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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
Obama's particularly large leads over McCain in Friday and Saturday's tracking suggest that the massive publicity surrounding Obama's speech at the Victory Tower in Berlin on Friday -- the only major public event of the trip -- and coverage of Obama's meetings with the heads of state in France and Germany may have tilted U.S. voter preferences more in his favor.
Maybe. But look, Obama's been drifting in the 45-48 range and McCain's been drifting in the 41-44 range and there's no reason to think that movements within the familiar bands represent anything other than normal fluctuation in a statistical sample. I think the commentary on the tracking polls looks more and more like the silly commentary on the daily fluctuations of the Dow where first analysts look at numbers, and then second they devise post hoc explanations of the movement. Realistically, I don't think there's anything worth commenting on unless some much more sustained trend develops.
Nicholas Kristof observes that "Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks." He goes on to suggest that technology may partially mitigate this problem, but veers off the direction of something fairly exotic: "One new venture is Demotix, which offers aspiring journalists a chance to upload their articles and photos for others to see — and some possibility that news outlets will publish them."
I think a better way to think about the web's impact would be something like this. How many foreign desks was a typical American actually able to read back in 1978? For most people, I think, the answer was one or two. Today only four American papers maintain a foreign desk but it's easy as pie to read any or all of them. And of course you can also read foreign coverage in British papers or read The Times of India's coverage of explosions on Bangalore.
I think the foreign coverage of professional journalists can only be very partially replaced by citizen journalism. But it's really easy to see how it can be replaced by other professional journalists. As newspapers, television networks, and radio networks all increasing move in a digital direction it seems to me that we can easily imagine a world in which there are 15 or so different global brands offering substantive general-interest global news coverage in the English language and everyone with a broadband connection is able to access all fifteen of them.
I hear Stanley Kurtz has been in Illinois digging up Obama's paper trail for upcoming articles in the Weekly Standard and National Review. I have no idea what he's found, but it's certainly about time that somebody went looking.
Meanwhile, Noam Scheiber writes about reporters' efforts to get their hands on a copy of Barack Obama's senior thesis, all copies of which have apparently gone missing from Columbia. The thesis was about nuclear negotiating strategies of the United States during the Cold War, and Obama's professor says it's unlikely to be controversial, and Noam concedes that it's an "exceedingly small deal" but still that "your default posture as a journalist, rather than a partisan or an operative, is that you always want more insight into the person your covering. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for us to push to see a project that Obama labored on for a year."
This is worth wondering about. When I was in college, I wrote a senior thesis. It was even, in a sense, on a politically relevant topic having to do with John Rawls' Political Liberalism. You might think that if you really wanted to understand what I thought about certain political issues you'd need to dig up that paper to gain some insights. But realistically, insofar as I can recall what the thesis said (I don't have a copy, but I believe it's in the university archives) it says stuff I don't believe anymore. If you really want to gain additional insights into what Matt Yglesias thinks about the issues, you should probably read my frequently updated blog.
Similarly, if you want to know what Barack Obama thinks about arms control you should listen to his speeches about arms control, look at his record in the United States Senate, and perhaps look at the stated views of some of his close associates on these matters. Just like the secret key to understanding John McCain's foreign policy views is to read the various major foreign policy speeches his given over his past ten years' worth of presidential campaigning and, again, look at the record and stated views of his associates. Journalists pride themselves on their sleuthing abilities -- trying to find new information and bring it into the public record -- but when you're talking about public officials the odds are that the most important information about their character and their policies is going to be the stuff that's already a matter of public record. An old college paper is just an old college paper.
Photo by Flickr user Mr. Littlehand used under a Creative Commons license
I was interviewed briefly as part of Shedrine Tadros's excellent piece for Al-Jazeera English on how blogs and the web are impacting the 2008 campaign:
I'm a pretty regular Morning Joe watcher as it happens, and I even caught some of yesterday's broadcast. But I missed the part where Joe Scarborough made a ludicrous defense of John McCain screwing up the chronology of events in Iraq and then launched into an unhinged attack on, well, me and my friends:
Also during this segment, Scarborough attacked liberal bloggers for correcting McCain’s error, saying they were probably “just sitting there, eating their Cheetos” and saying, “Let me google Anbar Awakening!” He added, “Dust flying — Cheeto dust flying all over. They’re wiping it on their bare chest while their underwear — you know, their Hanes.”
This after Scarborough observed that "I know a couple of hosts ran this last night and made a huge deal because a liberal blogger picked it up." The blogger in question being Spencer Ackerman. I'm really a bit baffled as to where these anti-blogger stereotypes come from. Spencer's reported from Iraq several times, I published a book recently, Ilan has a master's degree and speaks three languages -- we're not sitting around smearing ourselves with Cheetos. Like a lot of people, we write stuff. And some of the stuff we write is published on the internet. Is that really so weird and discreditable?
“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”
Now a previous NYT story re-did the translation and said it was fine, which you might think the paper would mention here. Meanwhile, how did Dabbagh listen to the translation? That doesn't make any sense.
Obama is pleased, but McCain certainly is not. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed support for Obama's troop withdrawal plans. Despite a half-hearted retraction, the comments have stirred up the US presidential campaign. SPIEGEL stands by its version of the conversation.
As well they should. They had an on-the-record interview in which Maliki's remarks were not at all ambiguous and during which time he repeatedly returned to the subject of thinking that Obama's proposals are the right framework within which to proceed. Against that there's a non-denial denial, in another person's name, issued by CENTCOM. Considering that Maliki in effect lives and works inside a CENTCOM controlled military installation, that's some exceedingly weak tea he served up.
We haven’t won the Iraq war, of course, which is why the debate over it is so consequential. Obama took to the pages of the New York Times Monday to explain, “My Plan for Iraq.” He reiterated his support for a 16-month pullout. We think — and certainly hope — that somewhere deep inside Obama realizes how unworkable and risky this timeline would be.
U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes [...] The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't.
This barely seems to be getting any play in the American press thus far, but at a minimum it deserves to dominate tomorrow's Sunday shows.
Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it's actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it's primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.
And, of course, I would add that the broader logic of the internet is toward disaggregation of content -- the fact that newspapers cover such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads probably won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere. On the other hand, there may be a corrupting impact of some of this cross-subsidization -- I can't help but suspect that the importance of real estate advertising to papers may have distorted their coverage of the housing bubble on the way up.
Rick Perlstein, on a panel about the media, describes The Boys on the Bus as a book about politics on a level with Machiavelli's Prince or John Locke's Second Treatise on Government. Obviously, that's deliberate hyperbole. But still, I think it reflects a common disagreement I have with the netrootsian perspective on things -- a tendency on their part to vastly overstate the significance of media issues in terms of their impact on the real world.
People working in a medium should do things that the medium is well-suited to. And blogs are very well-suited to complaining about media coverage. So blogs spend a lot of time complaining about media coverage. Which is all, I think, perfectly fine. But the tendency to make the leap from "complaining about the media would be a good thing to do with my blog" to "objectively speaking, complaining about the media is hugely important to creating political change" is a mistake. If anything, I think it's much more likely that the press tends to go easy on conservatives because conservatives have been politically successful than it is that the success is due to media coverage.
I didn't witness it firsthand, but Jonathan Signer reports that on teevee Obama badly beating McCain's fundraising is . . . good news for John McCain because Obama didn't beat him badly enough. Merely having a lead in the polls and in money just isn't good enough these days, I guess.
I kind of thought Jamie Kirchick had a good point here but then I looked closer at the cartoon he's criticizing. In his view, Rolling Stone ran a cartoon that "propagates the smears directed at John McCain -- that he's an unhinged warmonger rendered mentally unfit because of his experience in Vietnam, a meme that's been repeated by a number of high-profile Obama surrogates over the past few months." But look at the cartoon:
That's not an attack on John McCain at all, and certainly not the kind of attack Kirchick construes it as. The cartoon depicts various obstacles to McCain's political aspirations -- George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama -- as his North Vietnamese captors. I don't find this to be a funny or successful cartoon, but surely nothing that depicts McCain's political adversaries as war criminals can seriously be considered a smear against McCain.
I think I'm violating some kind of rule by going so long without blogging on this subject. I found the image to be neither especially funny as satire, nor especially outrageous as bad satire. The problem, though, is that the actually existing whispering campaign against Obama is so severe that it doesn't really admit of satire-by-exaggeration.
The other day, Publius at Obsidian Wings suggest ed that we retire the whole "sister souljah" concept from our political lexicon. I beg to differ. The "Sister Souljah moment" idea may be tired cliché with dubious political implications, but in this crazy new world of the 24/7 news cycle doing campaign punditry is harder than ever and we therefore need our lazy clichés more than ever. Will nobody think of the journalists? If anything, people need to try harder to more rigorously fit their discussion of all events into a handful of predetermined frames.
James Fallows, meanwhile, suggests "maybe we can also agree that no future book about China need include the cliche 'the Dragon' in its title." I agree to no such thing!
Oh, good, the LA Times decides that we need to run the 2000 election all over again with headlines like "Obama, McCain agree on many once-divisive issues." See Jonathan Zasloff for a reality check.
Amanda Terkel has a staggering list of things John McCain has done that have earned him praise from campaign reporters, including riding first class on the Acela ("John McCain traveled like a man of the people"), joking about killing Iranian civilians ("like any guy you’d want to have around the dinner table"), joking about killing John Steward with an IED ("a guy with a good sense of humor") and so forth. It's almost as if they think Strangers on a Train is a depiction of typical early 21st century American life, all rail travel and murder.
The AFL-CIO has (pretty cleverly, in my view) created a Union Vets Council to do stuff like air this ad:
I think liberals sometimes go overboard in terms of thinking that the right way to appeal to veterans is to double-down on social services for veterans as a kind of pure transactional interest group politics. But this ad smartly links the specific critique of McCain's record on veterans issues to broader economic concerns.
It's obvious that the financial problems at daily newspapers around the country have roots that go beyond quality. But still, given the lousy job the AP is doing covering the campaign, and given the extent to which many dailies rely on the AP for a lot of coverage, it's hard to see how anyone will be saved. I get paid money to read newspapers and complain about them, so a newspaper that's riddled with errors still has some value to me. But to an ordinary person, unless the newspaper is going to do a reasonable job of reporting the news there's no real point -- comic books are always going to have prettier pictures.
There's been a lot of talk about the unbalanced media environment in this election, and how it benefits McCain. What should Democrats actually do to counteract that advantage? (aside from opting out of the public financing system and running a buttload of paid media.)
I think that what Democrats should do is the same as what ordinary citizens should do -- support good media, punish bad media. If you subscribe to The Washington Post stop, and explain to them in a detailed letter why you're stopping. Subscribe to The American Prospect, and The Nation, and Mother Jones. When you read a Media Matters item about some BS on cable read the contact information under the "Take Action" banner and send them a note. If your note is going to the General Electric corporation, make sure to tell them you like Countdown and that Rachel Maddow should host a television show.
Powerful elected officials can do all those things but can also, as Republicans do with conservative media, support progressive media with access and praise to help raise the profile of progressive institutions.
Doing the "ordinary person"-side stuff can be tedious and annoying, but it must be done. Working the refs is hard work, and the right got where it is today by putting in the hours.
Gail Sheehy's Clinton campaign post-mortem is interesting, but like all such articles it's shocking to me how much it downplays Clinton's catastrophic political and substantive error in voting for the 2002 Iraq resolution. That mistake was about a thousand times more consequential than any particular instance of Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson bickering about this or that. It's just impossible for me to imagine her losing the nomination if she'd spent 2002 through early 2004 as a liberal hero and a lonely voice of sanity on the war.
If she'd made that call correctly, Obama never would have gotten in the race and we'd be talking about whether she should do the daring thing and pick that charismatic black Senator from Illinois as her running mate.
Not only did I enjoy this week's Frank Rich column but it occurred to me to point out that he deserves special praise for always making sure that the web version of his column include real hyperlinks to outside content, just the way a dedicated web column would:
What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.
I would say that beyond that, he also has a press corps that's so in love with the open atmosphere McCain maintains with his traveling press that they don't take advantage of the open atmosphere to ask him any probing questions. What's his plan for Iraq? Does he plan to purge the government of Bush's political appointees? If he's "not one who believes that we need to subsidize things" when asked about renewable energy, then why does he want subsidies for nuclear power? Etc.
John McCain proves once again that he's aware of the internet: "Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information."
It seems that old people find this anti-blogger campaigning to be worthy of tepid laughter.
I've been known to complain about the judgment of The Washington Post opinion pages before, but major kudos are due to Fred Hiatt for publishing this brave piece in which we learn the disturbing fact that some American college students are not only learning the Arabic language, they're simultaneously being exposed to an Arab point of view on political issues. Given that in the United States there are virtually no outlets aside from major newspaper and magazines, broadcast and cable television networks, and hugely popular books in which pro-western or pro-Israel interpretations of Middle Eastern politics are available, it's absolutely vital that we eliminate this scourge of Arabism from our campuses.
But beyond the brilliance of the piece and its insights, the bold gutsy guttiness of the editorial call is what really comes to mind here. Way to speak truth to weakness and stand up for the view that as narrow a range of opinions as possible should be expressed in America.
I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office.
That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests.
And yet here we are in 2008. And I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy, also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon. And Bush, like Nixon, has become unpopular. But Bush won't be hounded out of office.
I'm not exactly sure what accounts for the difference. I wasn't alive in 1973-74. I have a vague sense that at that time America's elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn't just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it's taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don't really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can't see that something's gone wrong here, but I'm not happy about it.
I haven't actually attended very much of the DLC's National Conversation (seemed more fun to go out and see Chicago) but I did catch most of Markos, the Great Orange Satan himself, on a panel with various other worthies. Not much of interest was said, really, but at one point he did call Joe Lieberman "an asshole" and received applause from many and no boos or dissent from anyone else.
Here's a neat opportunity -- the magazine is looking to recruit members of a panel ("Atlantic Exchange") of readers of the magazine and website who'd be surveyed no more than twice a month to gauge your thoughts about what we're doing so that we can better shape the various aspect of our editorial product to deliver stuff people want to read. Click here to learn more.
Creative Capitalism is a fascinating venture from Michael Kinsley and my friend Conor Clarke that "takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos" and hopes to develop into a book of smart reflections and debates around the central idea. At the moment the ground has been seeded by some of the great minds of the center-right but the pool of contributors is going to expand and random submissions are welcome. Eventually, a book will result.
If you, like me, have ever wondered where all those "Democratic strategist" and "Republican strategist" types who show up on cable networks come from, you won't want to miss Daniel Libit's Politico article on the subject. Basically, as you might suspect the whole thing is basically just made-up but all the relevant people are happy enough with the system so it persists.
Dafna Linzer and Paul Kiel follow up on their al-Hurra reporting noting that a number of media and political figures have gotten cash money from al-Hurra in exchange for appearing on the network. Now to be fair, a lot of the people who've gotten this money (David Corn, say) are hardly administration shills.
But it's an inherently problematic situation for a government-run entity to be in -- it naturally tends to build goodwill and shield the network from much-needed scrutiny.
Post ombudsman Deborah Howell follows up on David Broder's buckraking speeches:
The NAM, the ACCF and the national parents of the Minnesota group and Northern Virginia Realtors do lobby Congress. Broder later said he broke the rules on those speeches. He also said he had cleared his speeches with Milton Coleman, deputy managing editor, or Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor, but neither remembered him mentioning them. Wilkinson said Broder had cleared speeches in the past. Editors should have been consulted on all of the speeches as well as the cruise.
"I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper,'' Broder said.
Is it just me, or does this seem a little unsatisfying as a resolution? Broder broke the basic norms of professional conduct, and he broke the specific procedural rules of The Washington Post, and never disclosed these conflicts of interest, then he got caught, and now he's sorry so we just wash our hands of the whole thing because, after all, he's the Dean? That's that, I suppose, but it tells you what kind of business I'm in. Imagine the press's treatment of a politician caught up in a serious scandal we tried to get away with just mumbling "sorry." I can't imagine Mark Foley or Elliot Spitzer getting away with that.
Interesting CJR piece on John McCain's "incoherent environmentalism"
McCain’s wholesale abandonment of a month-long environmental PR strategy is more than a knee-jerk response to a new peak in oil prices. It is a sign that the McCain campaign’s efforts to define the 2008 election narrative are in disarray. Oddly, the political press—which has a Midas touch for turning policy disputes into process stories—seems to have missed the full political significance of this policy shift.
Of course it's not that odd: The press loves John McCain! What's more, to understand the extent to which McCain has turned himself around on environmental issues, you need some kind of grasp of how the logic of his gasoline demagoguery conflicts with the logic of his cap-and-trade proposals, and that seems to be beyond the grasp of many reporters.
So why not have the best of both worlds? Russert was many things, but he wasn't a "moderator." Moderators balance and direct debates. Russert, to his credit, was a prosecutor. Why not make Chuck Todd the actual moderator of the show and have him moderate a panel of journalists?
You could a roster of different panelists, of whom two or three might be on any given episode depending on who the guests are and what's big in the news at the moment.
It seems that Mickey Kaus is hoping that "Obama's election will kill off much of hip-hop, at least the gangsta-inspired parts. But just killing off bling and gangsta fashion would be a start." Belle Waring has some doubts "Because after he becomes president he'll automatically become chair of the crucial monthly meetings at which black people decide what they're going to wear?"
I think the idea is that the highest-ranking African-American politician gets to appoint members to the Black Fashion Board. Kind of like the Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court, but for inner-city style.
Maybe Kaus could debate Mitt "Bling-Bling" Romney about this crucial issue.
How does your own experience reflect on the fact that the supposedly democratizing aspects of blogs have been co-opted by the traditional media? Do you think that there is a kind of failure in now being under the imprimatur of the Atlantic? Doesn't the fact that every Atlantic blogger is Ivy-League educated and old media connected undercut the notion that the web has opened up avenues in media previously denied to "regular people"?
I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. The fact that The Atlantic's bloggers tend to have gone to fancy schools reflects the fact that, as has long been the case, it's really helpful to have gone to a fancy school if you want to get a job at a prestigious magazine. The democratizing power of the internet hasn't, in other words, democratized the hiring practices of The Atlantic.
What it has done, however, is democratized acquiring an audience. It used to be that to have a big audience for your writing, you needed to get hired by a periodical with an established audience. But these days, a very large portion of the most-read political blogs are upstart operations -- DailyKos, FireDogLake, Talking Points Memo, Atrios, etc. That's where the democracy comes in. Of course, being associated with a prominent brand can help you get readers. And so can being well-connected more generally. In particular, it's much easier to launch a new online product if it's associated with an existing, successful online product. The Internet has not, in other words, completely eliminated the barriers to entry. But it has reduced them.
It's difficult to start a new blog without institutional support and make it successful, but it's easier than starting a new magazine. And it's easier for institutions of all kinds to launch or acquire blogs that become successful (think of the Center for American Progress's wildly successful ThinkProgress) than it would be for those institutions to start new magazines. Consequently, the competition for eyeballs online is quite a bit fiercer than is the competition for print readers (Time competes with Newsweek, US News and World Report, and that's it -- no blog has such an empty niche -- and most newspapers don't have any competitors at all) and established position isn't nearly as useful as it is in old media.
Does that mean the internet is a level playing field? No. Does it make online communications a completely democratic medium? No. But is the field more level and more democratic than print? Absolutely.
Peter Boyer has a pretty solid profile of Keith Olberman and how he has and continues to change the cable broadcasting universe. But this paragraph about the response to Olbermann's first "special commentary" bothered me:
His bosses loved it. “I think we’re onto something,” the president of NBC News, Steve Capus, told me. “That’s what we keep hearing from the audience, more and more, is that they appreciate that we have people who are actually speaking truth to power, or being transparent in their own personal viewpoints.” That’s another way of saying that liberals, after many failed attempts, seem finally to have found their own Bill O’Reilly. Fox News still dominates the cable competition, and MSNBC over all continues to lag behind second-place CNN. O’Reilly’s audience is more than twice as big as Olbermann’s, which airs in the same prime-time period. But Olbermann’s ratings grew by nearly seventy-five per cent the year he began doing Special Comments, and the show is making money, a rare hit in MSNBC’s twelve-year run. “All of a sudden, he took off,” Griffin says. “In ways that MSNBC never had a show take off.”
How many failed attempts were there, exactly? My recollection of the relevant history is that first O'Reilly was successful. Then, because you're not allowed to put liberals on television, networks responded to his success by putting more conservatives on. Then someone at MSNBC had the crazy idea of giving Phil Donohue a show. Then Donohue's show became MSNBC's most popular program. At which point MSNBC canceled it because you're not allowed to put liberals on television. Some time after that, MSNBC put Keith Olbermann on intending, as Boyer reports, for his show to be a “newscast of record." Then, by accident, Olbermann started doing some liberal stuff. And it was successful, which based on the track record (one effort to put a liberal on cable and his show became the network's highest-rated program) is exactly what you would expect.
Meanwhile, I was watching This Week on ABC yesterday morning for the first time in a while, and I was surprised to see Robert Reich on their panel 'o pundits since, after all, you're not allowed to put liberals on television. Then they panned out and I saw that the panel also included Torie Clarke and George WIll, thus granting ABC amnesty under the "unless they're outnumbered two to one" exception to the "no liberals on television" rule.
Tyndall said that if he were NBC News President Steve Capus, a short list for the position would include White House correspondent David Gregory, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell — both of whom have guest-hosted “Meet the Press” — as well as political director Chuck Todd and “Hardball” host Chris Matthews. Two dark-horse candidates could be “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough or perhaps former “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw — that is, if he had any interest in returning to such a prominent role.
Matthews seems like the most likely choice to me, since for several years now in addition to Hardball he's been doing a more staid Chris Matthews Show on Sunday mornings that appears to me to have been training wheels for eventually stepping into Russert's shoes. I'd say the best choice would probably be Chuck Todd, who based on his on-camera work during primary evenings would bring a different approach rather than trying to do what Russert did and not doing it as well.
UPDATE: Of course you could really shake things up by going outside the box with Mélissa Theuriau but there's no evidence she speaks English. Closer to the box, several commenters have suggested Gwen Ifill who would be good if NBC is willing to hire someone from outside the network.
With Great Power Comes Great Numbers of Angry Critics
It's a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn't really care for passes. But I think in a lot of ways it sells Tim Russert's legacy short to offer merely bland praise (it really is true, by all accounts, that he was a super-nice guy to those who knew him in person) for someone who really was a dominating presence in modern journalism who exercised enormous direct and indirect influence. Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert's passing, I thought I'd take a mixed approach that doesn't back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.
Meanwhile, in a BHTV episode Jane Hamsher and I recorded shortly before Russert died, Jane revisited her displeasure with Russert's handling of the Scooter Libby matter.
A reader wants to know: "I know you read Ambinder's blog. Do you think it's balanced? If not, which way does it incline?" I think it's very balanced. I have no idea what Marc thinks and, indeed, I sometimes think Marc is so committed to reporting and balance that he doesn't know what he thinks. A lot of his posts are reporting -- him telling us what people are telling him, so any given post like that will reflect a bias toward whoever he was talking to, but look at the thing as a whole and it's extremely fair.
But over the past 40 years the tendency has been for Republicans to win and Democrats to lose and for the Democrats who do win to be moderate Southerners. Consequently, I think real horse-race specialists are instinctively skeptical of the idea that liberalism can or will prevail. That's a bummer for liberals to read, but it will change if 2006 is followed up by another big year in 2008.
A Fox News gig seems like a decent way for Huckabee to lay the groundwork for a 2012 presidential campaign, in terms of staying in the public eye. If he takes time to do some homework and kiss ass to a few major donors over the next few years, I think he'd be a formidable contender for the nomination.
Everyone knows that print journalism is in a state of economic crisis, and Sam Boyd may have the answer -- a GQ/CQ merger to produce your ultimate guide to men's fashion and legislative arcana. Lord knows congress could probably use more fashion advice.
It seems that David Broder takes money from business groups whose interests he covers and doesn't tell anyone about it in his columns. That's the kind of thing that gets you labeled "dean" of the Washington press corps, since the name of the game is to get ahead while being self-righteous about your ethics.
In defense of bad newspaper columnists, I bet most of them would write very similar bad columns without any payola -- the point is less that there's a payoff for any particular opinion expressed than the simple fact that becoming an adequately well-entrenched member of the establishment can be quite lucrative if you reach an adequate plateau, but to do it you've got to be oh so polite to them that pays the bills.
"Say what you will about the MSM, but they still have their uses," says Kevin Drum pointing to LA Times coverage of vanishing tomatoes. I actually got the scoop on this from a woman working the cash register at a Wendy's in Logan Airport (she was explaining why my spicy chicken sandwich would have no tomato slice) yesterday. But being a lowly internet pundit rather than an awesome Real Journalist, I didn't think to write up my reporting -- I figured if they Wendy's people knew all about it, then everyone must know.
It's very strange that John McCain can baldly lie to the press about a nationally televised speech he delivered last week and not get called on it by reporters. This wasn't some obscure address -- I watched it live, as did political junkies all across the land since McCain scheduled it so as to come amidst coverage of the SD and MT primaries.
The most traditional location to reach the political establishment, the Washington Post opinion section, is brazenly male-dominated. Seventeen of the 19 columnists are men; only three of the columnists are racial minorities. Guest op-eds could present more voices, but they rarely do. This year, only 12 percent of the Post's guest pieces came from women, according to a May count by ombudsman Deborah Howell. At the New York Times, eight of the ten weekly columnists are men; one is black.
I'd say this is especially egregious with regard to the op-ed pieces. The major papers seem to pride themselves on the glacial pace of turnover and total lack of quality control with regard to their regular columnists, which limits one's ability to diversify with speed. But all it would take to dramatically increase the number of women having op-eds published in The Washington Post would be to email some women who write about politics and say "want to write something for The Washington Post?" I'm sure someone would say yes.
John Schwenkler was none too happy with the news that The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb is off to the McCain campaign, got challenged on it by James Joyner, and offered this nice reply:
What Radley Balko said, I guess, though let me add that my initial gripe was with what this appointment reveals about the kind of politics Team McCain is going to be engaging in, and whether or not they would be a break from those of "the past". And a quick look over the most recent weeks of Mr. Goldfarb's repertoire of "online activities" - Nancy Pelosi's observation that the Iranians helped to tame hostilities in Basra amounts to "glorification of the enemy"; the New York Times is "committed ... to fighting no wars at all" (Really? I didn't get that memo); Democrats concerned about the strength of the Iraqi government are "divorced from the reality-based community"; scummy campaign advisers are simply the result of "day jobs which may create conflicts of interests"; the Democratic party is "chicken"; and so on ad nauseam - suggests that his contributions to the McCain message may end up being ... how shall we say? ... less than statesmanlike. Is Goldfarb "qualified" to make such contributions? Of course. But I stand by my initial expression of disgust.
Goldfarb, meanwhile, is only one of a pretty large number of people who've shuttled back and forth over the years between organizations McCain controls and organizations Bill Kristol controls. That's not to say that junior staff at The Weekly Standard are going to be controlling policy in the McCain White House, but McCain obviously has an affinity for a Standard-style approach.
I think Bill Clinton makes some fair points in his intemperate rant against Todd Purdum. But in a lot of ways, the flaws in Purdum's article (lots of innuendos about illicit sex) serve to obscure the valid points (we know very little about the financing of Clinton's lifestyle and his foundation) and the notion that the publication of a a single article on this subject far too late to impact the process represents a vast pro-Obama conspiracy in the press is laughable.
It's GQ after all, that killed a critical story about Hillary Clinton because Bill threatened to freeze them out unless they did it. In general, coverage of Bill's post-presidency has been exceedingly respectful, even in the generally Obamaphilic Atlantic.
So, I think it's probably fair for me to guess that almost all of you have no idea what my employer, Government Executive, does. I didn't either, until I started freelancing for them, and discovered that this magazine catering to federal employees had almost 80,000 subscribers and web traffic growing in the direction of half a million unique visitors each month. I just had no idea the audience was out there, because I never really bothered to think about it. But since I started covering federal workforce issues full-time, I've learned two things, one about journalism, and one about government.
1) Niche publications may be an increasingly important part of journalism's future, as long as the niche is of reasonable size. There are 1.8 million civilian federal employees, not including Postal Service workers. That's a huge market, and those readers are incredibly hungry for information about the conditions that govern their jobs.
And by narrowing down our beats, we get to do much deeper reporting than we might if we were at a publication that had a broader mandate. For example, my colleagues Robert Brodsky and Elizabeth Newell took the New York Times' story on AEY Inc., ran with it, and figured out the backstory behind how AEY got labeled a disadvantagedbusiness, a status that proved crucial to the firm's success. The Times had the story of what happened, but Elizabeth and Rob figured out why.
2) What's going on in the federal workforce right now is drastically under covered. Huge numbers of career federal employees are about to retire, especially in senior leadership ranks, and hiring freezes in the 1990s mean there aren't enough people to move smoothly up the ranks to fill those vacancies. These circumstances are prompting a reform boom: federal agencies are working to streamline the hiring process, adopting alternate work schedules and telework policies, and developing programs in coordination with nonprofits like the Partnership for Public Service to reach recruits of all who wouldn't have considered federal service before.
But those efforts may be too late to prevent disruptions to federal services and federal agencies. Wonder why your plane is late? It's partially airport capacity, but it may also partly be due to a mass exodus of air traffic controllers. Has it taken forever for you to get a passport? The State Department had to shift junior employees to process applications. Upset about the U.S. Attorneys scandal? The complexities of the relationships between political appointees and career federal employees provides key context. More stories than I ever realized come back to the people who work in government.
Recently we have seen an acceleration of the collapse of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like Walter Cronkite are appalled by the mergermania that has swept the industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news and gutting newsrooms. Rapid consolidation, evidenced most recently by the breakup of the once-venerable Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale of the Tribune Company and its media properties and the swallowing of the Wall Street Journal by Murdoch's News Corp continues the steady replacement of civic and democratic values by commercial and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls are being made by consultants and bean counters, who increasingly rely on official sources and talking-head pundits rather than newsgathering or serious debate.
The crisis is widespread, and it affects not just our policies but the politics that might improve them. There are two critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical of official statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous in the search for truth. One of them is war--and in the case of the post-9/11 wars, our media have failed us miserably. (Even former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now acknowledges that the media were "complicit enablers" in the run-up to the Iraq invasion). The other issue is elections, when voters rely on media to provide them with what candidates, parties and interest groups often will not: a serious focus on issues that matter and on the responses of candidates to those issues. Instead, when the Democratic race was reaching its penultimate stage, the dominant story was a ridiculously overplayed discussion about Barack Obama's former minister. Before the critical Pennsylvania primary, studies show, the provocative Rev. Jeremiah Wright got more coverage than Obama's rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. And forget about issues--the most covered policy debate of the period, a ginned-up argument about whether to slash gas taxes for the summer, garnered only one-sixth as much attention as Wright.
I find these complaints about quality plausible, but the alleged connection of these problems to mergers and consolidation is hard for me to see. Preventing firms from assembling chains of newspapers (for example) wouldn't alleviate the declining revenue issues that are driving papers to cut their budgets. What preventing consolidation would do is make it difficult for newspaper firms to realize efficiencies (does every big city newspaper really need its own set of film and television critics? do the LA Times and Chicago Tribune need separate Washington bureaux?) that might let them still produce a decent product in the new economic climate.
What does seem true to me is that really excellent journalism is probably not compatible with strict adherence to a profit-maximizing imperative. It's not a coincidence that the most interesting newspapers and magazines in the United States tend to be run as private or family-controlled or non-profit enterprises, thus allowing managers to pursue ideals other than the pure pursuit of profit. That's long been the case and will presumably continue to be the case, and the issue is largely one of whether or not an adequate number of new people and families can be persuaded to step up, as some old players (like the Bancroft's) decide to abandon journalism.
But it's difficult for me to see how enhanced FCC scrutiny of proposed mergers is going to compel news organizations to become more substantive in their coverage. And it's very difficult for me to see how enhanced FCC scrutiny of proposed mergers is going to compel news organizations to become more skeptical of official claims. It seems to me that such scrutiny would make news organizations more inclined to shade their coverage in order to curry favor with the powers that be.
Jessica Yellin talks about "pressure from corporate executives" to slant coverage in a pro-war direction.
But of course we're not supposed to talk about this, anymore than we're supposed to talk about why Phil Donohue got fired or why Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan both had fierce anti-war positions off air that they avoided expressing on camera.
On the one hand, it's a huge deal that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is now out there admitting that the Iraq War was a mistake sold with lies. But on the other hand, it's sort of banal. We've known this for years. It's a shocking truth about our current state of affairs, but not a truth that any longer has the capacity to shock me. On the other hand, this from Byron York was interesting:
One of the main reasons John McCain is facing such an tough job today is that we are now in the sixth year of a war that the president of his own party started by mistake. That's a major headwind when you're running for president; an error of that magnitude will exact a political price. Would anyone be surprised if voters say that they've had enough?
That all seems reasonable enough to me, but what York is missing is that McCain doesn't think it was a mistake. One would think the virtue of nominating a guy who doesn't have close personal ties to the Bush administration would be that McCain could say something like "hey, I think liberalism is wrong and conservatism is good, but that doesn't mean I'm a sociopath who loves war so much that he still thinks the invasion of Iraq was a good idea." But he doesn't say that, presumably because he doesn't believe it. At even a time when the chief propagandists of the Bush administration are willing to admit that there BS was BS, he's a true believer.
Let me just say that I think it's a sad day for America when partisanship and a desire to bring down Barack Obama has led conservatives to demand that the Red Army's work in defeating Hitler and liberating concentration camps obtain sufficient recognition. Everybody knows that the idea of the pristine and wholly virtuous war in which American force of arms, with an assist from Winston Churchill's moral clarity, stopped Hitler's war machine is among the most cherished myths of our nation. Discussion of the Eastern Front is to be avoided at all costs!
Surely preserving this principle is reason enough to let Obama off the hook. We can't have people running around believing that the Greatest Generation was a greatest generation of Communists!
Ron Rosenbaum sings the praises of so-called "liberal guilt." I largely agree. He says, though, that "What I don't understand is why there doesn't seem to be any conservative guilt over racism." I don't actually find this puzzling at all: There's little conservative guilt over racism because political exploitation of racial animosity has been an integral element of the conservative movement's political strategy ever since the day when the conservative movement stopped issuing straightforward defenses of white supremacy.
Under the circumstances, anyone who feels too upset about racism can't make it far in the conservative movement. You don't need to be a racist, as such, but in your public work you need to express much much much more concern about the alleged evils of "political correctness" or some such than you do about actual racism.
Julian Sanchez is also at the beach with me, and he's experimenting with some kind of set-up where he records movies on his iPhone and then they upload to his server as vlogs. This one's about ways to make distributed reporting work:
There seem to be some wind-induced sound quality problems,
Meh. I liked the Vampire Weekend column. It's just that while I almost always enjoy the "comic sociology" pieces that made Brooks famous, I wish they came with footnotes or something so we could learn whether or not there's actual sociology to back up the stuff Brooks is saying. Is there real evidence that the rise of geek culture is politically relevant as he implies toward the end? It's an interesting issue, which makes it an interesting column, but while I liked the joke about Barack Obama being the Prince Caspian of the iPhone set, I'd also kind of like to know the answer.
Much of Emily Gould's article about her life as a professional blogger doesn't seem similar at all to my life, but her description of the odd phenomenon of quasi-fame that comes from being a blogger has some resonance with me:
I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar’s coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. “Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was.
It's a pretty weird phenomenon, though since I've been doing this blog for over six years now (over 22+ percent of my life!) I've gotten used to it. People sometimes come up to me in bars, Metro stations, etc. and introduce themselves as if I were a real celebrity which is always flattering but then again it makes me worry that I'm somehow not living up to the blog persona or something.
Michael Scherer explains how the McCain campaign plans to release medical records in a manner carefully calculated to make it as difficult as possible for accurate information about McCain's medical history to reach the public:
The actual medical records will be viewed by only a select few news organizations, and even fewer print reporters. According to a report in the New York Times, the pool that will view the actual medical records Friday morning will include reporters from the three national wire services, the Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg, as well as the major television networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox. Only two newspapers are scheduled to be allowed access, the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic. While prior McCain campaign pool events have included a spot for a newsmagazine reporter, no reporter from TIME, Newsweek or U.S. News will be allowed to view the records, the campaign confirmed Thursday morning. All print reporters traveling with the campaign will receive a pool report of the records review, which will be written by pool reporters.
On top of all that, this is going to be done on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend so that stories will run on one of the lowest-audience news days. A responsible reporter doing a story on McCain's medical records would, of course, want to obtain the actual records and then discuss the documents with, say, independent doctors who might have actual expertise on the matter. Even really great campaign reporters obviously aren't qualified to look briefly at some medical documents and draw any meaningful conclusions from them.
Any statement which the speaker or writer feels the need to preface by saying "I'm not a racist, but ..." is bound to be racist, right? That's not a logical rule, but the empirically observed regularity is striking.
The liberal opposition to media consolidation has always struck me as puzzling. The ACLU, for example, worries that "Six major companies control most of the media in the country, including the most popular sites on the Internet." But that list of six companies doesn't include Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo -- surely influential internet players. And if the concern here is about the health of our democracy (which I take it it is) then I don't think one would one want to deny that The New York Times (owned by the New York Times, Co.) or The Washington Post and Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post Company) are significant media outlets that remain outside the grasp of the Big Six. And, of course, other, lesser newspaper companies like the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, LA Times) and Gannett (USA Today) are also outside the Big Six.
But if you ignore newspapers in favor of a single-minded focus on television, then you'll find that things are, indeed, pretty consolidated but they're a good deal less consolidated than they were when NBC, ABC, and CBS were the only players in town. Meanwhile, there are the public broadcasters (NPR and PBS) and thanks to the internet the opportunity to enjoy foreign media outlets, etc. In terms of reasons people might not be all that well-informed, the fact that folks are too busy to follow the news closely or otherwise disinclined to do so strikes me as a way larger factor than any alleged consolidation problem. A person with cable and an internet connection in 2008 has access to a far more diverse set of information sources than did a person in 1988 or 1968.
By now you've heard all about Barack Obama's radical pastor and secret Allah-worship, but Jim Geraghty's got the scoop about Obama's secret association with Portland-based indie rock bands. Yes, that's right, the Decemberists played Obama's 75,000 person rally. Quoth Geraghty, "I'm sure Obama would draw a big crowd either way, but wasn't that worth mentioning in the coverage?" Now Jason Linkins argues that "as the Decemberists are a modestly successful indie outfit, more apt to perform at venues such as the 1,200-person capacity 9:30 Club, it would be more accurate to suggest that the promise of an Obama rally is a great inducement to come see the Decemberists, rather than the reverse." Linkins misses the point, of course, that the Decemberists are popular enough to often play the 9:30 Club on consecutive nights so you can see that Obamamania's all hype.
More to the point, as Geraghty points out, this is yet more evidence that Obama is a Communist:
From Wikipedia: "Named both in reference to the Russian Decembrist Revolt (which may explain its use of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction at many concerts)..." Lovely.
I wonder if they played, "Sixteen Military Wives." The video depicts a bully named "Henry Stowecroft" (Kissinger and Brent?) representing the United States in a grade school model United Nations who declares war on Luxembourg. I kid you not when I tell you the video begins with the bully putting on a flag pin.
When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication — National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard — "and now I feel estranged," he said. "I just don't feel it's exciting, I don't feel it's true, fundamentally true." In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed "true." Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. "American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn't a big one," he said. "The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don't know if they can." He added, "You go to Capitol Hill — Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."
I have more thoughts on this matter, but for now the superficial -- does this really sound like a plausible reason for David Brooks to have agreed to become a New York Times columnist? Is there some long list of political pundits who turn down that particular job offer? I'm guessing Brooks took the job because he was offered a job as an NYT columnist and that's not the sort of job you turn down.
Somebody sent me this Kathleen Parket column a few days ago all outraged and I scanned it and didn't quite get the outrage. Here's the lede:
That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."
When I read this in a fog, not realizing who Parker was, I just assumed that was a set-up for a column about racist opposition to Barack Obama and skipped past the rest. But no! Parker is endorsing Fry's allegedly non-racist sentiments here. And yet, how could sentiments get any more clearly racist than by making explicit references to alleged deficiencies in Obama's bloodlines? Parker later cashes out the concept more thoroughly as "It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots." Again, blood equity? Heritage? That's not racist code words, she's just saying directly that Obama lacks the appropriate ancestry to be President and also that in virtue of his ancestry he's probably lazy.
Jon Chait notes the similarity to some traditional tropes of anti-semitism, "a device that's historically been used to deny the possibility that rootless, cosmopolitan Jews can be full members of a society." More broadly, it nicely dovetails with the anti-immigrant sentiment currently blossoming on the right as we learn that people with unduly recent roots abroad lack what it takes for full-bloodedness. How disgusting.
You've got to sympathize with the Bush administration. Sometimes you're running the government but, inconveniently, it's not the government of Burma and so you need to be accountable to voters, other branches of government, public opinion, etc. Under the circumstances, it helps if you can keep all your conduct secret. But that's hard to do purely through abuse of the classification process. So to speed things along, why not invent a new form of secret information? Good idea! Let's call it "Controlled Unclassified Information." More good ideas! The public has a right not to know.
Conservative radio host Kevin James is on Hardball to call Barack Obama and appeaser, and Chris Matthews hits upon the nice idea of asking James to explain what it was that Chamberlain did wrong at Munich. As becomes apparent, James has no idea! He just likes to say "appeasement" a lot, but doesn't know what it means, what the context was, what was wrong with it, or how it might possibly apply today. Basically, he's an idiot, which is no surprise, but it is rare to see these things so amply demonstrated.
What Sam Boyd said -- if MSNBC is considering this idea at all, they should hurry up and do it. She's been the best thing about the best election coverage team in cable news all primary season long.
Sichuan Province = Szechuan cuisine -- yes or no? James Fallows rounds up some accounts of the situation in Chengdu from Americans on the ground there. What can one really say?
We had a discussion around the office in the very early days of "Atlantic voices" about when it would and wouldn't be appropriate to use a profane word on the blog. I think I'm going to say that Ali Eteraz points out that Edward Luttwak is full of shit (see below) in a good HuffPoPost.
We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.
As Lee Siegelman points out the causal inference here is all wrong. Much more likely is that voters already committed to Clinton -- or strongly predisposed to commit to Clinton -- adopted the view that Reverend Wright was an important issue because they knew it was an issue that reflected poorly on Obama. Note, for example, that both pre- and post-Wright, both Clinton and Obama took a fairly constant share of different demographic categories.
The thing is, you shouldn't need to be especially sophisticated about statistics to figure this out. Clearly, Wright may have swayed some voters, but equally clearly most people had opinions about the election before Wright ever came on the scene. But Stephanopolous is hardly alone here, almost every time I see exit polls discussed on TV it's done with almost no understanding of how to read them properly.
One weird thing about journalism is that most people who work in the news business are happy to concede that the press is somewhat more trivial than they'd like it to be. This is often chalked up to commercial pressures -- we're not doing a terrible job because we're idiots or bad people, the journalist says, it's because the audience is so horrible. And yet despite the theory that the "freak show" builds ratings and sells papers, the reality is that television, newspaper, and magazine journalism are all in long-term structural decline steadily losing audience. It's almost as if people don't, in fact, want to watch the news covered in a stupid manner but actually would be somewhat interested in learning important information about the world.
Along those lines, Joe Matthews started paying close attention to local news in the Los Angeles media market and found that the Spanish-language channels were substantially more substantive than the English-language ones. And guess which language they speak on L.A.'s top-rated local newscast? Spanish, of course, perhaps because "in Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces."
More excellent work from NRO. Robert Malley has a job at the International Crisis Group where he, among other things, writes analytical reports about the situation in the Middle East. In the course of doing such work, he has spoken with leaders of Hamas. Naturally, this equals "connections with Hamas" and "palling around with terrorists."
I guess by this standard Jeff Goldberg's a Hezbollah operative or something.
It seems that First Daughter Jenna Bush is getting married, and she and the groom, showing some class and good sense, have chosen not to make their wedding a huge public spectacle. According to The Washington Post, the American people are very upset about this.
I've certainly got my share of gripes with the Bush administration (disastrous war, determination to give inequality a boost, catastrophic approach to climate change, illegal surveillance, systematic torture, etc.) but I'm gonna say they deserve a pass on this one. And, further, I'd hypothesize that I'm not alone. I haven't heard anyone complain about the non-public nature of the wedding, nobody's emailed to urge me to blog about it, indeed, I didn't even realize this was happening until the Post front page informed me that I felt deprived of the wedding photos I crave.
George WIll reviews Rick Perlstein's masterpiece, Nixonland and picks a very strange nit: "Calling South Vietnam’s army 'a joke' is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade."
But, look, South Vietnam's military was a joke. That was the whole crux of the issue with Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government had little legitimacy and couldn't build workable state institutions. Even after years of intensive U.S. backing, the South Vietnamese army couldn't hold off the North without substantial financial and logistical aid, and the assistance of American air and sea power.
UPDATE: Rick comments to say he "have chosen a better word than 'joke.'" Still, ARVN was not a very competent fighting force -- that's why they lost! It's true, as various commenters are pointing out, that North Vietnamese forces also received Soviet support, but the quantity of U.S. support for the South was always much greater than the quantity of Soviet support for the North. It was like Afghanistan in reverse (or Afghanistan was like Vietnam in reverse) -- the commies had better proxies, so a low-cost endeavor for the U.S.S.R. was able to create a high cost endeavor for the U.S.A.
Michael Calderone and Avi Zenilman: "'Deafening silence' from networks on military analysts". It's as if The New York Times' famous ability to set the agenda for TV news magically evaporates when wholesale corruption on the part of TV news becomes the story. They were complicit in lying to the public, they got caught, and they're not even slightly embarrassed or ashamed.
WaPostderides Iron Man as a "second-tier" super hero. Jonathan Last tries to defend his first-tier status, but I think that's a mistake. The problem with the article is that it doesn't do due deference to the significance of the second tier. At the end of the day, the first tier of costumed crime fighters is limited to just three members -- Superman, Spiderman, and Batman -- truly ubiquitous figures who any American could recognize even if they don't know anything about them.
Iron Man belongs firmly to a second-tier of major comic book characters who'd be instantly familiar to anyone who was, at any time in his or (less likely) her life a reader of superhero books.
Where a lot of folks surprised about the success of the Iron Man film seem to me to have gone wrong is just in underestimating how big the audience for the second-tier is. But the reality is that while current-and-former comic book fans are a minority of Americans, it's a pretty big minority, and it doesn't really take that many people to make a hit movie. A third- or forth-rate hero like Elongated Man could never carry the day, but the second tier is fertile ground if you just manage to put a decent film together.
Tim Russert just said "we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be." I certainly agree with that, but I do wonder why it's just now dawning on the TV talking heads. March 4 was Clinton's chance to make up the ground she lost in February, and she wasn't able to do it. We knew as of March 5 who the nominee was going to be.
Oh well. Glad to see more folks are realizing, and maybe we can wind this thing down. I guess I should try to go to bed before flying to California tomorrow for the Nixon Library event (be there!).
I like the thought, but I'm skeptical that Kathy G. is right to think that more widespread knowledge of Edward Said's work would have posed some kind of substantial stumbling block to the effort to sell the country on the Iraq War. The main intellectual drivers behind America's post-9/11 approach to the Middle East were, if not Said experts, at least broadly familiar with the general thrust of his work (I'd put myself in that category as well) which is precisely why you see things like The Weekly Standard publishing an Edward Said takedown piece by Stanley Kurtz on their October 8, 2001 issue.
Then they took another whack at Said in their November 12, 2001 issue. And Frank Foer offered a sweeping dismissal of Middle East Studies as a discipline in the December 3, 2001 issue of The New Republic tracing the field's flaws to none other than Said. In general, this was a period when "Arabist" became a term of disapprobation and it temporarily became conventional wisdom that foreign service professionals' judgment was mostly corrupted by excessive solicitousness of the opinions of foreign governments. Elites were generally familiar with the broad set of ideas that called the wisdom of invading Iraq into question -- from Middle East studies thinking to the realist tradition of international relations analysis to the mainstream opinion of the U.S. Army officer's corps -- it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken.
A teenage rap duo in Chicago has recorded a track, aptly called "The Economist," that extols the British publication's breadth and brevity and samples podcast commentary by correspondents Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb.
"The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?" the rappers wonder.
The answer, of course, is "heavy-handed editing" facilitated by lack of bylines.
It's strange to me how media types can simultaneously keep in their heads the idea that voters are very concerned about things like high gas prices and the rising costs of health care, but wouldn't be interested in political news that focused on which candidates have good ideas for addressing those problems. Oh well, hopefully we can get back to all freakshow all the time soon.
My estimation of Hillary Clinton has gone way down over the past six months, but we Obama fans still have a long way to go before we can match the likes of WorldNetDaily's "How Hillary will lead America into hell".
Having sung the praises of the vituperative British press it is worth pointing out that one downside of British media norms is that newspapers deem themselves to have much more leeway than ours do in terms of publishing stuff that's totally made up. Here's for instance, the Sun reports on a totally non-existent EU plot to dismember the UK:
According to the article, "“Secret plans reveal the South of England will be renamed TRANSMANCHE – and governed in part by bureaucrats in France." Apparently the Daily Mail "reported" on a similar plot last summer.
Peter Suderman doesn't understand why netroots types get so upset when Democrats go on Fox News:
Perhaps I’m not enough of a partisan, but I wouldn’t be bothered — in fact, I’d be rather thrilled — to see any conservative candidate, especially one I particularly liked, do an interview with Keith Olbermann, or even, say, a sit down with The Nation.
The difference between Fox and The Nation is that The Nation makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is. If a conservative politician sits down for an interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel or Eric Alterman or Chris Hayes or any other worthy Nationeer they'd be engaged in an interesting exercise in reaching out to self-consciously progressive media. Fox News, by contrast, is heavily invested in selling the idea that it's a "fair and balance" straight news source even though it's run by former GOP political operatives and people go from being Fox anchors to running the White House press shop.
Sitting down for Fox interviews is thought to lend legitimacy to this pretense of neutrality that Fox is seeking to foster, a pretense that makes Fox's anti-Democrat biases all the more damaging to Democrats.
Apparently there was some confusion in Fox News' coverage of Hillary Clinton's proposal that she and Barack Obama compete in some Lincoln-Douglas debates.
I think there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency without any change in the underlying shape of public opinion.
MSNBC’s ratings momentum continued in April, as the network finished the month as the only cable news net to show a viewership increase over last year (342,000 vs. 333,000, M-Su Total Day). MSNBC also showed the most growth in weekday primetime, up 9% in the key Adults 25-54 demo (253,000 vs. 232,000), while CNN dropped 9% and Fox News Channel plunged 14%.
That's nice for MSNBC, and I do think they're the best cable network and have come to rely on them for primary-night coverage, and the overall lowering tide would seem to be good for America. One of my new lines when print journalism types start fretting about the blogosphere is to remind people that the emerging media landscape can't possibly be worse than 24 hour cable news, which often seems to be going out of its way to be uninformative.
Read Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' stunningly unresponsive "response" to the NYT's revelation that the coterie of ex-officers used by TV news to comment on military affairs was riddled with conflicts of interest and being used as a Pentagon propaganda arm. I'm not sure what's more stunning, that Williams can't be bothered to correctly state the nature of the complaint, or that his response is actually more than we've heard from any other network.
Apparently, nobody's even slightly embarrassed by any of this. And on some level, why should they be? Since as best I can tell all the networks are complicit, as long as they all agree to just hum along nobody should lose any market share to anyone else.
Rove writes, "Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours." So, wait, now putting prisoners in stress positions is torture?
I was going to say "it's funny because it's true" but it's really not all that funny that we now torture people as a matter of policy in the United States.
It's Stephen Hayes versus Laurie Mylroie in a hilarious "battle of the Iraq/al-Qaeda conspiracy theorists." My preferences here lie with Mylroie who takes on a more extreme, and therefore more coherent, worldview in which we're supposed to essentially believe that Saddam Hussein is the cigarette smoking man behind all evil in the galaxy. Hayes, by contrast, tends to operate as someone who's primarily interested in scoring debater's points -- "liberals sometimes say there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but an Iraqi guy and a guy who knows Saddam met once in 1996 so we had to invade to stop another 9/11!"
Whether or not one enjoys blogs and blogging, I don't think that writing a blog that seems to consist primarily of complaints about blogging is likely to attract a large audience to the new Jeffrey Goldberg blog. Blogs are mostly read by people who like blogs -- writing about the evils of blogging is probably a good op-ed subject.
Like rather than wondering aloud "why more people don't simply pick up the phone once in a while" why not pick up the phone once in a while and write a blog that's dramatically better than all the phone-less blogs out there, thus proving the superiority of phone-based blogging? Meanwhile, though, thanks to the blog I saw Goldberg's Q&A with Shmuel Rosner in which he makes a ton of good points.
Some turns of events just cry out for the NY Post headline treatment. Meanwhile, a friend Twittered the suggestion that perhaps the right way to understand Rev. Wright is as a successor figure to the Billy Carter / Roger Clinton / Neil Bush tradition of embarrassing associates.
I once again was not invited to the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and this recounting by Mike Scherer doesn't make it sound very interesting except this one part:
As is tradition, the President stood to do a short stand-up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor.
Um . . . really? That happened? And it's an old joke?
Ezra Klein wonders when arugula became the signpost of fancy-pants elitism. I wonder, too. On the one hand, I'm pretty much a fancy-pants elitist but I'm really not sure which of the various leafy greens you see in salads is the arugula. Apparently it's also used as a garnish at Olive Garden.
But the real question is when did beer become so downscale? Go to a retail corridor in a yuppified neighborhood in any town in America and you'll find a bar full of people drinking . . . beer. Go to a Whole Foods in a town where supermarkets are allowed to sell beer and you'll find . . . beer. Surely these are well-known facts. Meanwhile, in literal sense the American "beer track" seems to involve Obama-friendly plains states plus outliers like Nevada (casinos) and New Hampshire (people driving in from neighboring states to avoid taxes).
I'll be doing a reading/Q&A/signing event for Heads in the Sand at the Borders on 18th and L in Washington, DC Thursday at 6PM so folks whose "jobs" and such prevented them from coming to my CAP event on Friday should come by and check it out.
James Fallows talks about how politicians want to talk about their agenda, but the press only wants to hear about the freak show:
The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work.
The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.
What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective." In particular, being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments. And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage. So instead you ask tough questions about process or about trivia, even though there's little evidence that these are the subjects about which people want to hear.
FireDogLake seems to be having server problems so I had to stop contributing to my book salon over there a bit more than half way through. But assuming things get fixed, I'll return tomorrow to try to follow up on the questions still outstanding. Check it out -- if you haven't seen an FDL salon before, it's a pretty cool format.
I'm going to be doing a FireDogLake book salon on Heads in the Sand today at 5PM, so if you've got any questions about the book you'd like to see answered, definitely head that way and ask 'em.
Strange but true, a reasonably kind review of Heads in the Sand by Robert VerBruggen (my new favorite conservative writer) in National Review -- "Blogger Extended: Matthew Yglesias's Heads in the Sand is a mixed success."
In his debut as a CNN commentator, former White House press secretary Tony Snow says it's unfair for John McCain to criticize Bush's handling of Katrina, and suggests that Dick Cheney could be a big political asset. This seems like right-wing hackery so egregious as to be counterproductive to the cause.
As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware?
It's plausible. Many people have remarked that political blogging has certain affinities with the pamphleteering tradition of the 17th and 18th century, so perhaps the idea of shifting toward the stylistic elements of that era should be expected as well. The fundamentally international nature of the internet can push in this direction as well. English words have different "correct" spellings in different English-speaking countries, so insofar as people become accustomed to reading foreign websites they'll get used to reading a lot of misspelled words. Or, rather, to having a more flexible concept of what the significance of spelling is.
I'm not sure if you've heard, but I wrote a book recently called Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats which examines the politics and policy of the 21st century national security debate from a progressive perspective. The main idea of the book is that the key to future political success for American liberalism is dependent on mastering the national security issue, and that the key to doing this isn't to endlessly continue the vacuous search for "toughness" but instead to ditch the people and ideas who wound up leaving so many Democrats complicit in the Bush administration's horrible war in Iraq.
Fred Kaplan calls it "a smart, vital book," Ezra Klein deems is "a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" and Hendrick Hertzberg emphasizes that it's not boring (as those of you who get the Ezra Klein joke may surmise), "Heads in the Sand is not just a razor-sharp analysis cum narrative of the politics of national security in general and the Iraq war in particular, it's also an enthralling and often very funny piece of writing."
Today is the "official" release date, so not only can you order a copy but I think it should now be in brick and mortar bookstores. Also if you live in DC and have a job that lets you wander off to think tanks in the middle of the day come see me today at noon talking about these issues with Rand Beers, Kurt Campbell, and Brian Katulis.
So, you know, buy my book. Tell your friends to buy my book. Read the book, even!
Good magazine takes a look at the historical track record of different media polls in terms of forecasting the general election. ABC looks like the winner to me, with Washington Post and Harris also worth taking seriously.
Not to get too invested in being an apologist for the media's pre-war malfeasance, but it should be said that there's a reason the press mostly relied on foreigners rather than American Democrats to make the case against the invasion of Iraq -- the leaders of the Democratic Party were all supporting the President's decision. If Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, etc. had all been against the war, I'm sure they would have been treated unfairly (as Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and Howard Dean were) but we would have heard from them.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that not only were key leaders backing the war, but they were also urging anti-war Democratic politicians to not make too much noise and fuss since the main electoral strategy for the 2002 midterms was a doomed effort to take the war "off the table" by having almost everyone in a tough race (either incumbent or challenger) back the war. This whole episode in our history has been surprisingly forgotten (along with related developments like Phil Donohue getting sacked from MSNBC for opposing the war) considering how recent it was, but you can relive it all in Heads in the Sand if you're so inclined.
Here's Time's cover. I certainly hope this primary can come to an end without anyone getting decapitated. But the correct reference is "there can be only one" in the rarely used subjunctive tense so as to emphasize the mythic nature of the dictum.
Meanwhile, it's worth observing that it's not totally clear that there really can be only one. There are a lot of good reasons to think an Obama-Clinton unity ticket would be an awkward, inconvenient pairing. But at the same time, Reagan-Bush was an awkward inconvenient pairing and that didn't stop it from happening. And it's not as if JFK and LBJ were soul mates or anything. If Obama and his team conclude that Obama-Clinton is the only way to make sure that everyone's rowing in the same direction then you could easily imagine them deciding that consolidating all the Democratic elites behind the ticket is more important than the fact that a Clinton VP choice would wreak havoc with his message.
That's funny, but for a more intellectually rigorous Friedman takedown, I'd suggest the preface to Heads in the Sand, which attempts to elucidate the "Friedman Units" concept for a wider audience as well as explore the larger significance of Friedmanesque behavior.
Patrick Healy has an excellent article in the Times making the point that it's illegitimate to make inferences of the form "A lost State X in the primary, therefore A will lose State X in a general election" or "A lost Demographic Y in the primary, therefore A will lose Demographic Y in a general election." If Clinton loses Demographic Y that could be because their preference is Obama > Clinton > McCain or it could be that they think Obama > McCain > Clinton and their behavior in the Obama/Clinton race doesn't give us any evidence.
The best evidence we do have to test these claims is provided by the early general election polling matchups, we can at least illustrate broad trends. According to Gallup, Clinton and Obama are both tied with McCain:
In head-to-head matchups against presumptive Republican nominee McCain, Clinton and Obama perform almost exactly the same. In Gallup's latest tracking of the general election, based on interviewing conducted April 18-22, McCain has a one-point lead over both Clinton and Obama. In the April 18-20 USA Today/Gallup poll, both Clinton and Obama were slightly -- but almost identically -- ahead of McCain among likely voters. In neither instance is there any meaningful difference in how the two candidates stack up against McCain.
Obviously, there's no way Clinton could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Obama supporters, and there's no way Obama could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Clinton supporters. Basically, there's nothing to see here.
Via Somerby and Lemieux, Richard Cohen has an war is peace moment:
And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion—about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance—but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons.
To be simplistic about this, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain. To try to be a bit more charitable, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly invested in the doomed epistemology of character. We can't know what lurks in the hearts of pols, but we can make inferences based on their behavior. But all politicians' behavior is mixed. So we (and by "we" here I mean "Richard Cohen") read that behavior through our preexisting beliefs about their character. And since we "know" that McCain is honorable, he fudges and ducks and swallows etc. for "understandable" reasons, whereas other, lesser politicians are just soulless scumbags. Of course McCain's reasons are understandable -- he wants to win! -- but they're just the same reasons everyone else has. They pander, he's understandable. They lie, he fudges. It's all senseless.
Which is, I suppose, just another way of observing that we're looking at a press corps that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain.
I'm pretty much a lifelong non-owner of a bicycle, and I've certainly never done city biking in traffic, but I just got one yesterday. So be prepared for many future posts about the low quality of America's bike infrastructure and how we should be more like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. For example, the city fathers of Washington, DC should consider that though it's nice that they've established some bike lanes, the key thing would be for the lanes to connect with one another and go into the downtown area so they'd be helpful for people trying to get from where they live to where the bulk of the stuff is.
It's like how the roads for cars don't just stop arbitrarily. Think about it. Also, to the bike thieves of the world -- don't steal my bike!
I don't know how many readers of this blog check out the comment section. But I think it's interesting. One of our longest-time contributors goes by the name of "Petey" and has traditionally had a lot of interesting things to say about both politics and basketball. Lately, though, all of his posts consist more or less of calling me a "trust-fund scumbag" and accusing me of being opposed to universal health care.
It makes for an odd argument. Basically, before Iowa Petey strongly supported John Edwards. My feelings were more mixed, but I came down softly on Edwards' side. Now Edwards is out of the race. Petey thinks Hillary Clinton's health care plan is better than Barack Obama's. As it happens, I agree. Petey also thinks there are other problems with Hillary Clinton. As it happens, I agree with that, too. To me, the problems with Clinton outweigh the fact that I think she has a better health care plan -- among other things, I think the outcome of 2008 Senate elections will have a larger influence on the ultimate shape of health care policy than will the outcome of the Clinton_obama primary -- but Petey disagrees. From this rather narrow disagreement, a huge amount of bile has spewed, including repeated insistence that I oppose the idea of universal health care when I clearly don't.
There are no perfect presidential candidates any more than there are perfect presidents. But by the end of January we had two options, and I think Obama's the better one. As of today, it's even more constrained than that -- if Clinton does poorly tonight, she'll be forced out of the race and progressives will be in good shape to acquire a level of political power we haven't had in decades. If she does well, she'll stay in the race and an incredibly destructive Democratic primary will continue for a while longer and the odds still make it overwhelmingly likely that Obama will emerge as the winner. That would be bad. I like her health care proposal more than I like Obama's (and I like Obama more on foreign policy, climate change, and several other issues) but I hope she does as poorly as possible tonight and gets out of the race. Either way, though, it's deeply irrational for people with similar political views to get so mad at each other just because we may disagree about which politicians do the best job of imperfectly embodying those ideals.
Progressive Media USA notes that if you're looking for an elitist in the Presidential race you might want to look at the super-rich guy who made his fortune by marrying an heiress:
And of course the couple still won't release the part of their tax returns that has all the money on it.
I continue to wonder what the point is of exercises like having Adam Nagourney or the team of John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend the ABC News debate. What the debate's critics are saying, after all, is that ABC's conduct was the apotheosis of everything that's wrong with MSM campaign coverage. To point out in response that the people most responsible for the MSM campaign coverage status quo thought it was good seems totally non-responsive.
What I'd like to see in defense of ABC would be to identify some likely Democratic Party primary voters in Pennsylvania or some other upcoming state who are now better-informed about the election than they were previously. Until that happens, though, I'm going to stick with James Fallows' observation that ordinary citizens show an extremely low level of interest in this sort of stuff. The fact that the people who've turned political reporting into appalling farce found the somewhat more appalling than usual farce of last week's debate even more delectable than the merely appalling debate work we'd seen earlier from Tim Russert and others is no kind of defense at all.
I'm not sure I buy the notion that McCain is too much of a rageoholic to be president. For one thing, I've had some anger management issues in my life and McCain doesn't seem that bad off to me. For another thing, coming from someone else I might worry that he'd inadvertently start a horribly destructive war with North Korea or something, but McCain's made it clear in the past that his considered view is that a horribly destructive war with North Korea could be a good idea. The anecdote that highlights McCain's real problem is here:
A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona's Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening's celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler's chest.
"I told you we needed a stage," he screamed, according to Hinz. "You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it."
5'9" is probably too short to be elected president and, even worse for McCain, this is an anecdote from 1986. In the intervening 22 years he's almost certainly shrunk due to spinal compressional and he's actually below average. We used to elect short men to the White House before the invention of, you know, photography but there's no way this is going to fly in a modern context.
Well, why shouldn't they vote on "character"? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin'. So if you don't want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?
Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama does, in fact, have accomplishments and a legislative record the other thing one could consider beyond a candidate's record is his or her proposals. You can bore down into detail about these proposals on Obama's website. Alternatively, you can opt for a more general characterization of the McCain/Obama choice where McCain would favor lower taxes, less generous services, and a more business-friendly regulatory environment whereas Obama would favor higher taxes, more generous services, and a regulatory environment that's more influenced by the views of environmental, consumer, and labor organizations. This whole general neighborhood of inquiry really ought to be familiar to someone who writes about politics for a living.
For reasons I can't quite comprehend, even some pretty hardened TNR-haters seem to see Leon Wieseltier as making a positive contribution to the world. Certainly, some very good stuff appears in the back of the book over there, but the man's own work is a kind of writing-as-thuggery. Anyways, it seems I have to add my colleague Andrew Sullivan to the ever-growing list of people TNR deems motivated by hatred of Jews. The context -- Bill Kristol sitting in his partisan hack armchair and determining that Barack Obama's Christian faith is insincere:
And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!
Um . . . really . . . noting the irony of Kristol's attack is now "Jew-baiting"? We seem to be defining our problems down here. But in Wieseltier's view, this is the equivalent of enslaving the entire people of Israel. And Wieseltier himself is, I guess, Moses? How preposterous. And this isn't a blog post -- Wieseltier has, nominally, an editor who ought to be able to engage in some quality control.
This is must-read stuff from the New York Times. It's about the ex-generals who show up on television as "military analysts" presumably there to provide a neutral point of view. In practice, however, it seems that they mostly have close ties to defense contractors as lobbyists or executives and are, in fact, just part of the Bush administration communications apparatus.
Gene Healy published this post on John McCain's fetishization of the idea of serving great causes a while ago, but I really like this one parenthetical joke:
McCain’s sometime ideological guru and op-ed page cheerleader, David Brooks, expresses similar themes in his writings. Even in Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s foray into “comic sociology,” he warns darkly of “the temptations that accompany affluence.” “The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.” (As a young man, Brooks served abroad with the Wall Street Journal Europe.)
This is a theme with a substantial lineage including, notably, important affinities with a lot of Theodore Roosevelt's thinking. I have a piece forthcoming about McCain's foreign policy which notes that one distressing possibility is that he actually believes this stuff and sees war-induced hardship as a benefit rather than a cost when thinking about foreign policy decisions. The President was, I think, getting at a similar idea when he claimed to envy our troops serving on the front lines since he was missing out on on the "exciting" and "romantic" opportunity to experience "great danger."
Normally when you hear this kind of stuff it mostly seems foolish, as when middle aged men such as Brooks or Bush who chose not to serve when they had the chance start musing about the romance of war. Coming from someone with John McCain's background and experiences it has much more credibility (which I think Brooks was and is shrewd enough to understand -- part of his initial late-nineties enthusiasm for McCain is precisely driven by the reality that McCain is one of the few politicians who can say this kind of stuff in a credible way) but also more troubling in some respects. McCain, after all, knows what he's talking about so it seems relatively unlikely that he's going to suddenly realize how perverse this is (the risk is that life will get good, we need policies to ensure a healthy baseline of death and destruction ) and reconsider.
Jon Chait makes some pretty short work of his colleague Kirchick's dumb post on Joe Lieberman (if only other Planksters did the same more often...) but if anything Jon concedes too much. For example, agreeing that Lieberman "ran as a pro-war candidate."
Did he? I dunno. He ran ads saying things like "I'm staying because I want to help end the war in Iraq in a way that brings stability to the Mid-East and doesn't leave us even more vulnerable" and made statements on the trail about how "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do." That kind of thing isn't literally inconsistent with his post-election position on Iraq, but I think it's clear that Lieberman was trying to use artful wording to present himself as much less of an Iraq hawk than he really is.
Certainly, Lieberman very much argued that Connecticut voters shouldn't view the election as a referendum on the war. After all, a referendum on the war would have meant Lieberman would lose the election since the war, enormously unpopular around the country by 2006, was even more unpopular in Connecticut. Instead, Lieberman tried to imply that he and Lamont were both for ending the war, and also argued that it would be foolish to base your support on a single issue. Today, Lieberman is arguing that John McCain's fanatical support for endless war in Iraq is a decisive reason to vote for him even though Lieberman nominally disagrees with McCain's positions on a whole host of other issues. That's a substantial change from the Lieberman who ran in 2006, on both what to think about the war and it's salience as an issue.
There's been something a bit odd about scanning the news all day and seeing all these accounts of media people lecturing the audience that, contrary to the opinions of the people who watched the debate last night, that the performance of the debate moderators was, in fact, very good. If voters don't think the debate focused on important, interesting topics, then too bad for them! If voters don't think the debate was informative, then too bad for them! The press, once again, gives itself a standing ovation and that's what matters.
On an unrelated note, I've been in about a million conversations navel-gazing conversations about the decline of "old media" like newspapers, magazines, and network television and never once has anyone suggested that declining audience might be in any way related to the quality of the product. Everyone knows that it's the public's duty to read newspapers, whether they find them useful and informative or not.
I thought last night's debate sucked, but this is unfair:
Stephanopoulos has, over the years, shown tons of willingness to be unfair and/or inept in his coverage of the Clintons so I see no real reason to attribute his unfair or inept coverage of Barack Obama to any larger motive. Beyond that, while the questioning last night was truly egregious, allegations of special bias against Obama don't make sense. When Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner, most of the debate hostility focused on her. Her campaign and her supporters whined about it, but the complaints didn't really make sense -- of course you focus on the frontrunner. It's the same thing now.
The debate was what it was because an awful lot of TV news is silly and horrible, not because anyone was doing Clinton special favors.
I'd forgotten that for months now Charlie Gibson has been asserting that $200,000 is a solid middle-class income, blissfully unaware that just 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more. You could be richer than 96 percent of your fellow citizens, but still just folks to Gibson. Obviously that's not on a par with being bad at bowling or anything on the "out of touch" scale, but it's still disappointing to learn that even our salt of the earth working class multimillionaire television news personalities aren't utterly infallible.
How is it that Charlie Gibson is challenging the candidates with reference to a constitutional provision that was overridden by Amendment XII over 200 years ago? I've seen a lot of dumb TV news stunts over the years, but that really takes the cake.
The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply--it almost determines the order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer--the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which "YOU know nothing"!
Ogged says this is John McCain. At the end of the day, though, I'm skeptical that McCain's life story really explains much of anything about his political ideas for good or for ill.
Alex Rosmiller takes aim at "the myth of meritocracy" as it applies to the blogosphere. I think most of what he says he right -- despite the lack of barriers to entry, there's still a very real sense in which things like timing and social networks are crucial to success in the political blogosphere.
There is, though, one sense in which merit really does play a larger role in the blogosphere than in the dread MSM. That is that, overwhelmingly, the only way for a blogger to succeed in having a lot of readers is for a lot of people (relative to the modest scale of blog enterprises) to genuinely find the blog worth reading. The MSM doesn't really work that way. A newspaper is all bundled together. So as long as The New York Times is worth reading (which it is) and Bill Kristol has a New York Times column (which he does) lots of people are going to see Kristol's columns. Him keeping his job just depends on him continuing to have the favor of the NYT high command. And then the mere fact of his presence on the op-ed page makes the columns "important" and worth reading for anyone who wants to participate in "the conversation."
Similarly, notwithstanding the unbearable inanity of Tim Russert, nobody can make it in big-time politics without submitting to the Russert Probe and a Russert interview with a major politician is, as such, a major news event worth watching. So Meet The Press can be a successful enterprise without anyone even liking it. The much larger number of distribution channels on the internet makes this kind of phenomenon -- where you become important just because someone gave you an important job -- is much less likely. Good blogs can go unfairly neglected, and bad blogs can become popular, but popular blogs are at least well-liked. I may not care for Instapundit, but Instapundit's readers really do like it, which is a real contrast with the typical MSM situation.
These days, she is more concerned about offending people. “I always fall into the trap of thinking if I’d written it better, surely, surely they would have understood,” she said, referring to the young women who were upset by “Goodbye (#2).” (“Morgan’s essay is incredibly condescending,” one blogger wrote. “It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama.”) Morgan put a log on the fire with her good arm. “They think I’m telling them what to do, but they are investing me with an authority I never had. Why is that? Do you know why that is?”
But who is this mystery blogger? Could it be my friend Ann Friedman, Deputy Editor of The American Prospect and Editor of Feministing.com? I think it just might be. Perhaps a casualty of print's sad space constraints, but you'd think that at least the online version of an article that mentions a blog post could link to the post in question. Readers interested in exploring the issue further might like to see the context. Who knows?
I haven't heard much about Doug Feith's new book, War And Decision, but Spencer Ackerman has a two post series which brings to light the amusing fact that Feith's book fails to back up Steven Hayes' various contentions about Iraq/al-Qaeda linkages even though as best anyone can tell Feith was the source for all of Hayes' "reporting" on the subject. This kind of thing, one assumes, is how Feith managed to acquire an unusually bad reputation amidst an administration packed to the ceiling with incompetents and war criminals.
Brendan Nyhan writes about how the need to construct a campaign narrative can lead to people substantially overestimating the importance of this or that campaign occurrence. For example, current polling makes it look likely that Hillary Clinton will beat Barack Obama by a bit more than ten points.
Now if you'd said on March 5 "looks like Clinton will win Pennsylvania by about 12 points" most people would have said "sounds about right, she has a huge advantage in the polls right now but Obama always gains ground through actual campaigning; still, demographically speaking it's very favorable terrain for Clinton." But today it's essentially inevitable that any failure on Obama's part to close the gap will be substantially attributed to "bittergate" even though failure to fully close the gap was not only predictable but widely predicted weeks ago based on Pennsylvania's age structure, educational attainment, and African-American population.
Blogger, economist, foodie, and author Tyler Cowen says:
Everyone who reads books on foreign policy should read this book. It is well-argued throughout and gets at fundamentals, rather than just slinging the latest epithets over our latest blunders in Iraq. I don't in every way agree with the author's recipe for liberal internationalism but overall this is a smarter book than whichever other tome you are likely to pick up on foreign policy.
I, however, am somewhat indifferent as to whether or not you read the book, the main point is that you should buy it. Reading, though nice, is strictly optional.
Check it out: Attackerman, a joint venture of Spencer Ackerman and the Center for American Progress. I, for one, welcome the ThinkProgress crew's move into franchising. I only hope that their long-range plan for world domination involves coopting/assimilating me rather than destroying me.
Folio proclaims The Atlantic to be one of their ones to watch:
The Atlantic David Bradley has assembled an all-star team of publishing talent (president Justin Smith, formerly of The Week, and newly-installed publisher Jay Lauf, formerly of Wired) that has dragged the once-stodgy print brand kicking and screaming into the Web 2.0 era. Will profitability follow?
Technically speaking, I think it was the all-star team of blogging talent that did the Web 2.0 era dragging. I also haven't actually heard anyone scream or seen anyone kick. But whatever. I was fascinated by the entry that followed:
Lenny Dykstra | Publisher, Player's Club The former New York Met, car wash millionaire and unlikely stock market genius is the force behind the Doubledown Media's latest launch, a magazine for professional athletes looking to manage their post-sports lives.
I grew up watching Dykstra on the great cocaine-fueled Mets teams of the mid/late-1980s and had really no idea what had happened to him since retirement. I'm glad to see he's doing well for himself, but one sort of needs to wonder how many subscribers a magazine like this could possibly attract.
Commenter eriks says Heads in the Sand: "I got the book yesterday and the Preface is the best summary of the Friedman Unit that I've seen. I'll read more when classes finish." Woo! Praise is always welcome -- send me an email -- but I'll also take on your criticisms and disagreements if you're inclined to try to get a response.
The bad thing about bloggers writing books is that we torment you with nagging about the need to buy our book. But the good thing is that if you do buy the book, you're also buying in to a vast interactive new media experience.
Henry Farrell notes that Doug Feith's blurbers seem to be damning him with faint praise. If, indeed, you can even call "It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them" praise at all. Contrast that with, say, Heads in the Sand which Fred Kaplan calls "a smart, vital book" and I think your choice in spring foreign policy reading is clear.
I'm not a paleocon myself (obviously) but I also think it's clear that one reason U.S. politics has gotten so out of whack over the past several years is that the balance within the GOP coalition has shifted so decisively against the paleo faction. For that and other reasons, a stronger paleo voice in the world is, in my view, a good thing and The American Conservative magazine has, over the years, published many valuable articles (also some crazy stuff) that I doubt would have seen the light of day elsewhere. This throat-clearing by way of welcoming AmCon's new blog to the 'sphere.
Clearly, the first step to getting climate change under control is to put a price on carbon, either through a tax or else through a cap and trade system. But trying to work exclusively through that mechanism probably won't work, we need, in my opinion, to go further through massive subsidies for BP's products and other efforts to help them market themselves as the "green" oil company.
Jack Shafer sure is right about this. The linking norms in the online versions of newspaper articles betray a very narrow-minded effort at profit-maximization that doesn't seem to understand that at the end of the day a website is only going to be profitable if its content is something people are going to want to read.
By John Cole. One thing that occurred to me after my visit to WVU is that I, like most DC writers, have repeated the idea that there's "unprecedented interest in this election" so many times that I've forgotten that there actually is unprecedented interest in this election and a lot more people -- especially young people and students -- are doing things like showing up at panel discussions to learn more about the campaign than I remember from the 2004 or 2000 cycles.
More hooker scandals: "The co-founder and former CEO of the liberal-progressive Democracy Radio and husband of U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow was caught in February by a Troy police sting aimed at catching prostitutes, according to a police report." In striking contrast to Elliot Spitzer, however, the John in this case is alleged to have paid a 20 year-old prostitute just $150. Houses are cheap in Michigan, too.
Are you a young or aspiring journalist interest in new media? If so, you should definitely consider applying for the new Atlantic Media Fellowship:
Our Atlantic Media Fellowship Program — Selecting 5-10 Fellows
Atlantic Media is now seeking 5-10 exceptional or aspiring writers, editors and other online media talents to serve as Atlantic Media Fellows for the Fall of 2008 through the Spring of 2009. Candidates should be current students in or recent graduates of college or graduate school programs.
Atlantic Media Fellows join the staff of Atlantic Media — helping launch, research, write and edit new websites. Fellows are paid $30,000-$40,000 (depending on experience) for the nine-month appointment.
Fellows are expected to begin their service at Atlantic Media in September 2008 and continue through May 2009. There is some prospect, but no certainty, that Fellows may be offered employment with Atlantic Media following the fellowship.
Fellowship Focus for 2008-2009 — Creating and Launching New Websites
The larger focus for our 2008-2009 Fellows will be creating and launching new websites for Atlantic Media. Fellows will help conceive new web concepts, develop their structure, design and voice, and complete the daily operations, writing and editing once the publications are launched. This is website creation from first to last.
Our offices also feature a popcorn machine, which is pretty neat.
Yesterday, Dana Goldstein observed that "Esquire's August 2007 cover featuring John Edwards was its worst seller of the year. Angelina Jolie, on the other hand, flew off the newsstands." According to Dana, "Esquire readers may not be all that interested in politics, but at least Esquire has attempted to cover the biggest election of our generation" in contrast to the major women's magazines.
This whole line of thinking seems confused. For one thing, the August Esquire obviously sold poorly because Matt Yglesias was featured in GQ that month. For another thing, there's no doubt in my mind that Esquire readers were drawn to the Jolie cover primarily out of interest for her work with UNCHR, the ONE Campaign, and other such endeavors. Well, probably not. But still, her work on global poverty and refugee issues is noteworthy and admirable, there are worse people to be on the covers of our magazines.
I think the "counterintuitive" style of journalism in which people sometimes appear to care more about producing an "interesting" argument than a true one gets pretty annoying. That said, surely there's something to be said for giving some consideration to originality of ideas and the goal of provoking further thought on the part of the audience. Do we really need a Richard Cohen column about how World War II was, in fact, a good war? Surely there's some more pressing topic that the precious Washington Post op-ed page real estate could be devoted to.
It is, however, a reminder that I'm glad to work in a medium where there are no space restrictions and I can cover important things and trivial ones to my heart's content.
To revisit the five year-old Charles Krauthammer quote from yesterday about SCIRI, I should say that I don't think the point is that Krauthammer was "wrong" about SCIRI. He was, of course, wrong but he's been wronger about many things over the years. Rather, the point of highlighting his changing tune -- and the hawks' general switch on this -- is to underscore the vacuous nature of the hawks' strategic thinking on Iraq.
The fantasy camp theory of the Iraq War in which we were going to install a happy pro-American democracy that led rapidly to a tumbling of Iranian and Syrian (and maybe Saudi!) dominoes was always dumb but it's at least clear why you might find it appealing. But that collapsed into the ashes years ago, and ever since it did folks have been casting about for rationales. We've gotten stuck in an inane debate over whether or not the surge is "working" or whether or not Iraq is "going well" when in reality it's been years since we've had any coherent objectives at all.
Glad to see that the Sirius-XM merger got approval. The companies' competitors in the terrestrial radio industry had been making the self-refuting argument that a merged entity would face no competition on the theory, I guess, that satellite radio is a hermetically sealed market totally unaffected by the rest of the broadcasting and music industries.
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
Death squads are no laughing matter, and yet you can't be a member of my generation and not find this lead anecdote from a Washington Post article on death squads in Brazil a bit amusing:
"What do they call the death squad here?"
Five middle-aged women, all of whom were visiting a church in their neighborhood's central square, answered in imperfect unison: "The Thundercats."
Is that a Brazilian idiom of some kind, or are they really referencing the show?
It's fascinating how unhinged a lot of the reactions to Obama's speech are over at the Corner. Here's Charlotte Hays just flat-out denying that it makes sense to try to understand things in context:
Obama says that we shouldn’t “condemn without understanding the roots” of remarks like those Wright made. Whatever the roots, these remarks are to be condemned. Within what context is it correct for the Rev. Wright to say “God damn America?”
There's some kind of reading comprehension problem here if Hays can't see that Obama's not saying it was correct of Wright to say that. Roger Clegg sees the speech as "politics as usual" which makes me think he must have been watching a very different usual politics from me up until now. K-Lo says "Any hopes anyone had that Barack Obama would be a gift to civil rights in America — that he would shake hands with Ward Connerly and really be a change died today, I think." In the speech John Derbyshire heard, "blame whitey, and raise high the red flag of socialism" was the essence of Obama's message.
You need to scroll down a bit to read it, but Colin Kahl has a letter to the editor in USA Today about Michael O'Hanlon mischaracterizing Barack Obama's views on Iraq.
One line of inquiry concerned a bank branch in Amiriya, a Sunni Arab neighborhood on the west side of the capital that the American military said was one of Al Qaeda in Iraq's most important strongholds last year. [...] "The bank is probably one of the most important things in the neighborhood. Opening it told people the government still cares about you," Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl said when I called him shortly after he returned to the U.S. [...] Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.
Also:
Meanwhile, I learned of another possible story: about a Chinese restaurant that had been opened in Baghdad's Karada districtby three laid-off steelworkers from China's Hubei province -- the first eatery here to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East in years. [...] A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. "The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here," the spokesman said.
No doubt the Chinese embassy is just trying to undermine John McCain's Presidential campaign as part of the PRC's long-range plot to secure world domination for the reanimated corpse of Vince Foster.
I'd say this gets it about right, though I'm not quite this bullish on the Eastern Europe coverage which seems to me to have an awful of "LIBERALISE YOUR LABOUR MARKETS DAMNIT" stuff in it. Basically, you want to stay far away from any article that threatens to turn to the subject of pensions or labor market regulations.
I'm always a bit surprised by the depth of anti-Economist sentiment lurking out there in certain corners. I wouldn't (and don't) rely on it as my go-to source of information about what's happening on the issues I care most about, but when looking for something to read on a plane or train ride or whatever it's a decent choice. Think of it this way -- suppose you had a well-traveled, reasonably witty cousin who voyaged around the world with a good eye for detail and a personality marred by a strange obsession with labor market deregulation and pension privatization (or, as he calls it, "privatisation").
You'd be happy to grab a beer with him every few months when he's in town and hear the occasional wacky anecdote about monarchists in the Caribbean or African dictators railing against apprentice sorcerers. Sure, the fact that the entire "Europe" section could be replaced most weeks by LIBERALISE YOUR LABOUR MARKETS DAMNIT gets a bit annoying, but still you can make a kind of sport out of it. This article on economic problems in Poland, for example, argues that "the urgent need is to raise productivity by liberalising the labour market" in the third graf, whereas this article on economic problems in Spain doesn't fret about "Spain's lack of structural reforms to [...] free up the labour market" until the very last graf. Does that make the need more urgent in Poland or more emphatic in Spain? No other magazine gives you those kind of delights.
Plus, labor market liberalization (or sation) aside, you genuinely don't get insightful coverage of the ongoing war in Somalia and America's role in that mess in any other magazine I'm familiar with.
I stole this image of Chinese news coverage of the situation in Tibet from James Fallows; do make sure to check out his whole post on the subject. Obviously, the PRC government puts a premium on information control. For a long time the hope has been that growing connectivity through the internet will start to undermine its information-control capabilities. And to some extent that's happened, but it also seems that The Great Firewall of China has generally been more effective than I would have thought ten years ago.
Back on Tuesday, Chris Matthews offered the following thoughts on the politics of health care:
Now, if a Democrat were smart, who gets elected president, they wouldn't go back to the old Canadian model, where they're all—you know, single-payer model. They'd say, “Wait a minute. Why don't I take something that looks practical out of Massachusetts with Mitt Romney, something practical that Schwarzenegger's trying to do, and put my name on it and say, 'Let's try that. Let's try some kind of mandated benefit. Let's try some kind of effort where businesses and young people have to pay their way. Let's do something that sounds vaguely Republican and self-reliant' "—if you're a Democrat. You know why? Because it would pass! And you'd have national health insurance! But if you keep pushing from your ideological end, you never get there.
It's a good thing Matthews has no familiarity whatsoever with the health care proposals of the major Democratic Party presidential candidates. What he's advising Democrats to do is exactly what Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have proposed, it's similar to what Barack Obama's put forward, and it's identical to what Ron Wyden is working on legislatively. Indeed, there's a prohibitive (and, I think, wrong) consensus in left-of-center health policy circles that abandoning single-payer in favor of something like what Matthews is proposing is the way to go. Most interestingly of all, Matthews goes on television to talk about politics for a living.
Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.
I dunno about that, certainly it seems to me that a lot of the current U.S. government's allies have been arguing, falsely, that there has been adequate progress toward reconciliation. Either way, I think the point is clear enough -- Petraeus is right that if you're willing to expend an infinite quantity of American lives, American money, and American resources of diplomacy and attention on Iraq, things might kinda sorta turn out okay at some point depending on what happens. I would only caution that if we cut and run it's also possible that some sunny scenario will emerge. But in terms of the goals actually set for the surge, i.e. reconciliation, it hasn't happened.
Americans, to some great extent, have internalized this cartoonish idea that politicians ought to be policy-making and policy-enforcing robots, but they almost never seem to bring the hammer down unless a politician errs in some extremely frivolous way. Some senators and congressmen, it's worth pointing out, take legislative action to settle personal vendettas as a matter of routine. Some take bribes, both real and de facto. Others see prostitutes. If I had to pick, I know which "oops" I'd rather catch my elected official in--the only one, it turns out, that's likely to put an entire career in public service at risk.
In some way, the best example of this was the Lincoln Bedroom fundraising scandal of the Clinton years. Appearing to auction off that kind of treat for campaign cash was tawdry as all hell, but Bill Clinton wound up catching more shit for it than his successor did for auctioning off vast swathes of national policy, even though the latter is clearly a more important sin in terms of its impact on people's lives. It all goes back to the fundamental frivolity of the Guardians of our discourse -- the whole political media is dominated by people who can't think about policy without getting queasy.
Everytime I see something painfully lame done on Clinton's behalf, I think she just might ultimately win this thing. At the end of the day, the United States is a pretty tacky middlebrow kind of country.
Tyler Cowen asks: "Here is my question for the left-wing bloggers: How good would The Wire be, if it had to appeal to 300 million plus viewers? While it is obvious that politics is a form of mass culture, this point is not made with sufficient frequency for my taste."
Obviously, under those circumstances The Wire would suck, just as the rhetoric engaged in by presidential campaign is incredibly dumb if evaluated as serious analysis of public policy or the structure of American political institutions. That said, the libertarianish line of reasoning that goes "politics is tawdry and often corrupt and therefore you liberals should go home and just let things become even more dominated by the corrupt interests of the wealthy and large business enterprises" doesn't make sense to me.
Katha Pollitt does a great response essay to Charlotte Allen's "women are dumb" op-ed. I even learned a thing or two about traffic safety:
Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.
Men like risky behavior leading to more accident fatalities jibes with my general understanding, but I wonder why women get into more aggregate accidents. You'd think that the same skills and instincts that help you avoid a fatal crash would also help you avoid a minor one.
When it turned out that The Washington Post's readers were kind of pissed that their newspaper ran an article whose thesis was that women are stupid (and what does it say about the paper that it assumed its readership to be mostly composed of rabid misogynists), the relevant editor argued that the piece was "tongue in cheek," a joke. But the woman in question, Charlotte Allen, wasn't joking at all: "I meant to be funny but with a serious point--that women want to be taken seriously but quite often don't act serious."
Of course in my experience men, like women, want to be taken seriously. And men, like women, sometimes don't act serious. Somehow the world gets on.
Chuck Schumer and Even Bayh explain that people vote for Hillary when they realize things are "serious." Because, after all, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, George Miller, SEIU, and Samantha Power are all unserious. I guess kind of like how entire states don't count. Maybe it's just inherently unserious to be troubled by the idea of continuing hawk hegemony inside the Democratic Party. We need some more "serious" "national security Democrats" to run things. An administration staffed by vapid careerists. Sounds great.
Of course, with me as with everyone else, my election-season analysis may at times become tainted by self-interest. For example, the evidence from my traffic stats unambiguously indicates that a lengthy primary campaign is good for blog traffic. What's more, I have at least some hope that it'll be good for Heads in the Sand, too.
I dismissed Rush Limbaugh's efforts to get conservatives to go vote for Hillary Clinton in order to make things easier for John McCain. Markos' efforts to do something similar on Mitt Romey's behalf didn't achieve anything. And, after all, why should it work -- the motive for voting is mostly expressive, so people are disinclined to do this kind of thing. But Dave Weigel rounds up some evidence that the Rush effect was real and put Clinton over the top in Texas.
And, of course, it worked. Clinton still won't win the nomination -- after Mississippi and Wyoming she'll be further behind in the delegate count than ever with fewer than ever delegates still up for grabs -- but for another couple of months McCain will have a high-profile anti-Obama surrogate in the field telling people the likely nominee is unfit for executive leadership.
K-Lo asks: "Is there any woman in America who doesn't want Cindy McCain's hair stylist and wardrober?" I certainly hope there are a few. I'm having a disturbing vision of a dystopian McCain Era in which the Ministry of Hair and Wardrobe forces all women to turn themselves into Cindy clones while muttering something about the need to transcend mere self-interest and individuality.
There's this typical mode of election analysis where you see that voters who said "change" is important voted for Obama, and voters who said "experience" is important voted for Clinton, so then Clinton won because more people were interested in experience, or else Clinton lost in another state because more people were interested in change. I can't quite prove it, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. It seems to me that people are drawn to one candidate or another for a murky series of reasons, and then they come to pick up their favorite candidate's themes. So people who like Clinton develop an appreciation for the importance of experience, whereas Obama supporters decide that the Iraq War is the most important issue.
Larry Bartels has a paper about this phenomenon that I recommend to one and all. Certainly, I think pundits ought to do a better job of at least keeping the possibility of this sort of thing happening. In general election terms, for example, Andrew Gelman has observed that the behavior of most voters is pretty consistent and predictable from year-to-year. But the candidates are always changing. So when George W. Bush is the nominee, the sort of people inclined to vote Republican claim that Bush's personal characteristics are really crucial, but when John McCain becomes the nominee the sort of people inclined to vote Republican like his personal characteristics.
Okay, watching an extended dialogue on MSNBC about the Churchillesque awesomeness of John McCain serves as an excellent reminder that even though I have strong feelings about the Clinton-Obama matchup, I don't really have a serious problem with either contender. The ensuing months of watching the press kiss McCain's is going to be painful.
Peter Brimlow, one of the really really really hard-core anti-immigration conservatives, seems to pretty profoundly hate William F. Buckley in terms that certainly make it seem as if Buckley must have been doing something right.
Commenting on my post about single-sex education, RKU snarks:
Didn't Matt just do a posting yesterday strongly implying that any claim of an innate statistical difference in female/male mental/psychological behavior was "sexist"?
This seems to be a favorite tactic of the right. Apparently, if I'm going to favorably cite someone as saying that "boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of lanugage and motor development when they enter school" then I also can't object to writing op-eds that argue, without evidence, that women are stupider than men. Because, clearly, either you're a die-hard egalitarian blank slater or else it's no fair objecting to sexism. The flaw here should be clear. Yes "boys and girls are (on average) different," but, no, cutting-edge neuroscience does not back up all your long-held prejudices.
NRO's Lisa Shiffren's not very happy about The Washington Post's "women are dumb" op-ed kick:
As far as I can tell, there is more than enough stupidity out there to go round. When it's a writer with a dumb idea for a column, the idea is that an editor will exercise better judgement. I'm not an oversensitive feminist. But as a rule, "women are really stupid" columns aren't funny even when written by women.
Note the requisite I'm not one of those feminists! disclaimer here. But this is just what it's about. Shiffren, like an awful lot of people, don't think that major newspaper op-ed pages should just be offering up random misogyny as their political commentary and then claiming they were just joking when people get pissed off. That's feminism.
A reader directs my attention to Mark Liberman's old dissection of fake neurologist and "gender education" advocate Leonard Sax. Why, it's almost as if major magazines shouldn't give the man's views a long and respectful hearing!
Senator John McCain likes to present himself as the candidate of the “Straight Talk Express” who does not pander to voters or change his positions with the political breeze. But the fine print of his record in the Senate indicates that he has been a lot less consistent on some of his signature issues than he has presented himself to be so far in his presidential campaign.
Mr. McCain, who derided his onetime Republican competitor Mitt Romney for his political mutability, has himself meandered over the years from position to position on some topics, particularly as he has tried to court the conservatives who have long distrusted him. His most striking turnaround has been on the Bush tax cuts, which he voted against twice but now wants to make permanent. Mr. McCain has also expressed varying positions on immigration, torture, abortion and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
Mr. McCain’s advisers say that he has evolved rather than switched positions in his 25-year career in the House and Senate and that he has been remarkably consistent on his support for the war in Iraq and the American troop escalation there.
I think things go a bit downhill from there, but this captures the essence of the matter quite well. Since the late-1990s, John McCain has expressed a very clear and consistent preference for very aggressive use of unilateral American military force. He broke with the GOP leadership to support intervention in Kosovo, then he broke with the Clinton administration to argue for a land invasion and a more sweeping conception of victory. He called for a policy of "rogue state rollback" in 1999, and attacked Bush from the right on foreign policy in 2000. He supported invading Iraq in 2002, argued that more troops should be sent ever since 2003, and is basically a rock-ribbed hawk.
But on other issues, McCain's stances tend to meander. I think it's perhaps counterproductive to speculate as to precisely why this is. But precisely because he has broken with the GOP on a potpurri of issues, but rarely done so with a great deal of consistency, he's really quite a bit more flip-floppety than the average politician even as he relies on his image as a consistent "straight talker" quite a bit more than your average pol.
Reader C.M. writes "You need to end our long national nightmare and open a new Wire thread." Consider it done. This is definitely making me miss the compression of the season into ten episodes rather than twelve, as I feel like I would have liked to see some of the characters' decision-making explored in a bit more depth than we got in episode nine. If anyone's OnDemanded the finale, please avoid spoilers.
Like Spencer Ackerman, I'm having trouble believing this was actually published -- it's a long argument by Charlotte Allen in The Washington Post in favor of the proposition that women are dumb. That's no exaggeration, that's what the piece is about. Plus: frenology:
Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size).
Presumably if we left Allen out of the sample, things might look different.
Yesterday, The Atlantic debuted a new feature available on the homepage and also at its own URL called "the Current." The idea is to take several of the day's most interesting stories, every day, and combine a brief take by a member of the Atlantic family with a curated guide to the best opinions available on the subject around the web.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Sara Mead's new Early Ed Watch blog at the New America Foundation is going to become this site's go-to source for early education news and analysis.
As long as everyone's hating on Tim Russert today, I thought I should to my Washington Monthly article on how much damage Russert and Russertism are doing to the country.
Tim Russert asked, "Senator McCain, realistically, how long will American troops be in Iraq, and how much is it going to cost us?" John McCain replied:
I don't know the answer to that, but I'm telling you what the question is, and the critical aspect of this is: What happens in the next few months? Time is not on our side. People in 125-degree heat with no electricity and no fuel are going to become angry in a big hurry. The sophistication of the attacks on U.S. and allied troops have increased. And what we do in the next several months will determine whether we're in a very difficult situation or not, and there's still time, but we've got to act quickly.
That happened four and a half years ago on August 24, 2003. But what the country needs is strategic patience.
Ross and I embarked on this exciting new adventure in web video punditry mostly to try to make sure it would actually work from a technical standpoint. I'm not sure the ideas we're expressing are really all that coherent, but the good news is that it's short and should lay the groundwork for a bold new world of timely, reasonably brief web video punditry. But here goes:
Jenny, who does the hard work of putting The Atlantic multimedia stuff together, says "Way better than either 'Hey Jealousy' or 'I Found Out About You'" thus setting a new standard for faint praise throughout the galaxy.
I sometimes think journalists should write more about the stories we wind up not writing. In a slow moment, for example, I thought I'd click over to The Nation to see if they'd published something embarrassing about Castro that I could flag to try to regain my mainstream credibility. Instead, I wound up reading this:
Conversely, if [Hugo] Chávez is such a democrat, why has he embraced Fidel Castro--a full-fledged authoritarian who, for decades, imprisoned his critics and quashed internal dissent--as his mentor and model? Why has he aggressively undermined the independence of the Venezuelan judiciary and concentrated power so heavily in the president's office? And why, most recently, did he use the referendum to seek sweeping powers to suspend due process rights in times of emergency?
What follows is a long and nuanced discussion of the situation in Venezuela that puts the whole thing into much more context than I'd seen previous in a magazine article.
Spencer Ackerman flags a Shmuel Rosner article on Samantha Power in which she responds to allegations that she hates Jews, etc., etc. The article's not terrible, but anything that refers to Noah Pollack, who's been peddling these smears, as a "yound and talented writer," is bound to be at least somewhat problematic. To make a long story short, though, first Obama was an anti-semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to Pollack it's Power who who's tainted by Jew-hatred.
In part, you're just seeing tawdry political smears against a popular and charismatic progressive politician. But in large part we're just seeing Episode 7,000 of one of the longest-running shows in the U.S. foreign policy debate in which nobody is allowed to say that any Israeli actions have caused anyone to suffer, have been responsible for any problems for the United States, have in any way contributed to the inability to reach a peaceful settlement of the conflict, etc.
It'd be nice to see the Obama campaign actually punch back on this kind of thing. To note that if Commentary's out to get you, it's probably because you're doing something right. Something like, perhaps, dissenting from the maniacal Commentary worldview that's done so little over the past seven years to make the United States or Israel more secure. Instead, they're kind of slinking away apologetically lest they offend the broad middle of American (and Jewish) opinion on Israel which certainly wants the U.S. to take a "pro-Israel" posture but certainly doesn't define that posture in a Commentaryish way as involving a limitless commitment to securing West Bank settlements and avoiding diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran. It's a pretty a disappointing lack of vision on Obama's part, though I'm hardly seeing a better alternative.
Michael Signer, who worked on foreign policy and national security issues for John Edwards, has a great piece in The Washington Post about the difficulty of getting any coverage of the foreign policy distinctions between the presidential candidates. He (rightly) cites Michael Gordon's series of interview/analysis articles for The New York Times as an important exception, along with some of the stuff Jason Horowitz did for The New York Observer, but "mostly you had to look to the blogs -- places such as the Atlantic Online, the American Prospect, TPMCafe and Democracy Arsenal -- for serious, sustained foreign policy reporting."
He observes, in what I think is a telling moment, that "there were few deep contrast articles -- the sort of thing we'd see from columnists such as Paul Krugman on domestic policy." I think a large part of the issue here is simply that we don't really have a Krugmanesque figure who primarily focuses on foreign policy issues. Instead, we have a couple of other important progressive columnists (E.J. Dionne, Harold Meyerson) who don't focus mainly on foreign policy, and we have a few foreign policy focused columnists (Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan) who aren't interested in trying to follow Democratic Party primary policy arguments in a sympathetic and engaged way.
That said, it's clearly a problem. Not on are foreign policy issues very important, but the president's level of control over them is much, much, much higher. A president who wants to implement sweeping change of the country's national security policies can snap his finger and get it done, whereas domestic policymaking is a complicated interplay between administration, congress, interest groups, etc.
Patrick Appel writes that "The Iseman scandal coverage has been dizzying. The left jumped at the opportunity to skewer McCain, while the right equally cherished the chance to condemn the Times." This strikes me as a pretty lazy equivalence. In a nation of 300 million people, I'm sure some people on the left have jumped at the opportunity to skewer McCain, but just about every liberal I read has taken the time to note that the Times' sexual innuendos were a pretty inappropriate way to frame a news story.
Have I (and others) "skewered" McCain's interventions in the regulatory process on behalf of Paxson communications and habit of accepting free plane rides from lobbyists? Sure. Meanwhile the right, it seems to me, has basically pointed at the smear and completely ignored these more substantive elements of the case against McCain's self-righteousness. It's a particularly odd trend since conservatives have spent a lot of time over the past ten years complaining precisely about McCain's self-righteousness.
However, I was told that I couldn’t use the lede I originally wrote for my column following the 2007 State of the Union address, in which Bush made ethanol the centerpiece of his energy strategy: “Before the State of the Union address, there had been hints and hopes that President Bush would offer a serious plan to reduce our dependence on imported oil. Instead, however, he took refuge in alcohol.”
Similarly, when I was in Chuck Schumer's office we were putting together some anti-ethanol talking points for Schumer to use in a committee hearing or on the senate floor or something and I wanted to include something about how "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of corn" but that was deemed (correctly) to be over the top. Still, this is what happens when an uncontroversially correct policy argument, widely agreed to by experts from all ideological points of view, runs headlong into a deadly mix of special interest politics and America's idiosyncratic corn-boosting political institutions.
Photo by Flickr user edcrowle used under a Creative Commons license
Increasingly, my friends and I are old men. For example, I hurt my back on Monday. Also, Spencer Ackerman and I got into a dispute about the Gin Blossoms. I say that "Hey Jealousy" is their best song:
Ackerman, by contrast, is a partisan of "Found Out About You"
I say only the collective wisdom of the internet can decide an issue like this.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, Gin Blossoms suck. I understand. Still, there's a question to be answered.
I'm looking forward to Paul Krugman's condemnation of this. More generally, one thing Hillary Clinton's supporters need to consider at this moment is the extent to which she and John McCain are reading from the same sheet of talking points.
If you genuinely believe in your heart that Obama is too green to be president, and that the person with more Beltway experience belongs in the White House, then by all means keep saying that stuff but if you would prefer Obama over McCain if Clinton can't get the nomination then you do need to consider what the impact of having high-profile Democrats going on record claiming that the likely Democratic nominee can't do the job is going to be. That's a different kind of thing than hitting him on his health care plan, or pointing to his sometimes off-base environmental record in the Senate.
I tend to agree that an Obama media backlash is probably looming, but it hasn't built up enough steam yet to prevent him from snagging the endorsement of The Houston Chronicle despite Hillary Clinton's efforts to woo them with her love of manned space flight and domestic oil production.
Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.
From that, I concluded that Clinton had said that Barack Obama was all hat and no cattle at some point. In fact (via Nyhan and Somerby) what happened was:
"There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and lot more cattle."
Of course in terms of bizarre literary readings, the troubled New York Times article on The Great Gatsby mentioned below has absolutely nothing on Bill Kristol's column about how George Orwell's take on Kipling shows that Republicans, like Kipling, are awesome.
One argument I make in my forthcoming book, Heads in the Sand, is that we shouldn't understand Bush-style neoconservative foreign policy as some kind of tremendously innovative new thing. Rather, it's very much a part of the same tradition as 19th century imperialism -- a tradition that had mostly gone into eclipse for good reasons after WWII and whose post-Cold War resurgence has brought us little of merit. It's by no means a wholly original argument, I'm following John Judis' underappreciated The Folly of Empire among other works, but I did think it was still a provocative one. At a minimum, I thought it was something most neocon types would deny. But here's Kristol, proudly waving the banner of Kipling and empire, and with nothing to say about the whole sorry business other than that Kipling is "politically incorrect" as if the whole "should we seek to subjugate the entire world with our military might" issue boils down to liberals being fussy.
To me, John McCain's habit of switching positions on many issues over the years makes it difficult to tell what, if anything, he really thinks about these matters. It seems, though, that a superior journalist like Nicholas Kristof gets to write for The New York Times op-ed page because he does have a solid read on what McCain really believes. What reportorial technique did he use to ferret out the truth? Telepathy! Thus, Kristof is sure that "With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is." Basically, "McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste." How does Kristof know this? Telepathy! Then Kristof runs down the considerable evidence that McCain is an enormous jerk and concludes that:
McCain himself would probably acknowledge every one of these flaws, and he is a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it. It is refreshing to see that courage rewarded by voters.
McCain himself would acknowledge these flaws if what? If he wasn't running for President? What kind of courage is that? I have know idea under which circumstances, if ever, McCain would acknowledge flaws that he has not, in fact, acknowledged. But the overwhelmingly relevant fact about McCain's flaws would seem to me to be their existence. Acknowledging flaws, after all, doesn't make them go away. And of course McCain hasn't even acknowledged them! But if things were different, he would, which would be courageous, so we should be glad McCain is getting close to the White House.
I liked Francis Fukuyama's review of Samantha Power's new book very much, but something at the end of it reminded me of a complaint I frequently have with commentary on the future of international institutions:
In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the United States and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers or trust it with large sums of money.
I'm not sure people truly grasp the force of a claim that involves the statement that something won't "ever" happen. Human civilization might go on for a very long time. Think of a person sitting around in 1808 speculating on what might or might not "ever" come to pass in the world. It wouldn't have even occurred to him to predict that Germany and France could never reconcile because there would have been no such country as Germany. Things would need to be very different from how they are now for major countries to be putting soldiers under the direct control of UN authorities, but if you consider how much things have changed from 1938 to 2008, it doesn't seem at all implausible that things might, indeed, be very different in 2078.
When I was in the Netherlands, a leading Dutch pundit argued to me that the Netherlands would never put its soldiers under the command of a German officer. I told him this exact scenario in fact already exists. He insisted I was wrong, but fortunately Bert Koenders, Minister for Development and Cooperation, was on hand to back me up. Things change, stuff happens, people will be surprised.
It's official, SEIU is endorsing Barack Obama, a move that supersedes any state-level endorsements of other candidates. I'm given to understand that the move was less about any particular SEIU-related policy issue than about the idea that an Obama endorsement and an Obama win is the best possibility for building the sort of broad, powerful progressive coalition that SEIU seeks.
I know this blog has gotten pretty horseracy as this race keeps on going, but I've still got a lot to learn if I want to be a bigtime media player. Yesterday, for example, Peter Slevin and Shailagh Murray did an article for The Washington Post on Barack Obama's economic plan. Well, it was sort of an article about Obama's economic plan. The headline was "Obama's Economic Plan Is A Pitch to the Working Class". Basically, it referred to Obama's economic plan, but didn't say anything about it. "Obama's Economic Plan Calls for Infrastructure Bank"? No. "Obama's Economic Plan Calls for Credit Card Reform?" No.
But that's just the headline. Journalists don't write our own headlines. Maybe if you decide to scan the article you can a taste of what sort of measures were included in Obama's plan. Here's the lede:
Sen. Barack Obama offered a detailed prescription for the ailing U.S. economy Wednesday, answering skeptics who contend he has not matched his inspirational talk with a mastery of policy and targeting voters in crucial primaries in Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas.
Up until the comma, we're doing well here. We learn that Obama offered a detailed plan. But after the comma, we don't learn any of the details. The next six grafs are all about the political context -- Obama's momentum, the looming primaries, Obama's need to expand his appeal to working class voters. In graf eight, John McCain accuses Obama of offering "platitudes." In grafs nine and ten, Obama fires back accusing McCain of flip-flopping on taxes. In graf eleven, Clinton echoes McCain's attacks. In graf twelve, the fact that Obama delivered a speech on the economy gets re-iterated. In graf thirteen, we learn that Obama says he'll pay for the plan by ending the war in Iraq and rolling back tax cuts. In graf fourteen, the Clinton campaign quotes a McCain advisor as calling the plan "plagiarism." Finally, in the fifteenth graf of an article about Obama's economic plan we get something resembling a description of the content of the plan:
The newest element of his proposal was the establishment of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would spend $60 billion over a decade to rebuild deteriorating roads, bridges and waterways. Obama said the spending would generate 2 million new jobs, many of them in a construction industry that has been hard hit by the housing market downturn.
I don't know whether Obama's campaign was helped or hindered by this strange way of covering the plan. Maybe his efforts to make inroads are being stymied since the ideas he was hoping to help him make them are being muffled by focus on the political context. Or maybe his efforts are being boosted, because the details wouldn't really sway people but random chatter about Obama doing detailed, working class stuff is sends the right message. My guess is probably the latter; this is more helpful to Obama than a straightforward description of the infrastructure bank proposals (it would allow the government to account for infrastructure spending as a kind of investment rather than an expense on continuing operations; it's the kind of distinction companies usually make between capital spending and operating expenses) but it's really no good for the country.
Change Begins March 4th. Hillary leads in the three largest, delegate rich states remaining: Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These three states have 492 delegates - 64 percent of the remaining delegates Hillary Clinton needs to win the nomination.
Chris Orr notes that this only works "If Clinton wins all three states by margins of 100-0." Penn doesn't seem to really understand spin. The point of spin is to make the person on whose behalf the spinning is happening look better, not worse. There's no point in just saying any old thing. What's more, it's not really surprising that he's bad at spin -- he's a pollster. Spinning is a distinct skill-set. But for some reason he seems to be doing an awful lot of it, and not very well.
Offering up a dose of humility before reminding us that he correctly predicted a John McCain win some time ago, Tom Schaller reflects:
Given how much more closely I’ve followed Democratic politics the past four years, I’ve been embarrassed at times by my assessments or predictions of the race for the Democratic nomination.
I think following politics closely may actually be an impediment to forecasting. People who don't follow politics at all can make mistakes because they wind up lacking awareness of relevant facts about the candidates (Giuliani is pro-choice) or general principles (the GOP is the pro-life party) that you need to know in order to predict with a healthy measure of accuracy. But beyond some general level of awareness of who's who and what usually happens, paying close attention tends to overly bias one toward the view that something surprising and interesting will happen. Now it may prove to be the case that 2008 is, on the Democratic side, that unusual year in which something surprising and interesting does happen. But even if Obama wins, it'll still be the case that every cycle some group of clever people is making the case for why this year is the year and it almost never is.
Spencer Ackerman offered a gentle critique of his friend George Packer's essay on Iraq in the premiere issue of the new World Affairs journal. I'd go a bit further -- I think this very much represents the worst of Packer's writing on Iraq rather than the best. It opens with some striking on-the-ground reporting from Iraq, then shifts to a discussion of how un-visceral these events are to most Americans, who are far more distanced from the conflict than we were from Vietnam and earlier wars. Eventually, though, it shifts into a kind of lame plea for open-mindedness:
So the lines were drawn from the start. To the pro-war side, criticism was animated by partisanship and defeatism, if not treason. This view, amplified on cable news, talk radio, and right-wing blogs, was tacitly encouraged by the White House. It kept a disastrous defense secretary in office long after it was obvious that he was losing the war, ensured that no senior officer was held accountable for military setbacks, and contributed to the repetition of disastrous errors by the war’s political architects. Meanwhile, the fact that the best and brightest Iraqis were being slaughtered by a ruthless insurgency never aroused much interest or sympathy among the war’s opponents. The kind of people who would ordinarily inspire solidarity campaigns among Western progressives—trade unionists, journalists, human rights advocates, women's rights activists, independent politicians, doctors, professors—were being systematically exterminated. But since the war shouldn’t have been fought in the first place, what began badly must also end badly.
Note that even in Packer's somewhat tendentious accounting, there's no actual parallelism here. War supporters, invested in the idea that they were right when they were, in fact, wrong blinded themselves to actual developments on the ground in Iraq. War opponents were, by contrast, what? It's hard to say. Not blinded by denial that terrible things were happening in Iraq. But, I guess, not affected by these terrible happenings in the way Packer thinks would have been appropriate? Insufficiently surprised that a war they'd always regarded as ill-advised turned out to be ill-advised? It's not clear.
As we go deeper, this continues to be the pattern. Packer sees a very schematic United States of America. One where "Pro-war journalists and bloggers deride the piece as fraudulent and anti-military" even before evidence is in on the Scott Beauchamp case. Similarly, when "two center-left think tank analysts return from a trip to Iraq and declare in an op-ed that the surge has produced military successes" the response is that "by the next morning, anti-war journalists and bloggers are in full cry, deriding the piece as credulous, dishonest, and self-serving." This did happen, but it's curious that Packer doesn't name the think tank analysts. Well, their names are "Kenneth Pollack" and "Michael O'Hanlon." And whatever else one might say about Pollack and O'Hanlon, it's certainly not the case that left of center people have been blindly ignoring their views throughout the course of the Iraq debate. Quite the reverse -- Pollack's The Threatening Storm was hugely influential and O'Hanlon was, for years, one of the most prominent national security analysts in America.
Similarly, given Packer's dystopian vision of American discourse, it's hard to understand how Packer's book, The Assassin's Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country -- a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.
The reality is that the American political debate from 9/11/01 to today has been enormously complex. A once-popular war has become highly unpopular. A great many people, myself included, have not only changed our minds about the war but changed our minds about a larger set of concerns. The market for the sort of serious, thoughtful reporting and analysis Packer has brought us from the region has actually been very large. People from differing political perspectives came together to contribute essays to a new journal called World Affairs. Howard Dean rose and fell then kinda sorta rose again to become DNC Chair. Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination, but secured election as an Independent. The distance between America and Iraq that Packer writes about is real enough, and it's quite true that the war exists as a kind of abstraction -- a faint presence. But the dumb and indifferent public senselessly processing information through fixed partisan blinders just isn't there -- the country wasn't evenly split on the war in the summer of 2003, and it's not evenly split today, either; a lot of debate has happened and a lot of people have changed their minds. Indeed, that changing of minds has in many ways been the central fact of American politics in recent years.
I'm going to be on the Rachel Maddow Show on Air America at precisely 6:34 PM Eastern time tonight. If she's not on in your market, you can stream the broadcast online here.
I'll admit that Marty Peretz's seeming affection for Barack Obama has given me some pause. But Spencer Ackerman points out that Leon Wieseltier is slamming Obama as insufficiently bloodthirsty. That's not quite as big as when Kenneth Pollack and Mike O'Hanlon came out in favor of Clinton, but I'd say it certainly counts as a stroke in Obama's favor.
The process by which the Democratic Party allocates delegates is complicated, so it's a good thing that CNN.com features this explainer. Unfortunately, their explanation is totally wrong. The Democrats only allocate 35 percent of the delegates based on the proportion of the statewide vote. The other 65 percent of the delegates are allocated to congressional districts, with the number of delegates per district varying (since congressional districts have the same population, I believe the variance has to do with how many people voted for John Kerry) from district to district. Then each congressional district has its delegates apportioned proportionately.
This is quite different from what CNN explained. Among other things, it impacts turnout strategy. If Congressional District Seven of State X is blanketed with snow and only 11 people turn out to vote, but all eleven vote for Candidate A, then Candidate A still gets all of CD7's delegates even if those eleven votes are the only votes A gets in a state where two million people vote.
CNN's system seems to me like one that would make more sense, but them's the breaks. You need to explain the real electoral system, not some more rational, easier-to-explain alternative system.
My understanding is that it's supposed to be unfair to charge McCain with having proposed that we fight a 100 (or, at times, 10,000) Years War in Iraq because he stipulated that Americans would stop getting killed (via magic!) during this indefinite occupation. Maybe so, but viewed in that light the comment merely reflects McCain's utter lack of strategic and diplomatic understanding. Such masters of nuance and sensitivity as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld all had the good sense to recognize that loose talk of perpetual American occupation of Iraq drives anti-American violence and gets US troops killed.
John O'Sullivan launches another episode in the oft-fraught relationship as he muses "Alas, Lee [Kuan Yew] is not eligible for the U.S. presidency." Lee is an impressive figure in many respects, but as we really supposed to deem it regrettable that we're not allowed to hand control of the country over to a foreign dictator?
For a long time it seemed inconceivable that we would face this problem, but don't we need some more polling to be done on this primary? All throughout 2007 I feel like I was being inundated with a new, meaningless national poll every 36 hours. And for a while, it seemed as if multiple Iowa and New Hampshire polls were coming out every day. But now, there's just an eerie silence. But I, for one, would be very interested in a poll of likely voters in the Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania Democratic Party primaries and I can't be the only one.
For that matter, will nobody think of the small states? With regard to, say, Hawaii all of our information is based on conjecture and hearsay. Obama was born in Hawaii, but then you read things about "the Democratic establishment is aggressively working to inoculate the state against Obama--priming their warhorses, the two biggest government unions, for a major turnout effort and bringing professional organizers from the mainland." How about a poll? It's a weird situation.
Yesterday, Chris Bowers explained why it doesn't make sense to start tallying up how many superdelegates won candidate or another "has." It's a good post, but to boil it down to a sentence: These are unpledged delegates and they're allowed to change their minds.
I would also, however, note another factor -- very few people know who the superdelegates are. Indeed, I heard an anecdote the other day about a politician who was wondering whether or not she was a superdelegate. The person who related the anecdote to me didn't know either. Well, I knew that she was, in fact, a superdelegate but I understand the rules -- but at this point in time the rules are so poorly understood that some superdelegates don't realize they're superdelegates.
He screwed up, but I think I'd have to agree that he's more being punished for Chris Matthews' sins than for his own. What he did is by no means worse than stuff MSNBC gives a free pass to all the time. And as long as I'm making sure that General Electric News will never have me on, why not like again to "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert".
I heard Jack Cafferty did a nice segment on CNN smacking John McCain for not bothering to show up for the stimulus bill vote. Nice to hear of someone in the press breaking with the love-fest. You can see his blog post on the subject and it's pretty solid stuff:
It was one of those moments that says a lot about someone’s character. What did McCain do? Nothing. He ducked. Instead of representing the people in Arizona who elected him, he simply chose not to vote at all. John McCain, pilot of the Straight Talk Express, wimped out.
And it’s not the first time. Not by a long shot. In the last year, John McCain has missed more than half of all the votes cast in the U.S. Senate.
People on the road are going to miss votes, but which ones you choose to show up for and which you consider skippable are telling. Especially the ones where you're the only absent Senator, as McCain was on this vote.
As I point out in my piece on the homepage today, the open-borders cackling that Amnesty John's victory shows immigration to be politically irrelevant is wishful thinking.
Some might say that the prospects for an anti-immigrant movement that can't secure control over either political party aren't good, and that with the hispanic share of the electorate only growing the idea of the coming Age of Krikorian is wishful thinking. But more to the point, this "Amnesty John" business is no good. Let's stick with "Juan McCain" or, my personal favorite, "Captain Amnesty", which I'm especially drawn to because it reminds me of Anti-Flag's "Captain Anarchy". I keep trying to come up with McCain alternate lyrics for the song, but I don't have the chops for it.
Eric Alterman makes the case for embracing it. It's worth emphasizing that there's something mighty impractical about the whole "no, we're liberals" kick. Whatever the methodological problems with the National Journal "omg he's the most liberal senator evar!" surveys it is, in fact, the case that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both in the left-most third of the Senator distribution and any reasonable approach will show that. Meanwhile, "liberal" just is the term people use for that side of the political spectrum in the modern United States.
Chris Bowers and the Center for American Progress don't get to unilaterally alter the country's language. If liberals don't use the word "liberal," in other words, the only people using it will be using it as an insult and people using it as a neutral descriptor. And the neutral descriptor people are going to keep using it no matter what liberals do.
Larry Kudlow posts the chart above before observing "While there may be no direct causality, one can’t help but wonder whether the investor class hasn’t been disappointed with the shape of this election battle." It was nice of him to concede that there may be no direct causality here, but he then of course uncorks his explanation of why there was, in fact, causality. Basically, investors hate Democrats so when primaries happen including the Republicans-only Michigan primary, the markets go down. You can see why Fox Business News isn't getting any viewers. This kind of dogmatism may work as political commentary, but it's poison as actual economic analysis.
Given that the delegates are allocated by congressional district, wouldn't it be nice if some of CNN's maps actually broke the results down on a district-by-district basis? Instead I've been watching analysis of an irrelevant county-by-county breakdown.
Marc Ambinder posts the following data from Pew along with the observation that it shows us that "Republicans like McCain." And indeed they do. Which, from the viewpoint of professional status, is pretty depressing news. After all, conservative pundits hate John McCain. But if conservative pundits can't make self-identified Republicans dislike John McCain then maybe all pundits everywhere are powerless.
I could try to console myself with the view that maybe Bill Kristol is just incredibly persuasive but I doubt that's right. Rather, I think the tendency is for people who participate in the political media to drastically to drastically overstate its importance. After all, the only people who pundits can affect are the relatively small number of people who consume political punditry. What's more, the consumers of political punditry are, by definition, people with an unusually strong interest in politics. But the people most open to persuasion are the people who don't take a strong interest in politics.
On top of all that, I think Kevin Drum's right that strident campaigning by a pundit tends to be ineffective and annoying. Anyone who's undecided is undecided because their gut tells them it's a close call. Table-pounding does more to suggest that the pounder lacks perspective than it does to persuade. But if to be effective you can only try to nudge people gently, then it's just going to be very difficult to have a large effect.
Via Ezra Klein, Lincoln Chaffee's memoir really does seem pretty interesting. I think that violates some kind of rule which says that memoirs need to be written by people who obviously could shed fascinating light on important events but who then proceed to refuse to do so. Instead, here we have Linc Chaffee, who no one ever thinks about, saying interesting things. This on the Democrats, in particular, is all that surprising but still interesting to hear directly from a colleague:
Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. "The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were," writes Chafee. "They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom. [...]
Chafee writes of his surprise at "how quickly key Democrats crumbled." Democratic senators, Chafee writes, "went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration's nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?"
It's always worth remembering that not everyone took that path. Carl Levin didn't. Russ Feingold didn't. Robert Byrd didn't. Lincoln Chaffee didn't. Opposition was possible, a lot of Democrats just didn't choose to avail themselves of the option. It's worth recalling that a vicious cycle emerged here. Lots of politicians wanted to vote for the war for political reasons. Lots of "experts" in the think tank world who wanted to boost their own careers therefore found it expedient to likewise trim their sales and talk a lot about the "right way" to invade Iraq for no good reason rather than emphasize how unlikely this "right way" was to emerge. That, however, helped build both public and elite support for the war, which further pressured politicians to get online.
The conclusion reached by our sister publication National Journal that Barack Obama is the most liberal Senator yesterday is sure to get a lot of play down the road if Obama wins the nomination:
I've always been skeptical, though, of these sort of subjective assessments. An interest group ranking can be interesting because it tells you what's important to the interest group. But for a global assessment, I like the Poole/Rosenthal optimal classification method that uses math to look at all votes and sort the members of congress. They say that Obama is the eleventh most liberal member
of the 110th Senate whereas Clinton is the 20th most liberal. In the 109th Senate, Obama was 21st and Clinton was 25th. Obama's inexperienced, so he wasn't in the 108th Senate but Clinton was tied for 21.5th place, and in the 107th Senate she was 22nd. Basically, Clinton has a very typical voting record for a Democrat, and Obama seems to be a bit more liberal, but not as far left as a Russ Feingold or a Barbara Boxer.
My dad says he got surveyed yesterday by the Marist poll and that after asking him a bunch of questions about the primary campaign they asked him some questions about the Super Bowl and then some demographic questions and then a question about whether or not he uses any home health remedies. What do you think that could be about?
The oft-mocked David Broder does us all an enormous services and writes the name of another Washington Post columnist:
Unelected conservative ideologues -- such as Rush Limbaugh and George F. Will-- can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: "If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president -- and president-in-waiting."
The unwritten first rule of the op-ed page -- you do not talk about other writers on the op-ed page -- has long struck me as in need of revision. If Broder can use his "dean" status to knock this wall down, good for him.
Infighting sure is fun! John McCain hates capitalism, and Mark Steyn's inspired to almost touch an anti-militarist note:
Well, Kathryn, since most of the gang seems to have turned in early (too demoralized to opine?), I might as well chip in. I'm getting a bit tired of Senator McCain's anti-business shtick. The line about serving "for patriotism, not for profit" is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from?
To me what's galling here is that it's not as if McCain took some kind of vow of poverty. When he divorces his first wife he "gave her a generous settlement, including houses in Virginia and Florida and financial support for her ongoing medical treatments" before marrying a wealthy heiress. Nobody's running around disparaging McCain's military service; there doesn't seem to me a need for him to disparage the life choice of people who got their money by earning it.
NRO's Michael Graham, an orthodox anti-McCain conservative, is pretty amusing as he tries to reconcile himself to McCain getting the nomination. Expect much more of this in the near future. Meanwhile, it's interesting to see McCain kissing Huckabee's ass in his victory speech . . . could be VP material. If you squish Huckabee and McCain together, the combination looks more like a regular Republican than either does on his own.
So that's GDP growth over the course of different presidents' terms. This is, obviously, a very crude method by which to judge a president's economic performance. But surely this sort of thing ought to stop a New York Times reporter from writing that Bush "has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents."
See also Dean Baker and Ezra Klein. That a newspaper would let a demonstrably false assertion into its news pages is no longer surprising, but it is telling that this apparently didn't "sound wrong" to anyone charged with editing the piece. If you'd submitted something about "Manhattan real estate has been in the doldroms throughout Mr. Bush's two terms" presumably an editor would have noticed that this seemed wrong. By say that it's been a historically good economy, and the Times thinks that scans just fine.
I don't at all adhere to the school of thought that says "if Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks like Barack Obama, he must be evil." That said, I do think it's clear reading things like this doozy from Brooks today that one important driving force behind the sophisticated right's praise of Obama is a simple belief that he'll probably lose in the end. Then, when Clinton is nominated, having praised Obama to the skies they can lament that once again -- sigh -- the Democratic Party has let them down and they have no choice but to vote for the Republicans. The effort here is to somehow bracket the Bush years as just some kind of goofy one-off that we can forget about and remember that the real issue -- as it so often seems to be here in Washington -- is Bill Clinton's sex life. Or something.
It's all pretty inane. I've developed an increasingly strong preference for Obama in this race, but there's no gaping substantive void between them policywise. Certainly, I don't think I can think of any respect in which an Obama administration would more closely resemble a McCain administration than it would a Clinton administration. Meanwhile, McCain, despite some admirable qualities, shares Bush's lunatic conception of America's role in the world, declined to endorse any climate change measures that might actually solve the problem, and has pledged fealty to Bush's irresponsible tax policy in a way that makes it impossible for him to do much of anything innovative on the domestic front. There's a big, clear choice facing the country between the party of war, tax cuts, and the destruction of the planet and the other party -- the notion that the big story is the fortunes of the Clinton family is preposterous.
Bush is going to hit this one out of the park. His detractors always forget that he's a master of oratory. As soon as he gets up there to the podium and gets a chance to explain clearly the ways in which his policies -- removing Saddam, slashing taxes, offering subsidies to business, standing up for the right to work, pulling out of treaties, keeping the fossile fuels flowing -- have contributed to the past seven years of robust economic growth (complete with four out of the five best years of the 28 year Reagan Boom) his numbers are going to start to turn around.
One problem the Republicans faced in the midterms (aside from earmarks run amok, something Bush is sure to tackle in the speech) is the long distance between November and January. During the spring and summer months the filter and the MSM's obsession with bad news out of Iraq took over. Having the presidentials all running away from Bush over the past year hasn't helped. But if Petraeus' testimony in September was one major turning point in the conservative comeback, I think tonight will go down as a second. The Democrats, hilariously, don't even see it coming.
Good to see Michael Gerson taking on the big issues like are text messages ruining America. He says they aren't: "The Internet, and texting in particular, has led to the return of writing." Of course that construction makes it sound as if "texting in particular" is a special case of "the internet," as in "the internet, and The Atlantic's web archives in particular, are full of people mocking Michael Gerson".
There are various interesting tidbits in Gabriel Sherman's article on Bill Kristol's appointment as a New York Times columnist, but as a professional the most interesting part is the revelation that Kristol "was paid roughly five dollars a word" for his Time column. I think that's about three bajillion times more than I've ever gotten.
You also need to wonder about the economics of it. You're thinking of paying Kristol about $4,000 per column to be a columnist. How much revenue is Kristol really supposed to bring in relative to the best neoconnish writer you could have snagged for $2k per column? My sense is that we pundits are actually pretty interchangeable. What's the marginal value of Kristol over Max Boot? If Tom Friedman and Sebastian Mallaby switched newspapers, would the Times' circulation really drop?
Spencer Ackerman has a nice column up at TAP Online about the speculation surrounding what's next for David Petraeus. At one point he observes that "Petraeus emerged from his first two assignments in Iraq -- commanding the 101st Airborne Division from 2003 to 2004 and then the training of Iraqi security forces from 2004 to 2005 -- as the only general to leave the war with his reputation enhanced." One interesting question is: How did this happen? Indeed, I think that's one of the greatest stories never told of the Iraq War.
The good reputation he emerged with following his time commanding the 101st can be attributed in large part to the fact that conditions remained unusually good in his AOR compared to what was happening in adjacent AORs. But it was thanks to his good reputation from that first tour that he was selected to head up the vital ISF training mission during his second tour. That mission, however, didn't go well at all. So why did Petraeus' reputation stay good?
Well in part it happened because he's a smart, articulate, well-educated general. But in large part it happened because he's a smart, articulate, well-educated general who was (and is) very good at cultivating the press. In particular, before being appointed to command MNF-Iraq Petraeus was a source, both on and off the record, for a wide variety of journalists both those working "straight" reporting jobs and those doing more opiniated work critical of the Bush administration from both a moderate liberal perspective and a neocon perspective. During that period, he cultivated a lot of good will and credibility that he's deployed to great effect since taking command. The fact that Petraeus has been a source for a lot of the journalists who cover the Iraq debate is a key element in understanding the politics of the surge and of the "Petraeus report." But it's a story that you'll never see reported on in detail because that would violate the rules of the game.
With my 2008 vote still up for grabs, Obama seized the upper hand after I read this New York Times feature and learned his chief speechwriter is a Red Sox fan and a 2003 graduate from the College of the Holy Cross! Let's see, Obama sounds like Cyrus from "The Warriors"; he wears a nicotine patch; he plays hoops; he loves "The Wire"; and now, the guy writing speeches for him went to the Cross. That's pretty tough to top.
I feel like the endorsment Obama really needs, though, is from the Sports Gal (plus her football picks were much better this season IIRC). Meanwhile, I have the reverse reaction to revelations about Red Sox fans from Cross.
I'll admit that I clicked onto Ruth Marcus' column grading candidates' stimulus plans specifically expecting to find something I could object to and thus write a feisty blog post about. But actually it seems about right, except that giving Bush "extra credit" for "not insisting on extending his tax cuts, which made no sense as stimulus and would have doomed its chance of passing" seems silly -- you don't extra credit for not screwing up.
Of course the whole stimulus package issue on the campaign trail is a little bit surreal since clearly the situation will be different twelve months from now when any of these people are president. Consequently, I'm not sure how much we really learn from this except for the somewhat disturbing fact that John McCain doesn't appear to know what a "stimulus package" even is or how to ask someone on his staff to explain the idea to him. There's a certain artificiality to the whole thing in that I assume the Clinton and Obama campaigns each felt pressure to differentiate themselves from each other even though by most accounts there isn't, in fact, any kind of gaping philosophical void between the two of them. Mostly I wish I'd seen something creative like Dean Baker's "green stimulus" concepts thrown in along with the more conventional ideas.
Brendan Nyhan calls me out for too much psychologizing in my last post on John McCain. And it's true. I don't like the guy. He's not the worst politician on the planet, but he's pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure he's the most overrated politician so thinking about him aggravates me. But these would be my sober-minded, non-psychic points about John McCain and the economy:
He has a tendency to flip-flop not on specific economic policies, but on broad economic themes like whether or not inequality is a problem.
His constituents in the elite press are weirdly obsessed with the idea that public policy should force average people to endure economic pain.
All of this leads me to conclude that John McCain would not govern very well on economic policy issues, and would fare poorly in a campaign that focused heavily on economic problems.
Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.
The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!
From The New York Times archives, David Frum writes on July 7, 1999 that the country needs to be more fiscally prudent:
It's time to blow the froth off the latte and make some prudent plans. Otherwise, the Government is going to find itself three or four years from now in the same jam as its citizens: pacing fretfully at 2 o'clock in the morning through a $100,000 kitchen renovation, wondering how on earth it talked itself into the delusion that it was going to finance its obligations with a big, soggy mass of Surplus.com shares.
Later, of course, Frum went on to work for the Bush administration where, in lieu of prudent plans, the decision was made to squander all the money in question on a set of giant tax cuts for rich people. Then to squander more money in a giant giveaway to drug and insurance companies. And to squander more money on a pointless and destructive war in Iraq. And more tax cuts! Always, always more tax cuts.
I think this is getting a bit silly. In his column, Paul Krugman seems to suggest that the main reason the Clinton administration failed to bring about major progressive change in the 1990s is that they didn't talk enough smack about Ronald Reagan. And now on the blog we learn that Clinton is clearly the more progressive alternative to Obama because here's one quote of Clinton saying something lefty sounding and here's one quote which Krugman insists on willfully misconstruing.
Whatever happened to the Krugman who used to urge journalists to worry less about what rhetorical style politicians adopt and more looking at their policies? Didn't this all start because Krugman thought Obama's health care plan, while constituting an improvement over the status quo, isn't as good as Hillary Clinton's? That's what I remember. And I think it was a fair point. But now we're supposed to believe that Obama's the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Or something. Meanwhile, I wish Krugman would at least acknowledge that there are foreign policy issues facing the country and some of us think they're important. I don't think "that Candidate B [i.e, Hillary Clinton], despite the progressive talk, is just Bush the third" but at times she's shown a disturbing amount of common ground with Bush's foreign policy views. At other times, she's seemed quite good, but her record on Iraq is bad.
Back to the beginning, I think it's extremely clear that the meager results of the Clinton administration relate, in the first instance, to the large number of conservatives in congress when Clinton was president, and in the second instance to the moderate views of Clinton administration figures. An inability to upend narratives about Reagan was neither here nor there. In terms of congress, again, one thing a lot of people like about Obama is that Democratic politicians running in marginal areas overwhelmingly seem to believe that they would do better with Obama at the head of the ticket.
That said, I'll freely grant that I'm getting a bit tired of defending Obama and his campaign. Stuff like this from Krugman clearly hurts them, but the easiest way to deflect claims that Obama is the more conservative choice would be for Obama to say so himself in a clear and direct way. Given that Clinton is very much running as her husband's wife, it should hardly be impossible to make the case that establishing continuity with the moderate Clinton administration is the moderate choice.
As you can read here in The New York Times, starting tomorrow articles from The Atlantic will all be available for free online. That'll be a boon to bloggers and the Web in general in at least two ways. First, it'll let us link to and discuss new magazine content as it comes out with a free and clear conscience. Second, and in some ways even more exciting, it means that I'll be able to mine the magazine's extensive 150+ years of archives willy-nilly for interesting tidbits and noteworthy perspectives on events.
That said, a subscription is still a great bargain at less than $25 a year. You can read it on a plane or a train, you can see the visual elements of the magazine in all their intended glory, and you can leave recent issues scattered about your house so as to suggest to your friends that you're the sort of intelligent person who reads highbrow magazines.
This morning, Mitt Romney had more delegates than John McCain. Following today's primaries, Romney's lead has grown even larger because Nevada has more delegates than South Carolina and Romney won a larger proportion of the vote in NV than McCain got in South Carolina. Naturally, the press is declaring this a big win for McCain. I just saw Howard Fineman explain that "there is no longer any strong candidate in the race" to oppose McCain. Nobody but the guy who's leading, that is.
But no president can do it alone. She must break recent tradition, cast cronyism aside and fill her cabinet with the best people, not only the best Democrats, but the best Republicans as well.. We’re confident she will do that. Her list of favorite presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, George H.W. Bush and Reagan - demonstrates how she thinks. As expected, Bill Clinton was also included on the aforementioned list.
Maybe we can put this dumb controversy to rest? Reagan was, though not someone I would call a good president or one of my favorites, undeniably an effective president in the sense that he had a very ambitious agenda and got a lot of it enacted before handing things off to his designated successor, and it's perfectly reasonable for aspiring presidents to want to emulate him in some regards. I'm not, however, ever in favor of talking about the need for "new ideas" or whatever.
Matt Welch painstakingly documents the fact that the John McCain newspaper endorsements flowing out from around the country keep making elementary factual errors. It's really aggravating stuff. It would be one thing if people were saying "I support John McCain because I want to see a candidate with hazy ideas about domestic policy issues and a steadfast record of support for preventive war." But instead the papers are all endorsing some other guy who never lies, always sticks to his guns, and at times is even an Iraq skeptic.
Chris Matthews doesn't appear to know what an ad hominem argument is. Noting that Bush's efforts to beg Saudi Arabia to sell us more cheap oil are "pathetic" doesn't qualify.
I'd been a bit concerned that this race/gender business was tearing progressives apart, but I think all decent people can come together now in loathing of Tim Russert and his refusal to ask questions about actual issues in the campaign.
UPDATE: Twenty minutes in, still no substantive questions!
The things PR people try to pitch me on get pretty hilarious at times. For example:
For any upcoming hair-care stories, I’d like to offer you Martha Clemence (see photo and bio below), lead stylist for Fantastic Sams® Hair Salons. Some ideas that came to mind which Martha would love comment on:
The Hillary Do – Yay or Nay?
Washing that man right out of your hair - Post-Relationship at home hair care; what to do with the flowers, chocolate and wine he gave youHow to look and feel your best, even on a budget
How NOT to go gray naturally
Everyday tips and tricks on how to keep hair healthy, even if you use an iron or curler
Everyone knows you put the flowers, chocolate, and wine he gave you into your hair -- it forms an excellent shampoo.
It seems that nothing gets conservatives off nearly so much as writing obviously unserious books with patently offensive titles, designed in every way to not be taken seriously, and then get huffy when people make fun of them without having given their precious works the deep consideration they deserve. So while I've been poking and jibing at Jonah Goldberg, I've also been making my way through his book. It gets pretty tedious in parts, contrary to the faint praise with which a lot of people have been damning it it's not witty or clever, so I won't deny having skimmed over parts where I already got the point. But I've read it, and here's what I think.
One major problem with the book is that Goldberg has no ability whatsoever to stick to a coherent line of argument. You might call this book "disparate essays about fascism and American liberalism designed to annoy liberals." He doesn't seem to care about what his various claims amount to or even whether or not they're inconsistent. Thus, sometimes liberals are too mean to the non-Hitler fascists of the world. Other times, the problem is that people on the left in the 1920s were, at the time, unduly soft on fascism. But other times the problem is that people on the left now have views on some subjects (e.g., the importance of public health) that are similar to views fascists had back in the day.
Bill Kristol on The New York Times breaking a major story back in June of 2006: "I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution." Public Editor Clark Hoyt reports:
Rosenthal said Kristol’s comment about prosecution bothered him. It was, Rosenthal said, “a heavy accusation that put him in a category other than a journalist.” But he said that Op-Ed columnists are not necessarily traditional journalists, and he did not think that “holding one opinion” should be the basis for selecting or rejecting a columnist.
Sulzberger said The Times wanted “a columnist who brought to our pages a deeply held and well articulated point of view in line with what you might call the conservative Republican movement. ... Our Op-Ed page is a marketplace of ideas. He’ll strengthen the discussion.”
Spencer Ackerman observes: "Truly a liberal fascist is one who won't take his own side in a putsch."
Joking aside, Sulzberger's comments are revealing. Clearly, one ought to consume a diversity of points of view. That's why back when he was still blogging I always liked to read Max Sawicky's brand of lefty economics even though I'm more inclined toward Brad DeLong's brand of center-left technocracy. For that matter, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok are one of my daily must-reads as well. I highly recommend the American Scene as an interesting source of various kinds of rightwingery, as well as the Technology Liberation Front for a free market perspective on tech policy. And of course there's my colleagues Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, and Ross Douthat. A healthy intellectual diet needs diversity.
But does it really require a "point of view in line with what you might call the conservative Republican movement" irrespective of its merits? I think there are lots of smart people who have some views on some subjects that are in line with the conservative movement, but to hire a columnist purely because his views mirror The Line from the Conintern is absurd. Suppose the conservative movement wants to mislead people about something or other. It happens fairly often. Now the Times's obligation is to publish articles designed to mislead the Times's audience? Really? And we're supposed to pay to acquire a product that's dedicated to publishing "all the news that's fit to print plus some stuff that's in line with the conservative Republican movement." Why would we do that?
