10 Nov 2007 06:03 pm
Tim Lee makes the excellent point that the country already has some experience with the All Discretion to the Executive model of electronic surveillance that the GOP, the Blue Dog Caucus, The Washington Post and others seem so eager to implement:
Martin Luther King was the most famous of the dozens of anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and other undesirables whose communications were bugged by the Johnson and Nixon administration. There's no evidence that the Bush administration has done anything like that. But if we eliminate meaningful judicial oversight of the executive branch's surveillance activities, there's every reason to think that a future administration will.
And of course the absence of evidence about abusive uses of the illegal surveillance program may say more about our general ignorance of the program than about the administration's probity. We know that the "rendition" program has been against innocent people and to extract false confessions designed to bolster bogus administration talking points about Iraq/al-Qaeda links, so there's plenty of reason to worry. But even if Bush has conducted his secret illegal surveillance in the most ethical possible way to conduct secret illegal surveillance, Tim's right to say that future administrations almost certainly won't. Nixon's gross abuses built on a platform of surveillance that grew slowly-but-surely over the decades across several different administrations.
Photo by Flickr user djbrady used under a Creative Commons license
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10 Nov 2007 04:00 pm
I hadn't realized that Greater DC has the country's highest median income. Good for us!
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10 Nov 2007 02:43 pm
I noticed something interesting when looking at Ed Kilgore's trenchant remarks on Joe Lieberman's recent SAIS speech:
It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were "good" from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be "bad." Democrats were "bad" from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were "good." During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were "good" and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were "bad," and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman's running-mate Al Gore "good," the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush "bad"). Both parties were "good" from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were "good" and Democrats turned "bad" (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely "bad" in opposing the war).
One illustration of how dimwitted this worldview is, is that in Liebermanland the "good" political party is pretty much always and everywhere the party that was in power at the time. That's because in the Joe Lieberman Handbook to Strategy, the test of your foreign policy acumen is just supporting wars. And, of course, presidents tend to only launch wars that they support. Thus at any given time, the incumbent will either be not starting a war (neutral) or else supporting his own policies (good) whereas the loudest opponents of his policies (bad) will be in the other party. The idea that there might be good and bad ways of using force, good or bad circumstances in which to use them, or heaven forbid other kinds of good policymaking (avoiding wars!) is just off the table.
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10 Nov 2007 02:06 pm
Mark Weisbrot for CEPR makes the case for a cheaper dollar, arguing that when the Great and the Good like Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson argue for a "strong dollar" policy they're arguing the interests of firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup rather than those of the majority of Americans.
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10 Nov 2007 12:27 pm
Rosa Brooks says abortion is passé, the right's new thing is torture: "Today, though, the GOP's interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey's views on abortion -- and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either." You can also look up the Ascent of Rudy in this regard.
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10 Nov 2007 10:36 am
I think it's safe to say that I won't be voting for Joe Biden for President, but I think Transplanted Texan at MYDD will be and his post yesterday drew my attention to this fairly prescient Joe Biden speech from September 10, 2001 on foreign policy in which it was clear that the combination of hubris and fanaticism that have made the Bush administration so dangerous on so many fronts was already evident in some ways.
Also interesting here is the context. Basically, Biden was laying the groundwork for an upcoming series of congressional hearings that were aimed at debunking the administration's case for a national missile defense system. The basic argument Democrats were making was that rogue state ballistic missiles were a very hypothetical threat and a missile defense system was a very expensive hypothetical defense against it. The top priority, in Democrats' view, was to maintain good relations with Russia and China to maximize diplomatic leverage against North Korea (and to a lesser extent, the less acute problems of Iran and Iraq) and to focus on counterterrorism threats.
Condi Rice, meanwhile, was set to give a speech on 9/11 that was all about the need to meet the threats of "tomorrow" and accusing her blinkered, terrorism-and-nonproliferation-centric adversaries of living in the past. Naturally, Rice wasn't planning on mentioning terrorism at all and when subsequent events revealed the wrongheadedness of the basic worldview, instead of revising the worldview they responded to the terrorist attacks in crazy ways (invading Iraq, e.g.) that met their preconceptions about what was important rather than with policies that addressed the issue at hand in effective ways.
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10 Nov 2007 10:35 am
Cato's Daniel Mitchell outlines his plan to return the United States to the levels of prosperity seen before the first world war:
The real issue is whether America would be a stronger and more prosperous nation if government was reduced to the levels envisioned by the Founding Fathers. America climbed from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity before the income tax was adopted, and federal government spending (with the exception of times of war) was a small percentage of GDP.
This seems like a bizarre way to argue. It's true, obviously, that the country was much more prosperous in 1912 than it had been in 1790, but it's grown far more prosperous still in the dread income tax era. Were the horse-and-buggy days really good enough for Mitchell? After all, without the need for paved roads we were able to keep the tax burden low, low, low. The near-total absence of useful medical technologies helped keep health care expenses low. And with the population ill-educated by contemporary standards and wage rates much lower than they are today, it was easy to run a school system on the cheap.
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10 Nov 2007 09:50 am
Good times as John McCain and Mitt Romney attack Rudy Giuliani for his Bernard Kerik associations, only to prompt Randy Mastro to strike back for Team Rudy by calling Saint McCain's sainthood into question while pretending not to: "It’s no more fair to judge Rudy Giuliani on the basis of one issue than it is to judge John McCain on the Keating scandal." But Rich Lowry has the really rough stuff from Katie Levinson on Giuliani's behalf:
Let me get this straight – first, campaign finance crusader John McCain oversees a campaign that spiraled completely out of control and went bankrupt and now he wants a questionable $3 million loan? Doesn’t quite pass the smell test, does it?
Americans need someone in the White House who knows how to balance their own checkbook before they try to balance the federal government’s. They don’t need John McCain, they need Rudy Giuliani - who has actually balanced a budget and made a payroll.
Of course it was a payroll that included his good friend and former driver, the corrupt guy who kept getting promoted to head more-and-more important agencies until Rudy vouched for the guy and got him nominated, almost vetting-free, to be homeland security secretary. Levinson concludes:
Is this what desperation looks like? Bernie Kerik’s issues have been known since 2004 and John McCain still had glowing things to say about Rudy Giuliani and his leadership. What, exactly, changed today? Best as I can tell, it’s just John McCain’s pure desperation in the face of a failing and flailing campaign trumping his so-called straight talk. It is truly a shame that John McCain has chosen to stoop this low.”
I think when you start attacking the other campaigns for showing "desperation" -- like when Hillary Clinton gets mad that John Edwards has the temerity to point out that they disagree on the merits of some issues -- it mostly shows that you don't have a good answer. Rick Davis for John McCain counter-counter attacks:
Rudy Giuliani’s history with Bernie Kerik is a story of poor judgment. After being briefed on Kerik’s ties to organized crime, Giuliani named him chief of the New York Police Department. Without any further vetting, Giuliani asked him to join his security consulting firm. Despite obvious ethical problems, Giuliani went so far as to personally recommend Kerik for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security.
A president’s judgment matters and Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly placed personal loyalty over regard for the facts.
Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and liberals everywhere are smiling.
UPDATE: Ambinder has more on the food-fight, including John McCain's mom lashing out against Mormons:
As far as the Salt Lake City thing, he's a Mormon and the Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal. And to clean that up, again, it's not a subject,'' Roberta McCain said. JohnMcCain quickly stepped in: ''The views of my mothers are not necessarily the views of mine.' ''Well, that's my view and you asked me,'' Roberta answered.
I'd actually been waiting quite some time to see an unambiguously bigoted bit of Mormom-bashing, I think we have a winner here. The idea seems to be that because Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and because the people who created the problems with the SLC Olypmpic bid are also Mormons, that Romney doesn't deserve credit for fixing things because in the Cosmic Balance of Mormonism it's all a wash. Or something.
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10 Nov 2007 02:29 am
Can't say that sitting in the stands for this disaster is making me super-optimistic about the nineteen home games left on my ticket package. Over the offseason I found myself becoming semi-convinced by the Dave Berri analysis that Gilbert Arenas was less central to the Wizards than was often assumed -- that he was being overrated and the non-"big three" teammates underestimated -- but now that we see Gilbert with a knee injury and the whole team looking awful, I'm provisionally back to the conventional wisdom.
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09 Nov 2007 07:14 pm
Ann Friedman notes that Rudy Giuliani doesn't only have the most male-dominated staff of any presidential candidate, he takes the prize for whitest campaign staff as well, clocking in at a striking 100 percent white. Phoenix Woman terms Team Rudy bad for diversity, but only Giuliani among the major contenders has child molesting priests and mobbed-up former police commissioners in his retinue. It's only diversity in the racial and gender senses that he's lacking.
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09 Nov 2007 06:13 pm
Far be it from me to mock the typos of others, but this one in Mike Tomasky's great essay on Paul Krugman for The New York Review of Books brings a smile to this comic book fan's face:
Many liberals would name Paul Krug-man of The New York Times as perhaps the most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan in American journalism. He has made his perspective on the Bush administration and the contemporary right, and on the need to see politics as a battle, manifestly clear in column after incendiary column.
Conservatives, being a superstitious and cowardly lot, naturally fear and loathe the Krug-Man and his powers of shrill, but the good people of Liberal City look to him as a friend and protector....
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09 Nov 2007 05:15 pm
A correspondent directed my attention to the second page of Ann Scott Tyson's Washington Post article on counterterrorism in Pakistan and wondered how long it's going to be before we see a Weekly Standard article about proclaiming General Ashfaq Kiyani to be the Petraeus of Pakistan. There's certainly food for thought here:
Nevertheless, U.S. military officials said that Kiyani, Musharraf's possible replacement as head of the military, is supportive of the counterinsurgency plan in the tribal areas, which he visited within days of assuming his current post last month. Kiyani has also indicated an openness to having the Pakistani military focus on missions other than conventional operations aimed at the threat of India, which senior U.S. officers consider diminished. "He has a different view," said one senior military official. "I'd expect he will step up and be head of the army, and there will be some changes."
This reminds me that Americans -- from journalists to congressmen to senior miltiary officials -- ought to consider adopting a less personality-driven view of how the world works. The fact that a Pakistani general angling for the top spot in Pakistan's all-powerful military tells American military officials that he wants to concentrate less on the top priority of the Pakistani military and more on the top priority of the American military tells us only that General Kiyani understands how to tell people what they want to hear.
Meanwhile, it raises a good issue. When we think about Pakistan's security forces, we think about fighting al-Qaeda. When Pakistanis think about Pakistan's security forces, they think about fighting India. If we want Pakistan to spend less time worrying about India and more time worrying about al-Qaeda, we should be thinking about whether or not there's something we could do on the India front that would make it worth Pakistan's while to worry less about India and more about al-Qaeda.
In general, this is what's really gone awry with the heavily moralized post-9/11 climate in the United States. We spend tons of time worrying about whether or not this or that leader -- Musharraf, Putin, Mubarak, Arafat, Sharon, Khameini, Kim, whatever -- is or is not a "good man," a "moderate," a "man of peace," a "tyrant," a "terrorist," a "pygmy," whatever -- that there's little thought given to the idea that countries have interests, and the United States has interests, and the name of the game is to set priorities and let other countries have their way on their top priorities if they'll let us have our way on our top priorities.
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09 Nov 2007 04:35 pm
Glenn Sacks concedes that "Feminist Writer Ann Friedman Has a Point" about the goofiness of arguments grounded on the alleged ugliness of liberal women only to get immediate pushback from commenters:
Lack of attractiveness results in quite a few middle-aged, embittered women, women who are ready, willing, and able to declare war on men. They did not have a line of men vying for the right to support them and their life-choices, looked around for a convenient class of oppressor and learned in their Womyn's Studies that they were being oppressed by MEN all along!
9's and 10's among women generally do not NEED those artificially constructed entitlements and privileges for women - they have men willing and able to cater to their comforts and needs.
So…. don't get caught up in Ann Friendman's ovary-think, Glenn.
Also -- "Even if all feminists looked like a model their obnoxious, hate mongering will allow them the same dislike and distrust as the ugly male-haters get today." Heh. Indeed. These guys really need to read Steven Den Beste then they might realize that the only real (Anglo) women left are strippers (or something).
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09 Nov 2007 03:58 pm
J.P. Green wants it known that whatever Ronald Reagan was or wasn't doing in Philadelphia, MS he did have a terrible record on race issues; as Sidney Blumenthal has written:
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".
As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.
Indeed, though one of the only nice things one can say about George W. Bush is that he's made some kind of effort to detoxify the Republicans' image in minority communities, it's still the case that he's followed Ronald Reagan's lead in having the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department stop enforcing laws barring discrimination against racial minorities. We should probably understand that as part-and-parcel of the Bush administration's broad-based effort to stop enforcing all kinds of regulations that might burden business (indeed, as I pointed out once in a Cato Unbound essay, when libertarianism was actually tried in the form of the Goldwater campaign it turned out that the main constituency for it was among hard-core white supremacists) rather than racism as such.
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09 Nov 2007 03:19 pm
To follow up on yesterday's Vladimir Putin post, this Moscow Times article translates the idea in question as a proposal to create a new post of "National Leader" for Putin to fill, not "Supreme Leader" as I, following Dmitri Simes, had it. It bears mentioning that, when you think about it, if Putin is looking for a model of an authoritarian system that incorporates some pluralism and many democracy-like institutions, Iran is actually a pretty good example of a system that's lasted a good long while now as a neither-fish-now-fowl sort of thing. Late-PRI Mexico might also be a source of inspiration.
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09 Nov 2007 03:18 pm
So it seems that even though Mark Penn is CEO of Burson-Marsteller and Burson-Marsteller is handling the PR account for Aqua Dots -- the toy that's come into ill-repute for having an adhesive coating that turns into GHB, thus putting children into comas -- Penn has nothing to do with Aqua Dots. Much as he has nothing to do with Blackwater, another Burson-Marsteller client. And how he has nothing to do with Burson-Marsteller's union-busting practice. So what does he do? And how can a CEO be so uninvolved in so much of his own company's activities?
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09 Nov 2007 03:07 pm
Since Brian Katulis is right about everything, it's no surprise that his response to Colin Kahl is also spot on.
See also my response to Kahl and Eric Martin's response to Kahl. Plus my post on the importance of regional strategy. If you're wondering why it's worth spending so much time on one guy's guest post, the basic answer is that there's a lot of influential thinking along more-or-less Kahlian lines in the most hawkish Democratic circles and he seems much more willing than others to engage in this sort of forum.
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09 Nov 2007 02:14 pm
Paul Krugman writes about excuses people make for the poor performance of the American health care system. One excuse -- too many cheeseburgers:
Americans don’t have a bad health system, say the apologists, they just have bad habits. Overeating and teenage sex, not the huge overhead of America’s private health insurance companies — the United States spends almost six times as much on health care administration as other advanced countries — are the source of our problems.
There’s a grain of truth to this claim: Bad habits may partially explain America’s low life expectancy. But the big question isn’t why we have lower life expectancy than Britain, Canada or France, it’s why we spend far more on health care without getting better results. And lifestyle isn’t the explanation: the most definitive estimates, such as those of the McKinsey Global Institute, say that diseases that are associated with obesity and other lifestyle-related problems play, at most, a minor role in high U.S. health care costs.
One might also note that insofar as Americans have less healthy lifestyles than we should -- which we certainly seem to -- that this, too, is a policy problem worth addressing, not just a factoid to wave around. One wouldn't want to go too far in terms of restricting liberty in the name of public healthy, but we certainly ought to take a closer look at the public health implications of our farm subsidies and land use policies (here both in terms of car accidents and the lost moderate exercise that comes from walking).
On top of all of that, however, is the point that giving people sound lifestyle advice and getting them to follow it is part of a good medical professional's job and part of the job of a good health care system would be to create a situation where people are getting their health status checked up and getting good advice about what they should be doing.
Photo by Flick user Derusha used under a Creative Commons license
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09 Nov 2007 02:02 pm
Supervolcano activity on the rise underneath Yellowstone National Park.
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09 Nov 2007 01:55 pm
Anita Esterday versus the Freak Show:
“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”
That this quote came at the very end of the story rather than the beginning speaks volumes. There's just no shame. I think most campaign reporters would rather spend an hour being waterboarded than spend it trying to understand the important questions facing the country.
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09 Nov 2007 01:27 pm
I'd have trouble writing lines like this one from Washingtonian's profile of Anthony Bourdain:
Despite his undying hatred of celebrity-chef culture, Bourdain, still affiliated with French bistro chainlet Les Halles, has reached Emeril-like levels of popularity. Tickets to what was essentially a book-promo talk on Wednesday night sold for $28 a pop, and most of the 1,490 seats at Lisner Auditorium were full. Known best for Kitchen Confidential, his best-selling 2001 exposé on the knife-flinging, drug-addled subculture of restaurant kitchens, Bourdain now eats his way around the world for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, his show on the Travel Channel. (A picture-heavy book based on the series was just released.)
He hates celebrity chef culture, but he's a chef who's written a best-selling book, has a cable television series, lectures to audiences of over a thousand, and sits down for magazine profiles in which he riffs on Nigella Lawson and the Barefoot Contessa. Plus: he appears on Top Chef. But he's managed to achieve all this despite his hatred for celebrity chef culture, a truly remarkable achievement!
It seems to me, though, that eight-five percent of celebrity profiles I read feature some line about how much the being-profiled celebrity loathes the limelight.
UPDATE: Look, I like Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential is a great fun book, I watch No Reservations sometimes and Top Chef always, etc., but we just shouldn't take his affected disdain for celebrity chefs all that seriously.
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09 Nov 2007 01:15 pm
James Surowiecki notes that the performance bonuses for hedge fund managers have absurd results: "Fund managers get bonuses at the end of each year, and they keep those performance fees even if the fund eventually goes south. So if a billion-dollar hedge fund rises twenty per cent in its first year and falls twenty per cent in its second, its investors will have lost money, while the fund’s manager might earn forty million dollars in performance fees." Consequently, a strong incentive exists to take advantage of this quirk and of financial markets' general upward trajectory, by just investing the money in ways that generates more noise -- bigger up and down swings -- some of which can be translated into bonuses.
Tyler Cowen has more thoughts on this, conceding that the recent explosion of new investment schemes "has brought us new products" but "it all seems to be new mortgage products" whereas "the junk bond revolution of the 1980s involved some "excess" risk-taking, but I believe those risks were more closely connected to the real economy, and more likely to bring real economy benefits, than the recent spate of mortgage-related risks."
Photo by Flickr user Stoneflower used under a Creative Commonc license
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09 Nov 2007 12:24 pm
It's been brought to my attention that Barack Obama's position on a training mission in Iraq is more clear than I'd thought. Here's Obama talking to Michael Gordon:
We’ve seen progress against AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq], but they are a resilient group and there’s the possibility that they might try to set up new bases. I think that we should have some strike capability. But that is a very narrow mission, that we get in the business of counter terrorism as opposed to counter insurgency and even on the training and logistics front, what I have said is, if we have not seen progress politically, then our training approach should be greatly circumscribed or eliminated.
I think that's exactly right. He goes on to say he does "not want us to be in the business of training and equipping factions or militias that are going to be turning on each other," but is willing to hold training and equipment out as a carrot for some kind of hypothetical post-reconciliation government. In short, Obama and Edwards both have the right policy on this and Clinton has the wrong one.
UPDATE: Armando in comments says he doesn't understand how Clinton's position differs from Edwards and Obama. The answer is that, as I understand it, Clinton still stands by her proposal to maintain residual forces in Iraq whose mission would unconditionally include "Training Iraqi security forces" and "Providing logistic support of Iraqi security forces." Clinton's plans echo CNAS's phased transition proposal whereas Obama and Edwards have evolved toward CAP's strategic reset proposal.
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09 Nov 2007 12:13 pm
Question: Do people have experience using iWork in general and Pages in particular? Are they any good? And more specifically, if I have to be able to open up MS Word files with track changes will that work in a tolerable manner?
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09 Nov 2007 11:47 am
David Brooks takes the pushback against the idea that Ronald Regan pandered to racists in Philadelphia, Mississippi and winds up dramatically overplaying his hand. But first let me just note that the specific charge has always struck me as oddly irrelevant. Look at the election map from 1980:
This just wasn't a close election. The country's economy was performing poorly, Jimmy Carter's foreign policy was perceived (unfairly, I might add) as failing, and Carter was strongly disliked by his party's liberal base. Under the circumstances, he was almost certainly doomed. Carter's strategy, which actually worked pretty well given the unfavorable environment, was to try to paint Ronald Reagan as a dangerous extremist. Under the circumstances, whatever Reagan was or wasn't doing in Mississippi, it's just not plausible that coded appeals to segregationists was the foundation of his electoral success.
On the other hand -- and here's where Brooks overplays his hand -- the centrality of race and racism to American politics in general and to its unusually conservative cast in particular is really undeniable. This isn't really a partisan point at all. Obviously, electoral power is bound to swing back and forth between the parties no matter what. And it's actually a bit hard to find a particular election to point to and say "the Republicans won this one because of racism" (had Thurmond pulled enough votes from Truman in Virginia to throw the state to Dewey, that would be your candidate) because racial divisions systematically impact American politics in a way that both parties have always adjusted to.
For example, lots of people believe that it would be very morally wrong if we used progressive taxation to finance a system of high-quality health care for all Americans and don't ground this belief in racism at all. Still, it's empirically the case that the reason such a system wasn't enacted during the New Deal Era was that white supremacists who feared that federal involvement in health care would lead to integrated hospitals. More generally, the fact that the recipients of anti-poverty transfer payments are disproportionately minorities -- and even more disproportionately portrayed as such in the media -- plays a large role in casting them as "Other" and in reducing political sentiments of solidarity and the implementation of solidaristic policies.
Indeed, I think it's uncontroversial, even among right-wingers, to observe that the Nordic countries have such an egalitarian policy environment largely because they're so small and homogenous, imbuing their politics with a communitarian spirit that's largely absent from the US. Racial divisiveness' role in impeding social democratic policies in the United States is just the inverse of that.
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09 Nov 2007 10:53 am
Courtesy of Sam Boyd, I see the Financial Times reporting on Joe Lieberman's views. Apparently, the Wise One "argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a 'moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish' foreign policy that was established by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy."
This reduction of, say, FDR's understanding of foreign policy to the idea that he was "hawkish" is really insipid. It's true, of course, that FDR responded to the policy environment he faced in a "hawkish" manner but the situation, clearly, was entirely different. Similarly, I entirely agree that Democrats should continue to emulate the Truman-in-Korea (or Bush-in-Kuwait) model of being willing and able to deploy military forces in order to protect foreign countries from conquest. You'd have to be an idiot to draw from the FDR-Truman school of internationalism the simple lesson that a disposition to start wars is a good idea. After all, JFK was "hawkish," too, but Lieberman seems to forget that his act of hawkery in Vietnam turned out to be a huge fiasco, and his foreign policy triumph came during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he wisely rejected the counsels of the preventive war crowd and instead struck a pragmatic deal.
Obviously all-war all-the-time has long been Lieberman's signature contribution to Democratic Party thinking (like Bill Kristol on the other side) but the willingness of others to swallow the idea that the "internationalism" of the liberal tradition amounts simply to a disposition to kill foreigners is really insane. Bush and Lieberman are bloodthirsty they're not internationalists. They've founded no institutions, they've made America despised, they actively seek to undermine international law, and they've brought our relationships with allies -- the ones the real internationalists built -- to unprecedented new lows.
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09 Nov 2007 10:20 am
Colin Kahl is a guy I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of until a week or so ago, but he's a real expert on Iraq and stability operations who seems to have emerged as a fairly influential backer in Democratic circles of commitments to a continued training mission in Iraq and other policies I tend to disagree with. Interestingly, the people I do tend to agree with all respect him a great deal (though they still don't agree) so Marc Lynch is hosting a guest post from Prof. Kahl laying out his views and I think there'll be responses later today from Lynch and others.
For now, I think Eric Martin makes some good points in response to Kahl.
I would also put giant red flags all around any policies whose own advocates say things like "This could work in theory -- although the probabilities are difficult to assess and are probably not particularly high." That suggests to me that we're not actually disagreeing about the merits of the sort of scheme Kahl's putting forward. I think his plan won't work and he thinks his plan won't work. He counters that not trying is even less likely to work. That's true, but of course there are costs (and opportunity costs) to staying and trying. As I said yesterday, the question of regional strategy is incredibly important here. The implicit calculus behind Kahl's thinking is that though his plan probably won't work, if it did work the gains would be very large and the costs of attempting it are very small.
I don't really see things that way. In order to outline goals that we probably can't achieve but could achieve "in theory," the bar has been set sufficiently low that the benefits of success aren't especially high. Meanwhile, the costs of continued involvement in Iraq seem quite high. This is starting to get some traction in the campaign as John Edwards lays out a strategy I agree with and points to the fact that Clinton's policies will keep us stuck in an occupation dymaic. The Obama campaign hasn't been clear on several of the points of contention which frustrates Chris Bowers (and me) but it's worth saying that my reporting indicates this is likely more the result of genuine indecision than calculated ambiguity -- Obama is hearing arguments from both sides and isn't sure who he agrees with.
U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Julian Billma
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09 Nov 2007 08:23 am
Isaac Chotiner points to some noteworthy data:
A late-October Quinnipiac University survey underscored this point. Nationally, it showed Clinton being edged out by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, 45% to 43%, within the margin of error. In red states, however, she ran behind him, 49% to 40%, and she trailed, 47% to 41%, in the purple ones. By comparison, Illinois Senator Barack Obama beat Giuliani by a single percentage point (43% to 42%) nationally but held that same margin in the purple states and came within 6 points (45% to 39%) in the red ones.
Isaac's afraid. I don't know what to think. If you think of "electability" as a pure dispositional property, then I think it's pretty clear Obama has more of it. It shows up in the early polls, in the pretty clear-cut fact that he's a more compelling public speaker, and in the anecdotal sense that he has an easier time of making people who disagree with him on important issues nonetheless decide they like and respect him (see, e.g., Andrew's Obama story for The Atlantic). This is an interesting and important fact about the election.
Still, one suspects that progressives primarily care about who's most likely to win the election and Obama's promising raw material is only part of the story. Some Democrats I speak to are very convinced that Hillary Clinton will be better both at taking punches from the right and at punching back. Certainly, most everyone (myself included) is impressed with the quality of the campaign she's run thus far. And this stuff counts. Nobody's so charismatic that opposition attacks will just bounce right off them. Now in DC people talk this stuff to death, and my basic take is that plausible arguments can be made both ways and the answer is just unknowable. An unsatisfying conclusion, perhaps, but good enough for a blog post.
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09 Nov 2007 08:10 am
I upgraded one of my machines to Leopard last night, and while it doesn't look like it's about to change my life it does have some cool features. And an annoying weird one. Namely, Apple has taken its somewhat weird and annoying "cover flow" feature from iTunes and brought it over to the Finder so now you can browse through your files and folders in the awkward, inefficient, can't-really-see-where-anything-is way. But why? Cover flow definitely does look cool on a television ad, but the crux of the matter is that actually using a computer is very different from sitting back and watching a scene unfold. Cover flow doesn't seem to me to work at all as a way to actually use your computer.
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09 Nov 2007 07:33 am
Marc Ambinder notes the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance bashing Rudy Giuliani: "We’re not going to beat Hillary Clinton with someone who has a record of agreement with her on abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration and many other issues important to Iowa conservatives." And Garance Franke-Ruta has the head of Iowa Right-to-Life bashing Rudy Giuliani: "We certainly would not like Giuliani to win because he’s anti-life and he’s a sure loser for the Republican Party."
It's interesting to see the non-Robertson (less crazy?) elements of the religious right trying to take this electability argument by the horns. Almost all the Democrats I know think these people are wrong and Giuliani would be the strongest GOP nominee. It still seems to me, though, that Giuliani is pretty likely to prompt a spoiler candidacy, especially if he somehow manages to win with the 30-35 percent he's currently pulling in the polls.
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