exhibited exemplary conduct by historical wartime standards.
But by the same token, what you see is that when such a massive undertaking goes on for years and years then even in a military where the overwhelming majority are well-behaved, a certain number of terrible things happen. And that is why Iraqis, quite rightly, don't want to see a foreign military operating on their soil and not subject to their laws. No sensible country would want to see such a thing happen, precisely because even under the best case it's still going to lead to the occasional tragedy. And of course the Defense Department, also quite rightly, has no intention of letting American military personnel engage in active operations on Iraqi soil while subject to Iraqi criminal jurisdiction rather than to American military law. Which is precisely why it makes sense for both countries for us to begin the process of packing up and leaving. Completely apart from the quality of the troops' performance (generally very high) or the quality of their tactical missions (seemingly very high recently) the overall situation is inherently untenable.
DoD photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter, U.S. Air Force
Kevin Drum is trying to find the answer to a question I asked him when I was in Orange County a little while back -- why is it that in southern California they use the definite article when referring to highways by number? Here on the east coast we drive on "I-95" or just "66" but over there they have "the 101." Thus far, his research isn't turning up anything very convincing. Anyone over in these parts have any thoughts? My pet theory has to do with Phantom Planet:
When I first heard this song, I thought they said "the 101" just in order to give their lyric enough syllables. Then I learned that's how everyone talks in that part of the country. But what if the band just brainwashed people into thinking they talk that way? Think about it.
If you look back to the summer of 2005, you'll see that few people at the time regarded conditions in Iraq as "good" or even acceptable. And yet things got so much worse over the course of 2006 and early 2007, that improvement in 2008 to bring us back to the kind of level of violence we had three years ago -- except with more walled-off and ethnically cleansed neighborhoods in place -- is now represented as a great triumph. James Vega has a forceful post up at The Democratic Strategist reminding us of how perverse this is.
And then you get things like today's newspaper headline "Bomb Attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk Kill Dozens". The essence of the "success" of the surge is that, as in 2004 and 2005, you only sometimes read about that kind of thing, whereas at its worst you read about it frequently. That's not nothing, but people should understand that even in its "better" state Iraq is very much a shattered society featuring an unenviable quality of life.
He identifies America's chief vital interest in the region without embarrassment: Persian Gulf energy resources. Until the United States develops an adequate substitute for oil, we are stuck in the Middle East protecting the free flow of affordable fossil fuel that not only fills American SUVs but also ensures the stability of global markets. Pollack makes a good case that were it not for our presence in the Gulf, we would not be such a valuable target on the jihadist hit list, and were we to leave tomorrow, the threat to the United States from Arab terror outfits would largely subside.
Since we are not leaving, we need to repair the region with a broad program of economic and political reform, different from the Bush administration's quick-fix obsession with elections that merely lent democratic legitimacy to Islamist groups in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. Pollack argues that a process of real liberal reform will take decades, if not longer.
I suspect that views of this sort are widespread both in elite Washington and around the country, and it's worth pointing out that this really doesn't make much sense. The basic proposition here is that if our military weren't so intimately involved in the Middle East, that this would run the risk of economic harm via instability in oil supplies. And fair enough, but our current policies have economic costs of their own in terms of both monetary expenditures (about $1 trillion on Iraq thus far, more than that in terms of bases and fixed infrastructure over the past couple of decades) in terms of terrorist attacks, in terms of pricey efforts to secure ourselves against terrorist attack (been on an airplane lately?), as well as in various other familiar airy senses.
That's the short-run tradeoff. In the longer term, we could massively mitigate the harms Pollack is worried about here by investing in making our country less oil dependent so that fluctuations in the price of oil wouldn't be such a big deal. A move of that sort would, of course, be a costly and difficult undertaking. But the alternative "a broad program of economic and political reform" that "will take decades, if not longer" to complete certainly doesn't sound any easier. And certainly there's no effort here to make an explicit cost-benefit calculation and explain why our past ten years' worth of forward-leaning policy in the Gulf have brought us more in economic benefits than they've cost, or that completely remaking the politica and society of the Arab world would be easier or cheaper than building a lot of windmills and trains.
Beyond that, this agenda is completely incoherent. Let's say you're a reform-minded Arab young professional surfing the web somewhere. And you read that Kenneth Pollack, leading American Middle East expert, has put forward a new book on grand strategy. The book argues that the US needs to promote a broad program of reform in the Arab world in order to prevent a violent Arab backlash against efforts to use American military domination to exploit the natural resources of the Arab world. What are you going to think about that? What's that going to make you think the next time you hear the American government talk about reform? Are you going to believe that invading Iraq was a well-intentioned effort to promote reform that perhaps went badly, or are you going to believe that it was an ill-intentioned effort to use American military domination to exploit the natural resources of the Arab world?
Reform is hard. Promoting reform is harder. Promoting reform in the name of cheap oil and military domination is almost certainly impossible.
Meanwhile, Smith seems to have decided to move to an even-more-wrongheaded position. His basic critique of both Pollack and the neocons is, basically, that they aren't racist enough ("As we saw with Hezbollah's orgiastic celebrations for released child-murderer Samir Kuntar, the problem with the Arab world is Arab societies themselves") and need to recognize that since Arabs are kind of subhuman all this democracy talk isn't going to get us anywhere.
Photo by Flickr user smatkins used under a Creative Commons license
Back on Friday, Jamie Kirchick wrote a kind of unhinged tirade against myself, other liberal Jewish writers such as Eric Alterman, and J Street, the new progressive pro-Israel pro-peace PAC that was, honestly, too long to read on a Friday. It was suggested to me, however, that in light of today's announcement of six more J Street endorsements of House candidates that I might want to check it out especially the part where he "guarantees" that Robert Wexler wouldn't accept a J Street endorsement.
Needless to say, today's list of endorsees includes Rep. Wexler along with Rep. Lois Capps and Rep. Susan Davis plus wannabe congresspeople Sam Bennett, Ashwin Madia, and Tom Perriello.
In this scenario, the government would operate the GSEs as public corporations for several years. They would then be in a position to extend credit where appropriate to support resolution of the housing crisis. Once the crisis has passed, the federal government would divide their functions into government and private components, the latter of which would be sold off in multiple pieces. The proceeds could be used to fund the low-income housing support activity that was previously mandated to the GSEs.
I'm not going to pretend to have any real expertise in this field, but a surprisingly broad (surprising to me, at least) range of knowledgeable people has taken something like this position and it's the one that seemed intuitively correct to me in the first instance. I've yet to hear any convincing arguments to the contrary or, indeed, any real effort on the part of either the administration or the congress to so much as explain why these sterner measures aren't on the table.
John McCain likes to point to his record on climate change as an example of an issue on which he differs with the Bush administration. But over time his once good-for-a-Republican record on this has started to look more and more threadbare. He wound up abandoning the legislative process formerly known as McCain-Lieberman, and actively opposed its successor, the McCain-Warner bill. McCain opposes all known efforts to encourage renewable electrical sources, and he's repeatedly promised to try to encourage low gasoline prices through increased drilling and reductions in taxes on oil companies. And now here's McCain economic adviser Steve Forbes more-or-less promising that McCain would, in practice, abandon cap and trade on carbon emissions:
Brad Johnson notes that if McCain follows Forbes here, he'll be following in the footsteps of Bush who promised to regulate carbon dioxide on the campaign trail in 2000 before deciding he liked pollution a lot.
McCain's increasingly watered-down position on climate has managed to pay dividends in terms of a huge spike in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests. It's McCain's right to sell out on this topic, but one hopes that if executives for polluting companies can notice that McCain's changes his stripes here that campaign reporters can as well.
UPDATE: Two things. First, clearly, that should be the "Lieberman-Warner" bill that McCain now opposes. Also, I'm told that McCain now says he favors renewable energy tax incentives even though he's always voted against them in the past.
Traditionally, one of the sources of America's advantage in wealth vis-a-vis the rest of the world has been higher overall levels of educational attainment. What's more, over time the overall level of educational attainment in the United States trended upwards. One of the most disturbing facts about the contemporary United States is that both of those trends have halted -- overall attainment levels have flatlined, and we've been overtaken by a number of other wealthy democracies. The causes of this remain somewhat mysterious, but (via Sara Mead) economists David Deming and Susan Dynarski suggest that the practice of so-called "Kindergarten Redshirting," where you keep your kid (usually a boy) out of kindergarten for an extra year so he'll be older than his peers and theoretically gain some kind of advantage, may be partially to blame:
Forty years ago, 96% of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84%. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit.
The basic causal mechanism, as Sara explains, is simple "Children (particularly boys) who are held back a year before entering kindergarten are a year older than their peers, which allows them to legally drop out of school a year earlier than they could have if they had started kindergarten when they were eligible, depressing educational attainment." Now individual choice plays a large role here so there's a limited amount policymakers can do to reverse this trend, but public policy does play a role here and we ought to try to make sure it's playing a constructive role.
Photo by Flickr user Leonid Mamchekov used under a Creative Commons license
Tom Edsall has a good overview of the election predictions offered by various political scientists. The consensus? A big win for Obama, unless he loses.
In truth, though, what's striking about the roundup is how little real disagreement there is. First there's Alan Abramowitz, Tom Mann, and Larry Sabato and their essay "The Myth of a Tossup Election" arguing that Obama will win easily. James Campbell, on the other hand, thinks it'll be close. Then we learn that "Vanderbilt's John Geer, in turn, is by no means convinced that McCain will lose as badly as Adlai Stevenson in 1952." Robert Y. Shapiro says it'll be close, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien argue that Obama will win but only narrowly because his race will turn off a segment of the electorate, Helmut Norpoth has a model that predicts a narrow Obama win, and then Sandy Maisel agrees with the Abramowitz/Mann/Sabato analysis.
Basically, predictions range from Obama winning narrowly to Obama winning easily with one guy calling it a toss-up. In other words nobody thinks McCain is likely to win.
My take on this is that the election is more unpredictable than the "Obama in a landslide" crowd thinks primarily because the fundamentals themselves are unpredictable. I don't think it's likely that there'll be a marked turnaround in economic conditions over the next few months, but macroeconomic trends are famously hard to forecast. Similarly, none of us really know what's going to happen in Iraq over the next few months. Elections are primarily determined by the fundamentals, and thus are in that sense more predictable than journalists usually imply, but it's not as if the fundamentals are all that easy to predict.
Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general's report released today.
In addition to inappropriate and illegal politicization, Goodling's habit of asking candidates for career positions "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" is also rather bizarre and creepy. Goodling, it seems, couldn't even see herself and her subordinates as serving alongside Bush in an effort to advance the larger cause of conservatism. Instead, the entire government is conceived of as existing to personally serve the greater glory of George W. Bush.
Ross Douthat recommends some anti-Dark Knightmusings from A.O. Scott:
I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. There is no doubt that Batman, a staple of American popular culture for nearly 70 years, provided Mr. Nolan (and his brother and screenwriting partner Jonathan), with a platform for his artistic ambitions. You can't set out to make a psychological thriller, or even an urban crime melodrama, and expect to command anything like the $185 million budget Mr. Nolan had at his disposal in "The Dark Knight." And that money, in addition to paying for some dazzling set pieces and action sequences, allowed Mr. Nolan and his team to create a seamless and evocative visual atmosphere, a Gotham nightscape often experienced from the air.
But to paraphrase something the Joker says to Batman, "The Dark Knight" has rules, and they are the conventions that no movie of this kind can escape.
Thence comes the thesis that a movie about a superhero just can't, on some level, be a great film. I think The Dark Knight has enough specific problems, especially in terms of the quality of the dialogue and some odd plot holes, that one is well-justified in cautioning that audience enthusiasm for this film shouldn't be allowed to go overboard. But I think moving toward a generic point about inherent limits of movies about Batman is pretty off-base. What is Homer writing about if not superheroes?
And at the same time, some of this winds up letting the artists off the hook. If a story's quality has been compromised in order to set up the next edition of the franchise, that's a storyteller compromising his story for money. Inevitable, perhaps, and thus not the most condemnation-worthy thing in the universe but still a real compromise that deserves to be criticized on the merits and not just waved off as an inevitable consequence of superhero-dom.
Meanwhile, not to be too much of a super hero apologist, I should say that over the weekend I went to see Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the Earth and at the end of the day Herzog's made a much better film.
Chris Broussard wrote last week about the Atlanta Hawks lowballing Josh Smith: "Atlanta realizes Smith has no leverage (I'm told Europe is not on his radar), and while one could argue the Hawks are being smart financially, they're screwing up by creating bad blood with one of their main cogs."
In the wake of what happened with Josh Childress doesn't the clear solution here seem to be putting Europe on his radar? Smith could even choose, at the end of the day, to stay in the states for less money than what some Euro squad is offering him but if he's not happy with Atlanta's $57 million, six year deal he should see if someone is willing to pay him more. It's crazy to leave the option of Europe entirely off the table.
I caught some of MSNBC's coverage yesterday afternoon and David Shuster was being shockingly forthright in pointing out that the McCain campaign's accusations about the cancellation of Barack Obama's visit to see some wounded troops in Germany were totally baseless. It seems Andrea Mitchell's got the bug too:
Unfortunately, my understanding of the research is that a thorough debunking of a bogus charge only very partially undoes the damage of making it. That's not to say that everyone's incentive is to say crazy lies all the time, but unless this creates a backlash against McCain that goes beyond this issue and builds a larger negative attitude about McCain being unprincipled and dishonest, the mere fact that the press is shooting down his allegations doesn't mean this can't help him at the end of the day.
Dean Baker notes that press coverage of a "record" deficit projection is based on measuring the deficit in terms of nominal dollars. You can do that if you want, of course, but there's no good reason to use this metric. Measuring by nominal dollars will give you the result that deficits always tend to get bigger over time (because of inflation) and also that larger, richer countries tend to run bigger deficits than smaller, poorer ones. Those, however, aren't the kind of results you want if you're looking for meaningful information about the state of public finance. For that, you need to turn to the deficit-to-GDP ratio. Historical chart below:
Dean observes that "the 2009 deficit will be equal to about 3.3 percent of GDP," similar to the deficits earlier in the Bush administration and to the deficits ran in the mid-1970s. The real "record" deficits hit in the 1980s and early 1990s were substantially larger than today's deficits.
One pundit who I guess we can be sure won't be falling out of love with John McCain is Richard Cohen who today writes that he can name more admirable stuff McCain has done over the course of his live than he can about Barack Obama. This turns out to be especially true if you take a question Obama was right about, the decision to invade the war in Iraq, and decide that it doesn't count because he was representing a liberal constituency. But things like John McCain's opposition to a prescription drug benefit for Medicare and his "very early call for more troops" in Iraq do count even though McCain was representing a very conservative constituency.
Basically, since John McCain has been alive a lot longer than Obama, if you focus only on the positive actions of both men but refuse to count any of Obama's positive actions then McCain comes off looking much better than Obama. Consequently, to Cohen Obama is a bit of a sketchy unknown figure:
I know that Barack Obama is a near-perfect political package. I'm still not sure, though, what's in it.
Now in an ideal world candidates for office might release statements, speeches, documents, etc. about their policy ideas. People could scrutinize these ideas. Most people, of course, might be too busy to plow into detail. But a professional newspaper columnist, at least, would be able to sit down and really dig into what Obama is proposing to do on taxes versus what McCain is proposing to do. You could look into their plans for health care and for the environment. All sorts of things like that. And then even a guy with a relatively brief record in federal office wouldn't appear to be such a blank slate. So it's really too bad nobody does that. You would think that with the dawn of the internet candidates could at least put something up on their website under an "issues" tab or something.
I see Eric Alterman paid closer attention than I did to Jamie Kirchick's missive about J Street from last week and found this important nugget. Kirchick writes:
The attempt by people like Ben-Ami, Alterman, Yglesias, Klein et.al. to portray their advocacy of unconditional Israeli negotiations with Iran and Hamas, unconditional Israeli territorial concessions, the Palestinian "right of return," (among other extreme positions) as having any truck within the mainstream of Jewish, American or Israeli opinion, while also having the gall to allege that anyone remotely to their right is an extremist, is something that psychologists call "projection.
Eric responds:
Well, excuse me, young man, I've never taken any position at all on Israeli negotiations with Iran or Hamas, the Palestinian right of return, or even "unconditional" territorial concessions, much less advocate for them. You are simply making that up. My guess is that neither have Matthew Yglesias or Ezra Klein, but they can speak for themselves.
I'm fairly certain I have said that Israel should negotiate with Hamas (certainly I do think Israel should negotiate with Hamas) but I don't think I've ever said anything about direct Israeli talks with Iran, which I think is too unrealistic on both sides to be a plausible idea, and I definitely don't favor a robust "right of return" that would see millions of Palestinians moving to Israel proper. I'm not sure I understand what unilateral territorial concessions are supposed to mean in this context -- are we supposed to understand Ariel Sharon as a fringe left-wing extremist for his Gaza withdrawal plan? I dunno.
Eric remarks that "One would think that the magazine that unleashed Stephen Glass (and Ruth Shalit) on the world would be more careful before empowering yet another young person with no journalistic credentials to make fantastic allegations merely because they happen to be consistent with the prejudices of the people who run it." I'm a blogger by trade, so I understand that mistakes happen in this medium and that it's not realistic to rigorously fact-check after post ex ante. Still, this is far from the first time that I've seen Kirchick attribute views to me that I don't hold. Sometimes he says I think things when I've written the reverse in books he claims to have read. It's an annoying habit, and it's especially annoying to know that there will be absolutely no consequences for this sort of thing and that he'll go on to have a long and successful career.
Marc Ambinder writes about the prospects for an elite backlash against the McCain campaign's new strategy of making stuff up:
"I will defend every single word in every single ad," a senior McCain campaign adviser told me last week. "But you can't really blame Obama for gas prices," I responded. "As they say, if you're not part of the solution," and here the adviser paused and smiled, "you're part of the problem."
Concerns about whether McCain is coming off too mean, they say, are irrelevant. The media, they believe, has created double standard that allows them to view Obama's contempt for McCain as in-bounds and McCain's attempts to draw contrasts with Obama as out-of-bounds.
But look, the issue here isn't that there's something out of bounds about drawing a "contrast" with Barack Obama. The issue is that, as Marc's source admits, the charge that Obama is responsible for the high price of gasoline is false. Similarly, attacking Obama for refusing to meet with injured soldiers because he was told he couldn't bring press cameras would be a perfectly fair attack except for the fact that it isn't true. So called "negative advertising" has gotten a bad reputation, but there's really nothing wrong with being mean about your opponent. But campaigns should be expected to stay within some kind of bounds of accuracy.
The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press.
Rick Perlstein can be a cynical as he wants to be about Richard Nixon and the founding of the EPA, but at the end of the day the upshot of Nixon's EPA-related cynicism was real improvement in the state of American environmental policy. The Bush administration has shown us that there are other ways of doing business.
In a new Brookings paper, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine reach the startling conclusion that when you increase the number of teenagers eligible to receive family planning services through Medicaid you get fewer teen pregnancies. Imagine that! It seems worth mocking but, honestly, the absurd thing isn't so much the research as that the relevant policies aren't already in place. For the record: "The authors estimate the policy cost of preventing an unwanted birth to be around $6,800. They conclude that this is a cost-effective policy intervention relative to other policies and programs targeted at reducing teen and unwanted births."
It seems the price-induced reductions in miles driven we're experiencing is significant enough that it's producing a shortfall in gas tax money going into the Highway Trust Fund. In response, I would note that John McCain's call for a gas tax "holiday" seems likely to exacerbate this problem significantly. On top of that, it seems to me that this would be an opportune moment to revisit some of our national priorities. With Trust Fund revenue falling, we ought to dedicate what remains to maintaining our existing road infrastructure but stop funding new highway projects.
Instead, general revenues can and should be used to pay for substantial increases in the quantity and quality of non-car transportation options. After all, the striking thing about the modest decline in driving that we've seen in 2008 is that it's happened even though essentially no effort has been put into providing anyone with reasonable alternatives. Insofar as state and local governments have responded at all, it's tended to be by cutting back on rail and bus service to save money at a time when the economic slowdown is hurting state budgets and the federal government is acting cluelessly.
New rail lines would, obviously, take time to build. But one could easily enough increase frequency and decrease fares on bus lines all across the country as a short-term measure. And there are a lot of commuter rail lines around the country that could have their non-rush hour frequency boosted in the short run. And of course we ought to be planning for the long run. Right now, only a smallish minority of Americans have access to decent quality alternatives to daily driving but it doesn't need to be that way and we shouldn't leave ourselves this exposed to future energy shocks.
Photo by Flickr user Rene S used under a Creative Commons license
Gareth Porter reminds us that this isn't the first time Nouri al-Maliki has tried to get the Bush administration to agree to a timeline for withdrawing from Iraq, writing about a summer 2006 episode that the Bush administration tried, successfully, to walk back. Jim Henley wonders if Bush could have saved the GOP's electoral prospects by just agreeing to what, at the time, pretty much all the major Iraqi factions were looking for. It's a bit hard to say, but it's just incredibly saddening to think of the fairly large number of decent opportunities to extricate ourselves from Iraq that were passed up in 2005 and early 2006 -- what if we'd followed up the famous 2005 "purple finger" elections with a negotiated plan to withdraw forces from the country? -- in the name of Bush's imperial dreams.
According to Jonathan Martin, the indictment of Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) is good news for John McCain (R-AZ) because it will "at least subtly remind voters about the clashes between the two senators over the years" over pork.
As you may recall, back during the 2004 campaign John Kerry said something about counterterrorism being primarily a question to be dealt with through law enforcement and intelligence rather than something that should be understood as primarily a kind of war. George W. Bush was eager to pounce:
Some are skeptical that the war on terror is really a war at all. My opponent said, and I quote, "The war on terror is less of a military operation, and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation." I disagree—strongly disagree.
Today, Barry Schweid writes for the AP about a new Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation report:
Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."
"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism," said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.
That comes via Spencer Ackerman. Press release here, full study here, congressional briefing here. In the spirit of credit where due, let's raise a glass to John Edwards and his 2008 presidential campaign team for being the only ones willing to stand up and explicitly repudiate the "war on terror" conceptual framework when given a chance back during the primaries.
They’ll also begin to use “Pelosi-Reid-Obama” in the all-in-the-same-breath way that Democrats now use “Bush-McCain” — to make the parties’ popular candidates indistinguishable from their less beloved incumbents.
This was more or less Bill Kristol's column a couple of days ago. The trouble is that as best I can tell, Pelosi isn't nearly unpopular enough for this to work. Her approval ratings are always in the thirties and so are her disapproval ratings. She's not a wildly popular figure, but she rates quite a bit better than George W. Bush and meanwhile is pretty obscure and unknown by a large block of people.
I saw this photo the other day and thought to myself "that looks delicious, too bad it's vegan fake chicken . . . mmm I should go to the Eden Center and get banh mi sometime soon." But now via McMegan I learn that it may be all in my head:
The clever experiment went like this: a large group of people were given a "human values" test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on "social authority" - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the "vegetarian" sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on "social power values" tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system. The scientists also conducted a similar experiment with Pepsi. Sure enough, people who fit the Pepsi demographic - they think having an "exciting life" is very important - always preferred Pepsi, even when they were actually drinking a generic cola.
Perhaps it's time to give vegan sausage a try.
Photo by Flickr user monkeyone used under a Creative Commons license
John McCain is asked whether he would order US forces to strike Osama bin Laden in Pakistan if they had a read on his location, and he bizarrely doesn't commit to doing so citing Pakistani sovereignty as his concern. That seems a bit odd to me; it's well-known and well-understood (though perhaps not by McCain) that the Pakistani government doesn't exercise effective control over significant swathes of its nominal territory and that this is a large part of the problem of al-Qaeda hideouts there.
Under the circumstances, Pakistani sovereignty can't be your top concern. The legitimate hesitation (though perhaps not the thing to say during an election) I would have before blasting away at OBL would have to do with collateral damage. Killing or capturing bin Laden would be an excellent thing to do, but with any of these targets it's probably more important to check first and make sure you're not also going to blow up a school bus or something as you go after the main target.
The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk -- either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.
"I'll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups," Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.
This, I think, does more than a little to underscore the limits of the "bribe our former enemies to be our friends" approach to Iraq. Of course, though the limits are real so are the possibilities. If keeping these guys on the payroll indefinitely were really crucial to American national security, I'm pretty sure we could find a way to work things out for quite a while. But it really isn't crucial to American national security. Having insurgents not shooting at US troops is much preferable to the previous situation, but insofar as the safety of our soldiers is the primary concern then getting the soldiers out of Iraq is a much more reasonable long-term strategy.
The "cash for allies" approach makes sense as a way to make a military presence more sustainable in a place where the presence is strategically important. But for some time now, the main strategic purpose of our presence in Iraq seems to be simply to sustain our presence in Iraq. That's not a good enough reason.
Chris Bowers proclaims that if Barack Obama picks Tim Kaine as his VP nominee that "would also signal that Obama has no intention to govern as a progressive" whereas "by contrast, Obama / Sebelius would be fine, and Obama / Dodd would be exciting." This seems to me to be reading way too much into the VP selection. Ronald Reagan's selection of George H.W. Bush much more presaged Bush becoming a conservative than Reagan becoming a moderate.
The best guide to how Obama intends to govern isn't who he picks as VP, it's the stuff he's said about how he intends to govern and what he hopes to accomplish. That'd put him to the left of the Clinton-Gore era of the Democratic Party but to the right of the Open Left vision of where the party ought to be, and that'll still be the case no matter who Obama picks.
As he got his presidential campaign going, John McCain wound up flip-flopping on several crucial issues saying he would vote against his own immigration bill, repudiating his record on taxes to embrace Bush's record, etc. But lately the campaign just seems to be off the rails, and unable to decide what McCain's stance is on various topics. For example, McCain and McCain's spokesman can't agree on whether or not increasing the payroll tax cap should be "on the table" in terms of changing Social Security. It's a point McCain has gone back-and-forth on many, many times over the course of the campaign.
Similarly, just yesterday we had McCain surrogates suggesting that McCain was going to abandon his support for cap and trade. Is he? Maybe with the Olympics coming up and the expected attendant lull in campaign coverage, Team McCain can slow down and huddle for a couple of weeks in Arizona to just go down the checklist and figure out where they stand on these issues. Hold some conference calls. Something. Is it possible that if McCain knew how to use email that he could maybe send some remarks out and get everyone on the same page?
Another sign of desperation at the McCain Campaign as they seem to have hired Matt Yglesias to do their copy editing.
Meanwhile, one thing I admire about Barack Obama is that he's taken a principled stand against a pointless overemphasis of manned space exploration even as Hillary Clinton and McCain both sought consistently to pander to the small number of beneficiaries of the status quo.
Ezra Klein called attention earlier today to some alarming predictions about the future of the American waistline. Often when people contemplate the unsound eating habits of the average American they suggest that the typical diet of Mediterranean countries would be a better model to emulate. Unfortunately John Boonstra notes that the reverse seems to be happening and Mediterranean people are shifting to American-style larger portions, more meat, and worse health outcomes.
The proximate cause is that these traditionally middle income countries are getting rich, and thus adopting the bad eating habits of richer countries. All of which points to a fairly profound challenge. Everyone understands that GDP is not the be-all and end-all of human flourishing. But still, typically as countries get richer you see an amelioration of conditions across the board. Beyond a certain point, however, this badly breaks down with regard to certain aspects of diet and public health. Our bodies are programmed to strongly desire certain kinds of foodstuffs that are assumed to be objectively scarce. Wealth undermines that assumption of scarcity in ways that are extremely deleterious to human well-being.
The good news, such as it is, is that we have a very robust tradition of government intervention in the agricultural sector. No free marketeers on the farm, no laissez faire in the refrigerator. Meaning that instead of our current policies, which are designed to do God-knows-what, we could have policies that discouraged the production and consumption of delicious French Fries, Combos, and steak and encouraged the production and consumption of not-so-delicious vegetables and quinoa.
Photo by Flickr user Jimmy MacDonald used under a Creative Commons license
Josh Marshall wonders how John McCain can be described as "ambivalent" about running on his war record when his war record is such a major theme of his campaign that "At many of his events, his campaign sets up a screen and plays for the crowd a three-minute film called "Service with Honor," telling the story of McCain's more than five years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison after his Navy plan was shot down in 1967."
But this is easy. As many pundits have pointed out, John McCain has awesome powers of oppositology. Suppose, for example, you were to catch McCain in a lie -- as seems to happen frequently these days. Well, Richard Cohen has explained that the very ease with which one catches McCain lying is evidence of his honesty:
McCain's true virtue is that he is a lousy politician. He is not a convincing liar, and when he adopts positions that are not his own, they infect him, sapping him of what might be called integrity energy.
Media Matters goes after the press and its worshipful relationship with John McCain:
I'll freely admit that Barack Obama gets about the best press I've ever seen a Democrat who doesn't just constantly trash other Democrats get. But the specter of watching John McCain -- who gets the best press of any politician anywhere -- spend the past few weeks whining about the media is more than a little infuriating.
It seems that with the Bush administration now agreeing to a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of US forces, the Iraqis are ready once again to talk about a Status of Forces Agreement. This, as I've been saying, is both as it should be and reflects the Iraqi-side case for a withdrawal timeline. American troops clearly aren't going to leave immediately so some kind of SOFA is needed. And the Pentagon will demand that the SOFA include provisions that are reasonable for a combat situation. But those conditions necessarily undermine the notion of a sovereign Iraq, so it's vitally important -- both politically and substantively -- for the Iraqi government to make clear that this is a temporary situation with an endpoint. That's why Maliki wants a timetable, it's one of the reasons Barack Obama's proposed a timetable, and it's why Bush and McCain seem to be getting dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of a timetable.
Meanwhile, it can't be said often enough that despite the reductions in violence over the course of the past 18 months an awful lot of the underlying conflicts that could lead to violence are still lurking. Brian Katulis and Peter Juul did a nice look at Kirkuk the other day in the wake of bombings in the north. One hopes that different Iraqi factions will have the good sense to avoid destructive conflict over this and other lingering issues, but they might not and I don't think it's smart to leave the Army sitting around in the middle of things waiting to find out.
I say right on to this. But what's more, there's something revealing about the sense of entitlement among Joe Klein's antagonists at Commentary. As he says "They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me." The people on the hawk side of this issue are used to getting their way through bullying, and to terrifying a large number of people who disagree with them out of ever saying so. One thing I think the blogosphere has been helpful in doing is opening up the conversation a little bit by giving some voice and prominence to people who didn't have much to lose or didn't necessarily know any better. Some of that spirit has trickled back into the MSM and it's a very good thing.
US Senator Sam Brownback is outraged that China may monitor the internet use of hotel guests in Beijing for the Olympics. I mean, what kind of a country would engage in electronic surveillance without any kind of warrant or due process? Only an authoritarian nightmare like China. Or, well, the United States of America. Brownback explains the difference thusly:
We don't put the hardware and software on hotels. If there is a targeted individual that seems to be a likely prospect of terrorists, they must go through the FISA court and ask for a court to determine that there is probable cause to be able to listen in on that information.
That's great. That really is the difference between a bad policy and a good one. In a country with meaningful privacy rights, the government would need to go to a court and get someone to agree that there's probably cause before they're allowed to listen in. But that's exactly what the Bush administration didn't do and what the new legal framework will let them get away with not doing. Maybe Brownback wasn't briefed?
It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.
One could dispute that theory, but it's not a particularly remarkable thing to say. You have a candidate who was greeted enthusiastically in Europe saying that the enthusiasm was about something larger than him -- about the United States and about the values Barack Obama and millions of other Americans cherish and hope will once again govern the country.
But Dana Millbank wanted to write an article about how "Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee." So he wrote:
Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."
And now for hours the press and the GOP have been in a frenzy about Obama's arrogance. Because he tried to say something humble about why he was greeting by hundreds of thousands of people when he gave a speech.
Washington Post: "For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true."
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the article proceeds as if harshly-phrased dishonest attacks exist on a continuum with harsh, accurate attacks.
Henry Farrell finds himself surprised to see "so little of the usual bombast" in the recent Phoenix Initiative report from CNAS. In general, I think it's a pretty remarkable document for typifying how the boundaries of what counts as a mainstream view have shifted over the past few years in a very positive direction. It's been, at times, a frustrating process but there are real result.
The big challenge facing Barack Obama is whether or not ordinary people can relate to him. After all, he's a big-time elitist. He thinks that it's better, all things considered, to speak two languages rather than one. Meanwhile, John McCain continues to flaunt his regular guy attributes, showing off his $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins in a variety of settings in much the same spirit that the legendary straight talker once traveled, like a man of the people, in the First Class car on the Acela to Philadelphia.
This comes to me via Chris Hayes who claims to be too high-minded to mock Mr. Fancyshoes. I, however, received a knowing nod of approval from Obama directed at my T-MAC 6s at YearlyKos 2007 so I owe him loyalty in all footwear-related matters.
In the relentless quest to find the soccer moms of this election, perhaps the answer will be found in the “active granny” vote — empty-nesters who have found a new freedom in their lives after the kids have left and who look at the world very differently than do their kids graduating college.
Not to rehash the entire Mark Penn debate, but has he missed the point that most people whose kids have just left home aren't grandparents? Surely having grandchildren should be a necessary condition for "active granny" status. Meanwhile, I'm surprised he's not encouraging candidates to play for the sniper vote.
Wow. Here's a weird story and some awesome reporting from Mother Jones. The article's subhead sums things up about as well as anything else: "Mary McFate was a prominent gun control activist. Mary Lou Sapone was a freelance spy with an NRA connection. They are the same person." Now, naturally, gun control activists write large are worried that this isn't the only example and that their movement may contain more moles planted by the gun lobby.
Here's another one for the "if a Democrat did it, the media would roast him alive" file. It seems the McCain campaign put together a joke site called Barack Book which is intended to mock Barack Obama and his supporters in a variety of ways. Since one of Obama's alleged political weaknesses is that unlike John McCain he's a charismatic, compelling speaker who people are excited about they chose to poke fun at him through the trope that, allegedly, his fans think he's the messiah. Specifically, Marc Ambinder explains the site "included a link to a real Facebook page, and next to an entry for 'employer,' the RNC wrote in 'Messiah Lutheran Church.'"
Messiah Lutheran Church, ha ha ha. Except this is the name of a real church, whose members are apparently mostly in Missouri but which has branches all across the country including this congregation in Florida whose photo I'm borrowing above.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure I even understand the McCain campaign's joke. They thought "Messiah Lutheran" was over-the-top and parodic, I guess? But it's not like the idea of a church dedicated to worshipping a messiah is wacky -- that's what they're doing in all the churches.
Every summer The Hill newspaper puts out its 50 most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill list, a DC event like no other because hating Hill types is one of the favorite passtimes of non-Hill Washingtonians. It's also time for the annual DCeiver commentary on the list which is highly recommended.
But not to steal the punchline here or anything, but one of the people on the list is Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) who'll be resigning from congress after the one-two punch of a DWI followed by the revelation that he had a secret second family. Amusingly, his dating status is listed as "Married, with children" which I suppose is accurate, but still.
PPI has launched a new blog, MovingUp USA on issues of poverty and social mobility. Over there Katie Campbell has a post on "States and Cities Take a Lead in Poverty Reduction" noting various things and then arguing that "Due to the skyrocketing federal deficit, which Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post writes today will grow to a whopping $490 billion dollars this year, it looks like states and cities will have to continue to lead the way and find creative solutions to reduce poverty and boost social mobility regardless of who wins the White House this fall."
Since urban areas tend to contain both pockets of poor people and pockets of liberals, it's to some extent inevitable that city governments will wind up taking the lead on poverty issues. But for the sake of poor people, we shouldn't be content to leave it that way. On the local level, after all, the easiest and most effective way to eliminate poverty is just to make it too expensive for poor people to live there. Your typical low-poverty suburb hasn't discovered some miracle formula that turns all its citizens non-poor. Instead, land in the suburb is relatively expensive and its enacted regulations that prevent you from building small houses, from building dense apartment buildings, from crowding a lot of people into a single family home, etc. Basically, if you make it illegal to do anything that would make it possible for a poor person to rent a home in your town, you can ensure yourself a low poverty rate.
This could work in big cities, too. New York City could eliminate its existing public housing, enact regulations to make it even harder than it currently is to build new housing units, and end rent control and soon enough the number of poor people would plummet. But you wouldn't be actually helping anyone this way, you'd just be pushing them out. Conversely, a city that does maintain a reasonable level of services for poor people (and note that the ability to get around without a car is an important service for many poor Americans) will likely become something of a magnet for the impoverished. Even -- or in some ways especially -- if such a city establishes a track record of helping people get on their feet on move up the economic ladder, its actual poverty rate may not decline as new waves of poor people show up.
Which isn't to say that state and local government can't do good things. Often they do very good things. But ultimately the incentives facing a lot of local governments are bad, and the resources aren't distributed in the right way. National leadership is vital to making really sustainable progress, especially considering that the number of people in need of help goes up in downturns at just the time when state and local governments usually need to cut spending.
Photo by Flickr user padraic used under a Creative Commons license
NBC News: "McCain and his campaign repeated at least two lines of attack against Obama, which when first said in early July, were called 'bogus,' 'wrong,' 'inflated' and 'misleading' by independent fact checkers."
It looks like the McCain campaign's strategy of relying on frequent lying may be getting their candidate something of a reputation as a liar.
One of the oddest aspects of some of the debates over the Bush administration and various forms of legal due process has been how unkosher it's viewed to suggest that the sort of powers Bush wants might be used abusively, in the manner of a Richard Nixon. It's odd because the rules Bush is trying to discard were put in place for the very specific reason that the Watergate investigation led to revelations of a much larger pattern of abuse. It's a pattern that reached a high point under Nixon, but wherein Nixon was clearly building on the abuses of his predecessors. So it wouldn't by any means be unprecedented for the Bush administration to use, say, surveillance powers to spy on political adversaries.
Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman says surely the recent revelations coming out of the Justice Department should be relevant here. People were being hired and fired for career positions on explicitly partisan political grounds. That's serious wrongdoing. And it's at the Justice Department. That's not evidence that partisan abuses were happening at the NSA, but combined with the history it should surely raise an eyebrow or two and in a rational world would be fueling demands for a more thorough examination of what the administration was really up to.
The LA City Council adopted a measure yesterday to prevent new fast food restaurants from opening in South LA. The theory is that this will enhance the diversity of dining options in the area in a manner conducive to public health. Cato's David Boaz throws a fit:
But I was particularly struck by this statement from Councilwoman Jan Perry, sponsor of the measure: “I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options.”
Greater food options? All the council is doing is banning some restaurants. How will that give residents more options? Maybe — maybe — other restaurants will open in South Los Angeles because fewer fast food restaurants will open over the coming year. But residents will still not have “greater food options,” just different options, courtesy of those who know best.
I don't find Perry's reasoning all that baffling. It seems that the most profitable kind of food service business to run in South LA is a fast food business. It further seems that this is the case to such an extent that there are almost no sit-down restaurants in the area. But it's possible that a sit-down restaurant in South LA could be profitable, while still being a less efficient use of the space than would a fast food outlet. Prevent new fast food outlets from opening and some sit-down restaurants may open to fill the gap. That will probably result in a smaller overall number of eating establishments than would have existed without the ban, but a greater diversity of choices since the hypothetical new fast food outlets would be similar to the existing options.
Now that said, it's far from clear to me that this is a good idea. The notion is to reduce obesity by bringing healthier choices into play. But what's banned is "any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers." That doesn't have anything to do with the nutritional content of the food being served and as such seems unlikely to have any kind of dramatic impact on the variable they're trying to nail. My neighborhood's beloved Florida Avenue Grill isn't fast food, but it's not health food either.
Sam Stein had the opportunity to hear Said Jawad, who's been Afghanistan's ambassador to the USA since 2003, talk about the national security situation and reports that while Jawad avoided any specific mention of Barack Obama or John McCain, he broadly endorsed what Obama has been saying about Afghanistan. It seems, in short, that both Iraqi and Afghan leaders agree that Obama is right and Bush is wrong about the need to rebalance away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan.
Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack argue that Hannah Rosin was overreading the evidence when she concluded that Section 8 rental vouchers were responsible for a crime spike in the Memphis area.
Describing Barack Obama's support for a cap and trade plan as a tax on electricity when McCain is also trying to get credit for breaking with Bush and supporting a cap and trade plan is doubleplus good.
If I may return to the question of John McCain's $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins imported from Italy, I want to say that I think the fact that McCain is an extremely wealthy man is more legitimately relevant to the campaign than a lot of liberals seem willing to credit. If it turned out that back in his State Senate days Barack Obama passed some laws that massively increased the value of a parcel of land he owned, people would report on that story. Or if John McCain was a major stockholder in a defense contracting firm and used his clout on the Armed Services Committee to steer contracts in their direction, people would consider that a relevant factor. And if a governor somewhere were dipping into the state treasury and transferring the money into personal accounts, people would care.
So when you look at something like the distributive impact of Barack Obama's tax plans versus the distributive impact of John McCain's tax plans, it doesn't strike me as ludicrous to say that people ought to spend some time pondering the fact that McCain is a member of the small minority of people who would have higher after tax income under his plan than under Obama's:
On the merits, of course, bad policy is bad policy irrespective of who proposes it. Repealing the estate tax would be a bad idea even if John McCain had no kids, and even if the McCain family didn't own eleven houses. But still, self-dealing holds a special role in conventional political discussions, and it's not for nothing that McCain makes a big deal out of the ideas of honor and sacrifice as campaign themes.
The obvious problem with the polls you see all the time about how the public feels about such and such an issue is that these surveys don't tell you whether the people actually care about the issue or not. Taegan Goddard, meanwhile, glossesThe Opinion Makers forthcoming from David W. Moore:
The author — a former senior editor of the Gallup Poll — says that today's opinion polls misfire due to an intrinsic methodological problem: survey results don't differentiate between "those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue."
This is disturbing. Either Moore managed to find a publisher for a book thesis about as obvious as "college students like to drink," or else Moore's thesis actually isn't as bog obvious as I think it is. I'm not sure which is worse.
Or there's a third option: his thesis really is as obvious as I think it is, but everyone keeps pretending not to know it anyway. Which means it's worth a book. Good luck, David!
I think that option number three is correct. Nobody who thinks about this stuff a lot could possibly fail to have thought of Moore's point, but at the same time politicians and their aides very frequently do act as if they don't understand this. I think the reason is that referring to polling data, even bad data, is a good CYA mechanism when you need to make difficult decisions. A consultant who says "we don't have any valid data on this question, but I think you should do X" is going to get blamed if X doesn't turn out right. But if he can point to some data, and say that he's not making the recommendation, he's just pointing to the numbers then if things go south it isn't really his fault.
This is a pretty common organizational flaw. The natural tendency is to try to maximize whatever it is that you have a good measurement of, even if the measured quantity is only questionably related to what you're trying to do. Politicians know how to get an issue poll in the field, and there aren't great metrics for getting the information you would really want. So campaigns often go to war with the data they have, even while knowing that the data's no good.
A new CNN/Opinion Research poll out Wednesday shows that despite nine solid days of blanket media coverage from overseas with Barack Obama cheered by adoring throngs of Germans and parlez-vousing with the French, making a three-point shot in the Middle East and standing outside No. 10 Downing Street, the freshman Illinois Democratic presidential nominee to be Senator Barack Obama of Illinois stayed static in the polls despite his well-covered long foreign tripsenator is stuck right where he was in the polls before he left.
How bad are things for Obama? Pretty bad: "He still leads Republican Sen. John McCain 51-44. But it's the same 51-44 as last time." Do you think that if Obama wins, then the day after the election all the headlines will be about how he hasn't yet really pulled away from McCain? Shouldn't the whole "our nominee is consistently behind in the polls" thing be worrying Republicans?
St. Petersburg Times (Florida): "The Straight Talk Express has taken a nasty turn into the gutter. Sen. John McCain has resorted to lies and distortions in what sounds like an increasingly desperate attempt to slow down Sen. Barack Obama by raising questions about his patriotism. Instead of taking the Democrat down a few notches, these baseless attacks are raising more questions about the Republican's campaign and his ability to control his temper."
Obama Tour Doesn't Help In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll Finds; Voters Care More About Energy Than Iraq --- FLORIDA: Obama 46 - McCain 44; OHIO: Obama 46 - McCain 44; PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 49 - McCain 42.
That's right -- Obama's tour didn't help. He's just winning in Ohio and winning in Florida. He must be shaking with terror.
Oftentimes policies designed to protect the environment involve difficult tradeoffs with economic growth. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes we have bad policies in place that encourage people to use space or energy wastefully, and these policies are both bad for the environment and bad for economic growth -- waste is bad. When confronted with such policies, politicians have an aggravating tendency to gesture in the direction of local culture suggesting that people in their jurisdictions just happen to have, as quirk, a strong desire to see resources used poorly. Thus via Robert Farley, we get Houston Mayor Bill White explaining why his city has such a low recycling rate:
“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated. But Houstonians can change, and change fast.”
As Farley says, when you read things like "25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city . . . the city says it cannot afford more bins" you start to wonder if an independent streak and an aversion to hype is really to blame here. Like maybe if the city provided bins to people who ask for bins, then more people would recycle. Or maybe we're supposed to believe that Houston's independent streak extends to a desire to have government services provided ineptly.
Photo by Flickr user dnorman used under a Creative Commons license
Paul Krugman writes that you can't think correctly about climate change unless you take adequate consideration of relatively unlikely scenarios for disaster. Psychologically, if there's only a one or two percent change of something happening, we tend to put it in the "not going to happen" file. But sound policymaking would consider a one percent chance of a scenario in which billions die to be something worth worrying about.
I've been thinking about this lately as I re-read Watchmen inspired by the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation. It's a reminder that in the 1980s, and especially before the Reykjavik Summit there was enormous anxiety about nuclear war. In particular, the criticism that Ronald Reagan's policies were likely to lead to a nuclear war was, though clearly not embraced by a majority, a fairly widespread and mainstream opinion. This comes out in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and "99 Red Balloons" among other places:
Obviously, in retrospect this was wrong. Consequently, from a certain point of view the Nuclear Freeze Movement people and critics of Reagan's "evil empire" rhetoric look foolish. But when you think in terms of probabilities this isn't necessarily right. Say that under Jimmy Carter's policies there would have been a one percent chance of a nuclear war in the 1981-84 period whereas under Reagan's more aggressive policies there was a three percent chance of such a war. That still gives a very good chance that Reaganism will work out -- 97 percent is good odds -- but still probably means that the Reagan option is a bad idea. But then of course things will probably turn out okay, making the skeptics look foolish, and perhaps unduly biasing future policymaking toward aggressive options.
I criticized Michael Scherer's article comparing the McCain and Obama tax plans, but he's done a great post at Swampland following up on the article and laying out very clearly why it is that Barack Obama's plan would cut taxes for most people and how it differs from McCain's plan.
Profits way up at Exxon and Shell. That sounds to me like a good time to implement John McCain's plan for a "summer holiday" tax cut for oil companies! After all, with all these skyrocketing profits their tax bill must be on the rise as well.
Business Week: "This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn’t make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It’s a blatant lie." But also the following scoop:
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
Back when I was in college and writing a blog, nobody even knew what a blog was. These days, though, the kids have all kinds of fancy new media including a podcast called The Progressive Student Voice which, as you can guess, is progressive politics for students. Yesterday I was interviewed for a segment on their latest episode talking mostly about Heads in the Sand and its applicability to our current political moment, but also a bit about blogging in general and the course of new media.
Say the word "HMO" and most Americans start reaching for their revolver. But most people who look at health policy and health economics agree that the HMOs were actually on to something, and that there really needs to be more scrutiny of which procedures are actually helpful and more emphasis on prevention rather than costly treatment. One question is why didn't this work out better? Paul Krugman's theory:
[I]f costs are to be controlled, someone has to act as a referee on doctors' medical decisions. During the 1990's it seemed, briefly, as if private H.M.O.'s could play that role. But then there was a public backlash. It turns out that even in America, with its faith in the free market, people don't trust for-profit corporations to make decisions about their health.
In my view what people objected to was not the for-profit status of HMOs per se but rather that they could be told they can't get all the care they want. That view will remain.
I don't think Cowen's got this right. Or, rather, while people will naturally always want "all the care they want," people's desire to obtain health care is large part a result of their interaction with the health care system. If I'm feeling ill and want the doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics, but then he says "no no no, you have madeupitis and if you take antibiotics you'll die" then suddenly it seems I don't want the antibiotics anymore. Medical treatment isn't fun, people don't just want treatment for no reason. If you convince them that the treatment isn't useful, they really won't want it.
But that means the person saying "no" needs to be credible, needs to be someone you trust. And I agree with Krugman that a representative of a for-profit company probably isn't it. The company has good reason to deny you coverage that may really be useful -- they just don't want to pay. And if the circumstances are right, it can even be in the HMO's interest for you to do. That's an ugly business and naturally people react differently to being told "no" by a company like that than they would to being counseled by someone they trust.
I think the real question for liberals looking for cost controls is whether the government can play that role. In many countries, public employees and public agencies really are trusted as custodians of the public interest in the necessary sort of way. And in America some public employees and agencies are trusted like that -- the military is treated with extraordinary respect and deference, as are firefighters and in some communities the police are. Vast power is granted to the Federal Reserve with a general sense that it's well-staffed by well-meaning people who can be counted on to do the right thing. But most agencies don't attract that level of respect. The challenge would be to build not just a public agency, but a public agency that people think of as being like the Fed or the Marines, rather than one like the DC Child and Family Services Agency. That's a tall order, but not necessarily an impossible one.
Kevin Drum's not the only liberal upset by a political press that can't seem to hold John McCain responsible for John McCain's campaign tactics. But isn't the image painted in today's stories -- of McCain as a kind of passive bystander to decisions being made on his behalf by his staff -- sort of more damning?
The presidency, after all, involves significant managerial challenges. And neither McCain nor Barack Obama has ever been a mayor or a governor or run an executive agency. Neither has ever run a company. McCain was a Navy officer, but he didn't achieve the kind of rank where he had substantial managerial responsibilities -- he flew airplanes, he didn't command ships. For both of them, their presidential campaigns are the largest enterprises they've ever run. That's not good preparation for the White House in either case, but we don't have much else to go on. And if we're supposed to believe that McCain can't seize control of his own campaign strategy, then what does that say about his executive leadership?
Pardon me if you've seen this point elsewhere, but in what sense is John McCain not a celebrity? I've seen him on the covers of magazines, on television, in newspapers, doing guest appearances on SNL, etc.:
Could you possibly be a major party presidential nominee and not be a celebrity? But in particular, McCain actually stands out among politicians as being someone who was a famous celebrity first and then parlayed his fame into a political career, rather than merely being someone who's well-known for being an important politician.
Energy efficiency is probably the cheapest, easiest renewable resource we have available to us. For a long time, energy was cheap and national policy was to make it as cheap as possible. That's left us with a legacy of infrastructure and appliances built on the assumption that wasteful use of energy is no big deal. But it is a bit deal and we have a lot of the needed technology and know-how needed to deal with it. Which I assume is what Barack Obama was getting at when he said this at an energy town hall meeting today:
Finally, one of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to conserve energy and use less oil is to make America more energy efficient and more competitive with the world. That’s why, when I’m President, I will call on business, government, and the American people to make America 50 percent more energy efficient by 2030.
But what does it mean to become "50 percent more energy efficient"? Does that mean we'll use half as much energy? That our GDP's energy intensity will be cut in half? Or that there's some measure of "energy efficiency" such that 2030 energy efficiency will be fifty percent larger than in 2008? Unfortunately, efficiency is a difficult subject to talk about. An SUV could have an engine that's "more efficient" than the engine on a moped (i.e., it does a better job of converting a given quantity of gasoline into horsepower) while still getting many fewer miles per gallon. I was in an elevator earlier today where the lights were freakishly dim, and a woman in there with me speculated that it might be for energy efficiency purposes, but dimming the lights isn't really the same as making them more efficient.
Photo by Flickr user thingermajig used under a Creative Commons license
The Hill takes a look at what smart growth and transit advocates are doing to try to take advantage of high gas prices to convince people that a shift of federal policy away from encouraging auto-dependency is the right way to go. Apparently folks have "coalesced around a bill introduced by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) called the Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act of 2008." In preparation for shifting to 501 (c) 4 status, I won't by any means endorse the bill or urge congress to pass it. Instead, I'll merely note that various people I respect seem to be hoping that congress passes this bill.
UPDATE: Also -- if you live in DC and want to do something good for smart growth, the environment, public health, and the local economy you should come to the Zoning Commission meeting on parking minimum's today at 6:30 PM (441 4th Street NW) and join me in advocating that minimums be lowered or abolished.
Pivoting off the news about John McCain's $520 shoes, Chris Hayes wonders if the press will ever notice that John McCain is a rich, out of touch elitist. Well, I have my doubts. But this stuff is relevant. Clearly, it's possible for people who've lived lives of privilege (FDR is the famous example) to promote policies that are beneficial to people who are struggling. But you really do see with McCain a lot of proposals that seem to reflect a lack of understanding of how people live their lives.
It's easy, for example, for someone on the "I married an heiress" plan to talk about the need to privatize Social Security or cut benefits. And someone who, like John McCain, has never actually experienced private sector health insurance might well not understand what it is about it that has so many people agitated. And McCain, it's worth recalling, isn't even someone who got rich by earning a fortune in business and thus might have learned something about upward mobility. He just married into it. But he doesn't appear to have any of that FDR-like sense of noblesse oblige -- he just has a lot of policies that are well-suited to the interests of people like himself.
With some press outlets now pointing out that John McCain's dishonest ads are dishonest, I got a few commenters wondering if I'll stop complaining about McCain's cozy relationship with the press. I think I'll do that when reporters stop crediting him with "irrepressible candor" for the most banal Q&A interactions imaginable. The press is still treating him the way proud parents treat their kid, perhaps willing to discipline him gently when he gets out of line but still eager to swear that his every ordinary action is magic.
The Bush administration wants to say that its officials have carte blanche to ignore congressional subpoenas, to which Judge John Bates replies:
The executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled Congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.
P.S. Terrible video but this album actually had its moments.
I agree that Hole gets a bad rap, but really Live Through This has the vast majority of the listenable material. Did you know that Melissa auf der Mar has a blog?
Chris Sheridan notes that LeBron James opened Team USA's exhibition game against Turkey with a FIBA move, swatting a ball that had hit the rim and was likely to bound into the hoop away from the basket. That's goaltending in America, but legitimate defense under FIBA rules.
That seems like an important step to me. Over the past few years, I've consistently thought that the fact that the rules have been an underplayed problem for American teams in international competitions -- it's hard when our guys are playing under unfamiliar rules that their opponents are familiar with. But it seems that this year the players and the coaching staff are putting more emphasis on getting people to think about how the FIBA ruleset should effect their behavior.
For reasons that remain a bit murky, the Bush administration, which has a terrible record on everything, seems to have a great record on homelessness. There was a HUD report out earlier this week indicating that some reforms in approach that the administration -- more specifically, a guy Philip Mangano -- has implemented are being stunningly successful and we've seen a 30 percent drop in homelessness between 2005 and 2007. Dana Goldstein has an informative brief interview with the New America Foundation's Douglas McGray about Mangano's philosophy and you can read this McGray article on Mangano from back in 2004. Hopefully the next administration of either party will continue to build on this foundation.
I think the McCain campaign's "Celebrity" ad and the whole line about Barack Obama being too arrogant or something are pretty ridiculous, but it's a bit puzzling to me to see liberals expressing the view that these are some kind of crypto-racist lines of attack. Given that Obama's black, and America's history, I think it's always going to be possible to read some kind of racial subtext into attacks on him. But both of these are lines of argument you could easily imagine being deployed against a white candidate and, indeed, they're fundamentally similar to arguments Republicans regularly make against Democrats.
Beyond that, trying to sniff out racial subtexts in these kind of things strikes me as overwhelmingly likely to prove problematic. People really don't like to be called racists. Obama really has had a brief tenure on the national stage and most people really aren't especially familiar with his legislative record or his agenda. If people hear about Obama's record their doubts may be allayed. If they're told that their doubts are really just racism, they get defensive. Personally, I think Obama's record on getting police to videotape interrogations speaks extremely well of him. For one thing, he was right on the merits of the issue. But beyond that, this is the kind of thankless cause that politicians normally avoid. Even those who might be willing to back a measure of this sort are rarely going to decide that it's worth investing actual time and energy in it. And Obama showed great skill in, over time, growing his coalition and defusing the initial opposition of law enforcement groups -- getting them to see that at the end of the day serious law enforcement professionals have nothing to fear from high professional standards and meaningful efforts to see that justice is done. But how many people know about this stuff?
Despite yesterday's news that the economy is back to growing (albeit slowly) it seems job losses are still mounting. With inflation also on the rise, my understanding is that basically we're screwed.
As sometimes happens when I read Marc Ambinder's blog, today I'm puzzled by the mentality of the campaign reporter:
While we've been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.
Obama had a point, and the auto industry recommends the same thing as do governors Schwarzenegger and Crist, but nevermind; the ridicule fix is in. An effective GOP shot.
Here's my understanding of the sequence of events. Gas prices are on the rise. Consumers are feeling pain, harm is being done to the economy. Oil companies begin posting record profits. John McCain and the GOP propose a series of giveaways to oil companies that economists doubt will do anything to reduce gasoline prices in the short run. These measures will, however, starve the government of revenue for infrastructure, harm the environment, and devastate coastal economies. Barack Obama counters with a tip that will do no harm to the economy or the public purse but will allow people to save money in the short, medium, and long runs. Obama's proposal is endorsed by the auto industry as sound (similarly, fully inflated bike tires make you go faster), and has been embraced by the most successful politicians in the Republican Party today. But Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity mock it along with the rest of the "Republican echo chamber."
The upshot is deemed to be . . . success for the echo chamber, "an effective GOP shot." But why? Maybe the attack will be reported in a way that's helpful to Republicans. But why should it be reported that way? Why should slamming Obama for offering sound, bipartisan, industry-endorsed advice by an effective attack?
Photo by Flickr user Eric Castro used under a Creative Commons license
WSJ: "But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them." Obama's also taller than average, which is well-known to be a disadvantage in presidential politics.
In all seriousness, if the predominant aspect of superficial physical appearance that voters have in their head is anything other than race, I think Obama should consider himself lucky. America can handle a skinny president.
Ezra's damn right about this. Go to pretty much any populated part of the United States, buy some land, and try to build something on it and you'll find that there are a lot of land-use restrictions in place. Some of these rules are good, some of them are bad (on balance I'd say we're over-regulated in this regard) but they're really all-pervasive. Then along comes the LA City Council to say you can't open a new fast food restaurant in South LA and libertarians and Will Saletan are freaking out. It's about freedom, damnit.
Well, it is on some level, but this is hardly unique. Is Saletan for abolishing liquor license regulations? Maybe he is. I don't think that's a crazy position but that would be a radical change in the way we do business. Banning fast food outlets, by contrast, is very much in line with the status quo. And though it might shock Saletan to hear about it, there are lots of upscale towns and neighborhoods all across the country that do the same thing.
Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia Saletan lives in Chevy Chase Maryland. According to the zoning regulations I downloaded from the Chevy Chase town website, it is illegal in Saletan's town to build a house on a lot of fewer than 6,000 square feet. It is also illegal to build a house that covers more than 35 percent of a lot. [UPDATE: I originally posted some erroneous math here, which you can read about in comments but I've now deleted]. This makes housing more expensive than it would be if you were allowed to use the land more intensive, or if you were allowed to slice lots up into smaller homes.
I'm pretty skeptical that these proposed South LA regulations will do any good. But it's not unique or unusual for land use regulations to exist. And working class people around the country suffer dramatically larger concrete harms from the sort of commonplace suburbanist regulations that Saletan's been living with, without apparent complaint, in Chevy Chase. Those kind of regulations are bad for the environment, bad for public health, and serve to use the power of the state to redistribute upwards. So if you're going to rail against land use regulations, maybe pick the ones that really hurt people.
Have you ever been reading Slate and found yourself thinking, "This is great, but if only if were more conservative..."? Then LibertyWire is for you! The new online publication, being launched in mid-August, is billing itself as "a conservative version of Slate." [...] A job listing I found for the new endeavor claims it will be "general interest," along the lines of "Slate, Esquire, Good, City Journal, The Atlantic or The New Yorker" (seriously, City Journal!?) but with an "editorial slant [that] is big tent right-of-center -- as open-minded about what we publish as The New Republic, The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine, but on the center-right rather than the center-left."
This is a bit bizarre. Slate and The Atlantic are already center-right publications (I know my soon-to-be-former colleagues at The Atlantic don't necessarily see it that way, but it is). Most of The New Republic is mostly left-of-center on economic issues, but always takes time to run things like Greg Mankiw's case for abolishing Social Security (PDF) and rarely if ever countering its conservative views on foreign policy, Roe v. Wade, various Ben Wittes apologias for the Bush administration's abolition of due process, etc.
But the view is that in this landscape what the world needs is yet another dogmatically conservative magazine.
I'm pretty sure the behavior Wal-Mart is engaged in here, pressuring employees to vote for John McCain, is illegal. But the real scandal is what's unquestionably illegal. There's an awful lot companies can do perfectly legally to block union organizing drives. But some of the most effective tactics are illegal. That doesn't, however, mean that following the law is smart business strategy:
On June 30 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart illegally fired an employee in Kingman, Ariz., who supported the UFCW and illegally threatened to freeze merit-pay increases if employees voted for union representation. The decision came eight years after the organizing campaign failed, and four years after the case was originally heard.
Under these circumstances, union organizers have no effective legal recourse to violations of labor law and employers have no incentive to actually follow the law. And since employees know the laws won't be enforced if broken, employers only relatively rarely need to actually break the law in order to get the correct intimidating threat. Like the mafia, a company like Wal-Mart only needs to be seen to break a few kneecaps and get away with it for there to be an adequate intimidation effect to de facto deny a vast workforce its rights.
Photo by Flickr user wetwebwork used under a Creative Commons license
The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.
Kevin Drum says "I'm not absolutely certain who my choice for scariest group in the world is, but if push came to shove it probably wouldn't be al-Qaeda. It would be the ISI, Pakistan's main intelligence service." Kevin and I were actually both part of a conversation at Netroots Nation where a third party argued that people feel Pakistan is terrifying because few people in the United States know anything about Pakistan or understand it. I countered that the very low level of knowledge about Pakistan in the United States is what makes it so scary on the merits. We're a very rich and powerful country and our wealth and might gives us a lot of ability to shape events in a favorable way. But that only works if we actually know what's going on -- in the absence of meaningful information, our power is useless.
The other smart thing, related, that somebody said to me recently about Pakistan is that Americans need to realize that all the stuff we care about is a secondary consideration over there. We think about Pakistan and its neighborhood primarily through the lens of al-Qaeda with other organizations defined by their relationship to al-Qaeda. The Taliban helps al-Qaeda and that's bad. Hamid Karzai fights the Taliban (which helps al-Qaeda) and that's good. When ISI helped the Taliban, that was bad. When Pakistan "flipped" and helped us establish Karzai, that was good. But when they fight Karzai (who fights the Taliban who help al-Qaeda) that's bad. This is how we order events and think about things.
But in Pakistan, the first, second, and third priority is India. Al-Qaeda, the United States, the Taliban, Karzai, warlords, the Northern Alliance, "militants," and so forth are only important insofar as they relate to India. To write about Pakistani intelligence "actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region" is to impose an America-centric frame on things. It makes it out as if Pakistani intelligence is waking up and thinking about American efforts to combat militants in the region, and then deciding to actively undermine them. More likely, they wake up and think about ways to undermine Indian efforts to expand influence in the region. If that means undermining American efforts, then our efforts are undermined.
Enough people in the business have gotten in touch with me in a hurry to dispute the idea that Slate is a center-right publication that I'm starting to have some doubts. And I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind. I suppose I could take some time to do a thorough content analysis and see whether material that criticizes liberals or liberal positions outnumbers material that criticizes conservatives or conservative positions but that sounds boring and tedious. So I dunno, was I wrong about that?
Another thought on the general subject, is that I've noticed that a lot of people in the field of journalism have a tendency to judge the political proclivities of a publication by the subjective mental states of the staff. The correct way, however, is to look at what's on the pages. Having three socialists doing page layout, two moderate conservative writing features on political relevant topics, and one moderately liberal film critic does not a left-of-center publication make. Similarly, if in order to be "interesting" and "provocative" your publication contains some articles in which heterodox liberals challenge liberal conventional wisdom and other articles in which conservatives challenge liberal conventional wisdom, then your publication is mostly publishing conservative content.
So there are all these liberals in the country. Probably if you took a smart liberal who performs well on television and made her the host of a TV show, those liberals would watch that show. Just a theory.
Eric Umansky at Pro Publica has assembled some cool graphics on the fiscal cost of the Iraq war. As you can see below, the inflation adjusted dollar cost has been enormous:
However, I don't think you can understand the politics of the war without understanding that in relation to the size of the American economy, Iraq has been small potatoes by historical standards:
A ton of money has been spent on the war, but compared to other wars the impact of this one on the typical American who's not actually serving has been relatively small. Meanwhile, though, note the mismatch between spending on Iraq and Afghanistan. At the moment, a debate is going on about whether sending more troops to Afghanistan today would help matters and I'm not 100 percent sure what I think of that. I am, however, pretty certain that if the Bush administration had followed up the brief deposing of the Taliban with a massive commitment to rebuilding the country equal to, say, half of what they spent on Iraq, that that would have made a difference.
America promised a robust effort to make sure that the war improved the lives of ordinary Afghans. And while we've certainly done some work along those lines, the comparative budgets of Iraq and Afghanistan show where our national priorities were, and they weren't on living up to the commitments Bush made. It
It really is too bad that in this country an accident of birth can get you preferential treatment and cushy jobs, when we should be building the kind of color-blind meritocracy that would exist if we eliminated racial considerations from college admissions.
I note, for the record, that Kagan's current kick about the need to revive great power conflict is orders of magnitude more wrongheaded and dangerous than the post-9/11 "let's invade Iraq" fad was. My friend DM likes to say that the one good thing about Iraq is that it distracted the neocons from their even crazier war with China schemes, but now those schemes are making a bit of a comeback.
With the fundamentals so favorable to Barack Obama, why can't he crack open a bigger lead against John McCain? What's wrong with him? Does he need to change tactics? Or is it, as Andrew Gelman explains, that what the fundamentals predict is a modest victory with Obama getting about 53 percent of the vote. Right now, that's exactly what he's in line for and I expect it's what he'll get.
Note that close-ish elections are probably how the world should be. A lot of people are conservative Republicans. Barack Obama is not a conservative Republican. There's really no reason for those people to vote for Obama, no more how badly the economy may be doing. I think the only scenario in which Obama could really win in a landslide would be one in which Bob Barr starts eating away at McCain's base vote.
But in their new role as bloggers, the paper’s editors seem to have all the intelligence and reason of the average Daily Kos diarist sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of dungeons and dragons.
Now here's the thing. Say what you will about RPG-loving nerds, but surely we recognize that these widely-loathed creatures are the very same widely-loathed nerds you could find in the BC Calculus class, taking AP Physics, or wasting time being taught Turbo Pascal. That's how we did things where I come from (admittedly, we played considerably more Diplomacy than AD&D but the principle is the same) at least, but I'm pretty sure that's the widespread stereotype. You can't, in other words, mock the nerds in the basement as being too dumb, it's just not right.
Meanwhile, yes, I assume that the NYT editorial board is not made up of folks who were the cool kids in high school. Was Goldfarb? It doesn't sound likely, but who knows. To speculate irresponsibly a bit, a lot of McCain's fans seem to me to be nerds who, instead of growing up and embracing their inner dungeon master, have instead decided that hanging out with the jock will make people think they're cool too.
Barack Obama paraphrases Ronald Reagan's famous question: "Are you better off than you were four or eight years ago?"
Now personally, I'd say I'm much better off than I was as an awkward nineteen year-old college sophomore. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'd give George W. Bush a ton of credit for that. Which is what's a bit odd about this question -- I'm not sure how tightly linked people's overall well-being really is to average economic trends. And at the same time the biggest victims of Bush's policies are the ones who are dead and thus don't have the chance to complain about it. A lot of people who were working eight years ago are retired today. And a lot of people who are working today were kids eight years ago. Many others have children today who they didn't have eight years ago. Or maybe eight years ago they were happily married and now they're divorced.
But even sticking to the strictly economic, we know that any given individual's wages tend to go up over the course of his/her career as he/she gains experience, skills, and seniority. Thus even during a period in which average wages stagnate, most people will actually be better off than there were a few years in the past.
The company is scrambling to retool for small cars, and I'm sure we'll hear a loud chorus of voices saying that GM did this to themselves by becoming so dependent on light trucks. Well, they did, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame management. GM's historical pension and healthcare obligations, and the vast difficulties they have in permanently laying off workers, mean that the company had to maximize cash flow as best they could.
But look: This is all management. GM could have struck a different bargain with its workforce that entailed higher salaries and lower long-term pension obligations. Its management thought it would be wiser to strike a different bargain, and the results have wound up being non-pretty. Running a large enterprise is difficult which, I think, is why the executives make the big bucks. But when decisions don't pan out, you take the blame. Meanwhile, car company management could have strongly backed the Clinton administration's effort to get health care under control back in 1993.
Well, kids, today is my last day as an Atlantic blogger and this is my last Atlantic post. The blog should re-launch on Monday, August 11 at:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org
That means no blogging for me for a week. I think I haven’t gone 24 hours without a blog post since 2004, and I haven’t gone blogless for a week since I started doing this over six years ago. I’m not sure if the vacation will be good for me, or if I’ll just drive everyone I know crazy pointing out that someone is wrong on the internet.
But I’m excited, both about the vacation and about the new job at the Center for American Progress. But it’s been a real thrill to spend some time as an “Atlantic Voice” and get to know Andrew and Ambinder, to work with Ross and Reihan and Megan, and, of course, to do The Table with its unsung heros Jenny and Terrence. I think Ta-Nehisi will be a great addition to the site, and I hope I’ll be a good addition to the CAP team. And with that -- goodbye, see you in a bit over a week.
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Heads in the Sand
