Arguing that the market doesn't always produce optimal outcomes, Tom Lee writes, "There's every reason to believe that, had a superficially similar but fundamentally superior technology to MS-DOS been selected, we would all be better off. Now of course I can't say that definitively. Maybe the productivity gains of an all-Unix world would have been so great that we'd have accidentally opened an interdimensional portal to Dinosaur World by now and all been devoured."

I just spent some time on the phone with a reporter doing a story on the DC blogging world that will probably make us all look like assholes. But the great secret of the DC blogging circle is that the best writer among us isn't actually a professional writer, but instead a tech geek. It's really, really annoying. On the bright side, Tom's post is a nice defense of non-market solutions to certain problems. It really is worth remembering that the internet is a chaotic, beautiful market laying atop a centrally planned structure. Worth a read.

"What happens when these independent voters find that Obama is offering little more than rehashed liberalism and the 'post-partisan' fantasy is revealed as just that?" Asks Daniel Larison. "Post-partisan" doesn't actually mean anything substantive, save being willing to talk about post-partisanship. Insofar as Obama says he's post-partisan and seems sincere in wanting everyone to agree with and like him, he's basically proven his case. After all, what's the post-partisan position on health care? On the war? On Social Security?

More likely is that, as time goes on, some of those independents will find out that they disagree with Barack Obama on various elements of his platform, while others will find that, lo and behold, his "post-partisan," traditionally liberal opinions closely match theirs! Some of those defections will be termed "post-partisan," but really, they're just people who disagree with Obama, but weren't paying enough attention to find that till fairly late in the process.

Economists Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote found that sentence length in vehicular homicides varied dramatically according to victim characteristics. What does this mean, exactly? Because vehicular homicides tend to be fairly random, you'd think victim characteristics would matter very little. It turns out, however, that offenders are given far longer sentences for killing women rather than men and whites rather than blacks. We're not talking about victims with criminal records or victims in the drug trade, etc. Rather, we're talking about random innocents mowed down in the street. To put it crudely, it seems pretty clear that the criminal justice system values some lives less than others. Not shocking news, of course. But it should be.

In case you were wondering who graces the cover of this month's American Spectator, it's Jimmy Carter. 83-year-old Jimmy Carter, who's currently writing books about his mother.

Is the right so hard up for enemies they're having to recycle now?

David Shorr:

I have a question. How often do presidents make major foreign policy decisions on the spot, within a space of minutes? If the answer is not very often (or never), then if you lengthen the timeframe to hours or days doesn't it become much less an issue of a leader's ability to make snap judgments? I'd rather not get into the middle of the debate about experience; experience is good. I just want to clarify how we really see this aspect of the job descriptoin for POTUS.

In reply to Hillary's new ad asking whether you can trust Obama to answer the phone late at night, Obama sez:

I don't think these ads will work this time because the question is not about picking up the phone. The question is, what kind of judgment will you exercise when you pick up that phone. In fact, we have had a red phone moment; it was the decision to invade Iraq.

Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer. I stood up and I said that a war in Iraq would be unwise. It cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I said that it would distract us from the real threat that we face, and that we should take the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the judgment I made on the most important foreign policy decision of our generation.

I will never see the threat of terrorism as a way to scare up votes, because it's a threat that should rally the country around our common enemies. That is the judgment we need at 3:00 a.m., and that's the judgment that I am running for as president of the United States of America.

Sometimes, I really wonder how dumb the Clinton campaign thinks we are.

To: Interested Parties
From: The Clinton Campaign
Date: Friday, February 29, 2008
RE: Obama Must-Wins

The media has anointed Barack Obama the presumptive nominee and he's playing the part.

With an eleven state winning streak coming out of February, Senator Obama is riding a surge of momentum that has enabled him to pour unprecedented resources into Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.

If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.

Should Senator Obama fail to score decisive victories with all of the resources and effort he is bringing to bear, the message will be clear:

Democrats, the majority of whom have favored Hillary in the primary contests held to date, have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer.

Who is this aimed at? Political reporters know it's dumb. Political junkies know it's dumb. Superdelegates aren't going to be taken in by it. What's the target audience? And why aren't they making better arguments? If I were the Clinton campaign, I'd be making serious hay out of the fact that, one way or the other, Clinton won Florida and Michigan, will probably win Ohio, and remains favored in Pennsylvania. In other words, Obama may do well in South Carolina and Wisconsin, but Clinton is preferred in the relevant swing states, the states Democrats will actually need to win the election, particularly now that Arizona's John McCain has shot the Interior West strategy to shit. But instead we get these silly press blasts abut how a loss in Ohio is an unexpected blow for Obama.

Why is she paying these people?

It's a bit weird to watch the Clinton campaign trying to follow Walter Mondale's playbook. The repeated invocations of the SNL skit were a clear throwback to Mondale's "Where's the beef?" attacks on Hart. Kill the insurgent through safe invocations of mocking pop culture! But that fell apart pretty quickly. So onto the next play. Here's Mondale's famous "Red Phone" ad:

And here's Clinton's new ad, which was done by the same guy:

Frankly, the ad struck me as pretty hokey. The continual invocation of "your children" at "3 am," the weird oscillation between talk of family and talk of terror -- the whole thing reads like Rudy Giuliani getting endorsed by the Children's Defense Fund. Worse, it actually seems like a more effective argument for McCain then Clinton.

It's not that I wasn't already excited for my weekend excursion into Virginia for Korean Fried Chicken, but oh my dear lord, they have a chart:

It's like my perfect food.

I've not gotten too far into this massive Pew Study on American religion, but the fluidity of religious preferences is rather surprising:

More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

Update: Stephen comes through with some really touching photographs.

This isn't only affecting Obama among the class of folks who would sooner vote for a six-legged pig in lipstick than a Democrat. Says Pew: "Obama suffers a significant number of defections from Democrats with more conservative foreign policy views, particularly on the issue of Iraq. A large majority of Democrats -- 70% -- say they want U.S. troops in Iraq to return home as soon as possible; these Democrats overwhelmingly favor either Obama or Clinton over McCain. But roughly a quarter of Democrats believes the troops should remain in Iraq until the situation has stabilized. These voters would support Clinton over McCain by greater than five-to-one (83% vs. 14%). Democrats who support maintaining U. S. forces in Iraq would support Obama over McCain by a smaller margin (66% to 31%)."

On some level, there's nothing odd about that. If you want to hang out in Iraq forever, you should probably vote for the candidate whose policy is perpetual war. Nor should Obama's shortcomings in the toughness sweepstakes shock anyone. Insofar as the foreign policy conversation is going to be about "toughness," Democrats will always lose. The question for Obama, and one of the central rationales behind his candidacy, is that he could help shift that discussion, he could "change the mindset." But it won't be easy. As you can see in Pew's offhanded use of toughness as a stand-in for national security credibility, the conflation of aggression and competence runs pretty deep in our polity. If, by the election's end, this poll question is still being used, Obama's probably not doing too well.

Jim, responding to the flood of books nominated for "20th century classic of American liberal political thought that has held up best," writes:

The suggestions seem to me to bring to mind the question of where/how those being educated in the last 20 years learn the wisdom and experience of post-WWII liberal/progressive - much of which is highly relevent to the pickle/fuckup we find ourselves in today?

Here's chance for a lefty organization to use the net to set out summaries of this good stuff for the current generation, including comments on where things were right and wrong: The wisdom of the progressive/liberal philosophy.

I'd also include less than book length articles and speeches (like Kennen in Foreign Policy on realism), obviously some good stuff like MLK's letter from the Birmingham jail and 'I have a dream' speech on the DC mall.

Secondary schools and colleges don't include most of the underpinnings of our political philosopy and practice except in some specialised grad. courses in a few institutions.

I'm thinking here more than a Wiki entry, but multi-person contributions that grow over time, with some editors to give structure and coherency. Where's American's for Democratic Action (ADA) when we need them - or the American Prospect, CAP, The Nation, et. al. Let's call this the American Liberalism Project!

Readers of this blog are pretty well-versed in the differences between Obama and Clinton on health care policy*. But what you may not know is that they also have disagreements on education policy! Dana Goldstein explains...

*Admit it. You thought I was going to talk about mandates again.

Tyler Cowen asks "Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?" This isn't to ask which is your favorite, or which most influenced you, but which has held up the best. "Road to Serfdom is a contender," he writes, "even though its main empirical point (socialism leads to loss of political freedom) would seem to be refuted." If you have ideas on this score, head over to his place and share them. But for now, I'd ask the same about 20th century classics in liberal political thought. Unlike Tyler, I'm not going to disallow economics-texts, largely because I think Galbraith should be part of the discussion. Rawls would seem an obvious contender, as would Susan Moller Okin. But range widely.

Daniel Davies:

It’s not often that one gets to correct a Nobel Prize winner, so I will take the opportunity. Stiglitz is quoted as saying that “Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain”. This is actually the best case for armaments spending from an economic point of view. Most of the time, when armaments are used, they damage something valuable. If all the bullets fired in Iraq had been poured down the drain instead, the world economy would be massively better off, even allowing for the cost of cleaning up the pollution caused in the drain.

This is a pretty remarkable find: A 1969 debate between William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky on the nature and intention of American foreign policy. I find Chomsky more convincing and concrete, but the two of them are both very good, and treat each other with surprising respect.

Via this beautiful remembrance of Buckley.

It's a pity that Dean Baker doesn't have some sort of coercive regulatory authority over the nation's papers, as a bit of his perspective would really make for more sensible reporting. Today, for instance, he blasts The New York Times for reporting that a House bill eliminates $17 billion in tax breaks without noting that that's over a 10-year period, and without contextualizing the annual $1.7 billion change in spending in terms of what the number means to actual people: $5.70 per person, per year. So in a couple short sentences, we've moved from a huge number -- $17 billion, or "LOTS OF MONEY!" -- to the actual way we'll experience it -- yearly increments of $5.70, or a cheap sandwich. That's a pretty different understanding of the sum. Indeed, to help dramatize the way the impression of the story changes depending on which number is reported, I made a helpful graph:

Why isn't it official New York Times style to, as a matter of course, translate the numbers into all of these increments so readers could better understand them? It would barely take a moment, and would only require an additional sentence. And it would translate incomprehensibly huge totals into manageable sums, allowing readers to make the relevant calculation: Not whether they believe X priority with $17 billion, but whether they believe it worth, on average, $5.70 a year. That, at the end of the day, is what they'll actually be paying. $17 billion is a sum that has nothing to do with them.

It's fascinating to watch the knives come out in the Clinton campaign. Oddly, I actually think Mark Penn is right to say that he gets a bum rap among those who blame him for creating a microtargeted, small-bore effort. His book may have been abut microtrends, but the campaign he helped run really did stake its success on broad themes, large arguments, and big policies. It just hasn't been enough.

Insofar as the campaign made big mistakes, they were tactical and organizational in nature. They didn't realize how long the primary would go on, and weren't ready to compete after Super Tuesday. They did a terrible job organizing in caucus states, and began opportunistically questioning the legitimacy of the process. They didn't control their surrogates, and let Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, and others trash Hillary's image by going too negative. Those were all errors, and some of them had a pretty large impact. If the campaign hadn't turned so many folks off in South Carolina, Obama may not have registered the win that revived his momentum after losing New Hampshire.

But campaigns are, in the end, only as good as the candidate they furnish. Looking back, the campaign's biggest error was fielding a candidate who had legislated as if it were still the 90s, eschewing bold progressive leadership and capitulating to Republican pressure on "national security." If Clinton had spent any of the last few years using her star power to lead high profile fights on universal health care, presidential powers, global warming, or Iraq, she might be in a very different place today. She'd be able to make the contrast with Obama, point to where she'd been a workhorse and he'd proven a showhorse. But she didn't. And at the end of the day, that's not Mark Penn's fault, though it may have been his advice. It's Clinton's fault.

Matt writes:

Ron Bailey's article on how being childless doesn't make people unhappy seemed to me to be a bit wide of the mark insofar as it didn't take into account the perspective of old people at all.

Whatever else raising children may be, it's also an expensive and time consuming pain in the ass that sharply limits your flexibility to do a variety of things for a large number of years. One can easily imagine the joys of parenthood being roughly offset by the burdens. But later in life, having a solid relationship with grownup kids and their children seems low-cost and hard-to-replace. Loneliness is very hard on people.

Megan is right. I do think of her "as a union basher." And her post, which I think is supposed to disprove that notion, just illuminates why. Megan says that concerns over seniority structure between two merging unions demonstrate "the problem with unions" and exhibit their tendency to introduce structural rigidities into the economy. Yet, weirdly, I've never seen her write a post saying a merger that was foiled or stillborn because the CEO didn't want to stop being the CEO demonstrates "the problem with CEOs." And lord knows I've never seen her write a post about a corporations misdeeds that said Enron, or whatever else, showed "the problem with corporations." Lots of institutions and economic actors, in the pursuit of their self-interest, commit sins, or introduce economic rigidities, or otherwise work in ways contrary to the public interest. If you're only keeping an eye on one of those groups and using their every misstep as evidence against the wisdom of their existence, then yes, you're a basher. And while I don't think Megan is against more distributional equality as such, the increased scrutiny -- none of it constructive, or encouraging -- that she gives the labor movement ends up placing her against one of the only forces in America fighting for better conditions and wages for workers. In general, I can understand being against specific union actions and tactics, just as I'm against specific corporate practices, but being anti-union as a matter of course seems incredibly strange.

A friend just IM'd me to note that she'd been working her way through the final season of the West Wing and was startled by the similarities between their fictional election and our actual one. Hypercharismatic, minority insurgent captures the Democratic nomination at a brokered convention? Check. Superficially heterodox Republican straight-talker beats a smooth-talking preacher for his party's nod? Yes, indeed. And the similarities run deeper than that. Slate explains:

Lev writes:

The major issue at hand is that John McCain's love among moderates and liberals is that they think that he secretly sympathizes with them. He did work to cultivate an image as being working with Democrats when they're right, and trying to lead his party to the sensible center on some issues. That's why a lot of people like the old guy, and not entirely without reason.

Ultimately, though, John McCain's embrace of the right will no doubt harm him with these groups, who will probably finally put it together that he isn't really one of them, and his hagiographical press coverage has made the public quite unaware of his stances on many issues, as well as the personal baggage he carries. In essence, most of the people who dislike McCain already aren't likely to change their minds, while the McCain fans will no doubt be presented with some new evidence to test their affection for him. The same might very well be true of Barack Obama, but Obama doesn't really have any damning stuff in his back yard that falls into the "secret to everyone" camp--unless anyone really thinks that all this Rezko business is really going to catch on after about fifty failed attempts.

All of which is not to say that I think there's no chance that John McCain will wind up winning in November--though most polls seem to give Obama the advantage for now--but McCain's "experience" argument is naturally going to involve more stories about the Keating Five, Vicki Iseman, etc. If he's running on his record, it's inevitable, because that stuff is his record. And his record is not hagiographical.

Political messaging must be a pretty sweet gig if you can really brag that "I have won about 70 major elections around the world, including many presidents, and I devised the simple message for Tony Blair in his last successful campaign: ‘Forward, Not Back.’"

Sure, Mark Penn, you may look good now (well, you actually aren't looking too good right now, come to think of it), but you've never had to run against me and my battle-tested "better, not worse," slogan. And don't even make me go nuclear. I've got my "good stuff, not bad stuff" signs just waiting for some poor sucker who pissed me off.

Meanwhile, to be a bit more analytical about this, message consultants are not generally the most important variable in a given race. So if you're the sort of consultant who gets hired by overwhelming favorites, you're going to look pretty good without having had to win very much. Joe Trippi, for instance, isn't terribly good at winning presidential races, but he seems to be pretty good at helping insurgents define the races they're in. But maybe he'd seem really good at helping frontrunners win if more of them hired him and he happened to be on their payroll when they won. Who knows!?

I've always had a fair amount of sympathy for pro-choicers who find abortion morally problematic and conduct some of their hand-wringing in public. The fury directed at them often seemed a bit out of proportion to the banal misgivings they expressed. But over at Tapped, Scott Lemieux gives the clearest explanation I've heard of why it's actually pernicious for political types to spend all their time emphasizing their moral struggles with the issue:

Good coalition-building on reproductive freedom would consist of emphasizing agreement (the stupidities and inequities of using inevitably arbitrary state coercion to force women to bring pregnancies to term, the greater effectiveness of the broad panoply of pro-choice policies in reducing abortion rates by reducing unwanted pregnancies) and de-emphasizing moral conflicts. People object to Sullivan and Saletan because they emphasize the latter rather than the former -- and especially in Saletan's case, in fact denying that abortion is morally complex but that people who don't share his moral views are simply wrong -- and argue almost exclusively on the political terrain favored by anti-choicers. Creating conflicts where no necessary ones exist -- like writing yourself out of the pro-choice movement because you think there are moral problems with abortion -- is coalition-fracturing. Acknowledging that many people find abortion immoral can be the start of a pro-choice argument, but it can't be the end of one.

Responding to my concern that we're losing our public, political intellectuals, Sam L writes:

There is also something good in the end of that model. Even in the mainstream (Time, the Nobel Committee), people are starting to realize that the era of Great Men who guide our cultural advancement is coming to a close, and that it is a good thing. That's why the IPCC got the Peace Prize along with Al Gore, and why "You!" were Time's man of the year.

O'Reilly and Edward R. Murrow couldn't be more different, but they both fit into a top-down media culture and a top-down political culture that asks us to passively look to these men as leaders. I think we won't see many more men like Galbraith or Friedman or Murrow, or Martin Luther King Jr. for that matter. It is sad, but it is also undoubtedly a good thing that our culture is shifting towards a model where a few intellectuals, a few journalists, and a few leaders no longer dominate our cultural and political arena. Because, lets be honest, for every man of intellect and integrity like Murrow, there was a Joe McCarthy bringing out what is ugliest in all of us.

So far as the whole public financing controversy goes, is there a reason that Obama shouldn't simply say, "I never wanted to have a campaign run by corporate interests, and I never understood that I could have a campaign funded by more than a million Americans making small sum contributions?" His ability to get more than a million separate individuals to contribute is remarkable, and should be turned into the story. Civic renewal is a good thing. And if McCain wants to argue, then Barack Obama, with his $20 quadrillion dollars, can make some hay of the fact that McCain's campaign is run by a lobbyist and he used the campaign finance system as collateral on a personal loan. It's not just that it would be politically stupid for Obama to let himself be bullied out of his fundraising advantage, but on the merits, he's actually created something remarkable in terms of voter engagement. He should see where it leads.

William F. Buckley died today. Rick Perlstein has a touching remembrance of the conservative icon whom he nevertheless called "friend." I'll take the moment to recommend John Judis's biography of Buckley, which is an absolutely terrific book. As a slightly more general point, in the last two or three years, a whole host of giants have passed away, men who were political thinkers at a time when that made you a cultural figure. John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Norman Mailer, and now, William F. Buckley Jr. Gore Vidal is just about the last of their number left. And that's a shame. They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O'Reilly's of the world. Where we once prized a tremendous facility for wit, we're now elevating those with a tremendous storehouse for anger. Run a search on quotes from Galbraith, Buckley, or Friedman, then do the same for O'Reilly and Coulter. We're really losing something here. And we don't even have Molly Ivins around to wrest it back.

Nick Beaudrot begs MSNBC for mercy:

there's no sense in writing the postgame spin so quickly (MSNBC's sub-head: "At end of debate, there is little evidence of a shift in course of campaigns"). Reactions will play out over the next few days. Perhaps Clinton being stymied by two male moderators and a male opponent will play well with women. Perhaps her performance played so poorly that Obama will win Ohio and Texas by five or more points. Perhaps the fact that Obama is campaigning eighteen hours a day and thus unable to follow events in Russia will make people have second thoughts about his foreign policy chops. Perhaps they'll resent the whole exercise and just not vote. We just don't know the answer to these questions, and we won't know until post-debate polls come out on Friday or so. Just let the thing play out!

Reason's Ron Bailey certainly wins the week's award for best pairing of a headline and subhead with his article titled "Why are People Having Fewer Kids?" and subtitled, "Perhaps it's because they don't like them very much." Sometimes, udnerstatement is the way of wisdom.

The piece is interesting, examining declining birthrates and connecting them to happiness studies showing that parents aren't happier than non-parents, and don't seem to enjoy the actual toil of childcare. Problem is, I never really know how seriously to take these happiness studies, In general, I'm an optimistic guy, and think I'd have rated my happiness an 8 both now and at most points in my life. But I'm undoubtedly happier and more satisfied now than I've been before. But I can only tell that comparatively, I don't think it would have shown up on a study in which I self-reported my happiness. Similarly, I think one of Bailey's commenters makes a good point when he says "I am guessing that if you surveyed marathon runners at various intervals during the race, they'd complain about how miserable they are. Upon crossing the finish line, they would talk about the overall achievement and how wonderful it was. Same with raising kids." And though happiness research actually shows slight lifts for parents after their kids leave the house, no parents I know seem pleased to have their kids gone, and most seem to want as much involvement as possible in their lives.

This sentence is where my concluding take should go, but I really don't have one. This is more one of those posts where I'm hoping you guys will make smart comments and explain how to understand happiness research.

To jump in with a related point on the debate over NAFTA, these trade deals really don't matter much. Insofar as these deals are obnoxious, it's generally because they're massive collections of corporate giveaways, not because they actually drive trade and outsourcing. Whatever else you want to say about the Peru Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, no one really thinks trade with Peru is having a terribly large impact on American jobs. Rather, the pressure is coming from countries like China and India who we don't have formalized agreements with.

And that's the nut of it. Relatively little trade is the result of formalized tariff agreements. But they're the concrete things we can fight over, so we end up having a lot of strange proxy battles over things like CAFTA, where the establishment thinks they're defending trade and some liberals think they're opposing outsourcing and really we're all just arguing about a big hunk of corporate welfare. Insofar as trade is a problem, the pressures have much more to do with the advance of communication, shipping, and transportation technologies which have made huge, low-income countries half a world away viable competitors on manufactured goods and electronically transmittable information.

Meanwhile, for some smart thinking about trade, let me recommend Jamie Galbraith's recent essay in The American Prospect arguing for a rethink of the populist take on the issue.

To follow up on the "experience" debate, Democrats should probably take the findings of this poll pretty seriously:

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have made ending the war a centerpiece of their campaigns. But in hypothetical matchups against either Democratic senator, about half of voters polled said McCain, a Vietnam veteran, was best able to deal with the war. Just over a third of voters polled favored the Democratic candidates on that issue.

Overall, McCain would beat Clinton 46% to 40% and Obama 44% to 42%. His lead over Obama is within the poll's three-point margin of error.

The Arizona senator also scored higher marks than Clinton or Obama for experience and strength. On the issue of "honesty and integrity," he beat Clinton and was tied by Obama. McCain is viewed favorably by 61% of all registered voters, including a plurality of Democrats.

And the survey showed McCain's advantages extend even to some domestic issues. On the economy, a subject that McCain has joked about his own lack of expertise, voters picked him over Democratic front-runner Obama as best able to lead by an 8-point margin -- 42% to 34%.

Couple disconnected comments:

• Clinton's opening complaint about constantly getting the first questions was really weird.


• Obama is going to need a stronger defense of Jeremiah Wright. He needs his line on that now.


• Does Clinton really want to double down on rejecting folks who have rough relations with the Jewish community? Clinton, after all, kissed Suha Arafat.


• Tim Russert's drilling on Farrakhan was awful to watch. "Answer for a prviate citizen's unsolicited support of your campaign! Answer for the fact that friends of yours don't like him!" Then he went with the Russia question which, to be clear, wasn't so much about Russia as whether the candidates have a good memory for names. The federal government doesn't lack for people to remind the President of foreign leader's names. I hate those gotchas.

Haven't done one of these in awhile. But I'll start: This is best rationale for writing a book that I've heard of.

Over at Free Exchange, Will Wilkinson is taking some shots at behavioral economics and its occasional implications for tighter regulation of markets. "These alleged irrationalities," writes Will, "are general tendencies of the species. So they must afflict every voter, every politician, every bureaucrat, every power hungry general. How exactly is 'a larger role' for the government supposed to improve on the coordinating function of the price mechanism?"

I'm not sure what exactly it is that Will finds so inexplicable here. Behavioral research often finds that consumers act irrationally in certain situations. So given a specific set of constraints, they may underestimate future risk, prove oversensitive to loss, exhibit significant status quo bias, and so on and so forth. All problems.

Now, the government may be made up of people, but it is not made up of people carrying out transactions under these conditions. An easy example is the research on opt-out 401(k)s. We know, from the economists, that investing in 401(k)s is generally a wise idea. We know, from the statisticians, that far fewer people do it than should. We know, from the behavioralists, that far more people would do it if the default setting put you in the 401(k), rather than forced you to wander down to HR and specifically ask for it. And so folks in the government, acting with more information and in a different context than folks in an office, think up a policy to "recognize the power of inertia in human behavior and enlist it to promote, rather than hinder, saving."

At exactly which point in this process does Will fear that the same irrationality that keeps someone from creating a retirement account will foul up a regulator's efforts to ease their way into a retirement account? Similarly, at which point does an individual's tendency to discount the need for future savings screw up a regulator's ability to create Social Security? Indeed, you may not like Social Security, or opt-out 401(k)s, but whatever their flaws, they simply aren't the same flaws affecting the targeted groups. Regulators, working with the benefits of information, expertise, and detachment, can certainly create incentives that militate towards empirically desirable behaviors. The failings of individuals are, in general, different than the failings of institutions, just as the failings of the market tend to be different than the failings of the government. In any given situation, you have to decide which is worse. But they're not the same.

The Nation has a new blog, called J-Street, focusing on Washington and featuring the writing of Te-Ping Chen and Chris Hayes. Chris is a friend of mine, and one of the most talented writers and thinkers I've ever met, and he also keeps going on about how good Te-Ping Chen is, so it's going right into the RSS reader. As a sidenote, the name refers to the fact that in Washington, there's no J Street on the grid. It just...isn't there. Weird, right?

Jacob Hacker, who created the basic structure that both the Obama and Clinton plans rely on, weighs in on the mandate issue today telling everybody to basically calm down. Contrary to what many of my readers probably assume, I actually agree with that take. Jacob doesn't detail the underlying dispute here as fully as he might, but the basic genesis of this argument is that most of us thought Obama's health plan was basically fine, if a bit worse than Clinton's, but got pissed Obama started going after the very idea of a mandate and sending out mailers reminiscent of Harry and Louise. Put differently, it was the politics, rather than the policy, that forced the argument. But if the politics calm down, the policy isn't objectionable enough to continue spending time on.

Everyone is recommending Noam Scheiber's piece on Barack Obama's policy shop of pragmatists, and they're right, it's good. But I'm not sure I agree with it. In the economics section, for instance, Scheiber is sort of caught between wanting to make the larger claim, as David Leonhardt has, that Obama's domestic policy advisers are behavioral economists, and not really having the policy juice to back that judgment up. He mentions opt-in 401(k)s, but it's hard to give Obama's team too much credit there given that they were prominently featured in Clinton adviser Gene Sperling's book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, and later adopted by the Center for American Progress. In other words: It's a mainstream Democratic idea, not one that points towards a new approach. Elsewhere, Scheiber writes, "One typical Goolsbee brainchild is something called an automatic tax return. The idea is that, if you had no tax deductions or freelance income the previous year, the IRS would send you a tax return that was already filled out. As long as you accepted the government's accounting, you could just sign it and mail it back." But that's not a Goolsbee brainchild: Wesley Clark had it in 2004, and this cycle, John Edwards proposed it before Obama.

Which gets to the larger point: Obama's team may be hardheaded empiricists, but they are also decidedly conventional. Whatever else you want to say about the health plan David Cutler wrote for Obama, it's not the perfect world proposal you'd come up with from a long, hard look at the data. It's not even what you'd come up with from David Cutler's look at the data. It's just a conventional, mainstream, Democratic health care plan that looks a bit cautious in light of Edwards and Clinton's proposals, and would've looked more solidly ambitious if it had come out in 2004. But it doesn't bespeak any unique approach on the part of Obama's team. Rather, it's verging on generic.

And that's true for a lot of their domestic policy plans, the major exceptions being government reform, tech policy, and energy policy. As for foreign policy, Noam makes some good points, but is working way too hard, I think, to fit a decidedly liberal foreign policy mindset into a pragmatic, rather than ideological, box. It's both. The worldview, however, is coherent and based solidly in theories of interdependence and soft power -- it's not an agglomeration of specific policy judgments. That's why Obama is always talking about changing "the mindset that got us into Iraq." He has an alternate mindset in mind that would be different.

In any case, I do recommend Noam's piece, as it's a good look at Obama's advisers and is written with his customary verve and skill. But I think the desire to detect an overarching theory powering his policy shop can be misleading. Obama's domestic policy shop is, in general, cautious and mainstream, though certainly empirical within those constraints. And his foreign policy shop is crafting a pretty significant and detailed vision that is deeply committed to a tightly-defined set of guiding ideals. But the two really are different -- in particular, his foreign policy advisers are rather boundary pushing while his domestic voices are fairly mainstream -- and I think it's really only the foreign policy shop that can be characterized as dependent on a detectable and unique approach.

Today, Your World in Charts™ is outsourced to NationalPriorities.org, which has a hugely cool gizmo that lets you enter your tax burden and then shows you how the government is spending the money. We sure are paying a lot for that national debt...

To follow up on the great cookie debate of Aught-Eight, I just had a solid nine miniature oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies and my happiness is steadily increasing.

Over at TAP, we recently asked a wide array of political types who should get the Democrats' VP nod. Eventually, we tallied up the answers and had various writers -- myself among them -- offer the best arguments for the top seven choices. I made the cases for Joe Biden and Kathleen Sebelius.

Sadly, the magazine killed my original "out-of-left-field" entry and replaced it with a round-up of random names. Those fools have got to get got. The original version, however, follows:

-----

Omar Little:

Little is more fun than nominating politicians for national stardom, and some wags in our voting pool took liberties with their assignment. We got everyone from serious-but-obscure professors like Kathleen Sullivan to rogueish-but-aging actors like Warren Beatty. The most interesting idea, however, came from the world of television’s most interesting show: Omar from HBO’s critically-acclaimed hit The Wire.

For those unaware of The Wire, it’s a gritty show about the clashes between individuals and institutions on the streets of Baltimore. Omar is the program’s breakout character, a gay, black stick-up artist who robs drug dealers and lives by a tough, almost samurai-esque moral code. He carries a sawed-off shotgun and hauntingly whistles “the Farmer in the Dell” as he walks through the streets. And he’s perfect for the Democrati ticket.

In this age of inequality, who better than a modern day Robin Hood to change the culture that’s abetted obscene pay increases for CEOs amidst middle class wage stagnation? With Omar whistling his way through Wall Street, wouldn’t a slightly higher tax on capital gains seem like a perfectly fair compromise? Wouldn’t a legendary bane of drug dealers show the Democrats to be tough on crime? Wouldn’t the combination of Omar’s proud sexuality and tough, street-hardened persona break some barriers and force even the staunchest of homophobes to reassess their prejudices? And don’t we need a vice-president able to bring a true understanding of urban poverty to the executive branch? As Omar himself would say, “Oh indeed.”

------

You can read the rest of the choices here.

A friend asked me yesterday if there's any way to right the Hillary Clinton campaign, any advice they could be given that would put them back on course. My answer then was that I didn't know. My answer now is that they should read Eve Fairbanks.

Like everyone else, I appreciated Michael Signer's op-ed lambasting the press corps for their shoddy coverage of foreign policy. But there may be a bit of a grass-is-greener dynamic afflicting his coverage. He writes:

Just entertain the thought for a moment. What if, in the coming months, every major journalist who covers foreign affairs wrote one story that actually recounted what the candidates are proposing on a foreign policy issue. On the Middle East, or the developing world. On energy independence, proposals to help veterans, the critical role of global aid, denuclearization, or how we should deal with rising powers such as Russia, China and India.

These stories would tell us what the candidates have proposed and whether their ideas are silly or workable. They would quote experts and present tough criticism and fair praise. They would tell us something about the candidates' characters. They would illuminate the future and tell us something about the past.

But I think Signer is also right to say that coverage of foreign policy has been particularly bad. For that, though, you have to blame Iraq. Policy disagreements in primaries tend to be very concrete. They're rarely about the underlying philosophy of the proposed policies. And they tend to be on the biggest issues, as not enough people care about differences in tech policy. So, on the domestic side, the focus is on health care, and you get a limited debate over mandates that's standing in for a broader debate on the government's role in health care. The debate over mandates isn't terribly important in and of itself, but it's the concrete manifestation of the larger differences in philosophy between the candidates, and it's something the press can report that Clinton supports and Obama does not. But on foreign policy, there's been no such easy wedge issue for reporters to exploit.

There, the issue of the day is clearly Iraq. And on Iraq, the foreign policy reporters have really had their work cut out for them: Looking backwards, there were clear and articulated differences between Obama and Clinton on whether we should go to war. But the Clinton campaign has worked tremendously hard, and been tremendously savvy, at obscuring their forward looking differences. She continually promises to end the war if she is president, and continually assures the crowd that "all of us on this stage want to bring this conflict to a close." It's possible to examine her arguments over residual troops closely and detect something less than a full commitment to withdrawal, but it's very hard to explain.

Meanwhile, Obama hasn't offered enough rhetorical or substantive distinction for the press to report on a substantive difference between the two. He also proved unwilling to pledge that our troops would be out by 2013, and he's shown no interest in endorsing a Bill Richardson style immediate withdrawal. At this point, he's arguing against "the mindset" that led us into the war, which is actually the correct culprit, but is hard to translate into a policy difference. In that way, Iraq has actually obscured the differences in foreign policy philosophy among the candidates. Unlike health care, where the concrete disagreement pointed towards broader philosophical distinctions, Iraq has seen superficial agreement pointing away from broader philosophical distinctions. And that's made it much harder for reporters to get at policy arguments between the two. To uncover some of these arguments, you really would need to force the candidates to begin answering hypotheticals, but the prfess hasn't been willing to pick that fight.

To get a sense for the dangers of taking large medical studies at face value, check out this comment thread over at Kevin's place. Kevin wrote up a new study that apparently proves Prozac and other antidepressants in the SSRI family are worthless. It's an interesting result, but a bit hard to believe for anyone who's ever seen a friend cycle through antidepressants till they land on the right pill and dosage and suddenly turn back into themselves. Many of Kevin's commenters, who've seen the same thing, begin instantly complicating the research, and by the end, it seems fairly certain that the research could be technically true but its result utterly misleading. It's worth reading through just to get a sense of how skeptically to treat this stuff.

You know who you are....

So long as I'm talking about dirty campaigning, it's been hard to figure out if the Clinton campaign was behind today's picture of Obama in a turban. But given the number of reporters trying to track the information down, my hunch is we'll know soon enough. And if it is proven to have come from the Clinton tent, that might well be the end of her campaign, as livid superdelegates abandon her, the media lashes her for the attack, and the narrative slips irretrievably from her control. Indeed, the campaign's repeated declarations that there's nothing wrong with the photo seem, to me, to be preparing for that eventuality. We'll see.

Came home to an e-mail by Jeanne Lambrew tonight, who's an informal adviser to the Clinton campaign and a senior fellow at The Center for American Progress. Lambrew, evidently pissed off about the surfacing of Obama's Harry and Louise mailers in Ohio, got a bunch of highly respected health policy types to sign onto a letter condemning the visual. The letter is signed by folks ranging from Princeton's Uwe Reinhardt to the National Academy for State Health Policy's Alan Weil to Edwards' former health policy adviser Peter Harbage. All in all, an impressive group.

My rule, in general, is to post this stuff when it comes my way, with an open invitation to the other campaign to respond on the blog. I will say, in preamble, that I agree with the letter's main thrust, but it overstates its case. It says, for instance, that "Senator Clinton’s plan clearly recognizes that universal coverage cannot be achieved unless health coverage is affordable, and her plan provides subsidies to ensure it is affordable." It's true that Clinton's plan recognizes the need for affordability, but the subsidy levels are left vague, as are the out-of-pocket spending caps. Whether they would prove sufficient is, as of yet, unknowable.

That said, the letter does get at the basic difference between Obama and Clinton's policy visions, even if it goes a bit far in emphasizing the distance between their policies. "The main difference between their plans is that Senator Clinton would make health security a right and responsibility for all Americans, while Senator Obama would do so only for children and thereby cover fewer Americans." Clinton's plan doesn't quite make health coverage a right, but it does enshrine universality in policy. It creates a combination of right and responsibility that, the campaign hopes, will get us to full coverage. Obama's campaign simply makes it easier to get coverage. That's a worthy goal in and of itself, but it's less than he should be offering, and in any case, it's really time he cut it out with these damn mailers. Even though I'm tired of talking about them, they remain reprehensible, they remain misleading, and Obama's not in bad enough shape to need this sort of help. Anyway, the letter follows. If the Obama campaign wants to respond, they're welcome to do so.

Download the original attachment

February 25, 2008

To Interested Parties:

This presidential campaign has lived up to its historic potential. Bold visions and policies have been offered. And the debate has been vigorous. However, a debate that generates more heat than light sets back rather than advances shared goals. This has happened in health care.

Senators Clinton and Obama have both embraced what should be a non-partisan goal: ensuring affordable, quality coverage for all Americans. They both have policies to ensure access to affordable health insurance. Both rely on an individual requirement with enforcement provisions to ensure universality for targeted populations. The main difference between their plans is that Senator Clinton would make health security a right and responsibility for all Americans, while Senator Obama would do so only for children and thereby cover fewer Americans.

Regardless of one’s views about whether the individual requirements in healthcare should apply to all American adults or just American parents of children, all people committed to universal healthcare can agree that our policy debates should focus on substance.

Unfortunately, the Obama campaign is circulating in Ohio and elsewhere its “Harry and Louise” mailers that unfairly and unconstructively attack Senator Clinton’s universal health care reform plan. These mailers purposely revive “Harry and Louise,” the actors hired by the insurance industry to help destroy health reform in the first Clinton Administration. They make the inaccurate claim that the plan would force people to purchase unaffordable health insurance. Senator Clinton’s plan clearly recognizes that universal coverage cannot be achieved unless health coverage is affordable, and her plan provides subsidies to ensure it is affordable.

The “Harry and Louise” mailer literally takes a page from the playbook of the health insurance industry and other special interests which spent over $300 million to kill any meaningful healthcare reform in 1993-94. It undermines serious dialogue on needed changes to the health care system.

We call on all candidates for President to recommit to a civil, positive discourse that does not undermine the larger goal of quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans. To that end, we urge Senator Obama’s campaign to cease using a mailing that is clearly inconsistent with this goal.

Signed by (in alphabetical order):

Louis Cooper, MD

Former President,

American Academy of Pediatrics

Nancy-Ann DeParle, JD

Former Administrator, HCFA (now CMS)

Sherry Glied, PhD

Mailman School of Public Health,

Columbia University

Jonathan Gruber, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Peter Harbage

Former Edwards Health Advisor

David Kessler, MD

Former Commissioner, FDA

Jeanne Lambrew, PhD

LBJ School of Public Affairs,

University of Texas at Austin

Jack Lewin, MD

American College of Cardiology

Karen Pollitz

Health Policy Institute,

Georgetown University

Irwin Redlener, MD

Children’s Health Fund

Uwe Reinhardt, PhD

Princeton University

Elena Rios, MD

National Hispanic Medical Association

Alice Rivlin, PhD

Former Director, Congressional Budget Office

Sara Rosenbaum, JD

School of Public health and Health Services, The George Washington University

Allan Rosenfeld, MD

Mailman School of Public Health,

Columbia University

Donna Shalala, PhD

Former Secretary of Health and Human Services

Laura Tyson, PhD

Haas School of Business,

University of California, Berkeley

Bruce Vladeck, PhD

Former Administrator, HCFA (now CMS)

Alan Weil, JD

National Academy for State Health Policy

Good point by John Judis:

Obama's commitment to radical centrism could also be severely tested. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the support of popular movements, gave priority to getting their substantive legislative agendas adopted; and they succeeded by uniting their supporters and dividing their opponents. If they had focused first on uniting Democrats and Republicans behind common objectives, they probably would not have gotten their way. And, if they had initially turned their attention, as Obama has proposed, to "the most sweeping ethics reform in history," it is unlikely they would have passed public works spending (Roosevelt) or tax cuts (Reagan). Jimmy Carter, too, provides a cautionary tale: The last Democrat to take office on a radical centrist agenda, Carter failed to tame Congress or K Street and was defeated for reelection. He had campaigned for the presidency on the presumption that reformers could overturn the status quo in Washington. In the end, he turned out to be wrong.

But with Obama, there's a particular tension in his rhetoric. You can believe, as Mark Schmitt has eloquently argued, that his emphasis on unity is part of a larger theory dedicated to achieving legislative change. Or you can believe that Obama thinks polarization is an actual problem to be solved and he means to conduct his presidency in such a way as to render our politics less divided. As Judis notes, that will probably require a consensus-based vision of governance that imposes serious constraints on which priorities Obama can pursue and how aggressively he can fight for them. Or it's possible that unity can be both a means and an end -- that Obama can prove so popular that the GOP is scared to oppose his initiatives -- but I think that's rather unlikely. And I'm not even sure Obama himself knows, or even can know. It'll only be when he has to actually make the trade-offs between who he wants to be, what he wants to achieve, and what he's willing to sacrifice that he'll really have to figure this out.

I'll side with Kevin on the "experience" debate. To argue that Barack Obama has more direct legislative experience than Clinton and is thus not vulnerable to experience attacks is to be misled by a hyperliteralism around the word "experience." As Kevin puts it, "Obama partisans are missing the point here. Like it or not, most voters have a sort of vague operational view of experience that means something like 'involvement in big league politics.' And on that score, Hillary gets 15 years: 8 years as an activist first lady and 7 years as U.S. senator. Obama, conversely, gets a total of 3 years as U.S. senator. It may seem unfair that his eight years in the Illinois legislature don't count, but for most people they just don't. Being a backbench state legislator just isn't big league politics. Seen through this lens, the problem with Obama isn't that he's less experienced than Hillary, but that he's inexperienced, full stop."

I'd recast the issue of experience, actually, as one of familiarity and comfort. To voters, government is a sort of black box. It's actual workings are pretty much a mystery. So every four years, you vote for someone who appears to basically share your beliefs and your worldview, who you're comfortable with personally, and who seems able to step into that back box and make things happen. And if you can only get some of those traits, so be it. Voters are used to Hillary Clinton. They're even more used to John McCain, who's not only been on their television screen for eight years, but looks like most of the guys they're used to seeing on their televisions screens in this context. They're not used to Barack Obama. That, in part, is why he can shake them from apathy, and create this movement. But it will also be why many mistrust him, and are willing to believe everything from attacks on his patriotism to charges that he's just "not ready."

So far, Obama has had to appeal to primary voters, who are a much higher information electorate, and much likelier to vote for the candidate who involves them. In the general, he's going to have to attract a lot more people who don't really want to be involved so much as they want to vote for someone and trust that that person will take care of things for awhile. McCain will try and trade on that. Obama will try and degrade his credibility by ticking off aspects of his record that voters disagree with. But when McCain says that Obama has never met a world leader or had to vote to authorize a war, don't think that Obama can defuse the attack by pointing to his experience in the Illinois State Senate. Voters don't really know what goes on in Washington and they're totally unaware of how Springfield works. Many like Obama, and some are even excited about him, but if he wins the nomination, the challenge will be whether he can convince the apathetic majority to feel comfortable with him.

A friend sent me this in response to last week's post on cookies:

In general, that's exactly right. More specifically, I'm not sure I agree with the curve. Rather, initial cookies create very significant increases in well-being, while cookie consumption beyond, say, 11 (assuming generously sized cookies) begins to make one feel fat. But still very happy.

Can you tell I don't really feel like blogging today?

I'll be on MSNBC at about 1:35 Eastern talking about the Clinton campaign. It'll be four minutes of incredible fun and enlightenment.

According to the new WSJ/Harris poll, about three-quarters of Americans believe patient satisfaction surveys as one of the most reliable indicators of care quality -- more reliable than frequency of preventive tests or independent assessments by watchdog groups or independent medical boards.

Last week, I went to the doctor for a lingering cold. I waited for about 75 minutes, was ushered into the physician's office, spent about 45 seconds telling him my symptoms, 90 or so seconds having my lungs listened to and my ears peered at, and another 60 or so seconds being written a prescription for an antibiotic and told to come back if I wasn't better in 10 days. So what information do I have to evaluate the session? Well, length of wait, I guess. Friendliness of physician. Number of awards on his desk -- and there were lots. Amount of time he spent listening to my symptoms and examining me. Whether or not he confidently named off a probable bacteria and corresponding antibiotic.

And that's about it. Now, the length of the wait has nothing to do with the quality of the care. Nor does his friendliness, except insofar as it encourages me to more fully recount my concerns. The awards on his desk have nothing to do with my visit, but they certainly make me feel more confident, and most behavioral studies suggest that such artifacts would create an "anchoring" effect that would lead me to evaluate my physician more positively. The time he spent actually working with me was minimal, but I have no reason to believe he neglected to do anything necessary. I'm glad he confidently prescribed something but I have no idea if I needed it, or if it was the right prescription, or if it was the causal factor in recovery or just happened to coincide with the end of my cold.

Patient evaluations are, without doubt, the easiest way to evaluate care. They require no extra spending on the part of the insurers, and many of us are already habituated to looking at user reviews of everything from books to restaurants. Doctors offices are a very small leap. But are they sufficient? Not in any way that I can see. Patients don't have anywhere near the expertise or the information to evaluate medical care. What they would really be doing is evaluating the quality of the experience, which is not the same thing, and can in fact be quite misleading. Worse, it could incentivize everything from overtreatment -- doctors get better ratings if they do something -- to a cottage industry in meaningless awards that could be displayed on doctor's desks. It's well and good to have patients evaluate wait times and bedside manner, but asking them to evaluate medical care -- which, according to this poll, most folks think a fine idea -- could really prove rather destructive.

Bill Kristol, the World's Worst Op-Ed Writer™, burps:

Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin.

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

I think Paul Waldman is taking Ralph Nader's presidential run too seriously. Everybody needs a hobby. Some people pick stamp collecting, or book clubs, or taking walks. And some people, like the Lobster Man and Ralph Nader, run for president. And much as we do with stamp collectors and the Lobster Man, we should give Mr. Nader some privacy in which to quietly pursue his hobby.

In general, I don't pressure myself to post on weekends. If I'm around, I do. If not, not. Today, however, I was absent for an altogether sadder reason. I was in New York, attending the memorial service for the younger brother of a dear friend.

My friend's sibling was an extraordinary young man: He was born with health problems that left him mute, and with some facial disfigurement. His was a road marked by surgeries and the stares of strangers, where many were robbed of the joy of his presence because they didn't know to look for it. But he was wickedly intelligent, with a quick laugh and a slyly subversive sense of humor. He was easy to hang out with, infectiously fun to be near, and the best Scrabble player I've ever met -- I watched (well, experienced) him effortlessly dispatch a table of professional wordsmiths all multiple years his senior. And he was loved by a wonderful family and adored by an extraordinary brother.

His death was an awful accident, the sort of quiet tragedy which shows that the world is much worse than merely cruel, it is unconcerned and inattentive to those who fight so hard to inhabit it. But a measure of grace was ripped from the darkness, and the memorial service was beautiful, primarily because each testimonial channeled his personality with a clarity and coherence so forceful that it left no doubt as to the power of his imprint, and to how deeply his life mattered.

The speeches were also striking, though, because more than a few were from the doctors and surgeons and nurses and pulmonologists who'd spent years of their lives with this young man, and had done heroic, even daring, work on his behalf. In honor of his life, and their work, his family has asked for donations to National Foundation for Facial Reconstruction. "The NFFR founded and proudly remains the funding arm of the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery (IRPS) at NYU Medical Center. The Institute is a center of excellence that diagnoses and provides medical treatment and psychosocial services for over 1,700 patients every year, regardless of the severity of their condition, the length of treatment or the family’s ability to afford care - 72% of the patients seen at the Institute are uninsured, Medicaid recipients or 'clinic' care patients." It's a remarkable center that makes possible remarkable lives. If you have a bit of extra money, you could do much worse than to support their work.

Incidentally, like Ross, I really don't buy the idea that McCain gets favorable coverage from the press because he's a high-ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, and thus in part dictates their corporate future. Chairman Daniel Inouye isn't really a media darling, and nor is Ted Stevens, John Rockefeller, or Mark Pryor.

Rather, reporters just like John McCain. Tucker Carlson actually did a terrific article about riding on McCain's Straight Talk Express in 2000. I can't find it online, but it's collected in his book Politicians, Pundits, and Parasites, which is well worth the cost of entry. A taste:

McCain understands that if you're going to play the reformer, sad-eyed disapproval won't do. You've got to pick up the hatchet. McCain does a terrific Cary Nation impression. It's effective because on some level it's true. McCain has a genuinely bad temper. He is a genuinely tough guy.

During his first run for office, McCain learned that one of his opponents had tracked down his first wife, looking for dirt. According to a political consultant who worked for him at the time, McCain cornered the man at the next candidate's forum. "I want you to know," McCain said, "that campaign aside, politics aside, if you ever do something like that again -- anything against a member of my family -- I will personally beat the shit out of you."

It's impossible to imagine Chris Shays threatening to personally beat the shit out of anyone. But it would be a lot easier to like him if he did.

What very few (male) reporters feel comfortable with is their personal physical courage. Their ability to fare well in a bar fight, or make a credible threat to someone stalking their wife, or endure five years of torture in a Vietnamese prison camp. McCain has something that they don't understand, and that they want. And it's one reason they like him. Because not only does he possess those qualities, but he also appears to like them. And that validation from a tough guy is reassuring. Add in that they've not had any reason to go after him -- it's always easier to like a scrappy insurgent -- and you've got a recipe for a pretty adulatory relationship. The question is what happens now, when he's the nominee, and they have to go after him, and he stops liking them, and some of that angry toughness is turned against their friends.

If McCain is brought down by all this, it won't be by the affair he doesn't actually appear to have had, but the favors for lobbyists that he most definitely appears to have done, and lied about. Worse for McCain, he let his hotheadedness and righteous indignation get the best of him and angrily declared he's never, ever done a favor for a lobbyist. Problem is, he's done favors for plenty of lobbyists, even the ones he specifically said he didn't do favors for, or even meet. The resulting contortions have already produced the best quote of the election, with McCain's superlawyer Bob Bennett saying, "We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?" Well, the difference between McCain saying he didn't meet with Paxson and him actually having met with Paxson is the macimal possible difference that can exist between two statements. It's the difference between yes and no, the difference between doing favors for lobbyists and not doing favors for them, the difference between McCain telling the truth, and lying. Indeed, the difference between those two statements may be the difference between McCain winning this election and losing it. The Times story is the beginning, not the end, of the investigations -- investigations McCain isn't used to enduring, doesn't have the temperament to bear gracefully, and whose results he's almost certainly contradicted with that maximalist statement of his own virutes.

Jon Chait makes a strong case that the Iseman story, if true, is as bad or worse than anything Clinton did. Even so, I think the path of wisdom on this, particularly for Obama, is to use it to set precedent rather than score points. Imagine if he held a press conference, waited for the inevitable question on the story, then said something like, "look, you want to ask me about his plan for a 100-years in Iraq or more tax cuts for the rich or better deals for telecom lobbyists, we can talk about that. But his personal life is not only none of my business but, frankly, it's none of yours." Indeed, he could hit the media even harder than that, slamming trivial coverage and the obsession with conflict and scandal more broadly. It's an argument that he can make defending an opponent but not defending himself. It would generate terrific press coverage, and probably have a salutary impact on how they covered the rest of the race. And, above all, making the principled case for McCain now would be protective for Obama when the inevitable personal attacks come at him.

Nathan Newman is optimistic about the labor movement's future. "Not that all unions have the long-term vision needed," he writes, "but there's been an almost Darwinian evolution in the union movement. Those unions without long-term vision have shrunk and those with long-term vision have grown and become more and more dominant." Indeed, the data seems to show a couple different labor movements whose fortunes are actually going in different directions. if what you're interested in is the labor movement in the service sector, or among immigrants, or in the Southwest, they're doing incredibly well, and under incredible adverse circumstances. The Justice for Janitors was as remarkable an organizing venture as we've seen in this country. Conversely, if you're looking at manufacturing unions, or old line institutions in the Midwest, they're doing quite poorly, as the economic forces buffeting the industry are simply bigger than they are. To some, that means the death of the labor movement, as conservatives often assure me that unions only exist to extract value for their members, and you can't extract vaue from service sector jobs in the way you can for machinist positions. So I grabbed some earnings data and looking into whether or not that's true. Short answer: It isn't:

Turns out it's plenty worthwhile to be in a union. If you're a machine operator, the union difference is 39% of your wages. That's the same as it is in the transportation industry, and less than it is for manual laborers. For the service sector in general, joining a union is equivalent to a 27 percent bump in wages. It's all pretty significant, and it's being reflected in the success that unions like UNITE-HERE and SEIU are experiencing.

Matt on the Israel/Palestinian conflict and Marty Peretz's claim that the Palestinians may not be prepared for citizenship:

I really don't think it's viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don't have them? The answer is pretty simple -- the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don't have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens -- as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently -- that's a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.

It's clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is "transfer" and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?

Unlike Matt, I don't think continual apartheid is even an option. Instead, every day that the problem remains unresolved is a day that the probability inches closer to one that the situation ends in a murderous spasm of terrorist violence and, possibly, Jewish retribution. The least bad option -- by far -- is a viable, generous Palestinian state. It is, at the end of the day, the only outcome capable of protecting Israel.

And the YouTubes continue:

"Imagine," writes Michael Kinsley, "that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium. You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them."

Obama also put it well last night: The surge has been a tactical success masking a strategic blunder. We've tamped down on violence, but changed none of the underlying realities of the conflict, nor even discovered a clear pathway pointing towards reconciliation. Rather the opposite, in fact. We now see no pathway towards reconciliation, and our "bottom-up" strategy to rout al-Qaeda has been to heavily arm Sunni tribes who would sooner turn violently against the central government than submit to its authority. Again, there are a lot of words for this strategy, but success isn't one of them.

The Clinton campaign has paid Mark Penn $3.8 million, given his polling firm another $8 million, and they still have $2 million in unpaid debts various Mark Penn fronts, including the consultancy run by his wife. That's extraordinary. I would've given her tone deaf messaging advice better suited to the political atmosphere of the early 90s for a mere $1.5 million.

Clinton's worst moment in last night's debate was the "change you can Xerox" line, which some soon-to-be-fired member of her staff clearly hoped would be a devastating soundbite. It, uh, wasn't. But Clinton's weakness on this plagiarism issue is amplified by two facts. Fist, by wide acclaim, her best moment of the night came towards the end, when she said, "You know, whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about." That sounds a whole lot like a line John Edwards used to use, which went "What's not at stake are any of us. All of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election. But what's at stake is whether America is going to be fine."

Moreover, as Jason Zengerle reminds us, Clinton has written two books, both with ghostwriters, one in which she didn't even credit the ghostwrite in the acknowledgments, which seems like a rather worse sin than Obama grabbing a line from his buddy. So is this really the ground on which Clinton wants to make her final stand?

This Kos diary comparing the legislative records of Clinton and Obama is getting a lot of attention. The diarist, "Grassroots Mom," says she decided to spend a couple hours looking through the Library of Congress records, and came away convinced that Obama's legislation was better, and more often successful, than Clinton's. And maybe it is. But the diary doesn't show that. Rather, it's a pretty one-sided brief in favor of Obama.

On Iran, for instance, she's blown away by Obama's introduction of "S.J.RES.23 : A joint resolution clarifying that the use of force against Iran is not authorized by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq, any resolution previously adopted, or any other provision of law." In other words, if Bush wants to go to war in Iran, he needs to come back to Congress to do it. It's a good bill. But it's a resolution -- a sense of the Senate act. We're not told, meanwhile, that Clinton is one of three sponsors on S.759, which "prohibits funds from being obligated or expended for military operations or activities within or above Iran's territory or within Iran's territorial waters except pursuant to a specific congressional authorization enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act." So where Obama's bill says an attack on Iran is not authorized Clinton's says it simply won't be funded. If I didn't know that Obama was better on Iran than Clinton, I'd give this round to her. But the diarist doesn't even mention Clinton's bill.

Elsewhere we hear that Obama has a bill "to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require reporting relating to bundled contributions made by persons other than registered lobbyists," but not that Clinton has nine cosponsors on legislation S.804, which is a major reform of our Federal Election code, and would do an enormous amount to clean up elections. We learn that Obama has a bill to "to provide housing assistance for very low-income veterans," but not that Clinton has sponsored the Heroes at Home Act, which is a pretty impressive piece of legislation creating new protocols and treatment pans in order to ensure full mental health care for returning veterans. We're not told of Clinton's bill to spin FEMA off into an independent agency, her legislation to take seriously the threat of nuclear proliferation, or her work to massively expand pre-kindergarten.

This isn't to rag on Obama, who has sponsored good legislation as well, or even on the diarist, who did some useful research. But for all the buzz about the Kos diary, it's not anything even approaching a fair comparison of their legislative records. And I'd go a step further and say that their legislative records aren't even terribly useful, as Obama was only in the Senate two years before running for president, and Clinton has spent most of her time in the minority and all of it stymied by a Republican executive. Neither Clinton nor Obama have impressive legislative records because the conditions weren't amenable to impressive legislating.

CurrencyTrading.net has published their list of the Top 100 economics blogs. It's a bit odd. The main categories include Greg Mankiw, Tim Worstall, Cafe Hayek, and the Club For Growth. Aside from the Club for Growth, all those sites feature fine economic thinkers, but they're resolute conservatives, ad they bring those assumptions to their economics. Their liberal counterparts like Brad DeLong and the Angry Bear, however, are ghettoized into a "liberals" category, which also includes, inexplicably, The Wall Street Journal blog. And Megan McArdle escapes both the "conservative" and "libertarian" and is just "economic policy." It's all a bit odd. My understanding of the economics profession is that it's much less tilted to the right than the public face of the economics profession, but I've never really gotten a good explanation as to why liberal economists have let their discipline be painted as an adjunct of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

I missed most of the debate, so why don't you tell me who won?

I don't think Change to Win's endorsement of Obama will matter much organizationally. By this point, Obama is so well-funded, and his ground games are so deeply planned, that CTW can only offer an assist on the margins. Moreover, the coalition doesn't really have a broad political organization of their own, and have instead been folding their efforts in with the AFL-CIO's -- and the AFL-CIO hasn't endorsed.

Much more important will be their impact among superdelegates. The more that powerful Democratic Party interest groups united behind Obama, the less likely it is that superdelegates will heed the pleas of the Clintons. A lot of superdelegates are Congressmen from districts with strong union presences, and they'll take not only Andy Stern's call, but the call from representatives of unions in their district. No matter how this election shapes out, these Congressmen will still need Labor's help. So insofar as a lot of superdelegates seem to want to go with Obama but have a sort of status quo bias that leaves them slightly afraid of crossing Clinton, the calls from established and constant allies who they also don't want to cross could be important.

John Derbyshire thinks that "to the degree that black and nonblack Americans get on with each other at all, it is largely thanks to the coalition of black citizens and nonblack liberals and interest groups represented in the national political life by the Democratic Party." So: You've got a black friend? Thank the Democrats. Good relations with your black colleagues? Send Nancy Pelosi some flowers. Appreciate your white housemates? Howard Dean deserves a kind word.

I have to say, I think Derbyshire has actually written the craziest goddamn thing I have ever read on the Corner -- which is, as far as I can tell, a blog devoted to continually upping the ante for "crazy goddamn things." The idea that black Americans and white Americans are natural enemies who have only put down their swords because they both love the Democratic Party is so serenely nutty that I'm beginning to wonder if John Derbyshire isn't just a bored imp from the 5th universe who's growing more and more distraught that none of his "colleagues" have realized he's pranking them.

Rather predictably, the McCain campaign is responding to the New York Times story on his possible affair with an all-out attack on the New York Times. If I were him I'd do the same thing. But it's worth pointing out here that the Times isn't getting any balance points from the right for having hired Bill Kristol, the world's biggest McCain-booster, onto their op-ed page a couple months ago. Indeed, Bill Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard, is part of the anti-Times chorus. When Kristol's next column comes out, I imagine he, too, will be part of the anti-Times chorus. And rightly so. He hates the Times and everything it stands for, except insofar as it stands for paying him money and publishing his articles.

Hiring a banal writer and an unimaginative ideologue like Kristol might have made some sense if his presence really would have legitimized the paper's reporting in the eyes of conservatives, but it's done nothing of the kind. Conservatives still hate The Times, and now, every Monday, the Times op-ed page features a poorly written, basically hackish column from Kristol. It's lose-lose.

Obviously, that doesn't mean that immigrants have no effect on unskilled workers, but whatever impact they do have is pretty clearly not that large. Indeed, the column that the graph comes from is a pretty good overview on the economic literature surrounding immigrants and wage pressures. I'd highlight the fact that even George Borjas, the economist most often used by restrictionists, estimates that under realistic assumptions, the drag immigrants exert on native, unskilled wages is about 4 percent. Given the universe of things screwing over the working man, immigration just ain't that large a player. And, in contrast to forces like skyrocketing CEO pay, deunionization, and the march of health costs, the "winners" here are poor immigrants rather than corporate executives and hedge fund managers.

Brad DeLong explains how Castro' policies really were massive economic failures, and Matt Yglesias draws the critical lesson for American foreign policy, which is that "for good reasons and for bad ones, the romance of thumbing one's nose at the USA has powerful and important resonance for a lot of people around the world. Under the circumstances, it rarely serves our interests to get into dramatic confrontations with leaders who are far too puny to objectively threaten our interests. After all, what significance would Castro have without his superpower adversary? US persecution of the Communist regime in Havana is really the only thing it has going for it."

A corollary to that point is that the more unpopular America is, the more political appeal opposing us will have. So the more we do to stoke anti-American sentiment, the more we strengthen the domestic political hands of the very leaders we oppose. It's a vicious circle, and one the Bush administration has been pursuing with all the zeal of a kid who just discovered ring-around-the-rosie. Ahmadinejad has been able to cover up a lot of poor economic management by wrapping Iranians in the grand struggle against America who, of course, he can blame for his country's poor economic performance. Crazier yet, Bush has been eagerly accommodating Ahmadinejad's political strategy and treating him as a real threat to America who must be stopped. It's utterly bizarre.

"Fences don't stop economic forces from working," writes Mark Thoma. "I think the only viable long-run solution to the immigration problem is to reduce the economic distance between Mexico and the U.S. Obviously, we don't want to do that by reducing our income, so we need to do what we can to help Mexico develop and raise its standard of living. In that regard, I would like to hear more from the presidential candidates on how the U.S. might help to promote business and job development in Mexico."

So far as the immigration issue goes, I'm pretty sanguine about the economic impacts -- my read of the literature suggests that there's very little in the way of demonstrated harm caused by low-income migration, and the case for more high-skills immigration is rock solid. You can't tell me that letting one of Google's founders into our country has been a net loss for our economy.

That said, America is riven with serious economic distress and competition from low wage immigrant labor almost certainly has an impact on Americans without high school degrees (the best working estimate is that it's reduced the wages of unskilled workers by about 3 percent, and had small but positive impacts higher up the skills ladder). But shutting down that competition, and its associated 3-5 percent drag, is an absurdly ineffective way of helping low income Americans. That it's so often the solution of politicians who are against universal health care, raises in the minimum wage, enhanced unemployment insurance, college affordability programs, progressive taxation, and so forth tells you all you really need to know about the cynicism of many (though certainly not all) who are presenting this as an issue of economic uplift.

That said, it's perfectly fair to desire less immigration for cultural, or even economic, reasons. But staunching the flow requires economic development in Mexico, not restrictionism in America. Mark Thoma takes a look at the various presidential candidates web sites and concludes that only Obama is really even paying lip service to that solution, so kudos to him. All of the candidates, however, should folks read Jeff Faux...

Can't say if it'll work, but this is certainly an innovative way to shake up the Israeli/Palestinian peace process.

In general, it seems dumb for health systems to restrict the ability of individuals to purchase supplementary services. If I want to get an MRIs for fun, I should be able to. But if the citizens of the United Kingdom want to elevate solidarity above access, that's rather their business. They can always vote to do something else if they change their minds. It does not, as some suggest, expose a deeper flaw within "European" health systems. Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, and so forth don't face this problem. Indeed, they've not found it terribly hard to guarantee a floor of benefits without putting a ceiling on available treatments. To some degree, this mix-up is a natural function of folks knowing more about nations that are closely associated with America (Canada, Britain) and assuming they can generalize those examples out to "Europe." But you can no more do that than you can talk about the "North American" model, which would have to somehow fit America, Canada, and Mexico. And you particularly can't do it with Britain and Canada, who have almost uniquely statist health care systems.

This is easily the best meditation I've seen on the complicated legacy of Fidel Castro.

I think Hilzoy makes an excellent point here. Forget whether Obama surrogate Kirk Watson froze up when Chris Matthews asked him to list Barack Obama's accomplishments. It's actually pretty weird that Matthews, who's supposedly the viewer's expert guide through the thickets of contemporary American politics, is pretending to ask Kirk Watson about Barack Obama's achievements. The record of the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is the sort of thing you'd expect a professional political pundit to have a fairly good handle on -- better, in fact, than an obscure Texas state senator.

Now, maybe you think Obama has a solid history of legislative achievement (Hilzoy does) or maybe you don't (slightly closer to my view, though the same goes for Hillary Clinton and John Edwards), but it's certainly the sort of thing that political professionals with large research staffs can look into and form an opinion on. Having Watson stammer and gulp his way through the segment might have made for good television, but insofar as Matthews' job is to inform his audience rather than create striking YouTube clips, he should have actually taken charge of the segment. That's sort of the problem with these shows: They don't know whether they're supposed to inform their audiences or create compelling television, and sometimes letting the latter happen means accepting that the former won't.

Meanwhile, Watson has written a charming and self-deprecating post on the whole affair.

If the New York Times has evidence that John McCain conducted an affair with a lobbyist, then they should come out and say so. To try and imply it primarily by reporting the concerns of members of McCain's staff and halfhearted denials from his allies is confusing for the reader and bad for the paper. They don't get to create plausible deniability by hiding the charges in a much longer exploration of McCain's reputation for honesty and his history with lobbyists and special interests -- the substance of the story is whether McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, and whether he then advocated for her clients improperly. Those two things either happened or they didn't, and the paper should just tell us which it is.

This is toeing a bit beyond my technical competence, but it's important nevertheless. On the Democratic side, all the of plans are built off the same basic structure. While Obama's lacks a mandate and Hillary's is softer on small business and Edwards' was better on pharmaceutical issues, the differences are much less significant than the similarities -- and the similarities aren't accidental. Rather, all the plans are incarnations of Jacob Hacker's basic vision, which has been adopted by the Economic Policy Institute and promoted to the campaign's by the Campaign for America's Future. So, in a way, you can think of Hacker's plan, as released through EPI, as the ur-Democratic plan, the basic vision that's closest to what the mainstream of the party will push in 2009 (and for the record, it includes an individual mandate).

In order to prepare for that battle, EPI and CAF asked the Lewin Group -- probably the most highly respected health care consultancy firm around -- to score the plan's costs and savings. And the results are very encouraging. The bottom line is that the Hacker structure covers just about everyone and saves huge amounts of money. At the start, bringing the changes to the system and the broad expansion of coverage to 46 million (or so) Americans means total federal spending increases by about $50 billion, but employer spending decreases by $10 billion, families save $22 billion, and states save about $20 billion. So it evens out.

But that's only on day one. Then, over time, the new system does quite a bit to cut costs through "restricting provider payment increases, negotiating deeper drug discounts, and simplified administration." The bottom line of the report is that "under these cost controls, total national health spending over the 2008 through 2017 period would be about $1.04 trillion less than under current law over that same period." That's $1.04 trillion in savings even with 47 million more Americans covered and far less economic insecurity for the rest of us. That's $1.04 trillion that can be spent on infrastructure, on schools, on homes and televisions and groceries and wars and iPhones and whatever else we decide to fund. And that's a big deal. As we health wonks like to point out, reform isn't only a matter of justice and decency, it's also a matter of economics. Lewin's conclusions -- which apply with pretty fair specificity to the plans offered by both Clinton and Obama -- only further underscore the case.

There are no end of competing hypotheses that propose to explain why we invaded Iraq. But beneath the question of why this war versus another, or versus none at all, is the issue of why the country, and the media, and the politicians, evinced so much confidence in our capabilities. Insofar as the war was a subject for dispute, the questions tended to be about justification: Was the war the right thing to do, the humane thing to do, the ethical thing to do, the lawful thing to do? Rarely did we question whether it was within our capabilities to carry out.

In part, that's because you're not really allowed to question the military. Troops always deserve our support, and support, in this context, means admiration, and even overestimation. It would have been political suicide for a prominent politician to stand up and say that our military was unfit for this task: It wasn't culturally astute enough, experienced enough with occupation or counter-insurgency, populated by enough Arab speakers. It would have been even more unthinkable to question the virtues of the soldiers themselves, admitting, as we all know, that they are a fighting force composed largely of young, aggressive kids who've never been out of this country and, through no fault of their own, are utterly unprepared for a task of this delicacy. Add in our fetishization of military hardware, and the apparent ease with which we toppled the Taliban, and you had a deeply skewed conversation which seemed singularly unable to address what should've been the threshold question: Can we do this?

Alex's book is extraordinary precisely because it doesn't try and explain the Iraq War. Throughout the book, the focus remains tightly controlled; it is nothing more than one recruit's story. And in that, it is unremarkable. His work is foiled by careerist bosses, equipment shortages, burnout, politicized workplaces, and a thousand other impediments and dysfunctions utterly familiar to anyone who's ever worked in an office environment. The problem, though, is that we're unused to thinking of the military as an office environment. The Army's commercials show paratroopers, not bean counters. We're constantly told that the soldiers need more awesome armored humvees, but we rarely hear of the damage done by desk and computer shortages. At the end of the day, though, it's a bureaucracy like any other, populated by the same mixture of talented go-getters, cowed corporate toads, quiet careerists, savvy veterans, and so on. This is the instrument we apply to war-making, not the elegant killing force of Michael Bay's private wartime erotica collection.

This is not, at the end of the day, a book about why we were wrong to enter Iraq. It is not a book about Bush's failures, or Rumsfeld's mistakes, or the Democrats' cowardice. It is not about how the insurgents outflanked us, or the pre-Petraeus strategies failed us, or Sadr outplayed us. It's a book about what it's like to go to work in a war zone. What you'll take away is that, in may ways, it's a helluva lot like going to work anywhere else. And that's a fact with huge implications for the way we think about war in this country. Bureaucracies are, by nature, blunt instruments. If you're attempting a delicate surgery in which you cut out the heart of an old political order and carefully reconstruct a new organ in its place, you need a tool up to the task. And if you don't think your corporate headquarters would fit the bill, you shouldn't so quick to assume the Department of Defense will do any better.

The story on John McCain and the employer health deduction seems to get more complicated as you dig into it. His web site says that McCain will "reform the tax code to eliminate the bias toward employer-sponsored health insurance." Since the tax code's bias towards employer-sponsored health insurance is the employer-sponsored health insurance deduction, that seemed like fair proof that he was going to eliminate the thing. Additionally, that's what his aides said he was going to do, and what conservative health commentators kept saying he was going to do. It seemed politically suicidal, but hey, that's the Straight Talk Express for ya.

But a couple weeks after releasing his plan, McCain apparently "clarified" his remarks, which is to say he went back on its central element. Now, he was going to eliminate bias by making employees pay the taxes of their employers -- "employees who have employer-provided health insurance would be taxed on the portion of their coverage that their employer pays." They'll get tax credits to help offset these new taxes -- and make no mistake, this, even more so than closing the employer deductions, is a brand new tax that we've never seen before -- but wonks have looked into that strategy, and the models show that it will still amount to a nice little tax increase. Also, it's stupidly complicated, and forces McCain to give individuals new taxes and tax credits when he could accomplish the same thing by ending employer deductability. Now, I have no problem with a tax increase. But someone should ask McCain why he's doing so much lying, clarifying, and backtracking.

About a week ago, I said that the Clinton campaign had run a pretty good race -- their main mistakes were running against Barack Obama, and voting for the war in 2003. Thinking more about it, that judgment was a bit too simplistic. Early on, they ran well. The initial inevitability strategy was smartly carried out, and their fundraising operation truly was remarkable. But as they've come under increased pressure from Obama, they've started to fall apart, and that's had much broader relevance for the arguments underlying Clinton's candidacy. All of this is the subject of my column on last night's results. An excerpt:

Before this campaign, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama had been tested in a tough electoral contest. Obama's path to the Senate largely required him to step over the bodies of establishment candidates who self-destructed in scandal. Clinton's 2000 victory over Rick Lazio, and her 2006 triumph over the forgettable John Spencer, demonstrated little about her readiness for combat. Thus, unlike John Kerry in 2004, we've not heard much about them as "closers" nor heard tell of their stunning triumphs in tough campaigns (it's easy to forget how much of the Kerry myth was built around his upset victory of William Weld in Massachusetts). Instead, there's been a lot of meta-campaigning—campaigns about what good campaigns they would run.[...]

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination. Obama's campaign, in Iowa, South Carolina, and elsewhere, made good on their promises to excite new voters. Additionally, the Obama campaign ran a disciplined, forward-looking operation. It methodically organized—and, as a result, dominated—the caucus states; it predicted early on that the contest would drag beyond February 5 and were thus better prepared in the recent primaries; and the campaign ran a tight ship with little dissension, few gaffes, and no damaging leaks.

Clinton's campaign has done exactly the opposite. Aside from an important win in New Hampshire, she has not overperformed in any state. Tactically, her strategists have made a series of massive errors: They were so stung by their loss in Iowa that they largely turned away from caucuses, a disastrous mistake as the race became more dependent on delegates; they thought the election would be over early on and were unprepared to go past February 5, which is why her organizing in post-Super Tuesday states has been so poor; they appear, only now, to be thinking through the implications of Texas's hybrid primary/caucus system—and Texas is must-win. No one thought to dispatch an intern to ask the state's Democratic Party how March 5 would work? How savvy of a campaign operation could this be?

This isn't so much a paradox so much as an incorrect expectation, but still:

This is what economists call "the commuting paradox." Most people travel long distances with the idea that they'll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school. They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters. A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. People usually overestimate the value of the things they'll obtain by commuting -- more money, more material goods, more prestige -- and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health. "Commuting is a stress that doesn't pay off," says Stutzer.

And the Clinton campaign's desperation gets more unseemly by the day. On their new web site meant to convince folks that Benjamin Franklin will cry if they convention doesn't ignore the expressed will of the Democratic primary voters and select Hillary Clinton, they offer "five facts about Democratic delegates." Some actually are facts, like the one noting that pledged delegates and superdelegates each count for one vote. And then we get, "FACT: Florida and Michigan should count, both in the interest of fundamental fairness and honoring the spirit of the Democrats' 50-state strategy." It's almost as if they thought putting it after two real facts, and after the word "FACT," would be like a Jedi mind trick. "There are not the fake delegates you're looking for," says Obi Penn Ickes.

But it's not a fact. It's an opinion, and a wrong one at that. Indeed, you want a fact? "Clinton's own senior adviser, Harold Ickes, voted as a member of the DNC committee to not recognize these two state delegations because they violated the rules of the primary scheduling process. Now as a Clinton campaign representative he's making the case that they should count." There's your fact: Hillary Clinton's representatives helped make the very rules Hillary Clinton is now breaking.

Even more insulting is what comes beneath their "FACT" -- lies, like the campaign's contention that though Hillary Clinton was literally the only candidate on the ballot in Michigan, "she had no intrinsic advantage over her opponents other than the will of the voters." Right, and I had no intrinsic advantage finishing first out of 6 billion in the Ezra Kleinathon, even though I was the only individual on earth who competed.

What's really a pity about all this is that Hillary Clinton's campaign is by no means dead. They may still win. But it's unlikely they're going to win because of these shenanigans. Instead, she'll have to rack up some impressive victories in the next few primaries, or see Obama stumble and the superdelegates decide him a bad bet. Either scenario could result in a Clinton victory. But along the way, gambits like this one will have soured many decent people on Clinton's campaign, and rendered her win an ugly and divisive one. She's cheapening her own prize here, and for no good reason.

Alex Steffen has written a great essay on the need to think about the impacts of driving far beyond the simple fact of tailpipe exhaust. I was particularly struck by this:

A recent major study, Growing Cooler, makes the point clearly: if 60 percent of new developments were even modestly more compact, we'd emit 85 million fewer metric tons of tailpipe CO2 each year by 2030 -- as much as would be saved by raising the national mileage standards to 32 mpg.[...]

the amount of density the study's authors call for is extremely modest. They encourage building new projects at a density of 13 homes per acre, raising the average national density from 7.6 units per acre to 9 an acre.

To give you a sense of how gentle a goal that is, consider this: the turn-of-the-century Garden City suburbs, with their generous lawns, winding streets and tree-lined boulevards averaged 12 units an acre. New Urbanist suburbs, not particularly dense, weigh in at 15-30 units per acre. Traditional town house blocks have as many as 36 homes per acre. Parts of Manhattan, I've read, can reach 160 units per acre, but even without crowding together high-rises, many extremely livable parts of Vancouver have 40 homes per acre.

There's often a tendency to assume that the status quo is the most "natural" way for things to be, and that rejiggering the relevant subsidies is somehow more artificial and presumptuous. But the current system was built atop a massive structure of subsidies and tax breaks. The mortgage tax deduction advantaged bigger homes; funding schools through inequitable property taxes encouraged families to move out of cities where the property taxes were low and into richer suburbs where the schools would be wealthy; putting billions into costly and little-used roads made far-flung developments appear cheap to those who only saw the finished product; underfunding public transportation heavily influenced development patterns, and so on and so forth. And that doesn't even get into the racial unrest, social dysfunction, and crime levels that helped drive white flight -- and thus sprawl -- in the 60s and 70s. Indeed, there's nothing natural about our current settlement patterns, and no reason preserving them should be seen as a nod to expressed preference rather than, as it actually is, a status quo bias in favor of the current subsidies and their associated winners. Nobody's saying we should make suburbs illegal. But we don't have to abide by public policy that makes them look far cheaper and more economical than they are.

(Imague used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Goopil.)

So McCain is now promising "no new taxes." But the centerpiece of the health care plan he's pushing is apparently an end to the employer health care deduction, which would suddenly transform about $1 trillion in currently untaxed wages into...taxed wages. So there's all this money that employers currently don't pay taxes on, and under McCain's plan, they're going to pay taxes on it. Taxes they didn't have to pay before. Can someone explain to me how this isn't a new tax?

XKCD aptly describes my life:

To the girlfriends, family members, and assorted friends who've been brushed off with that excuse, I hope you realize that, in a larger sense, I was doing it for you. Letting wrongness persist on the internet harms us all.

I'll second Kevin on McCain's dearth of new ideas. Listening to his victory speech tonight, you'd have thought he was running against the Soviet Union. To some degree, that's an ideological necessity: His worldview doesn't work without a "transcendent challenge of our times." Some politicians ask us to build, McCain demands that we protect, retrench, and sacrifice. Which is why he always sounds so out-of-date. The Iraq War, at this point, doesn't lend itself to sacrifice, at least not unless he wants to up the surge to 400,000 and institute a draft. But such calls for sacrifice are the foundation of the McCain worldview, so the whole thing just comes out sounding odd. With McCain, it's always midnight in America, and did you just hear a weird noise downstairs?

Obama just cut in on Clinton's speech. On the one hand, I sympathize with the intent. She wasn't giving a concession tonight -- she lost, but it didn't count, so no concession needed -- but instead using the tradition of the concession speech to offer a nationally televised "contrast" speech, in which she said things like "only one of us is ready on day one to be commander in chief, ready to manage our economy, and ready to defeat the Republicans. Only one of us has spent 35 years being a doer, a fighter and a champion for those who need a voice." Obama, realizing he owned the airwaves, started right over her. And why not? Why give her airtime to bash him? On the other hand, it could look churlish if the media spends a lot of time reporting on the slight. And on the third hand -- we've got lots of hands, we're liberals -- that's some hardball politics from Obama. In any case: Drama!

Update: Ben Smith says it was Clinton who changed her speech time to preempt Obama. That didn't work very well.

I've never seen anything creepier than the promotional videos on the Cadbury site showing their Cream Eggs meticulously planning out, and committing, suicide, while moaning "gooooo."

File this one under ideas I wish I'd had first. Barron Young Smith called up Jeff Frieden, a monetary expert at Harvard, and asked what would happen if we actually switched back to the Gold Standard. The answers were not encouraging. Recessions would be deeper and longer, responsibility for smoothing out the economy would shift from the Fed to the Congress, our exports would become pricier and more jobs would flee overseas, and banks would get a massive subsidy as they profit from the sort of deflationary tendencies te gold standard enourages. All in all, a stupid idea.

Does skin tone (within conventionally defined racial groups) have an effect on political opinions? Surprisingly, the answer may be no...

Read Juan Cole on the Pakistani elections and the defeat of Musharraf's party. "Bottom line," writes Cole, "the Pakistani public has demonstrated a dislike of extremism, including religious extremism, awarding a plurality of seats in the national legislature to secular parties and the rest to right-of-center parties, but roundly rejecting the fundamentalists...[Musharraf] is in for a bumpy ride and it would be much better for everyone if he would recognize the writing on the wall and step down."

Dean Baker writes:

Robert Pear has written many good pieces on health care policy at the NYT over the years, but he has a disturbing tendency to attribute grand ideological motives to politicians when their behavior can just as easily be explained by crass political calculations. He did this yet again when he described a proposal by President Bush for a series of cuts in the Medicare program as "advancing the Republican vision of a larger private role in the health care system."

Do we really think that there is a group of Republican political philosophers (presumably chaired by President Bush) that contemplates the ideal health care system? Perhaps something like that exists, but it seems at least as plausible that Republican elected officials know that they have gotten lots of campaign contributions in recent years from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and that they are expected to work for their money, hence the interest in expanding the private sector's role in Medicare.

This time, an all social democrat extravaganza with my friend Chris Hayes. We spent much of the episode talking about the crosscurrents of identity in this election -- and not just the racial and gendered kind. We also go into criticisms of health care mandates from the left, the unbearable closeness of policy solutions among the Democrats, and superdelegates. It's fun for the whole family!

Update: And if you don't want to watch the whole thing, this is a pretty solid summary of what Chris and I were talking about.

Behold Huckalerts.

Sorry, but Brad is precisely wrong on this. There were Congressmen in 1994 who came together to try and fashion a compromise after the Clinton health care bill seemed a clear failure. But Jim Cooper was not among their number. Rather, he was a uniquely pernicious actor who worked to undermine the plan both before, and directly after, its introduction. As we learn from this terrific timeline of the battle, in June of 1993, about three months before the Clinton plan came out, Cooper met with Clinton to "explore their differences over health care." Those differences were "universal coverage." the "employer mandate," and Cooper's fear that "the administration was being pushed to the left by liberals in the House."

So let's be clear on where Cooper starts: He was against universal coverage. He was a conservative Democrat who wanted a minimalist, incremental approach to health care that wouldn't offend his corporate constituencies. He thought the Clinton plan was too liberal, even as it began as a compromise between liberal visions of single payer and conservative dreams of market competition. Then, on October 6, 1993, two weeks after the Clinton bill is released, Cooper reintroduces his own plan, creating, from the outset, a weak, moderate "alternative" for business, centrists, and other opponents of reform to rally around. "Privately," we learn, "Cooper is convinced the White House will have to bend and accept his position."

Cooper was, from the beginning, an enemy of reform, not a constructive participant seeking compromise. He did not survey the assembled bills and try and forge a deal. Rather, he did everything he could to undermine the Clinton plan, and played a key role in destroying its chances by shattering the Democratic legislative strategy ("Thwarted on the Republican side of the aisle, Dingell turns back to his Democrats -- and once again finds Jim Cooper standing in his way.") and peeling off Blue Dogs and business. Without even the pretense of party unity, there was never the underlying foundation to force negotiations among the key players -- and so, contrary to Brad's claims, Cooper should be remembered not for trying to cut a deal, but for undermining the conditions and legislation that would've allowed a deal to have been cut. He was out for his campaign contributors and, as a read of The System makes clear, his own glory. He wanted to be the dealmaker of health care. He wanted it so bad that he killed the damn thing.

And you, my dear reader, may wonder why we're talking about this obscure Congressmen who's not been relevant since the early-90s. Well, it's because Obama is using him as a surrogate on health care.

Hoo boy.

Via Chris Hayes.

The Clinton campaign's strategy for winning the primary is getting less and less democratic. First they were going to break the agreed-upon rules and seat the Michigan and Florida delegations -- neither of whom got to vote in a contested primary -- rather than run actual elections in those states. Then they were arguing that we should really only count states with primaries, or maybe only big states with primaries. Then the hope was that superdelegates would ignore the voters and make a counter-majoritarian decision, throwing the election to Clinton. Now we're getting this weird story in which the Clinton campaign is suggesting they might go after pledged delegates -- that is to say, the delegates who represent the actual vote totals. It's an odd loophole of the convention system that these delegates aren't really bound by the voters they're supposed to represent. It is assumed that they will vote for the candidate the voters pledged them to, but there's no law around it.

Now, it's not really likely that the Clinton campaign can get any of these voters to switch. And maybe Simon is just making a big deal out of idle musings from a "senior Clinton official." But, given their past gambits, this latest trial balloon isn't exactly out of place. It's a shame, as I happen to really like Clinton, and I love her domestic policy shop. But her campaign should -- at least publicly -- evince a bit more concern for the role of the voters in this nominating process.

Update: Clinton campaign spokesperson Phil Singer says, "We have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama. It's now time for the Obama campaign to be clear about their intentions." Putting aside that the Obama campaign is ahead in delegates and has not suggested any intentions to poach, I'd really like to know who the "senior Clinton official" talking to Simon is. And more to the point, why they're talking to Simon and offering such explosive musings. One odd subplot of this campaign is that despite the Clinton camp's reputation for discipline, they've got a lot more anonymous officials (not to mention surrogates) wandering off the reservation. Also, read this bit of delegate speculation from Chris Bowers.

Megan McArdle:

McCain is not a classical liberal; he's the product of an intensely hierarchical honor culture that he seems to think would substantially improve the rest of us if we adopted more of its values. I have no shortage of respect for the military, and their willingness to place their own lives between the rest of us and war's desolation. But that doesn't mean I think America would be a better place if we had a more martial state. His record bespeaks little respect for spontaneous order and individual freedom. What free-market instincts he evinces seem to have come as part of the conservative ideas combo-pack he bought because it was cheaper than buying the parts individually--all he really wanted was the national greatness and the moderately conservative social structure.

As was entirely inevitable, David Brooks is beginning to turn on Obama in favor of McCain. His article, however, points out a worrying fault line in the Obama campaign, which is that "unity" simply isn't that robust a foundation for his appeal. I don't think Brooks is quite right to associate unity with senseless bipartisanship of the type we saw among the "Gang of 14," but there's no doubt that the litany Brooks offers up will undercut Obama's claims to post-partisanship, particularly against McCain. That's why it's good that Obama is moving towards a more concrete appeal centered around McCain's plan for a 10,000 year occupation of Iraq, a continuation of Bush's plutocratic neoconomics, and all the rest. Hillary is considered a divisive figure, but McCain isn't, so you're not going to get very far against him by arguing that you're the sole force capable of bringing the country together. But while Obama has gone abstract against Hillary because they largely agree on matters of substance, McCain is the champion for all manner of unpopular and discredited policies, and one can make a very sharp, and very concrete, argument against the actual vision he has for the country.

It wasn't the embargo, nor the cessation of diplomatic relations. It wasn't the travel ban, nor the plots to give him exploding cigars. Rather, it looks like old age is what did Fidel Castro in. Our strategy of isolating him and his countrymen was worthless. It merely impoverished his people and, many believe, strengthened his regime, as if he couldn't deliver all of the economic benefits his citizens might want, at least he could involve them in a grand struggle against a cruel superpower. Narrative may not keep you warm at night, but it gives you something to think about while you wait for morning. And that should give us something to think about as we consider similarly misguided strategies against Iran and other countries we're feeling too churlish to talk out our differences with.

In any case, Castro's retirement at least gives us the rhetorical cover to end the senseless embargo and travel ban that we've had on Cuba for so long. Steve Clemons has the state of play on that.

This may only excite me, but the Tax Policy Center just brought out a pretty, well, I want to use the world "cool' here, but that may not be quite right. In any case, they just brought out an online briefing book which is really clearly done. Worth a browse.

It's not exactly shocking that none of John McCain's advisers agree on economics, as John McCain rarely agrees with John McCain on economics. Try asking him how he feels about tax cuts sometime, or exactly which entitlements need to be cut. McCain's new "no taxes" pledge has made some liberals I know nervous, but John McCain's popularity came during his "some new taxes, and definitely no more tax cuts" stance of 2000-2003. Indeed, the only reason his anti-taxes pledge is making news is that he's refused to take it for so many years, the same years in which his favorability ratings skyrocketed. So color me unimpressed.

Actually, color me hopeful. McCain is listening to a guy named Peter Peterson who mainly seems interested in slashing entitlement spending. Kevin Hassett is one of the guys who wrote Dow 36,000 a year or two before the stock market crashed. McCain's other advisers have similarly unpopular/wacky views. The fact that he's picked a bunch of them who have a wide and conflicting array of wacky and unpopular views only makes this better for the Democrat.

XKCD explains gender stereotypes:

Via Paul Krugman comes this chart showing the correlation between social spending and poverty reduction in industrialized nations. Contrary to some conservative claims, it turns out there actually is such a relationship. Shocking, I know:

There may be some level at which poverty is intractable, but we're nowhere near it. Now, it's fair for a society to decide that it doesn't want to spend much money trying to ease impoverishment, but we should be honest about that choice. Instead, there's a lot of blather about how we "can't" do anything. But that silly. There's lots we can do. It just costs money.

Like Paul Krugman, I think poverty is bad. And also presumably like Paul Krugman, I think you should read his op-ed on the subject today. Then I think you should compare it to Bill Kristol's witless, ahistorical muddle about how Republicans are like Rudyard Kipling and have the seriousness which only comes from being a ruling power, or something. The difference in intellectual quality, to say nothing of empirical grounding, between the two columns is startling.

I'm not enough of an economic history expert to say whether David Brooks is right to argue that, unlike Europe, "American leaders expanded education and created the highest quality work force on the planet. That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century." That's a very clean, compelling story that situates American economic dominance as the outcome of a bloodless meritocratic competition among rival nations, but I seem to remember my 20th Century history saying a lot more about two massive World Wars that rocked Europe, destroying their productive capacity and continental infrastructure, and requiring a fair amount of rebuilding. America, by contrast, was protected by an ocean, and benefited from a last man standing effect. That's not to say educational attainment wasn't important, but attempts to paint it as the only relevant factor in economic attainment tend to be wildly overblown, and contradicted by the evidence. It's a nice story to tell, because saying that all our economy needs is more education is an aspirational tale that neatly sidesteps more fundamental concerns of dsitribution and dignity, but it isn't, so far as the evidence goes, terribly true.

"Either way," asks Peter Suderman, "would a largely or fully public health care system, like Ezra wants, solve the problem of lack of patient knowledge?"

Absolutely not. Libertarians have a tendency to simply extrapolate their opinions out, and assume that liberals hold the same views, only with more state thrown in. This is why many act as if liberals believe the expansion of the state to be an intrinsic good, just as libertarians believe its contraction to be an end in itself. And it's what Peter is doing here. The liberal vision on health care, however, is not the libertarian's dream of a perfect market, checked by individual consumer preferences, but paid for by the government. Most liberals think that implausible. In the aggregate, the individual consumer will never have enough information or enough expertise to exert effective control over the medical industry. People don't comparison shop when they have a heart attack, they don't know how to effectively contrast chemotherapy providers when their doctor tells them they need to start treatment now. Confronting illness -- much less physical trauma -- is not like buying a television. You can't walk away from the deal, and you're in a terrific state of fear and urgency before you ever speak to a salesman.

Which is why liberal solutions don't try and force the individual into a governing role he or she is not equipped to assume. That's not to say we don't want to give them the maximum possible information and price transparency, but we don't believe that to be a sufficient answer to the health care crisis. An actual solution will require reforms far above the level of the individual. The incentives of providers will have to be reworked to prize wellness over profits, or at least to align profits with wellness, rather than simply with treatments. The government is going to have to step in with a lot of money for the sort of comparative effectiveness research the private sector has been stubbornly unwilling to carry out on any large scale. Price signals are going to have to work much better, and that too will probably require regulation, like through some form of smart cost sharing. And there's much, much more. But patient knowledge, while nice, isn't anything near sufficient. Our relationshio with doctors is not like our relationship with the saleswoman at Best Buy. Our need for coronary bypass surgery is not like our desire for a Viking stove top. You will never create a health care marketplace in which consumers have enough power because health care is a unique marketplace that patients enter when they feel -- and often are -- utterly powerless. Hell, if Susan Sontag couldn't retain her rationality, what hope do the rest of us have?

Obama made exactly the right move today and decided to forgo public financing in the general election and instead rely on the small donor funding model he's successfully constructed in the primary. In response, the Clinton campaign put out this press release:

Wolfson issued the following statement in response to Sen. Obama’s decision to break a pledge he made regarding public financing in the general election:

“Senator Obama says words matter. They do.

“Last year, Senator Obama pledged to take public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee agreed to do so as well.

“Unfortunately, he broke that pledge this week. It now appears that Senator Obama made a promise to the American people that he is not keeping. That’s wrong.

“That’s not change you can believe in.”

Meanwhile, the current public financing system has been dead for some time, putting whichever candidate abides by it at a severe funding disadvantage. It's a virtuous handicap. Killing it is probably a service, particularly when, like Obama, you have something other than corporate money to put forward as an alternative. Indeed, Obama's campaign points the way towards a public financing model along the lines proposed by Mark Schmitt -- a system where you advantage small donors, offering federal matching to contributions under $250, or maybe $500. If you could make a broad-based, small donor strategy as effective as a corporate, big-money strategy, you'd do a lot to bring equilibrium to the forces influencing elections. Politicians, after all, would far prefer funders who don't force them to vote like cretins. It's just that, till now, such strategies haven't really made sense. Obama, through a combination of hiis star power and the internet, has been able to make this approach viable by his lonesome, without federal help. But most politicians won't have his unique advantages, so putting in place structures that help small donors participate in a meaningful way and help politicians who rely on them would make a lot of sense. It would be change you could believe in, to steal a line.

So long as I'm talking about Democratic history today, I was watching the PBS documentary on Sargent Shriver and was struck by a particular historical point they made. It's often said that Johnson's embrace of the Civil Rights movement lost the Democrats the South for a generation. Less frequently mentioned is that it also gave Johnson, and Kennedy, his office.

Shortly before the 1960 election, Martin Luther King Jr. was sentenced to four months hard labor in a Georgia prison -- the result of breaking parole on a traffic violation. Many figured this was a death sentence, that he'd be killed within the prison's walls. Sargent Shriver convinced Kennedy -- then locked in a tight campaign against Nixon -- to call Coretta Scott King an express his anxiety over her husband's fate. The call made the front page of the next day's New York Times, and set off a firestorm. Bobby Kennedy, in particular, was furious at Shriver, who he feared had just lost them the election. But in for a penny, in for a pound, and Bobby then went to work on the sentencing judge, eventually securing King's release.

This was a huge deal in the (usually Republican) African-American community, which switched registration and overwhelmingly voted for Kennedy, tipping five Northern states in a grindingly close election. Without that early alliance with the civil rights movement, you probably have no Kennedy, and without Kennedy, no Johnson, and without Johnson, no Great Society, no Medicare, no Civil Rights Act, no modern Democratic Party. So, putting aside issues of justice, it's not even clear that the Democratic Party's electoral fortunes would have been better off had they hid from civil rights.

This, from Dayo Olapade, seems a useful point:

For those questioning Barack Obama's appeal to women voters, or his prioritization of "women's issues," from health to abuse to choice, I think it's wise to note that despite the dreams from his father, Obama's domestic existence has been dominated by females since birth--in every direction. A single mother raised him, and he, in turn is raising two young girls. Horizontally, of course there is Michelle (whose role as a 'strong woman' compass is getting quite the airing this week) and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a teacher in Hawaii.

Rick Perlstein on Nixon and McGovern:

The warnings turned out to be of limited portent; politicians who called for Iraq withdrawal in 2004 now look more like political prophets than harbingers of landslide defeats. But the M-word short-circuits thought. McGovern lost because he was an isolationist? If you had said that in 1972, people might have looked at you funny. Whatever his preference for deep cuts in the defense budget, Republican surrogates who hauled out the isolationist charge were labeled "silly" by no less an honest broker than the New York Times’ Scotty Reston. Over the following six years–according to my ProQuest search–the words "McGovern" and some variant of "isolation" were mentioned in the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune a mere six times. If McGovern campaigned as an "isolationist," then Richard Nixon–whose main appeal was that he could better end the war, whose "Nixon doctrine" was a promise to the American people not to send troops to more foreign countries, and who literally blamed America’s financial woes on "international money speculators"–campaigned as one, too, only more effectively.

Even so, you have this idea floating about that running against war -- as Nixon also did that year, remember "peace with honor?" -- is somehow an electoral anathema. The opposite would seem to be true. Moreover, for reasons a bit beyond my understanding, the Iraq War hasn't been judged an ideological failing, and the historic defeat Republicans endured in 2006 is being seen largely as an unexpected phenomena, rather than the obvious consequence of an ideology that led them to advocate for a useless and doomed conflict. It's seen, somehow, as a bad event, rather than a bad idea. So few seem to be taking broader political lessons from the issue. But though the reaction against Iraq came a few years after the war had begun, it's been far more direct, and far more ferocious, than anything the Democrats suffered as a clear result of (eventually) opposing Vietnam.

I spent some of the morning running almost random searches to try and remember the name of my doctor. Eventually, I got him. And a bunch of reviews of him. Most of the reviews, to be sure, were good. The consensus appears to be that he's sort of mean to you, but quite thorough. But that's all the reviewers were able to evaluate: Was he courteous? And did he do lots of stuff?

Those are not particularly useful metrics on which to evaluate doctor quality. Etiquette is important, but neither here nor there to diagnosing appendicitis. And "doing stuff" can actually be bad, and needlessly costly. The question is whether the doctor is doing the right stuff. But patients simply don't have the requisite tools to evaluate that question. They can't review doctors like they can review books, or movies, because impressions of the experience aren't terribly relevant, or insofar as they are relevant, they're a second-order concern. There have been some efforts to get insurers to rate doctors, but their incentive, of course, is to rate doctors highly when they're being stingy, and helping the insurer make profits. There are a host of other ideas for rating doctors floating around, but most of them are bedeviled by similar problems. And that's why I'm fairly pessimistic about attempts to heal our medical system by giving the consumer information and power. The doctor-patient relationship is necessarily private, so you're not going to have third-party observers (nor should you), and it's founded on a massive information asymmetry (otherwise, the patient wouldn't be there), neither of which lend themselves to an accurate and reliable consumer information system.

Howard Gleckman of Brookings Tax Policy Center has 7 questions for Barack Obama, all of them good ones. My favorites are:

• When House Ways & Means Committee Charlie Rangel proposed a major reform of the tax code back in October, you said you hadn't a chance to read it. I know you've been busy, but it has been four months. So, what do you think?

• Your tax agenda is filled with, may I say, narrow (Bill) Clintonesque tax cuts for various interest groups. That doesn’t sound like much of a "change" agenda. What is your transformative tax policy?

• You say you'd push for bipartisan legislation. But your tax plan would provide new refundable tax credits to encourage low income people to buy a house, care for their children, save for college, and even work. You have some new small business breaks, but you'd raise taxes on oil and gas producers, multinational business, and repeal the Bush tax cuts for high-income individuals. What makes you think any Republican would vote for that?

• You have said nothing about the Alternative Minimum Tax, a trillion dollar problem over the next decade. What would you do about it?

• How will you control the spiraling costs of Medicare and Medicaid? Your health plan would actually expand Medicaid. Except for cutting subsidies to managed care plans, you have no proposal to control Medicare spending. Health IT, and disease and chronic care management may help slow the growth of overall medical costs, but no one believes they will solve the problem.

• You promise to repeal the alternative minimum tax. That alone would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. You also want to cut corporate taxes. How would you pay for it all?• You want to cut the size of government, but how? Eliminating earmarks is nice, but trashing every one would save only about $18 billion a year. The latest Bush budget would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over five years, even before we fully pay for the Iraq war and an AMT fix. Exactly what other programs would you eliminate?

• What would you do about entitlement spending? You say you support bipartisan reform of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but what would it look like?

• You vow to reduce health care spending through better use of disease management and information technology and by giving consumers more control over their care. But let's talk straight: Do we need to ration care to truly manage costs? If so, who will do it?

• You say we could be in Iraq for 100 years and you support a major missile defense system, as well as an expanded military. How would you finance these priorities, which are likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars?

Ah, primary season...

F*ck off, you Clinton hating, c*cksucking, IGNORANT moron!!!!!! Why don't you look at the vacuum behind Obama's EMPTY slogans, and expose the fact that he has done NOTHING to suggest he can achieve even 1% of his bullshit slogans in the REAL world!!!!! This nation is on KoolAid...and may wake up TOO LATE to realize that a bland cartoon has been elected under empty slogans...thanks to morons like you who have joined this mass-delusion. F&ck off!!!!!!!!!!!!

Matt Duss is a national treasure. Consider this an open links thread.

Matt Yglesias, Sam Rosenfeld, Ann Friedman, Spencer Ackerman, Kriston Capps, Kay Steiger, and I discuss the last few episodes of television's greatest show...

I was at a panel on blogs and the media today and ended up in the argument over whether we're going to lose our awesome, objective, truth-telling media. Like a good blogger/pundit type, I argued that we don't really have an awesome, objective, truth-telling media, and that the accumulation of protocols and procedures meant to protect reporters from criticism actually makes it hard to figure out what's going on in a lot of news stories. Along those lines, I've read a bunch of fairly good news stories on superdelegates, but this op-ed on superdelegates and their historical role is much clearer on the subject than anything I've read in the news section. That's not because reporters are bad writers or bad people, but there's just a lot of useless stuff in news stories that hide the relevant information.

Particularly useful was the tidbit that "superdelegates do not unite to block the candidate with the strongest support from voters; they have always cast a majority of their votes for the candidate who won a majority or plurality of votes in the primaries." That seems important, and given that everyone seems to agree that Clinton is going to end this with fewer delegates, I'd think the media would make more of a deal out of the weirdly ahistorical nature of a superdelegate primary.

I like Matt's post on the media's odd way of covering policy as if it were a matter of aesthetics. To be sure, Obama did offer a policy speech yesterday which was directly aimed at countering criticisms that he's a lightweight who only talks about his own movement. Obama, because he compulsively talks about the way in which he's going to talk about things, said this pretty explicitly. "Mr. Obama seemed to allude to the criticism of his rivals who suggest that he excels at rhetoric, but falls short on details, by saying at the outset of his remarks that he was going to 'take it down a notch' by giving a speech that he said would be 'a little more detailed, a little longer, with not as many applause lines.'" Message: I'm wonky.

But even so, Obama's speech actually had a lot of policy in it! And presumably, the way to figure out if he was talking about policy was not to evaluate whether his speech was longer and more boring than his other speeches, but to examine the actual statements he offered and ask some experts how the proffered solutions might fare. A reporter would, of course, tell you that this was a campaign event, and policy mentioned in campaigns doesn't much matter, it's all done for positioning. But that's a chicken and the egg problem. If reporters covered policy speeches as if they were really important and then didn't forget about them when the candidate entered office, suddenly they'd become really important. If six months after Obama took the White House the New York Times ran an A1 story about how Obama was refusing to push this policy idea his campaign offered up, he'd push the policy idea. And if holding politicians to their policy promises became a predictable thing the media did, then politicians wouldn't make so many hollow promises as they wouldn't want the bad coverage later. But if the media treats policy ideas offered during the campaign as mere positioning and evaluates the policy based on whether the positioning is effective, then the politician will treat policy during the campaign as positioning and forget about it once the positioning is judged sufficient.

So far as I can tell, the Republican plan for health care tends to be calling Democratic ideas "socialized medicine." But a new poll out of the Harvard School of Public Health suggests that may be an increasingly ineffective strategy. The researchers conducted a survey asking folks if they knew the term (if they had no idea what "socialized medicine was, they weren't included in follow-up questions) and then asking them some questions about it. The results aren't encouraging for the Rudy Giulianis of the world. First they asked whether socialized medicine would be better or worse than what we have now:

So, a plurality think we'd be better off with socialized medicine. Then, the researchers dug in, offering up some statements about socialized medicine and asking if that's what the respondent thought it was. In general, folks believed it to mean the government guarantees, and pays for, health insurance. They didn't think it meant your doctor lost control:

Then, to cap it off, the researchers gave a couple examples of systems and asked if they were socialized or not. Most folks thought Medicare is socialized medicine (it isn't). Some new that the Veteran's Health Administration is. And a pretty fair percentage thought private HMOs qualified:

All in all it's pretty encouraging stuff for those of us who'd like to see an actual discussion on the issue, and pretty idscouraging for those hoping a simple two word smear could shut the topic down.

Apparently the kids today are...choking each other. And doing it to get high. In my day, we just smoked a joint.

One of the oddities of the primary season in that the Democratic and Republican contests take place under different sets of rules. In general, the Democratic contests award delegates proportionately -- the number of delegates you win is roughly equal to the number of votes you receive, so long as you clear a minimum threshold (15 percent, generally). The Republicans, by contrast, tend to use winner-take-all rules. So the fine folks at the Monkey Cage decided to look into what would happen if you switched the rules. First, check out the Democrats:

Because I don't know how to control the range Excel places on the Y axis, the results look a bit more dramatic than they really are. The takeaway here is that Republican winner-take-all rules would make the contest a bit more competitive, giving Clinton round 70 more delegates, and taking 30-some from Obama. But check out the Republicans:

Among them, the difference is huge. Shift to proportional, Democratic rules and McCain's insurmountable lead snaps back to a dead heat with Romney. It's only under the winner-take-all system that his strategy of eschewing field organizing and eking out victories suffices.

Meanwhile, it's a bit odd that, for both parties, switching to the other side's rules would make the race more, rather than less, competitive.

I don't really know if you can figure out the rest of this campaign through multivariate regressions, but Poblano is giving it a shot.

For the record, I agree with Isaac Chotiner that the Clinton team has run a pretty good campaign. etter, indeed, than what I thought they'd run. It may or may not prove to be enough, and looking back, there will surely be identifiable mistakes and botched opportunities. But, in general, I think Clinton's problems were, on the one hand, voting for the Iraq War, and on the other, running against a staggeringly talented insurgent who combined the traditional "wine track" strengths with overwhelming support among African-Americans and huge media power. Neither of those were really messaging or fundraising problems as such.

Insofar as her campaign made mistakes, it was in existing. One of the recurrent themes in my experience of the primary is that I like Hillary Clinton (and, for that matter, her policy shop) a lot better than I like the "Hillary Clinton campaign" (the press shop, the consultants, the blind quotes, etc) and "the Hillary Clinton campaign as explained by a petulant Bill Clinton." During periods when I see more of Hillary Clinton and less of her campaign, I'm more favorably disposed. During periods when I see less of Hillary Clinton and more of her campaign, I'm less favorably disposed.

John Lewis's announcement that he's going to switch his support, as a superdelegate, to Barack Obama, is a huge deal for a couple of reasons. The first is simply symbolic. Lewis is one of the greatest civil rights heroes still living. His defection from Clinton to Obama carries tremendous narrative weight. More important than that, however, is that Lewis's high profile defection provides cover to all who may come after him. By publicly stating that his responsibilities as a superdelegate outweigh the commitments implied by his earlier support of Clinton, and, as such, he will be voting with his district rather than with his endorsement, he eases the path for those who would do the same.

And there look to be many. There's been a very odd argument raging in recent weeks as the Clinton campaign upheld that superdelegates should vote for "who they think would be the strongest candidate for the party," not who their constituents favored. So they've been sending out e-mails linking to instants like this one, where Axelrod said superdelegates are "supposed to exercise their judgment as to what would be best for the party." At face value, it's not obvious that Clinton is the party's stronger candidate, and so the appeal made fairly little sense. But what the campaign was actually trying to do was codify the principle that superdelegates weren't morally obligated to follow their districts and states, and should be expected to make autonomous choices, which could then be influenced. Foreseeing that they would end behind in delegates, they wanted to be able to campaign for superdelegates, rather than watch them deliver an automatic endorsement of the voters' choice.

Lewis, however, is going against them on both levels: He's saying, on the one hand, that he will be bound by his district. And he's saying, on the other, that Obama's campaign now has the "sense of movement and sense of spirit," making it the "stronger" choice as well. That's very dangerous of Clinton: It attacks both her abstract argument about electoral strength and her technical argument about the proper behavior of superdelegates. Indeed, predicting anything before Ohio and Texas would be foolish, but if Clinton's superdelegate support collapses, it will be Lewis's defection that laid the groundwork, that made it safe for others to desert her.

The arcade documentary King of Kong was, far and away, one of my favorite movies of 2007. Maybe it shouldn't have been.

Update: More here.

Slashfood points us to a list of some of the world's more "disgusting delicacies":

We prefer to think of them not as disgusting, per se, but as ...daring. Different. Deconstructed...Some of the more colorful examples? In Morocco, you can indulge in oil made from goat excrement. The goats climb the trees in search of food, and the resulting oil is though to have medicinal purposes. Or you could hop over to Italy and try some Casu Frazigu. Sound exotic? It's made when a fly lays its eggs on cheese, and maggots hatch and crawl throughout the cheese. So, essentially, it's rotten maggot cheese.

But that's just kids' stuff compared to what awaits you in Southeast Asia: balut, a fertilized duck egg, comes complete with a partially formed duck fetus inside - at no extra charge! Just season with salt and pepper, and dig in.

And for dessert, engage your senses with Sumatran coffee beans [ed. note - pictured]. Not adventurous enough for you? Well, they come fresh out of the digestive track of a civet, a small, cat-like creature. The civet eats the beans, and when they are excreted, they are scrubbed clean and brewed.

Update: Actually, here's my link. Good friends know that well-made chocolate chip cookies are actually my favorite food in the world (well, along with salmon nigiri). And this is about the best explanation I've ever read as to why. It's not that they're delicious, though they are. It's that, as Jessica writes, "The Chocolate Chip Cookie, when executed properly, is one of few very foods in the world capable of producing happiness." And, beyond happiness, it's one of very few foods able to induce an actual, almost tangible, feeling of comfort. It's like Prozac made from saturated fat.

(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Esti.)

Becks writes:

The New York Times blog has a post up about "presenteeism", people who come into work sick, and how to discourage it. This has always been a problem with places that don't have paid sick leave, but I expect that it's creeping even more into companies that do offer benefits because of the shift from separate vacation and sick leave to "paid time off" banks that combine both. After all, when a person is faced with the calculation of "Do I come in sick and infect my coworkers but save a PTO day so I can go on vacation with my family later this year? Or should I stay home and use a PTO day for the sake of not infecting my coworkers?", they aren't being a completely irrational actor by choosing the former. (I'll leave a point about externalities as an exercise for the reader.)

You could, of course, change this calculation in the margin if all workers got paid sick days and sufficient vacation leave such that they didn't feel they needed to make a zero sum choice between staying home for a cold and being a good worker, or staying home for a cold and going to Tahiti. This may be a good time to post one of my favorite -- in that it's powerful, rather than makes me happy -- graphs:

And as I always have to point out, that final bar showing 10 is for Japan, not America. America has no bar, because Americans, alone in the developed world, aren't guaranteed even one day of paid vacation. And that not only effects the amount of vacation we get (particularly among unskilled workers), but it also effects the workplace culture around using our vacation and sick days. When you -- or many around you -- can't do something, you're more liable to invent reasons why you also shouldn't, which helps explain why folks feel so guilty taking sick days and vacation time.

A new study out of Massachusetts shows that 1 out of 10 prescriptions in the community hospitals studied contains a serious, and preventable, error. The handwriting isn't read correctly, or the wrong box is checked, or the drug isn't considered in context of the patient's whole regimen, or any of the countless other possible mistakes occurs and, as a result, patients get the wrong drug, or get sick, or don't get better, or, in the worst cases, die. And this could largely be fixed if the hospitals would install computerized records and prescription ordering systems, as they have in the (gasp!) socialized Veteran's Administration and most other countries.

But, of course, we still have the best health care in the world. I hear that, in Canada, sometimes you have to wait a couple days to get your (non-error ridden, much-cheaper) prescription...

I rather like Obama's new jobs program, just as I liked it when Clinton proposed and supported similar measures. In general, I think Democrats do too little to promote the government's role in rebuilding infrastructure and generating job creating investments, and that they should make those programs a larger priority during economic downturns. Democrats tend to talk of government action as moral and safe, aimed either at redressing injustice or protecting individuals from the vagaries of the economy. Both those things are often true. But sometimes government programs are just a plain good deal, as in the case of the National Institute of Health, Universal Pre-Kindegarten, the VA Health System, infrastructure rebuilding (both on its own and as a countercyclical jobs program), and many more.

To make one more point on the Clinton campaign's promise to try and re-seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, its getting a bit annoying to watch them discover brand new principles as soon as they become politically useful. I never, not once, heard anyone in the Hillary Camp say the real test for the candidate was how they did in huge, heavily-Democratic states like California and New York. Rather, before she lost a bunch of small states, I kept hearing that her experience in upstate New York would assure her the Missouris of the world, which Democrats needed. I never, not once, heard anyone in the Clinton campaign denigrate the representative nature of caucuses when it look like they might win Iowa. Never, not once, did they respond to a poll showing Hillary in the lead by saying, "hey, it's just a caucus, and basically undemocratic." Now, of course, they want caucuses not to count. Fine, that's politics. Similarly, when the DNC decided to strip Michigan and Florida of their delegations, I never, not once, heard the Clinton campaign stand up stop the whole thing from happening. They stayed silent, and even assented to the DNC's decision. Clinton's campaign manager released a statement saying, "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role."

So for those in comments pretending this is all a matter of principle, come off it. The rules may have been bad ones, but they were bad ones that the frontrunner's campaign could have changed. She could have skipped Iowa and argued against the caucus system. It would have been a huge deal had she taken that stand. Much more to the point, she could have kept Florida and Michigan in the process, or demanded a different compromise (The Republicans, for instance, stripped the two states of half, rather than all, of their delegates). But she didn't. Hell, she could even ask to rerun the elections in Michigan and Florida, either as primaries and caucuses, and seat the delegates emerging from those contests -- that would be the decision if you were worried about them missing out on the campaign.

But she did none of those things. And sure, it's politics, Clinton is angling for advantage, if a bit cynically. But that judgment is not where the conversation stops: If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns.

"If you asked 100 reporters what one word they would use to describe John McCain," writes Paul Waldman, "99 would probably answer, 'maverick.' Indeed, they've become so used to attaching 'maverick' to McCain that it has become almost a part of his name; 'the maverick John McCain' is used in the same way we refer to 'Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega' or 'teen sensation Hannah Montana.' A Lexis-Nexis search reveals that in the month of January alone, McCain was referred to in the media as a 'maverick' more than 800 times."

And so Paul asks the relevant question: How did John McCain become a maverick? After all, he's not nearly the most heterodox Senator in his caucus. He votes with his party 84 percent of the time and, according to the broadly respected Poole-Rosenthal Index, was the eighth most conservative Senator in the 110th Congress. There are plenty of actual centrists and moderates who hang out in the middle far more often tham McCain does. What McCain has figured out is how to make his moments of heterodoxy dramatic, and how to enlist the press in that effort:

Here's how it usually works. Imagine that the Democrats and Republicans have a conflict over a piece of legislation, and on both sides, party unity is fairly strong. Only a couple of senators—let's say Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, two centrists—have decided to break with their respective parties and join the other side. Reporters will find the positions taken by these two unremarkable, since Nelson and Snowe have crossed the aisle many times before (their party unity scores are regularly in the 50s, compared to McCain's 84). The news stories that follow will still describe the story as a clash between the two parties, and Nelson and Snowe will be footnotes at best, bit players in the drama whose actions don't change the underlying news narrative.

But if John McCain decides that he will join Snowe and side with the Democrats, the story being written in the media undergoes a dramatic shift. It now becomes not a story about a conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans, but a story about a conflict between John McCain and the Republicans. He instantly becomes the lead actor in the tale, as Democrats fade into the background. His name will be in the headlines, and every article about the topic will include quotes from McCain, reminders of past breaks with his party, a quote from a representative of a conservative interest group attacking McCain, and stirring descriptions of the Arizona senator's courageous independence, political consequences be damned. [...]

There is one other key factor to understand in the making of the "maverick" myth. Look at the times when McCain has differed with his Republican colleagues, and what you find is that in almost every case, the position held by most in the GOP was broadly unpopular with the public. Campaign finance reform, regulation of tobacco, even the Bush tax cuts (to which the public was indifferent and which McCain could hardly support, having criticized them as Bush's opponent in the 2000 presidential race)—in every case, the position McCain took put him on the right side of public opinion. So what the press calls "maverick" stands could just as easily be interpreted as highly political efforts to maintain McCain's strong popularity with the general public. For someone whose goal was to gain sufficient affection among his colleagues to rise to become his party's leader in the Senate, these would be unwise moves. But McCain never demonstrated any interest in a position in the Senate leadership—his sights were set higher.

Incidentally, the stock market did great yesterday. I wonder if Larry Kudlow is going to conclude that investors adore Barack Obama?

The New York Times reports:

With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules.

This demonstrates not only a gross ruthlessness on the part of Clinton's campaign, but an astonishingly cavalier attitude towards the preservation of the progressive coalition. To be willing to blithely rip it to shreds in order to wrest a nomination that's not been fairly earned is not only low, but a demonstration of deeply pernicious priorities -- namely, it's an explicit statement that the campaign puts its own political success above the health of the party and the pursuit of progressive goals, and one can't but help assume that's exactly the attitude they would take towards governance, too.

Ever wanted to watch me participate in a cook-off while arguing politics with Libertarians? Well, now you can.

Oh, and remind me to give you all my new Chinese asparagus recipe this weekend.

Sara Robinson does us all a nice service with an article detonating various myths about Canadian health care. It's a good piece, and fair, too. She doesn't deny that there are some long waits (and she adds an interesting twist to the situation, saying, "the farther north you live, the harder it is to get to care, simply because the doctors and hospitals are concentrated in the south") or that Canadian doctors make less money than their American counterparts. But nor does she deny the overwhelming evidence that, for about half as much money, Canada has built a better health system than we have.

I'm particularly interested in the ninth myth she identifies, that "people won't be responsible for their own health if they're not being forced to pay for the consequences." This underlies a lot of conservative commentary on on health care but it is not, so far as I can figure out, particularly true. After all, Americans pay much more out of pocket for health services, and we are much, much less healthy than residents of nations with nationalized health care. Now, I don't think health care delivery systems are the causal variable there -- culture, and walkability, and food subsidies, and pollution, and stress, and a million other forces intervene -- but it sure doesn't seem that our attempts to motivate health behavior by dangling financial ruin have done much good.

I well remember the mad rush to get necessary classes in college, and how much I loathed those kids who got in simply because they'd had a better lottery number than I did. My friend Tristan Reed, however, has done more than just whine about it (aways my favored strategy), he's come up with a better way.

it's a shame that Milbank didn't take his conceit more seriously. The American Association of Anthropologists says of their varied and broad discipline, "always, the common goal links these vastly different projects: to advance knowledge of who we are, how we came to be that way -- and where we may go in the future." That would be a wonderful guiding spirit for a book on Washington. But Homo Politicus is not an anthropologist's take on Washington. It is a cynic's single-minded search for that which will arch his eyebrow.

Milbank gives us the perverts and the liars, the fools and the frauds. But speaking as a Washingtonian, his book is most notable for those who are absent...Milbank, by offering this parade of horrors to Washingtonians and civilians alike, helps assure the former that their misbehavior is perfectly normal and helps reinforce the latter's decision to ignore politics altogether. Indeed, you have to give Milbank this: like a real anthropologist, he appears content to study his subject rather than seeking to better it. There is no attention to the structural factors that aid corruption or the underlying trends that feed polarization. There is no talk of reform or renewal, no vignettes describing those who are trying to better the process and need the support of Milbank's readers.

"In case you thought she'd go quietly," warns Andrew, "Hillary [is going] negative in Wisconsin:"

That's not negative, it's comparative. And it's all true! Obama's reticence to continue debating Hillary does not speak well of him. It's perfectly within his rights, and may well be politically savvy, but then it's also fair for Hillary to ding him on it. His health care plan is not universal, and she should hit him on that, too. In return, Obama can, and should, come back with an ad drilling into their differences on Iraq, on government reform, and whatever else his campaign can dig up. It's good for folks to know how the two campaigns disagree! And if this is what passes for negative in the Democratic primary, than this is about the friendliest election ever conducted.

And in case I forgot to mention this today, John McCain is a great big phony. And what the hell, I may as well repost this:

I think Matt is right to say that Obama's great advantage is that "he's the kind of person whose support for an idea makes the idea seem more compelling than it otherwise would have. You can imagine him getting people interested in things that didn't previously interest them, or convincing people that steps they used to think were too risky are, in fact, necessary." But this is what's been so disappointing about the Obama campaign: It has refused to press that advantage.

I can imagine him doing those things, but, as of now, I literally have to imagine it. He hasn't done any of them. Whatever your opinion on mandates, Obama went in a timid direction on health care, avoiding mandates, single payer, automatic enrollment, and every other step that could be considered risky. On that issue, he's ended up using his extraordinary eloquence to defend timidity and caution, not sell hard steps. On other issues, he's been better, but not by all that much. Take taxes, where Obama's plan is just a broad-based middle class cut, and Iraq, where he's gestured towards progressive opinions but not actually picked many fights (the negotiations fight, remember, was started by Hillary). This is not to say his plans are bad, or totally bereft of innovative elements (carbon auctions are important, as is government transparency, and he's got a great technology plan), but for all his talk of telling people the hard truths, he's largely protected them from both hard truths and unfamiliar policies.

That's not to deny his potential in these areas. But I have to take it on faith that he'll use his talents to push forward, rather than to merely get elected. Because though a major part of the case for Obama is his preternatural persuasiveness, which we can all imagine being pressed into service of an aggressively progressive platform, we're being left to make that connection on thin evidence. Obama may say he wants to be a president like Reagan, but on substance, the fact of the matter is he's campaigned much like Clinton. And that worries me about him. Obama may tout the politics of hope, but when it comes to getting presidents to govern in the way they'd like them to, progressives should remember that hope is not a plan.

I keep hearing that the Massachusetts Plan is a terrible failure, but I can't quite figure out why that is. Here, for instance, is The Boston Globe's recent editorial on the subject:

In a little less than two years, here's what Massachusetts has achieved:

# Expanded Medicaid by 60,000 for the poor and near poor and children.

# Established Commonwealth Care to provide insurance for adults living near poverty - more than 169,000 enrolled.

# Created Commonwealth Choice policies for more affluent people - 16,000 enrolled.

# Merged the individual and small-group markets so the self-employed can buy affordable insurance and encouraged businesses to set up programs so employees could get a tax savings on premiums - tens of thousands more enrolled in private insurance.

# Structured an individual mandate so penalties only fall on those for whom affordable coverage is available.

The financial problems are mostly because of underestimating the number of uninsured and the rate at which they would sign up for subsidized coverage. As a result, the state, which had originally expected to spend $472 million on subsidized insurance this fiscal year, now expects to spend about $150 million more than that. It anticipates spending almost $870 million next year.

It is hard to see these unexpected costs as a catastrophe when some 300,000 people, more than half of the people who lacked insurance, now have coverage. This is a surprisingly quick start for a hugely complicated program launched only a year and a half ago.

You folks heard of the Predatory Lending Association?

"The state's largest for-profit health insurer is asking California physicians to look for conditions it can use to cancel their new patients' medical coverage," says the first line of this article in The LA Times. What more even needs to be said?

Lets start from a basic proposition: In the current system, insurance companies add negative value, which is to say, they make health care worse, not better. Conservatives often complain that health insurance is not "insurance" in any real sense, it is not protection against unexpected costs, but insulation from largely predictable costs. We know we will need to purchase health care. We contract out with health insurers to smooth those expenditures -- render them predictable and manageable over the course of years, rather than unexpected and crushing in the course of months. That's why we pay insurance premiums so we can one day get chemotherapy, rather than simply paying for chemotherapy.

But "we" here is misleading. Not all of us make this deal with insurers. And among those of us who do make this deal, we make it in different ways, purchasing different levels of insulation, on different time periods. So the insurers, quite naturally, turn their attention to making deals with the most profitable among us, and avoiding deals, or finding ways to break contracts, with the least profitable. They are very innovative in their attempts to do this. But there's nothing good about those attempts. Competition among drug dealers does not aid the neighborhood, and currently, competition among insurers does not aid the ill. Indeed, their inattention to actual care is startling. America, for all its technological advancement, has among the lowest adoption of cost-saving, care-improving, electronic records in the world. That is the fault, in part, of our insurers.

And here's why: It is actually counterproductive for insurers to compete on giving us the best care. It's not simply that they're not doing it, but given the structure of the marketplace, they shouldn't do it. Imagine insurer X creates the best damn diabetes protocols in the country. And they begin advertising this fact. What happens on Day Two? Well, they're flooded with individuals suffering from diabetes, or individuals who fear they will one day be suffering from diabetes. These people, in the current system, are a bad deal. Not only is it near impossible to insure them at a profit, but pooling their costs (which is what insurers do, after all) raises premiums for all the insurer's other customers. When the average customer of an insurer gets sicker, prices go up for all their customers. So the healthy folks contracting with that insurer quit the pool, and go find a cheaper deal, which forces the insurer to raise premiums again, driving out more healthy folks, which forces them to raise premiums again, which drives out more healthy folks, and so on. It's what we call an insurance death spiral, and it ends with the collapse of the insurer.

Given those incentives, insurers cannot compete to offer better care, because if they offered better care, all that would happen is they would attract worse deals. Which is why, in the current system, insurers make things worse. Tyler Cowen has a vision for how insurers could, in a more perfect world, compete to our benefit. And I don't necessarily disagree with it. But let's be clear on what's necessary:

1. Universality: Insurers cannot compete effectively unless everyone is in the pool. If the healthy can leave, insurers cannot compete to offer better care. They'll have to compete to attract the healthiest, which means offering the lowest costs, which means insuring the fewest sick people. The system has to be universal.
2. Community Rating: Insurers cannot be allowed, before offering insurance, to use demographic subslicing to cherrypick the market. That means no more preexisting histories, no complex formulas around age and income and race and region. They offer insurance to anyone who wants it for the exact same price. No exceptions.
3. Risk Adjustment: Merely having everyone in the system won't be enough, and nor will forcing insurers to do away with their most delicate cherrypicking tools. Insurers will just become sophisticated at advertising on G4 Tech TV, and in snowboarding magazines, and in urban centers -- in places, in other words, where the young and the healthy gather. So atop the universal system, atop the community rating, you need risk adjustment, which means either that insurers are reimbursed more for taking on sicker patients, or, my preferred method (and the one used in Germany), insurers with particularly healthy pools pay into a central fund that redistributes to insurers with less healthy pools. At the end of the day, it has to be as profitable for an insurer to insure a sick person as a healthy one.
4. Information Transparency: It needs to be easy for individuals to compare insurers on plan comprehensiveness, price, outcomes, etc. That means we need a marketplace where folks can go to shop for insurers, and they need to have standardized comparisons, or non-partisan rating authorities, providing information they can use.
5. One Market: This is contained in the last point, but there needs to be a singular place, or set of them, where individuals can shop around for insurance. This is hard stuff to find, and harder yet to understand, and real effort needs to go into constructing an easily accessible marketplace that customers can effectively navigate.

There are probably more, but those are the major ones. It's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which insurers actually compete to offer better service, in which the marketplace really does work to the consumer's benefit. That could take a million different forms, from personalized care coordinators to electronic records to online access to your health information to negotiated discounts on gym memberships to a million things I haven't thought of. But none of them happen with any sort of frequency now because insurers operate in a perverse market in which their incentives are to make the system, and our care, worse.

(Image used under a Creative Commons license from BookGrl)

To make a follow-up point on Al Wynn, there are districts where moderation is understandable, where centrism is a currency that actually helps keep you in office. Maryland's 4th, which regularly gives 80 percent of its votes to its Democrat, is not one of them. These are the districts that can sustain serious progressives, and thus help, in the aggregate, pull the Democratic Caucus in progressive directions. To leave a timid corporatist like Wynn in such a seat isn't merely irksome, it's actually a serious opportunity cost, and it does real damage. If every safe Democratic seat were occupied by the sort of principled Democrat it could sustain, you'd have a very different Caucus today.

No, not that one. This one.

It's great to see that progressive insurgent Donna Edwards easily rode over hackish incumbent Al Wynn to capture the Democratic nomination for a safe Congressional seat in Maryland's 4th District. Her victory was by no means assured, as Terry Samuels pointed out, "Wynn has the support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer as well as the endorsements of NARAL and the AFL-CIO; Edwards has the backing of the maverick Service Employees International Union and the liberal blogosphere, including Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga."

And the mavericks won. Wynn voted for the Bankruptcy Bill, for the war, for the repeal of the estate tax, and for the president's tax cuts. And though he had more money, these politicians, and his deep closeness to corporate America, doomed him, and did so publicly. And that last is important. As Matt correctly says, "the tree of progressive politics must be watered with the metaphorical blood of sellouts ever now and again. Some people seem to me to walk around in their head with a model in which politicians are very principled ideologues who then divert from their default status due to electoral fears. In a more plausible schematic, they have a natural tendency to drift in the direction of utter corruption and only electoral fear keeps them doing their jobs in a somewhat responsible manner." Wynn's loss will help power that fear for years to come. Primaries are the countervailing power that progressive activists can exert against corporate influence, and it's a deeply healthy development that the Left has begun using them successfully.

Obama really stomped Hillary yesterday, winning Maryland by 23, Virginia by 29 and DC by 51 points in what Tom Schaller has aptly termed "the Potomac Pummeling." And if the numbers are impressive, the demographics Obama won are more significant. He won whites, seniors, the poor, and even those in rural areas. In Virginia, he won Hispanics by eight points (though he lost among them in Maryland). And yes, Hillary Clinton "didn't campaign there." At least not much. But let's not be naive about this. Virginia and Maryland both border DC. Large swaths of them share our media market. And both of them are in the United States of America. No one forgot that Clinton was running, and neither of these states were insufficiently exposed to her campaign. Realizing she was going to lose, she skipped all three, but there's no chicken-or-egg question here. She didn't campaign because she wasn't going to win, it's not that she didn't win because she forgot to campaign. Meanwhile, Obama has been using this string of victories to begin acting more like the presumptive nominee -- a function of the campaign's calculation that, as manager David Plouffe said, “it’s next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close the delegate count.” And as part of this shift to a frontrunner campaign, Obama has been taking on McCain more directly:

Effective? Not?

I don't have much to say on this, but sometimes it's important just to bear witness:

In November 2002, when Melvin Bevels was short of money for groceries and rent, the elderly man visited a Small Loans store in Sylacauga, Ala., and borrowed money -- he thinks it was $200. Small Loans is part of a sprawling network of more than a hundred lenders in four states, including Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, owned by Money Tree Inc., a closely held Bainbridge, Ga., firm.

Mr. Bevels, who can't read, says a clerk helped him fill out papers that instructed Social Security to send Mr. Bevels's $565 monthly benefits to an account at an out-of-state bank, which transferred the money back to Small Loans or its parent, usually within a day. As is often the case, Mr. Bevels's bank earned no interest and didn't come with either ATM cards or checks.

Every month for nearly four years, Mr. Bevels, who is known around town as "Buckwheat" because of his thatch of yellow-white hair, rode his motorized mobility scooter to Small Loans to pick up his "allowance," which was sometimes as little as $180 a month, he says.

In a written statement, Money Tree's general counsel, Natasha Wood, declined to comment on Mr. Bevels's case but said: "Anyone who sets up a direct deposit arrangement with Small Loans Inc. does so completely voluntarily."

Mr. Bevels, who believes he's 80 but isn't sure, quickly lost control of his finances. When his utilities were shut off, a neighbor gave Mr. Bevels water in a plastic jug and ran an extension cord to Mr. Bevels's trailer a few hours a day to power his nebulizer, which delivers aerosol medication to people with chronic lung conditions. Mr. Bevels was facing eviction when his trailer burned down, leaving him homeless.

A county social worker arranged for Mr. Bevels to move to public housing and got his Social Security benefits redirected to a local bank. When Small Loans sued Mr. Bevels for repayment in small-claims court in Talladega County, Ala., a legal-aid attorney headed to court. The judge threw out the case when the lender failed to appear with documentation for the loan.

"It just isn't fair, what they do to old people," says Mr. Bevels, crying quietly. "It isn't right."

Apparently, there's a college scholarship for political bloggers. I nominate wunderkids Matt Zeitlin and Dylan Matthews. But there's only one scholarship, so I also nominate them to battle for it in a steel cage match.

This accurately expresses a few of the many reasons I don't think Obama is a lock:

In a general, Obama won't be running against Clinton, he'll be running against McCain, a politician that has actually taken political risks and endured the wrath of party hacks in order to make progress on real issues: "What has Obama done? Show me a single issue or piece of legislation where Obama has done something politically unpopular in order to move forward toward a greater goal." I pointed out that this argument hasn't made much of a difference so far. Ah, replied the adviser, "That's because Clinton can't show that she's done it, either." What's more, he said, the press will stop giving Obama a free ride in the general. McCain will be out there, holding court on his bus or his plane, providing unfettered access to both reporters and voters, and journalists will no longer be able to ignore Obama's lack of access and lack of interaction with real people. In fact, it'll be the only thing they talk about.

This is part of what made Frank Rich's column this week so weird. He was attacking Clinton for a somewhat cheesy, rather scripted "townhall" where, at the least, she answered questions. Obama, by contrast, doesn't even offer those. Awhile back, the blogosphere had a term that went something like, IOKIYAR, or "it's okay if you're a Republican." I've been thinking that there should really be "INOKIYHC," or "it's not okay if you're Hillary Clinton."

All that said, the polling really does suggest that Obama has an advantage against McCain in the general, and in my off-the-record conversations with professional conservatives, they seem unanimously afraid of Obama. It's not so much that they're sure he can win (and none deny the possibility that he could lose), but they're definitely not sure how they can beat him, and they fear he has the potential to win big. With Clinton, by contrast, they feel they know how to attack her, and don't worry about anything game-changing.

I'm behind a deadline at the moment, but I couldn't let this twist in our fine credit market go unnoticed:

One recent morning, dozens of elderly and disabled people, some propped on walkers and canes, gathered at Small Loans Inc. Many had borrowed money from Small Loans and turned over their Social Security benefits to pay back the high-interest lender. Now they were waiting for their "allowance" -- their monthly check, minus Small Loans' cut.

The crowd represents the newest twist for a fast-growing industry -- lenders that make high-interest loans, often called "payday" loans, that are secured by upcoming paychecks. Such lenders are increasingly targeting recipients of Social Security and other government benefits, including disability and veteran's benefits. "These people always get paid, rain or shine," says William Harrod, a former manager of payday loan stores in suburban Virginia and Washington, D.C. Government beneficiaries "will always have money, every 30 days."

The law bars the government from sending a recipient's benefits directly to lenders. But many of these lenders are forging relationships with banks and arranging for prospective borrowers to have their benefits checks deposited directly into bank accounts. The banks immediately transfer government funds to the lenders. The lender then subtracts debt repayments, plus fees and interest, before giving the recipients a dime.

As a result, these lenders, which pitch loans with effective annual interest as high as 400% or more, can gain almost total control over Social Security recipients' finances.

Unlike Spencer, I think Leon Wieseltier is exactly right to worry that Obama's signals on foreign policy do not convey "the hardness I seek, the disabused tone that the present world warrants. ... [Obama] seems averse to the hurtful, expensive, traditional, unedifying stuff." When Obama talks about changing "the mindset" that led us into the Iraq War, he's talking, almost specifically, about Leon Wieseltier's mindset; the belief that "hardness" is analogous to wisdom, that seriousness requires being "disabused" of one's instinctual aversion to brutality, that the "hurtful' and "traditional" stuff has worked. "One of the striking features of Obama's victory speeches," writes Leon, "is the absence from these exultations of any lasting allusion to the darker dimensions of our strategic predicament. He makes no applause line out of American defense." Leon wants a leader to brings crowds to their feet with talk of war. His skepticism of the Obama campaign on these grounds is among the most powerful arguments I've yet heard for Obama's candidacy.

As a sort of follow-up to my previous post, this argument from Yale's Heather Gerkin is important:

If the president asked me to identify a reform proposal for fixing what ails our democracy, I would tell him that he is asking the wrong question. We already spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what's wrong with our election system and how to fix it. The problem is that we are fighting reform battles on hostile terrain, and almost no one is thinking about how to change the terrain itself. Our focus should not be on end goals but on how to get from "here to there"—how to create an environment in which reform can actually take root.

Reform is an uphill slog in this country. Even a crisis as profound as the one that occurred during the 2000 presidential race prompted only modest reform. Just think about that for a moment. In the wake of the Florida fiasco, there was a strong national consensus that we had a problem, lots of potential solutions, a reform community ready to act, and a cause that was at least superficially appealing to voters. Yet relatively little got done. If that is not a sign of a tenaciously difficult reform environment, I don't know what is. Even a newly minted president is likely to find it hard to get change passed.

Rather than urge the president to fight the same fight in the vague hope that his proposal, unlike so many others, will take root, I would urge him to step back and think about how to create an environment that is more receptive to change generally. It is time to think less about end results and more about the institutional correctives and intermediary strategies that will help us get from "here to there." We have already spent a lot of time identifying the journey's end. Now is the time to figure out how to smooth the road that leads there.

The Brennan Center asked a bunch of luminaries what the next president's first act should be to strengthen our democracy. Dahlia Lithwick replied:

Close Guantanamo.

It's not that warrantless surveillance and the state secrets doctrine, broad, inscrutable signing statements, and water boarding aren't problems , but I am assuming here that the President elect would have scrapped all this before putting his or her toothbrush down that morning. There may be some temptation to keep Gitmo open for a few weeks. Don't. Close it down. Move the remaining prisoners stateside and give them trials. Torch the camp. Issue a press release. And walk away. No one thing has been a more damaging daily—often hourly—reminder in the foreign media of this administration's contempt for American and international law.

I tuned in to last night' Politico interview of Barack Obama just in time to see him give a final answer on taxes. The hosts were pressing him on whether he was a tax cutter or a tax raiser, and he, in true Obama fashion, rejected those labels, and said the question, to him, was whether we were raising taxes on those at the top or those at the bottom.

Fair enough, but that's still weak ground to stand on. I want a Democrat willing to say that the question is, "what are we paying for? And what do we need to pay for?" The tendency to speak of taxes as an unpleasant surcharge exacted for the government and spent on...well...who knows, is poisonous. Within that mindset, folks probably prefer if you take the cash from the rich and not from them. But if Obama is going to be the transformational, Reagan-style pol he presents himself as, he's going to have to grow comfortable speaking positively of the role of government, and selling some of his initiatives as good ideas worth paying for. It's worth it to have effective responses to natural disasters, worth it to have a modern national infrastructure, worth it to have national health care, worth it to have more than one safety inspector examining Chinese goods, worth it to invest in medical and scientific research, worth it to enact universal pre-kindergarten. Indeed, many of these priorities are not only worth the cost, but they're actually good investments. They're a damn good deal. And Democrats need to grow comfortable making that case. The Republicans have succeeded in moving the tax debate onto grounds of "who pays," and "how much." Democrats need to remember to ask, "what for," and "what if we don't?"

The New York Times "reports":

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend.

If, as the New York Times suggests, the subprime crash is about to spread into "prime" loans, than that is a very, very bad thing. Worse, Dean Baker not only says they're right, but that things are far grimmer than they realize (he suggests looking into newly issued prime loans, rather than the whole universe of prime loans). Dean's predictive record has been scarily accurate of late, so we're probably all screwed.

David Brooks certainly isn't wrong to suggest that the programmatic unity Democrats are evincing in the primary isn't likely to escape an actual administration unscathed. But he's vastly overestimating the size of the domestic divisions. The policy priorities of the traditional leftists and the traditional centrists are, by and large, the same. The Rubinites realize their open markets and dynamic capitalism is endangered by broad feelings of economic insecurity, which can then be expressed in a Dobbsian roar against immigrants and trade. So they want universal health coverage as much as the lefties. In general, Jacob Hacker's view that the defining domestic problem is economic insecurity -- and it stands in the way of both a just and dynamic economy -- has taken hold across the party, which is why Hacker has published with the centrist Hamilton Project and their sworn enemies at the Economic Policy Institute.

But if the question will not be of policies, compromises can still divide the party. If a Democrat ends up bargaining away the public insurer to achieve the plan's passage, will the left feel betrayed, or accept that as a pragmatic compromise, and a decent first step?

On Iraq, however, Brooks is speaking the truth. It doesn't look to me like either Obama or Clinton will pursue a particularly quick withdrawal strategy -- they've been careful to avoid any hard and fast promises in the primary (remember when neither could promise to have all troops out by 2013?), and that's facing an audience and electorate much more maximally oriented towards withdrawal than anything they will see in the general election. Their hesitancy to end the war could create substantial anger on the left. If Clinton continues the war, I think you'll see the Left turn sharply against her. If it's Obama, I think you'll see them work harder to rationalize his position as pragmatic, and let his principles stand in for his program. Folks forget that in 2003, Howard Dean was opposing the war while suggesting a policy not far off from the Surge. "I believe that we need a very substantial increase in troops. They don't all have to be American troops. My guess would be that we would need at least 30,000 and 40,000 additional troops," he told Tim Russert. Yet he was still the anti-war candidate. Today's conversation is more sophisticated, and Obama isn't going to start a new surge. But it'll be important to see whether a candidate they philosophically agree with is enough to distract the Left from policies they may oppose.

Spackerman says basically all that needs to be said about Michael Rubin here. As a general point, I agree with him that liberals need to do a better job distinguishing between serious, good-faith participants in the public discourse who they disagree with (Roger Cohen, say, or David Frum) and bad-faith participants whose credibility comes from a sinecure at AEI and is used to smear liberals as anti-semites (Michael Rubin). Maybe we need a test, or set of warning signs. For instance, whenever you hear one of them call something the "George Soros-funded" whatever, that's probably a good sign your time would be better spent listening to someone else.

This is, by far, my favorite YouTube of this cycle:

Sorry for the light posting today, been on the road. But my absence was not the product of a lack of affection. I love you, my dear readers, and I want you to have a happy, politicized, Valentine's Day. So I spent most of today searching for cards I could give you all, but came up dry. Thankfully, the RNC came though for me:

Like, ohmygod, aren't they just adorbs!? There are three for Clinton, and three for Obama. Interestingly, the attack on Clinton seems set - she'll raise your taxes. Each card is a variant of her promising to raise revenue for necessary social services. Obama, however, clearly confuses them a bit. Where the hits on Clinton are concrete and unified, the cards mocking Obama are a bit more scattered and abstract. Some nail him for inexperience, some hit him for "present" votes. They're comfortable painting Hillary as a generic liberal bogeyman, but Obama, it seems, confuses them a bit more.

I think Isaac Chotiner gets this right:

In the past two weeks, seven different organizations have polled the races and on average Obama beats McCain by 3.2%, while Clinton loses to the Arizona senator by 2%. Not a single polls has Clinton doing as well as Obama. Normally this wouldn't be such a big deal--after all, most people don't obsessively read polling data. But this year's race might be different. If, as seems increasingly likely, the Democratic nomination drags on all the way to the convention, it's imperative that Clinton close the gap with Obama. Think of it like this: you are a superdelegate or party boss. You have been undecided but now must choose between two candidates with roughly equal numbers of delegates. Most of all, you want to win in November, which is now only three months away. And while one of your two choices is consistently beating the Republican nominee in polls, the other is consistently losing. It's not hard to imagine that many of these people will be swayed by the data above.

But does it matter to superdelegates? I'm a bit skeptical that straight electability concerns will matter enormously, but I could see the case that regional appeal will. If, as we're hearing, red state Democrats are genuinely concerned about Hillary's potential to drag down their tickets, but feel that Obama, by being less polarizing and by supercharging African-American turnout, could actually help them, I'd imagine that would weigh pretty heavily in their eventual decisions. A lot of this, however, will depend on how vulnerable Hillary looks come the convention. My guess is a lot of superdelegates are going to operate under the premise that if you vote against the Clintons, you better be sure they're going to lose.

I have to say, I find it a bit strange that Paul Krugman's attacks on Barack Obama's health care plan and consensus-based theory of change have elicited so much more attention than Frank Rich's far less substantial, and far more unhinged, rants against Hillary Clinton. Hillary bashing has become so normalized that, save in the most extreme and offensive instances (like Shuster accusing her of "pimping out her daughter), it barely registers as more than background noise. On the one hand, this is a real advantage for the Obama campaign. On the other, it's tremendously unfair, and a prime example of the media using pack narratives and group beliefs to influence elections -- a power that progressives should call out and oppose. Whatever their respective merits as politicians, what's happening to Hillary is little different than what happened to Gore. They can dislike the progressive as surely as the centrist.