MORE ON THE LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT. Dana beat me to the punch in noting that the Congressional attempt to override Ledbetterpassed in the House, but is regrettably doomed. I will add that at the ACS panel I discussed earlier this week, reliable business water-carrierStuart Taylor poo-poohed the decision by noting that it was just a statutory interpretation case which can be changed by Congress. But, of course, when (as in this case) the will of a majority of members of Congress is trumped by a lame-duck president, there's nothing they can do to check the power of the Court. This is the problem with conflating judicial power with judicial independence; the courts do not have the unconstrained power to narrow the application of civil rights law, but in a Madisionian system they have considerable discretion in many cases to challenge the legislative branch. All of which would be OK except that the Ledbetter decision was illogical. She was still being paid less because of discrimination, and hence the statute of limitations clock should re-start after every individual act of discrimination. Which is why this was the EEOC's standard even during the early years of the Bush administration.
Having said that, even if this error cannot be corrected until a Democrat re-takes the White House, it will be good to force Bush to veto the act and to publicly defend the Supreme Court's insulation of employers engaged in rank gender discrimination against the will of Congress. It's also a useful reminder that there's a lot at stake in Supreme Court appointments besides abortion. When it comes to Alito, businesses have gotten exactly what they paid the Republicans for.
WHAT'S UP IN WAZIRISTAN. I asked a source with expertise in the region for thoughts about the David IgnatiusWaziristan column that we've been discussing today. The reply:
Nothing in there that's new. I don't think Washington is lacking for disgruntled ex-gov't employees with ideas how to solve this crisis or that... of course, Crumpton is smoking crack if he thinks that aid agencies can simply waltz into Waziristan or anywhere else in FATA and immediately deliver electricity and all sorts of other developmental goods. And it's similarly unclear why outsourcing the dirty work to the tribal militias will do the trick, when the current model of outsourcing to the Pakistan Frontier Corps has proven such an unmitigated disaster. Remember - foreign militants by and large only reside where they are welcome in the tribal areas. So the only tribes that would conceivably go along with an American strategy would be ones that are not currently hosting foreigners. Which would mean that, in order to score the US foreign policy objective, they'd have to be asked to basically invade other tribes' territorial abodes - not something I see happening in the Pashtun frontierlands...
It might sound like a good idea to use the tribes to fight Al Qaeda, but using proxies to fight our wars for us can be a lot harder than it looks, and the prospect of success will depend a great deal on the specifics of the on-the-ground situation. That said, Ignatius deserves a lot of credit for casting the spotlight on this simmering issue, and for raising public awareness about how important what's happening in the area is to America's long-term safety.
FAIR PAY ACT PASSES HOUSE. Congress today voted 225-199 to overturn the Supreme Court's May ruling that all claims of pay discrimination must be filed within 180 days of the first pay check at a new salary. The House bill reverts to the accepted interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, in which each pay check is a separate act that can serve as the basis of a discrimination claim.
RUPERT MURDOCH'S MSM-PIRE HAS ARRIVED. It looks like the media mogul has finally bullied the Bancrofts into submission. The New York Times reports that the family has tentatively authorized Murdoch's $5 billion buyout of The Wall Street Journal's publisher, just months before the debut of Murdoch latest on-air venture, the Fox Business Channel:
For Mr. Murdoch, the Dow Jones takeover gives him not only one of the world’s great media trophy properties and a larger voice in national affairs, but also a ready source of material and credibility for his newest big gamble, the Fox Business Channel he plans to launch in October.
More fair and balanced analysis, coming soon to a satellite near you.
ETHICS! In yet another rebuttal to claims the current Democratic congress isn't accomplishing anything the House today passed an ethics reform bill that closes a variety of loopholes in current law. It isn't revolutionary but it's progress. The Senate is expected to pass the bill by the end of the week. We should be concerned, however, because six of the eight nay's were Democrats, including John Murtha (full roll call here).
POLITICAL POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. I think this, by Andrew Sullivan, is very insightful, and very important:
Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in their defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.
All of that is perfectly understandable, incidentally. The traumatizing incidences Sullivan points to did, in fact, happen. Hillary was pilloried for a bit of offhand feminism, and eventually forced to apologize. Her health care plan was shredded, and contributed to the worst Democratic losses in a generation. She was forced to largely recede from public life, and assume a more traditional, subordinate, spousal role.
You don't live through such experiences without scars, without lessons. Some say those lessons will make her more effective in office. Possibly true. But there's also an argument to be made that those were the wrong lessons, that they are less applicable now, that they will lead her astray, that they have ingrained a reflexive caution during a moment that calls for boldness. Hillary's approach to politics often seems predicated on survival, with accomplishments to be jammed in-between the cracks. Her actions are not those of someone who trusts in her capacity -- or even sees it as her goal -- to change the ideological tenor of the country. There's an argument to be made that she's right. I'm just not convinced.
IN DEFENSE OF EDWARDS (AGAIN). The main point of Dana's post -- that John Edwards is hiding behind Elizabeth on certain controversial issues -- is certainly true. He shouldn't get a pass on bad positions just because his wife is more progressive. But the examples Dana uses to critique John are slightly unfair, as some commenters have pointed out.
First, Dana writes, "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama made it to the Planned Parenthood conference. John didn't -- he sent Elizabeth." As I've written here before, Senators Clinton and Obama were working down the street from where the conference was taking place, whereas Edwards was traveling through poor rural regions discussing poverty. This is not a question of whether reproductive health or poverty is the more important issue (they're obviously inextricably tied together in many, many ways), but a question of why Edwards should be criticized for not attending a conference when he was doing something else that was also important and worthwhile.
Second, she writes, " Elizabeth's support for marriage equality doesn't undo John's quibbling." Fair enough. But Obama and Clinton also oppose gay marriage, so it looks like the Democratic frontrunners are each quibbling on gay rights in their own individual ways. Except for Kucinich and Gravel, every Democratic candidate's position on this issue is pretty much equally indefensible.
IN WHICH I PRAISE DAVID BROOKS. So much as I was disappointed by his column last week on "neopopulism," Brooks' latest effort, a comparison of the poverty plans offered by John Edwards and Barack Obama, is really very good. He treats the plans respectfully, describes their varying emphases accurately, and comes to a fair conclusion on which he prefers:
Obama and Edwards agree on a lot, but in this matter they emphasize different things. As Alec MacGillis of The Washington Post observed, Edwards emphasizes programs that help people escape from concentrated poverty. Obama emphasizes programs that fix inner-city neighborhoods. One helps people find better environments, the other seeks to strengthen the environment they are already in.
Edwards would create a million housing vouchers for working families. These would, he argues, “enable people to vote with their feet to demand safe communities with good schools.” They’d help people move to where the jobs are and foster economic integration.
The problem with his approach is that past efforts at dispersal produced disappointing results. Families who were given the means to move from poor neighborhoods to middle-class areas did not see incomes rise. Girls in those families did a little better, but boys did worse. They quickly formed subcultures in the new communities that replicated patterns of the old ones. Male criminality rose, but test scores did not.
Obama, by contrast, builds his approach around the Harlem Children’s Zone, what he calls “an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort.” The zone takes an area in Harlem and saturates it with childcare, marriage counseling, charter schools and job counselors and everything else you can think of. Obama says he’ll start by replicating the program in 20 cities around the country.
In this case, Brooks' description of the research is accurate The largest experimental demonstration of economic integration was the Moving to Opportunity Program, a fairly large program where 5,000 families were given Section 8 vouchers and mobility counseling to move from ghettos to areas with under 10 percent poverty. Their outcomes were closely tracked and the results were tremendously disappointing. You can find plenty of the research here. The researchers concluded:
Moving to lower poverty areas had significant positive impacts on: personal safety; housing quality; mental health and obesity among adults; and mental health, delinquency, and risky behavior among teenage girls. There are, however, apparently some negative effects on boys' behavior, and no statistically significant effects on employment outcomes for adults or educational achievement for children. Only marginal improvements were found in the quality of schools attended.
What I don't really understand is Brooks' preference for the Obama model (I'm undecided, incidentally). The Harlem Childrens' Zone, as Brooks points out, hasn't generated any conclusive data yet, and, more importantly, "there are 4,000 community development corporations around the country and they have not lifted residents out of poverty." So that seems like a fairly untested approach, too.
Brooks does argue that he'd follow with Obama's model, because "Obama seems to have a more developed view of social capital. Edwards offers vouchers, job training and vows to create a million temporary public-sector jobs. Obama agrees, but takes fuller advantage of home visits, parental counseling, mentoring programs and other relationship-building efforts." That's a fair point, but it seems that if you're worried about social capital, breaking up centers of poverty so individuals have connections into different economic classes, new industries, and unfamiliar social strata would be important.
WHAT TO DO IN WAZIRISTAN?Dana and Ezra's posts earlier today about David Igantius's column are both pretty skeptical about the actual plan he describes. Dana is right that we should be extremely skeptical of any military intervention run by this administration, but Ignatius is right that the overthrow of the government of Afghanistan went pretty well and thus it isn't quite right to say that "all Bush administration military interventions are ill-planned and heavy-handed." So, what should we think of Ignatius's plan?
As Ezra pointed out there is a real problem that it would be very good to be able to address -- al-Qaeda now has a safe base of operations and a reliable source of funding (Iraq) and Bin Laden is still at large. Ignatius's plan (designed by a CIA officer involved in the Afghan war) is modeled on the approach used to overthrow the Taliban. The plan relies on the cooperation of local leaders who, allegedly, are hostile towards al-Qaeda. Is this true? When we overthrew the Taliban we knew the Northern Alliance was at least willing to work with us, though we weren't sure of its quality. The plan also basically calls for bribing them, which makes me somewhat skeptical:
In Waziristan, U.S. and Pakistani operatives would give tribal warlords guns and money, to be sure, but they would coordinate this covert action with economic aid to help tribal leaders operate their local stone quarries more efficiently, say, or install windmills and solar panels to generate electricity for their remote mountain villages.
Ultimately, I doubt this would work, in part because one of the major advantages we had in Afghanistan was air support. That, as I understand it, is what really turned the tide more than arms in the fighting against the Taliban. Ignatius also doesn't address the political implications in Pakistan. Musharraf is in a rather precarious position at the moment, and an American military intervention could easily do more harm than good.
EDWARDS "HIDING BEHIND HIS WIFE." Writing about Elizabeth Edwards' appearance at the BlogHer conference, Addieconfesses that although she was turned off during the YouTube/CNN debate when John Edwards opposed gay marriage but said his wife supported it, she became an Elizabeth acolyte (and there are many) when she saw the prospective first lady in person.
I've also written about Elizabeth's inspired public appearances. Most people who meet Elizabeth feel overwhelming respect for such an intelligent, witty, well-spoken woman who refuses to let cancer take over her life. But let's be honest. Elizabeth isn't running for president, John is. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama made it to the Planned Parenthood conference. John didn't -- he sent Elizabeth.
Is this a successful campaign strategy for John? Yes, because his wife is likable and eloquent. She helps the Edwards campaign neutralize the threat of another, equally compelling candidate spouse. But I can't help thinking that there's something a bit disingenuous about the idea that we elect a couple to the White House instead of an individual. First, it shows how invested our political system is in heterosexual marriage as the ultimate qualifier. We're all a little bit skeptical of unmarried politicians, aren't we? And furthermore, while spouses certainly can have enormous influence over one another, as voters, we ultimately have to be comfortable with the views of the candidate him or herself, the person who will be representing America as president. That's why Elizabeth's support for marriage equality doesn't undo John's quibbling.
THE OTHER FORGOTTEN WAR. I agree with Dana that the actual policy prescription offered in this David Ignatiusarticle seems a bit implausible. Trusting the CIA to successfully carry out a large, covert counterterrorism operation in the mountainous region of Pakistan by arming tribal warlords seems, well, risky. The type of thing we regret a couple decades down the road when it's created sixteen new dictatorships.
That said, the actual question Ignatius raises is an important one. Al Qaeda is, so far as we know, reconstituting themselves in Northwest Pakistan. Like in Afghanistan, they basically control a swath of territory and are using it as a new base of operations. As liberals constantly point out, Bush's actions in Iraq have done wonders for both their recruitment and their financial situation. As liberals also like to point out, the war in Iraq is a distraction from the War on Terror.
So, uh, what do we think should be done about the War on Terror? I agree that Ignatius's policy prescription seems dangerous, but what's the alternative? What do we think should be done about the reemergence of al Qaeda in Waziristan? The war in Iraq is indeed a distraction from the War on Terror -- but that doesn't me we can let it totally distract us.
MOVIE PLUG. I'll second what Mattsaid about Charles Ferguson's new documentary about the first year of the American occupation of Iraq, No End in Sight. I think the very structure of the film -- focusing on and portraying the initial missteps in the first phase of the occupation as avoidable but decisive turning points that doomed any future efforts -- along with the implication of various points emphasized throughout basically make the film an incompetence narrative of the war, which I resist. But it's nevertheless an amazingly effective, absorbing, and intelligent film, and the mendacity and incompetence that it documents are of course real enough, and endlessly nauseating.
Most importantly, I think, the film avoids the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of many political documentaries (including many good ones) that have proliferated during the Bush years, where various critiques of the administration can get piled on in not-quite-coherent fashion. No End in Sight, by contrast, is a movie with a very coherent narrative to tell and charge to make; I think its story is incomplete, and, in a few respects, not quite right, but it's devastating nonetheless. See the movie if you can.
WHO DESERVES TO VOTE? In his Los Angeles Timescolumn, Jonah Goldberg plays a thought experiment in which all Americans, not only immigrants, would have to pass a civics test in order to gain the right to vote.
Some more serious people suggest that voting should be mandatory, believing that if the "disenfranchised" -- often code for dream Democratic voters -- cast ballots, the country would move profoundly to the left. John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed in 1986: "If everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years."
This last bit is almost certainly false. The evidence is that if every eligible voter voted, national elections would probably remain unchanged.
They key word here is "eligible." Tax-paying, working, undocumented immigrants and non-violent ex-felons account for millions of potential Democratic voters. It's no coincidence that conservatives fight every attempt to get these groups, which are majority Latino and African American, onto the voter rolls.
PELOSI: IF THINGS WERE DIFFERENT, I'D WANT TO IMPEACH. At a meeting between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some dozen-and-a-half journalists, the speaker reiterated her reluctance to embark on impeachment hearings. (The meeting was convened in honor of the late, great progressive activist Maria Leavey.) First, in answer to a question by Michael Tomasky about the planned introduction of an impeachment measure targeting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the speaker said, "I would prefer to stay focused on our agenda." She had outlined a long list of legislative priorities, the latest being the children's health insurance bill (S-CHIP), which is scheduled this week for a vote.
Later I asked about the tension between the pressure to pass an ambitious legislative agenda and simultaneously protect the Constitution, which I personally fear will be a pile of ashes by the time Bush & Co. finally leave town. At first I got the answer I expected, all about the need to conduct the people's business, end the war, and not divide the country. And I can see that she really wants to affect some of these priorities, such as health care coverage and new education investment; Pelosi does have real passion about these things. Then, as we were about to move on from the topic, she said, "If I were not the speaker and I were not in Congress, I would probably be advocating for impeachment."
FORGET IRAN. How about a CIA proxy war in Pakistan? That's what the Washington Post's David Ignatius suggests the United States do to root out al-Qaeda factions in the northwest Pakistani province of Waziristan.
Intervening in another Muslim country is risky, to put it mildly. That's why a successful counterinsurgency program would need Pakistani support and why its economic and social development components would be critical ... The United States can begin to take action now against al-Qaeda's new haven. Or we can wait, and hope that we don't get hit again. The biggest danger in waiting is that if retaliation proves necessary later, it could be ill-planned and heavy-handed -- precisely what got us in trouble in Iraq.
But doesn't evidence show that all Bush administration military interventions are ill-planned and heavy-handed? I continue to be amazed by national security experts who would place any trust in this president.
TELL ME, PETRAEUS. A WaPo's webcast interview yesterday with Democratic whip James Clyburn suggested that a positive report from Gen. Petraeus could cause a boondoggle for the 47 blue dog Democrats in the House, without whom it will be impossible to pass any kind of timetable for withdrawal. The report from Petraeus is expected to be mixed, given little subsiding of violence in Iraq, but some forecast a slightly more positive review.
And why not? Over the last year, there's been something of an exodus of good reporters from Iraq (some of whom have come back to writebooks), and even the reporters still there rely heavily on Iraqi stringers for person-to-person reporting, and on the U.S. military for any kind of statistics. With such a heavy reliance on the military for information, Petraeus could be glossing over the bad news from Iraq and making it very hard to slice through the war of rhetoric the right will launch. Especially since he answers directly to Bush, who of course wants the war to seem like it's going better, Petraeus has every incentive to tailor his report (even unconsciously) accordingly.
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a "starting point". By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford's Law.
Application to Iraq. This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than "some" or "some but not enough to justify a war" or even "some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs". My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.
[...]
The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.
I'm also willing to concede that a couple of the very narrow claims Mattmade aren't terribly germane. But the overall point certainly holds. The only potential value from the O'Pollahan op-ed are claims made about the situation on the ground in Iraq. To take them seriously we would have to trust the ability of the people making the arguments to think critically about the propaganda they're being fed, search very assiduously for disconfirming information, etc. Given that O'Pollahan have 1) a remarkably extensive history of atrocious misjudgments about the situation in Iraq and the competence of the Bush administration and 2) have an obvious stake in defending the disastrous war their reputations were staked on, that their claims about "on the ground" improvements cannot be trusted is the least that can be said. The fact that the claims they make that can be assessed with publicly available data continue to have a strong tendency to be tendentious or false makes this even more clear. It may not be true as a matter of formal logic that it is impossible for them to be right, but I think you'd be smarter to put your money in Baltimore Orioles 2007 World Series futures.
In related news, Thersmakes a wish: "You know what I want? The 3-Card-Monty concession outside the Washington Post editorial board room." I think the bidding for that starts at $500,000...
MORE ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF "DE-POLITICIZING" REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM.Dana has an excellent post responding to claims that progressives should "de-politicize" issues of reproductive justice, noting that the main problem with this is that it's impossible. We've already been through this with respect to the Iraq War, but you can't "de-politicize" an issue that is a) salient, and b) on which substantial groups of people have fundamentally incommensurable views. And this is true not only with respect to abortion but with other reproductive issues. Despite the endless attempts of the Will Saletans of the world to believe that if we just stop talking about abortion (natch, by endorsing his anti-Roe views entirely and calling it a "consensus") we can reach agreement on other issues. But we won't be able to reach a consensus about lowering abortion rates by increasing access to birth control and rational sex-ed because in general the American forced pregnancy lobby is opposed to these policies. You can't "de-politicize" an issue on which people disagree all the way down to first premises.
And this idea that a magic compromise is just waiting out there on these issues should be particularly untenable in the wake of Carhart II. The only thing that can be said for the idiotic "partial birth" bans is that, because the don't even arguably protect fetal life, they force people like Kennedy to fully reveal the fundamentally sexist underpinnings of the movement to regulate abortion; without the anachronistic assumptions about women's inferior decision-making capacities the legislation has no rational justification at all. Debates about abortion aren't just about abortion, but involve very deep divisions about the role of women in society and the desirability of regulating female sexuality, and these irreconcilable differences structure debates about not only abortion but all reproductive issues. To think that we can make them go away is dreaming in Technicolor.
VOCAB LESSONS. For reasons Jared Bernstein will elaborate on in a coming issue of the magazine, I'm unimpressed with Nicholas Kristoff's glowing column on Bryan Caplan's book suggesting that American voters are simply too stupid to vote like Libertarians. Indeed, even if I agreed with him on what the economic research suggests for American policy, I'd suggest that he's way overstating the role information has on voter preferences.
All that said, this bit in Kristof's column is really quite funny:
It’s true that nobody ever made money betting on the high level of campaign discourse. When George Smathers successfully ran for the Senate, legend has it (he denied it) that he took advantage of his constituents’ limited vocabulary by alleging that his opponent was “a shameless extrovert” who had “before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”
Not only that, but the miserable cur actually called Smathers' wife pulchritudinous! To her face!
HILLARY AND OUTSOURCING. The Obama campaign fumbled badly in June when it attempted to make an issue of Hillary Clinton's ties to Indian businesses implicated in the outsourcing of American jobs, releasing a press release that identified her as (D-Punjab). Today the Los Angeles Times offers up a more analytical take on the Senator's ties to India's Tata Consultancy Services, a company with 10,000 employees in the United States, 90 percent of whom are foreign-born. Clinton lured Tata to open an office in Buffalo, New York, the Western New York city that's only now beginning to revitalize after a decades-long economic slump. She heralded Tata's arrival as an opportunity for research collaboration between Buffalo's state university and the corporation.
What were the results? Tata created only 10 jobs in Buffalo (the company won't say how many of those employees are American citizens) and has so far not worked at all with the university. In 2004 Clinton defended herself to Lou Dobbs, saying, "Outsourcing does work both ways." But at least in the Tata deal -- and my hunch is that this is the case for many supposed partnerships between huge multinational corporations and public universities in economically beleaguered regions -- local benefits were minute.
The Times reports that earlier this month, Clinton assured an Indian-American audience in Silicon Valley that she'd fight for more visas for skilled workers like themselves, recognizing that there are benefits to both the United States and their home country. So while Clinton is talking frequently now about economic inequality -- I've heard her rail against astronomical CEO salaries, for example -- she isn't really backpedaling away from her long-time view of economic globalization, which is essentially a positive one.
BREDESEN ON HEALTH CARE. Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, during a semi-unobjectionable post on health care, writes:
Cover Tennessee passed in both chambers of the General Assembly with broad bipartisan support. Health care is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, it is an American issue.
That's great, Phil. Tell it to the millions of children who can't sign up for S-CHIP because the President is blocking reauthorization on grounds that federal health insurance for uninsured children is, in fact, a Democratic issue, and thus antithetical to Republican interests.
Bredesen goes on to say that "It comes back to personal responsibility - we don’t have it in our power to promise everyone free health insurance without limits. But we do have it in our power to offer them access to affordable and portable health insurance, and then the choice is theirs."
That paragraph isn't just indistinguishable from Republican rhetoric on health care. If you gave it to me blind, I'd tell you, with 100 percent certainty, that it is Republican rhetoric on health care. That Bredesen manages to write hundreds of words on the subject but can't bring himself to invoke any values beyond "personal responsibility" is, I think, telling.
O'Hanlon and Pollack insist that this is "a war that we just might win" without pausing to indicate what "victory" means in this context; at best, it seems, we could hope for some temporary stability. They seem to define stability as a reduction of civilian casualty rates by "roughly a third since the surge began". I've written before about the nonsensical efforts of surge advocates to claim success by pointing to Iraqi government casualty figures; no one believes that those figures are accurate, including the US military, the Iraqi government, and any sensible analyst. Nevertheless, lets take the argument seriously for a moment. If we take February 1 as the official start date (icasualties uses this date), then Iraqi casualties since the beginning of the Surge have amounted to 12741. Casualties in the six months prior to the Surge were 13462. That's a drop of about 700 dead, assuming that the count for July 2007 doesn't go up (it will). Okay, let's compare this six month period (12741) with the same six month period in 2006. From February through July of last year, 6216 Iraqis are recorded to have died. Note that 12741 is a larger number than 6216. Also note that the Golden Mosque was destroyed in February 2006, which set off (apparently not) the worst sectarian strife since the fall of Saddam.
Okay, that's not so super. I assume that Pollack and O'Hanlon are using "Surge Start Date Mojo"; you may have noticed that the "surge" has a magical start date that moves back and forth, depending on when the advocate wants to start counting from. So I'll do them the credit of assuming that they've found a creative way of arguing that civilian casualties have dropped by a third. If you start from the worst month ever, then it's not hard to find improvement. Unfortunately, this puts to the lie everything else they right about finding "stability" in Iraq; stability, it appears, does not include a cessation of bloody massacres, relentless suicide bombings, and an astonishing death rate. It's about outcomes, people; if the country is stabilizing, then civilian death rates should go down. If the insurgency is being defeated, then its capacity to launch attacks on US forces should decrease. Statistically, these things aren't happening. The same can be said for O'Hanlon and Pollack's claim that "everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people." That may be true, but it hasn't revealed itself yet in outcomes; Baghdad receives less electricity that it did a year ago, and far less than it received under Saddam Hussein.
I can only assume that Pollack and O'Hanlon consciously decided to wander Iraq with rose-colored glasses; they make no effort to detect or describe any of the enduring difficulties in the country. They don't, for example, note the continuing failure of the Iraqi political process, or the fact that the Iraqi prime minister apparently loathes David Petraeus. They don't mention the increasing tensions between Turks and Kurds in the north, or between Kurds and Sunnis in Kirkuk. They wave away the difficulties of training and sectarian violence within the Iraqi Army by noting that its ethnic divisions roughly mirror those of the country, without making any apparent effort to determine whether this diversity is within or across units. That's rather an important distinction, as diversity across units does not speak well for national unity. They don't mention that the Iraqi prime minister strongly opposes the strategy of bringing Sunni insurgent groups within the umbrella of the security services. They ignore the fact that sectarian violence in Baghdad may be down (if indeed it is down) because Sunnis and Shias have, through murder and intimidation, effectively ethnically cleansed their neighborhoods. They recklessly conflate, as the Bush administration has, the Iraqi insurgency as a whole with Al Qaeda, without considering that Al Qaeda has become formidable indeed if it can carry out hundreds of attacks per day during the "Surge".
In short, O'Hanlon and Pollack have set out to describe all of the positive aspects of the "Surge", and none of the negative. As I note about, even this effort is clumsy and deceptive; they have to manipulate the few statistics that might support their case. Perhaps worst of all, however, is this:
As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
Whatever criticism O'Hanlon and Pollack may have made of the Bush administration, they have both been vigorous supporters of the Surge, and they were both supporters of the initial invasion. I would like to say that their credibility as analysts depends on the perception of the Surge's success, but of course that's not quite right; no one ever loses pundit tenure simply by being appallingly wrong and obviously dishonest while advocating war. To paint themselves as harsh critics who've somehow "come around" is to create a fantasy.
Of Kenneth Pollack enough has been said. Of Michael O'Hanlon, more should be. Winning Ugly, written with Ivo Daalder about the Kosovo War, is a fine book that I've used before in classes. However, I would trust his analysis far more if I felt that he was more concerned with painting an accurate strategic picture than with maintaining his own position and influence. Note, for example, this awful Washington Times op-ed, in which he excoriates Harry Reid for pointing out that General David Petraeus would essentially be judge in his own case, assessing for Congress the success of a military operation he designed. Without apparent irony, O'Hanlon suggests that Reid's time would be better spent trying to produce a second Iraq Study Group. O'Hanlon doesn't bother noting that the first group was utterly ignored by the administration and by surge advocates like... Michael O'Hanlon. O'Hanlon also doesn't bother to delve into the rhetorical use to which the administration and its allies on the right have put General Petraeus, preferring instead simply to laud his integrity. I'm forcibly reminded of Ari Berman's article The Strategic Class, in which he detailed how think tank creatures like O'Hanlon and Pollack have carved out a space on the far right wing of the Democratic Party, and used it essentially to pillory left and moderate Dems into various interventions. The relevance of such analysts depends on their apostasy; they must be understood as standing apart from mainstream Democratic thought to have any influence at all.
Finally, I'm left thinking about the peculiar position that O'Hanlon and Pollack, among others, occupy with respect to the academy that produced them. Political science opinion, across the left-right spectrum and from all of the different schools of IR resolutely opposed the Iraq War and predicted that it would be a disaster. Rock ribbed realists, liberal institutionalist, and social constructivists disagreed as to why the war would be a disaster, but nevertheless stood against it almost to an individual. I have to wonder whether the continued advocacy of O'Hanlon and Pollack for disastrous policies in a disastrous war has something to do with the need to set themselves apart from the rest of academia, and to point out that they, unlike their Ph.D. holding brethren, have sensible and "serious" attitudes about military action.
THE OTHER DIRTY SOUTH.ViaSue Sturgis: The Environmental Integrity Project recently released a report about the most polluting power plants in the country. As Sturgis summarizes:
Of the 50 U.S. power plants emitting the largest amount of all the pollutants considered, the majority -- 31 facilities in all -- are located in the South. In fact, all of the nation's 11 top polluting power plants are located in just two Southern states: Alabama and Arkansas.
Reading this just reminds me of all the other measures in which the South fares poorly:
Children in poverty: Mississippi (50th), followed by Louisiana (49th), Alabama (44th), Arkansas (44th), South Carolina (42), North Carolina (39th), Tennessee (39th), Georgia (36th).
Teen motherhood: Missisippi (50th), Arkansas (45th), Alabama (45th), Louisiana (45th), Georgia (42nd), South Carolina (41st), Tennessee (40th), North Carolina (38th).
On many of these measures, southern states are multiple times worse than northern states. When you break it down to the county level, these disparities are even more horrific, with statistics in some poor counties in the deep South literally indistinguishable from the numbers in some third world countries.
AND LIONS WLL LAY WITH LAMBS. I'm not enough of a globalization watcher to know what impact this will have, but it looks like the next president of the International Monetary Fund -- that bugaboo of globalization-skeptics everywhere -- will be a French socialist. And not some weak-kneed, in-name-only French socialist, but one who sponsored the government's reduction of the workweek from 39 to 35 hours and loudly criticized the IMF's handling of the Asian financial crisis in the late-90s.
VETO POWER. On Friday the White House announced that even if Congress passes legislation reversing the Ledbetter ruling, Bush will veto it. The statement (pdf) said such legislation would "serve to impede justice" and "allegations from thirty years ago or more could be resurrected and filed in federal courts." The basic argument the right is making on this (on the Court and in the White House) is that 180 days is more than enough time for a discrimination filing to take place (even though most states already allow for up to 300 days) . As I've written before, it's rare to obtain knowledge of pay disparities with any certainty in such a short period of time, and often the initial disparity is so small it sometimes takes several years to discover the full effect. As long as Republicans control the White House, though, there seems to be little chance for any real efforts to combat discrimination.
JOE BIDEN, SECRETARY OF STATE? He's certainly been impressively forthright in the debates, and as Helene Cooperreports in the New York Times, his plan to partition Iraq into Shiastan, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan is gaining traction in Washington. Cooper writes:
Foreign policy analysts...pointed out that breaking up Iraq could cause bloodletting (as if that isn’t happening now) in Iraq’s urban areas. While Sunnis predominate in the western part of the country, Kurds in the north, and Shiites in the south, Iraq’s cities are not as homogeneous. Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul don’t have clear geographical lines separating the main groups.
Or at least they didn’t. The reality is, Iraq’s cities have become far more homogeneous recently as terrified residents have fled areas where their ethnic group doesn’t predominate. The neighborhoods around the edges of Baghdad have already experienced a lot of ethnic cleansing.
THE PUNDITS CAN'T DECIDE WHY THEY DON'T HAVE A CRUSH ON OBAMA. In general, I resist claims about which candidates "the media" does and doesn't like. True, there is a real hostility to John Edwards and there was a time when "the media" really was John McCain's base. Still, viewing coverage only through this lens often obscures more than it reveals. That said, I've been dismayed by just how unfair (and that's really the only word I can use) the media has been in its coverage of the recent Clinton-Obama fight (see my previous post for more on that). Initially many argued that Clinton won the debate:
Of the top tier candidates, there now appears to be little doubt as to who is the best debater: it's the senator from New York. Again last night Clinton was at the center of almost every conversation and she shined on the few tough(er) questions asked of her... And, again, Clinton drove home the experience issue with her response to the question over whether or not she would agree to meet with dictators like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Never mind that focus groups had Obama winning or that "experience" isn't necessarily foremost on Democrats' minds right now. I mean, "little doubt?" Seriously? Marc Ambinderexplained why most pundits are getting this wrong shortly after the debate:
The press seems to be very keen about Clinton's answer to the dictator meeting question. Whatever "presidential" means to the press -- and it seems to be mean non-pandering, serious, grave and reflective -- Clinton's answer was very "presidential." Do those Democrats who watched the debate on television agree? [...] If there is a disjuncture between the press's evaluation of Obama's performance and the voters' evaluation of his performance, it can probably be attributed a larger change orientation in the Democratic primary electorate.
Indeed, some pundits can't quite seem to explain what their issue with Obama is:
The Fix seems to find himself less enthusiastic about Obama's debate performances than the various focus groups/dial groups organized by television networks to provide instant reaction.
Take Monday night's debate. As we wrote, Obama dominated the early stages of the debate and closed strongly. But, in the middle he seemed to lose his way.
There's little question that when Obama is talking about putting the national interest over special interests and railing against lobbyists he is as good or better than any candidate. But, he isn't yet as consistent a performer as Hillary Clinton and at times Monday night Obama seemed to disappear a bit.
This is pretty weak tea. Cillizza doesn't really have any basis for his feeling that Obama did poorly, he just doesn't feel warmly towards him. That's fine, but it doesn't mean Obama is bad at debating or campaigning. I've used Cillizza as an example because he's very straightforward and honest, but I get the same vibe from a lot of coverage and especially when political reporters are interviewed.
The real issue, I think, is that the pundits don't quite seem willing to admit that the the Democratic primary electorate has different preferences, both in terms of policies and candidate attributes, than they do. This also, I think, explains why Clinton unwisely dove into the fight with Obama after the debate (for example she posted a clip of the exchange on her website and otherwise did her best to keep the story going). If the media were the constituency that mattered that would have been a good decision, but it wasn't because they media doesn't actually represent the Democratic party primary electorate's views. This is what makes me think, as more people start paying attention to the actual candidates rather than campaign journalism, Obama will make gains.
THE SHAPE OF ASS-COVERING TO COME. At the ACS conference this weekend, there was an interesting panel about covering the court, moderated by Tom Goldstein (who turns out to be a terrific, witty public speaker) featuring Emily Bazelon (part of Slate's formidable, gratifyingly non-contrarian one-two punch for legal commentary), Linda Greenhouse, and the man famous for asserting his nominal liberalism before taking the Republican side in virtually all legal and political controversies, Stuart Taylor. Goldstein (paraphrasing here) asked Taylor if he had second thoughts about his clown-show claims that Sam Alito was a moderate who would disappoint conservatives. Taylor briefly conceded that Alito and Roberts had been more conservative that he expected, but then tried to reassert their fabled moderation by noting that not only Ginsburg and Stevens but Scalia attacked their jurisprudence.
But, of course, Scalia didn't attack Roberts because of any ideological differences. Rather, he attacked Roberts and Alito for reaching substantive conclusions indistinguishable from Scalia's but then being dishonest about what it means for whether precedents remain good law. This doesn't make them moderates; it means that they're completely doctrinaire reactionaries who would prefer that their gutting of precedents attract as little attention as possible, while Thomas and Scalia are at least willing to be honest about what they're doing. This may fool people like Taylor, but it shouldn't fool you.
HRC MUST BE PISSED... ...at the childhood friend, John Peavoy, who handed over a cache of letters she wrote him in college to a New York Times reporter. An English professor at Scripps College in California, Peavoy says he's not sure whether he'll vote for Clinton (with whom he hasn't spoken in decades) or Barack Obama.
Though written in the late sixties, the letters are free of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, except for their author's disapproval of a friend who does acid. Hillary relates typical adolescent mood swings in overwrought prose, but also discusses her alienation from her conservative Illinois upbringing and her transfer of political allegiances from the Republican to the Democratic Party. She calls a Republican convention “a farce that would have done Oscar Wilde credit” and discusses antiwar views.
All in all, these letters aren't particularly revelatory. They prove only that Hillary has been bookish, ambitious, and maybe a little bit condescending her entire life.
CLINTON WON THE BATTLE, OBAMA IS WINNING THE WAR. Improbably, the Clinton-Obama fight is still going strong and, also improbably, Obama now seems to have the upper hand. How do I know? In the first 24 hours after the debate it was Obama who was arguing Clinton was distorting his position, now it's Clinton's surrogates who are arguing Obama is distorting her statement. As Marc Ambinderpointed out, It's never a good thing in politics to say "what I meant to say was." That's the position Obama was in shortly after the debate:
[Clinton is] somehow maintaining [that] my statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting was about. I didn't say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon. From what I heard the point was well, I wouldn't do that because it might allow leaders like Hugo Chavez to score propaganda points. I think that is absolutely wrong.
Yet, in a deeply impressive bit of street-fighting the Obama campaign has managed to turn what originally was a Clinton attack on him into a counterattack on Clinton. On Thursday and Friday both campaigns were going at it. Obama called Clinton "Bush-Cheney lite" and Cliton's campaign called Obama "Naive." There were a bunch of "both sides think they can win this" articles and blog posts written. Today however, I'm ready to call this for Obama. Polling shows more people agree with him than Clinton (though this is probably a pretty hard question to poll fairly since it depends so much on wording) and Clinton's campaign is now on the defensive. Clinton supporter and first-tier surrogate Tom Vilsack is now saying that Clinton actually agrees with Obama:
"Rather than just simply acknowledging the mistake that was made during the course of the debate, the Senator has attempted to distort Senator Clinton's record in an effort to mask this confusing statement of his," said Vilsack. "It's not the Iowa way." Vilsack also scolded Obama for comparing Clinton's foreign policy philosophy to that of the Bush administration; "These comments are so wrong, one could say that they are certainly audacious, but honestly they are not particularly hopeful," said Vilsack.
You know you're losing when you start complaining that the other side is being unfair in not "admitting the mistake." The Obama campaign is packed with incredibly sharp people (as of course is Clinton's) and any candidate who thinks Obama's rhetoric means he won't be willing to give as good as he gets is going to be quite rudely surprised.
As the ever-prescient E. J. Dionnenoted last Friday, this debate helps Obama in two ways. First, he gets to go one-on-one with the frontrunner which is a good for him and bad for her. Second, it allows him to make the debate aobut her vote for the Iraq war. Clinton's strength, experience, has gone head to head against Obama's, his better record of judgement and his commitment to change, and, based on the evidence above, I think Dionne's analysis is right and Obama will come out this fight strengthened.
YOU, SIR, ARE NO VINEGAR JOE STILWELL. I have to disagree withJohn (blogging at Ezra's place):
We don't need to be psychics to figure where this leads: faced with the choice of backing Petraeus, or backing the nominal Iraqi PM, the U.S. Govt. will find some cushy job for Petraeus to retire to.
Eh... Nouri Al-Maliki looks a lot more like Ngo Dinh Diem to me than Chiang Kai Shek. Indeed, he bears even more resemblance to the endless series of jokers, like Nguyen Cao Ky, who "ruled" South Vietnam at one point or another during the war. The Bush administration and its neoconservative allies have invested too much of their prestige in Petraeus to let someone as tangential to the war effort as the Prime Minister of Iraq get in the way. Remember, Petraeus is the Ulysses S. Grant to Bush's Lincoln, the Creighton Abrams to Bush's... Nixon? Anyway, he's not going anywhere.
In a related story, it looks like the same can be said for counter-insurgency expert and all around rock star Colonel H.R. McMaster, who's been turned down for promotion to brigadier general for a second time. Armchair Generalist has a discussion, as does Small War Journal.
CAN WE NOT LET THE CLEAVAGE CONVERSATION BEGIN?The Washington Post today has an article defending it's recent style section piece on Hillary Clinton's neckline: "Let the Cleavage Conversation Begin." How about not? Pretty please? The article is a completely vapid attempt to justify what was itself a completely vapid piece that was rightly derided and condemned by pretty much everyone. The best part is the author of the original piece's defense:
People have gone down the road of saying, 'I can't believe you're writing about her breasts.' I wasn't writing about her breasts. I was writing about her neckline."
Because that's so much better. Seriously if this turns into the next haircut controversy I'm going to lose it completely. We all know Hillary Clinton has breasts, a month of the media talking about them isn't going to do anyone any good. In fact, I'm pretty sure it'll do a lot of bad...
CONSERVATIVES ARE TURNING JAPANESE, I REALLY THINK SO. Perhaps because conservatism in the U.S. is collapsing faster than the Tour de France, Republicans have recently consoled themselves with foreign elections. Most recently they spent a good deal of time crowing about the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy in France (better not tell them about his fondness for national-champion industries), and now they're turning their attention to Japan, where the ruling LDP faces a tough election this weekend.
Not only do they support the conservative, corrupt and generally hidebound LDP, they specifically support Shinzo "Comfort women? What comfort women?" Abe (see this article by Matt Sledge for more on that) because he has the most pro-U.S. and anti-Chinese foreign policy vision. In particular, the good folks at AEI like his plan to "integrating East Asia into a common economic bloc and linking democracies in the region to create an 'arc of freedom and prosperity'" -- a "co-prosperity sphere" you might call it. No, I don't think Abe has evil imperialist designs on East Asia, but I also don't think we should hope for the victory of man whose only foreign policy achievement has been at pointlessly ratcheting up tension in the area. How exactly is continuously goading China by lying about the past supposed to make us safer?
I also enjoyed this segment:
The vote likely will pivot on scandal and mismanagement of the country's enormous pension system. This is a shame. The election really should be about Mr. Abe's vision for a more activist international role for Japan.
Think for a moment about just how arrogant that is. The Japanese should ignore how well their government is, you know, governing and instead make their electoral decisions based on how well their leaders serve what right-wing U.S. pundits think are our interests in the area. Clearly, after all, the most important thing for the average Japanese citizen is how aggressively his country expands it's military.
Things were so much simpler when we paid millions of dollars to get friendly politicians elected in Japan. I'm sure the AEI is drafting a paper on it now...
BUSH TO VICTIMS OF PAY DISCRIMINATION: DROP DEAD. Many progressives were shocked by the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co to interpret workplace discrimination laws so narrowly as to throw out all cases that aren't brought within 180 days of a discriminatory pay decision. This is obviously unfair because one often does not realize for some time that their raise was inadequate. Rep. George Miller (D- CA) and 31 cosponsors have introduced legislation to reverse this unjust decision. Under theLedbetter Fair Pay Act, workers could instead bring suit within 180 days of receiving any paycheck affected by the discriminatory decision.
That might sound reasonable to you but apparently it's an outrage to the White House, which announced today a statement of administration policy strongly opposing the bill. Surely they must have some serious grounds for wanting to prevent potential victims of discrimination from having their day in court right? Wrong. They just hide behind the canard that the bill's "vastly expanded statute of limitations would exacerbate the existing heavy burden on the courts by encouraging the filing of stale claims." That's a pretty weak excuse. Am I crazy to suggest could we call the rightwing's bluff by introducing a bill to simply create more courts and hire more judges since that would presumably solve this problem they hide behind?
THE KIDS ARE ALL LEFT. As a final note to today's blogging about sex and religion (here, here, and here), an interesting new survey shows that 25% of young people describe their religious affiliation as "none," compared to only 11% of the general population.
The survey (in .pdf form here) was done by Democracy Corp/Greenberg Quinlan Rosen, and has some other nice numbers as well:
Young people think Democrats can do a better job on youth issues (+39 net margin), the environment (+38), healthcare (+35), Iraq (+33), energy independence (+32), the federal budget (+25), the economy and jobs (+24), the war on terrorism (+21), values (+15), taxes (+13), and guns (+4). No issue polled was thought to be better handled by the GOP.
52% of young people support gay marriage. 67% believe "same sex couples trying to get married are courageous in facing opposition and really committed to building happy lives together." 61% think global warming is an immediate threat. 60% believe religion should not play a role in politics.
WONK ROUND-UP. So, as it turns out, think tanks don't release all that many papers. They don't work in blog time, where weekly features seem like a good idea. So these round-ups were getting a bit thin on actual things to round-up. Mindful of that, I'm broadening the mandate a bit, and will be including all sorts of wonky happenings, from new candidate plans to academic papers. to journal studies. Ready? Let's go.
DoddCare: Chris Dodd released his health care plan yesterday, and it's not bad. Not great, but not bad. It essentially creates a Federal Employees Health Benefit Program for all Americans -- which means all Americans will have access to a menu of subsidized and regulated private plans. There's a mandate for coverage, so it will achieve something quite close to universality, and once you're in Dodd's new healthmart, your insurance can follow you from job to job.
That said, the plan has no public insurance option, doesn't dissolve the current system or even envelope currently existing federal programs, and doesn't look to me like it's got much in the way of cost control. It's considerably less ambitious than what both Edwards and Obama have proposed. However, it's the sort of plan that, if you believe Congress will be more likely to pass something modest than massive, actually appears achievable. I'm not, myself, a fan of incrementalism, but others are, and Dodd's proposal is a fairly wise way of going about it. Given his poll numbers, though, it's rather surprising he didn't go for something a bit more game-changing. I was genuinely hoping for something approaching single-payer from him. It would've allowed him to break through on the subject, while this plan will be lost in the mix.
Insurance Matters. A New England Journal of Medicine study tracked what happens when individuals who've long been uninsured enter Medicare. This won't exactly shock anyone in the audience, but it turns out that they need a lot more care than those who've been insured in recent years. They've got all sorts of conditions no one's been treating, This costs more money. Astonishing, I know.
One issue with the uninsured is that we often are, in a sense, kicking the can down the road. We live in a society that does guarantee emergency care. But dealing with hypertension when it begins rather than ten years after it first started not only improves heath, but can cost less. Statin drugs are cheaper than heart surgeries.
The Edwards Tax Plan. Billed as "Restoring Economic Fairness," the Edwards tax plan has the normal mixture of family-friendly tax credits and EITC increases. The big news, such as it goes, is that it raises the rate on capital gains income back up to 28 percent ("the same rate signed into law by President Reagan."), thus bringing the taxation of income from wealth back into line with the rates on income from labor. It also repeals the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 a year.
How Pre-K Programs Pay-Off in the States. Wondering how high-quality Pre-K programs have effected "federal and state budgets, crime costs, and the earnings of pre-K participating children and adults" in, say, Missouri? EPI's got ya' covered.
A Sustainable Health System For All Americans. The good folks at New America tell you what their perfect system would look like. "It would shift the responsibility for providing health insurance from the employer to the individual, freeing American companies to concentrate on growth and competitiveness without having to worry about rising health care costs. It would make health insurance mandatory for all U.S. citizens, but it would also offer generous subsidies and large risk pools to help defray the cost of premiums. It would be guided by a refocused approach to health care delivery that emphasizes prevention, early diagnosis, and evidence-based treatments rather than expensive and often known-to-be ineffective diagnostic and treatment techniques. And it would encourage the widespread adoption of information technology to reduce administrative costs and help all clinicians and patients share best-practice information in real time."
FROM LI-LO TO LOST IN SPACE. Geez, is nothing sacred? Apparently not, reports the AP:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - At least twice, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a flight-safety risk, an aviation weekly reported Thursday, citing a special panel studying astronaut health.
The independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch that was within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology, which reported the finding on its Web site...
The panel was created following the arrest in February of former space shuttle flier Lisa Nowak, who was implicated in a love triangle.
In the astronauts' defense, I should say that the prospect of being violently propelled off the planet on a rocket might cause a reasonable person to want a drink beforehand, and it's not like there have ever been any Space Shuttle fender benders.*
*Those space disasters have occured have been due to mechanical and administrative, rather than drink-induced, failures.
MORE (BLOGGING ABOUT) SEX! Following up on Dana and Ezra's recent posts, I highly recommend this Slate review of a book on exactly this topic by Mark Regnerus. It turns out that the best way to get evangelical teens to avoid sex is for them to see themselves as an "embattled minority" beset on all sides by wild sex-crazed peers. Alternatively they could be Mormons. The piece is full of other fun details too. Jews are less likely to have had sex but "more likely to say sex is pleasurable and more likely to have experienced oral sex."
RE: NOT SO HIP TO THE INTERTUBES. I don't think hipness is the question. Rather, spontaneity is. The GOP candidates want to stay away from the YouTube debate because they're afraid of even mildly uncontrollable settings. It's rather remarkable, actually, that the media, who relies on candidates entering unscripted settings in order to make news/give reporters some to write about don't exhibit some class solidarity and direct one-tenth the scorn they heaped on John Edwards haircut towards the GOP's cowardice and unwillingness to speak before the voters in an even mildly unpredictable setting.
All that said, I think a John McCain/Ron Paul debate would be awesome, and would happily watch it on Pay-Per-View or, better yet, on YouTube itself.
BUSH V. CALIFORNIA. FBI Director Robert Mueller wasn't the only one revealing fishy and potentially illegal Administration blunders yesterday. Testifying before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, Stephen L. Johnson, head of the EPA, declined to say whether the Transportation Department is lobbying against California's proposed guidelines for cutting automobile carbon emissions by 25 percent beginning in 2009. The San Jose Mercury Newsreports:
The auto industry is arguing for a single federal standard. That is the same case that Transportation Department officials sought to make when they contacted lawmakers' offices in early June, according to department documents released last month to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight Government Reform Committee.
GOP NOT SO HIP TO THE INTERTUBES. Via Salon: It's fascinating/typical that only two GOP candidates, Ron Paul and John McCain, have agreed to participate in the GOP version of the YouTube/CNN debate we all enjoyed so much this week. This looks to me a little bit like print journalists whining about the corrosive effects of online media. Don't you get it, guys? You can't resist this stuff.
TODAY IN TAP ONLINE.Dana Goldsteinattends an event in which Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), mother of a three-month old, talks to young conservative women about work/life balance issues.
It's no wonder McMorris Rodgers feels "guilty." Unlike many conservatives, she seems to recognize she's lucky, and not just in her selection of a husband. She says she wishes more women could have the benefits she enjoys of a flexible work schedule, generous family leave time, and the privilege of working from home. But such policies have never been endorsed by her own political party. Republicans are taking a back seat as Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) leads the fight to expand the Family Medical Leave Act, which would enshrine into law some of the flexibility McMorris Rodgers theoretically endorses. The Women's Caucus claims bipartisan leadership on FMLA, so it will be interesting to see where McMorris Rodgers, the group's Republican leader, comes down on the issue.
McMorris Rodgers paints a picture of a happy, post-gender-ideology family, so it's difficult to understand her fawning reception at the Heritage Foundation. Just last month the think tank hosted an event telling young women that if they focus too much on their careers in their 20s and 30s -- as McMorris Rodgers says she did -- they will alienate men and become "sad, lonely, and confused." How's that for mixed messages?
Harold Meyersonwrites that a new Congressional inquiry into outsourcing may shed some light on how well the federal government monitors the performance of its contractors.
Brian Beutlerreports that FBI Director Robert Mueller's testimony yesterday on warrantless wiretapping indicates that Gonzales may have lied to the Senate.
NINE-AND-A-HALF MONTHS. Like Dana, I find it refreshing to have a real life evangelical writing in a top op-ed page. But something about Michael Gerson's op-ed, which took as its subject the studies showing mainline Protestant teens have sex later than evangelical teens, struck me as odd. As Gerson explores the issue, he's enthused to learn that this isn't really about which religion is superior at promoting chastity, but simple demographics. Protestants are richer:
When the statistics on teen sexuality are controlled for social and economic factors, conservative Protestant teens first have sex at about the same time as their peers -- the average is midway through their 16th year. That is hardly comforting to conservative Protestant parents, who would expect more bang for the bucks they spend funding Sunday schools -- well, actually, less bang.
But these numbers shift when controlled for religious intensity. For those who attend church often, sexual activity is delayed until nearly 17, while nominal evangelicals begin at 16.2 years, earlier than the national average.
As a coastal elite, I find that utterly baffling. The impressive abstinence gains offered by fervent religious commitment amount to nine-and-a-half months? Why do we even care about doing that? I understand if you want to make the marker marriage, as that at least has a biblical pedigree. But I genuinely don't understand the celebration, or even interest, in a delay so small, and so utterly devoid of obvious social benefits.
COMPASSION CONSERVATISM REDUX. Former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson is a welcome addition to the Washington Post op-ed page because, as one of the guys who actually believed in compassionate conservatism, he's willing to say things other conservatives just won't. Today, for instance, he admits that Evangelical teenagers, those same kids who are wearing chastity rings and swearing not to masturbate, actually have sex earlier than their mainline Protestant peers. This can be partly accounted for by socioeconomics -- they're less likely to go to college, for instance, which correlates with an earlier sexual debut no matter what the teenager's religion. But even controlled for social and economic class, Evangelical teens first have sex at about the same time as all American teenagers, between the ages of 16 and 17.
Gerson concludes that the problem (because there's obviously a problem with sex, right?) is that although teens hear abstinence-only lectures, they aren't truly embedded in "social structures and networks that foster duty and discipline." But what about those kids who, together with hundreds of their peers, make public abstinence pledges through programs like True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing? At some high schools, every single student attends a presentation and makes the pledge. That's a shared community meant to foster discipline, right? Well, as numerous studies show, a year after the pledge those teenagers will be having sex and contracting STIs at the same rate as their non-pledging peers, but will be using contraceptives and protection less often.
I hope conservatives read to the end of Gerson's column, where he singles out one American community for successfully encouraging their children to delay sex, avoid pregnancy, and use protection: college-educated "liberal elites." Of course, their kids are having sex too. They're just being smarter about it. So maybe economic security and a quality education are the best ways to improve teenagers' sexual health? Hmmm, I wonder what we can do to foster those qualities...
I LOVE THIS IDEA! Call me Grinch (and trust me, you will if you meet me in December), but I think it would do well-off children a world of good to, as thisNew York Times article describes, collect small donations for a local charity or organization in lieu of receiving dozens of birthday gifts. When I was a kid, my most treasured presents were the ones from my parents, while the stuff other kids' parents picked out for me was often not quite right. They didn't know I wasn't into horses, for example.
Of course, I imagine this might be a hard sell if your kid is the first on the block to host a gift-reduced birthday party. But one little boy in the article gets a tour of the town fire station in exchange for his donation. How cool is that? Another benefit could be a lifetime understanding of altruism and modesty, which parents might be very happy about when it comes time to plan the Sweet Sixteen, bar mitzvah, or wedding.
WOULD YOU LIKE THAT PRESS RELEASE WITH A SIDE OF SCHADENFREUDE? A press release from Pete Stark's office on the mark-up of the Children's Health and Medicare Protection Act reads:
CHAMP provides health care to 11 million kids, reverses the Republican drive to privatize Medicare, and protects and preserves an improved Medicare program for the future. It ensures seniors and people with disabilities can continue to see their doctors, improves Medicare's preventive benefits and mental health services for beneficiaries, and reduces costs for beneficiaries with low incomes.
“It’s been many years since those of us on the Democratic side of the aisle have been able to schedule a markup on a bill that is a priority for us. I’m pleased to be here.
We’re going to get complaints from the other side of the aisle. I don’t blame them. It’s no fun being in the minority – and I’ve got twelve years of empathy.
IS THIS WHAT THE HOUSING BUST LOOKS LIKE? The Dow's taken a 400 point plunge today over concerns that defaults and foreclosures are going to take down credit and mortgage companies. I'm no expert, but my impression is that that's a bad thing.
MICHELLE MALKIN DEMONSTRATES HOW TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS. Try to intimidate them. When they drop their anonymity to add credence to an article you doubt because it conflicts with your worldview, post their picture on your blog. Post their MySpace page on your blog. Quote people calling them a "pretentious ass" and a "strange chap. Write vaguely threatening lines like "Milblogger/ documentarian J.D. Johannes is headed back to FOB Falcon in Iraq in a few weeks, where Beauchamp’s unit was located (and which Johannes guessed correctly). Johannes has some words for the TNR writer." Find and post their college poetry.
Look, these people are thugs. They freaked out about The New Republic's anonymous diarist because his words clashed with the childish mythology they've constructed around the US Military. Despite lacking any actual evidence disproving or even calling into question his story, they were able to make enough noise to spark an investigation and media attention. And all this will only further confirm their hunch. By creating the optics of wrongdoing, they will reassure themselves and those around them that wrong was, indeed, done. And their great enemy, The New York Times, abets it all. Proud day for the blogosphere, and for any and all decent human beings who align themselves with Makin and her hordes.
LIKELY STORY. I'd like to second everything Matthas to say here about the appalling brow-beating the conservative press has been giving The New Republic over its controversial "Baghdad Diarist." But let's not neglect the role of The New York Times in fomenting doubts, either. An additional reason people have huffed and puffed about whether or not author Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a.k.a. "Scott Thomas," was really a member of the armed forces is because Times reporter Louise Story inaccurately reported on Tuesday that there was some question on the matter -- despite the fact that she had been assured he was a member of the military. She tried to make it look as though TNR editor Frank Foer was being shifty or perhaps even lying, ending her story on the controversy:
The magazine granted anonymity to the writer to keep him from being punished by his military superiors and to allow him to write candidly, Mr. Foer said. He said that he had met the writer and that he knows with "near certainty" that he is, in fact, a soldier.
Later, she added a new final sentence, according to close Times watchers on the right:
After this article appeared, Mr. Foer said he was "absolutely certain" that the author is a soldier.
But that's not a proper correction and the chronology in the story that's online consequently is a mess. Based on the antecedent, it reads as if Story had interviewed Frank about the Diarist (the most probable "this" in "this story") before it was published, which doesn't make any sense. And look at the prejudicial language Story used early on:
several readers and a spokesman for the base where the soldier is supposedly based have written in, raising more questions.
Supposedly? Why couldn't she just say "where The New Republic says the soldier is based"? That "supposedly" is an editorial taking of sides on the part of the writer, inserted into what should be a straight news piece to signal readers to question the veracity of The New Republic's statements. TNR editors were quick to correct the false impression her article created, writing at The Plank: "Scott Thomas is a soldier in Iraq... we know this with absolute certainty."
Why the Times thought the best reporter for a charged and messy media accuracy story was someone whose own skills have been the subject of tremendous controversy in the past is a mystery to me. Close readers of The Times will recall this Jack Shafer column from 2005, "Weasel-Words Rip My Flesh! Spotting a bogus trend story on Page One of today's New York Times," about Story's piece on young women who think they don't want to work once they have children. The piece was so "bogus" Shafer opined: "She deserves a week in the stockades. And her editor deserves a month." I rebutted her "facts" here at The Prospect, Shafer wrote a follow-up piece, and the blogs went into overdrive documenting her outrageous over-writing.
Now that we have an answer to the question she led with on Tuesday -- "Just who is the “Baghdad Diarist”?" -- it's clear that on the question of whether Thomas is who he said he was, at least, it is TNR's accusers who have been the fabulists.
I think it would be pretty awesome if instead of going the legal route to try to impose accountability on the president and his cabinet, congress just started making more creative use of the power of the purse. So, for instance, how about a spending bill that significantly boosted combat pay for soldiers deployed in Iraq, while also reducing the salary of the Attorney General to minimum wage? Or minimum wage for the entire White House staff? My understanding is that congress can do this, or at least attempt to. Now, of course, you might say that they’ll never get the votes necessary to over-ride a filibuster or veto, but I think setting up a bill in which Republicans had to vote against an increase in combat pay for the sole reason that it would result in a pay cut for the attorney general would make for pretty good optics.
One thing I wish Democrats had a better sense of is how much optics matter right now. If the Republicans will filibuster, and George Bush will veto, every proactive policy change they offer, then the achievable goal is not passing impressive legislation, but building popular support for a progressive agenda and making the opposition look obstructionist and myopic. But this doesn't seem to have penetrated with Senate Democrats. Reid grudgingly forced Republicans to spend a night of filibustering withdrawal -- but only a night. So the optics happened when everyone else was asleep. So far as I can tell, Reid did that to satisfy some progressives, and inconvenience the opposition. Since then, of course, we've passed...nothing, and even a bipartisan compromise to come closer to fully funding S-CHIP is facing a presidential veto. Reid seems very interesting in preserving time to Get Things Done, but that's not actually resulting in anything getting done, or in popularity for his caucus.
PRIUS PUNDITRY:Robert Samuelson has achieved the impossible. As an anti-sprawl crusader who staunchly advocates higher gasoline taxes, I never thought I'd read a column arguing for a $1-2 per gallon increase in the gas tax that is totally obnoxious and illogical. And yet, the Washington Post's Samuelson did just that in his most recent piece. Samuelson devotes seven paragraphs to attacking Prius drivers as self-righteous show-offs. He has no empirical data to support his nasty assumption such as a poll of Prius drivers as to why they buy those cars. But he does indulge in some perverse sleight of hand when he argues:
The Prius is, I think, a parable for the broader politics of global warming. Prius politics is mostly about showing off, not curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Politicians pander to "green" constituents who want to feel good about themselves. Grandiose goals are declared. But measures to achieve them are deferred -- or don't exist.
This makes absolutely no sense. Samuelson claims without evidence that buying a fuel efficient hybrid is about "showing off" and declaring grandiose goals while deferring measures to achieve them. But buying an efficient car is precisely a measure to achieve lower greenhouse gas emissions. Emitting fewer greenhouse gases is demonstrably what it does, while Samuelson's argument that the buyer's motivation is really "showing off" is just lazy conjecture. It's also irrelevant -- a Prius doesn't emit more CO2 if its driver has the wrong motivations.
And Samuelson totally buries the lead under his unfair attacks on the citizens who have chosen to do their part in slowing global warming. It turns out he's actually for sensible progressive policies to address carbon emissions, including the higher gas tax (to force people to buy more Priuses just like those prigs he can't tolerate) and an anti-sprawl measure to reduce average home size. But then he throws up his hands and says that of his proposals only higher fuel efficiency standards are politically plausible. Well that's very helpful.
So what is his conclusion? That, say, we need to convince the public to accept some lifestyle adjustments to make his other suggestions more likely to be implemented? No that would reek of the self-righteous "Prius politics" he just wasted newsprint deploring. Instead Samuelson says,
Deep reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases might someday occur if both plug-in hybrid vehicles and underground storage of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants become commercially viable. Meanwhile, Prius politics is a delusional exercise in public relations that, while not helping the environment, might hurt the economy.
Well, that's helpful. So overall Samuelson contends that we could stop global warming but the public is unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices and we're doomed unless technology saves us. But since there's nothing we can do about the environment we should just focus on growing the economy and somehow, although he makes literally no effort to explain the mechanism at work, a handful of eco-concious consumers buying efficient automobiles will disrupt that. Maybe David Broder isn't the most inane columnist on the Post op-ed page after all.
WHEN ANIMALS CONDUCT COVERT OPERATIONS... AND ATTACK. In one of the weirder stories I've seen recently, Iranian Police have picked up for questioning 14 squirrels that allegedly were carrying spying equipment (via Boing Boing and Danger Room):
The IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency] said that the squirrels were kitted out by foreign intelligence services - but were captured two weeks ago by police officers.
A Foreign Office source told Sky News: "The story is nuts."
Yet this is not the strangest story of modified animals used by the military to come out of the Middle East in the last few weeks. Locals in Basra have become convince that the British military has release man-eating badgers into the city in an attempt to do I don't know what (hard to imagine the thought process there). This occasioned what I can only describe as pretty much the best public statement ever:
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.
THE STATE OF PLAY ON S-CHIP. My column today is on the ideological subtext of the fight over reauthorizing and expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and how the White House has turned it into a proxy war over universal health care. Read it and be enlightened. But before the showdown gets much further, the various bills actually have to pass Congress, which, for the first time in Nancy Pelosi's leadership, appears tough.
The hang-up is, essentially, tobacco. The House bill reauthorizing and expanding S-CHIP pays for itself in a couple ways, the primary one being a 41 cent increase in the tobacco tax. This has left Democrats from tobacco states deeply skittish about the legislation. Add in the usual intransigence of Blue Dog and business friendly types, both of whom are grumbling about the increase in spending and the levying of a new fee, and the House bill is expected to actually spark a fight inside the caucus.
The House bill also has another element, which the Senate bill completely foregoes: Reform of the Medicare Advantage plans. For a longer explanation of this issue, Bob Berenson wrote a piece on it back in December. But the quick lay of the land is this: Back in 1982, Congress tried to unleash the magic of the free market by letting private insurers offer Medicare plans for seniors who wanted them. The insurers would be paid at the same rates as Medicare and, if they were indeed more efficient, could then offer more expansive benefits and out-compete the public program.
They were not more efficient. But they've been very good at lobbying Republican Congresses. And so now, the government is paying these private plans about 120 percent of what Medicare gets per patient. In other words, the government is overpaying these plans in order to help them out-compete the public plan -- which they're still not doing. It's an almost hilariously absurd state of affairs, were it not actually costing us all a lot of money.
So the House bill equalizes those payments back to 100 percent of what Medicare gets. If the private insurers can compete on a level playing ground -- and it should be noted here that they get to pay the same rates to providers that Medicare has negotiated, so it is a level playing field -- then so be it. If they can't, they can't. But industry groups are predictably unhappy to see this gravy train ending and so they've launched a massive advertising and lobbying campaign to block the bill. So there are a lot of groups potentially pressing against passage. On the other hand, it is health care for kids...
HOUSE SAYS NO PERMANENT OCCUPATION. Twenty-four Republicans were the only House members yesterday to vote "no" on a resolution that would prevent the United States from establishing "any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq or to exercise United States economic control of the oil resources of Iraq.” Republicans claim the bill was little more than political theater, since the Bush administration has never said it supports a permanent occupation of Iraq. But as Spencer Ackermanreported in the Prospect last year, the construction of massive American military infrastructure in Iraq suggests otherwise:
[The Army] started dispensing contracts to defense firms that could build and maintain an infrastructure sufficient to support an indefinite U.S. military presence. At Fort Monmouth, 6,000 miles from Iraq, a communications project was born, called the Central Iraq Microwave System, or CIMS.
The CIMS project has a simple objective: to connect the sprawling U.S. base outside of Baghdad, known as Camp Victory, with the rest of the U.S. bases in Iraq. Three aspects of CIMS are especially noteworthy: First, it's a land-based network of huge communications towers and underground fiber-optic cables, rather than a comparatively costly but temporary system reliant on satellite signals. Second, it won't connect every base in Iraq to Baghdad -- just the bases that the United States plans on keeping far into the future. Finally, its completion will connect Baghdad to the other U.S. military installations in the Middle East, from Qatar to Afghanistan.
MORE ON THE FEDERALISM DODGE. To follow up on Matt and Ezra, another angle to run at it from is to apply the logic to the civil rights movement. If one takes the Rauch/Brownstein argument seriously, wasn't it also wrong to "federalize" the divisive issue of segregation? Of course, they wouldn't say that, but that first of all demonstrates the underlying question-begging; as a normative matter, 99% of the time saying something should be "left to the states" is just another way of saying that the question of social justice isn't a very high priority.
But even more importantly, it also raises obvious problem for their empirical claims: desegregation and disenfranchisement were "protest issues" even when they were left to the states, and became "ordinary politics" issues after they were federalized. And to get on my old hobbyhorse, the gentility of the American abortion debate pre-Roe has been grossly romanticized, and it's also worth noting that Canada has federalized both abortion and gay marriage, and not only have the issues remained largely "ordinary politics" they aren't even especially salient, and at least with the former the outcome has been perfectly stable. This suggests that federalism isn't the key variable here. There's no reason to believe that allowing 20 states to ban abortion will somehow diminish the conflict over abortion, and of course you have the negative externality of many women being maimed or killed in black market abortions, arbitrarily forced to carry pregnancies to term, etc.
And, of course, there's the larger issue: why "protest politics" is supposed to be a problem in the first place. People protesting and mobilizing around what they consider to be fundamental injustices, at least in the context of a nation where the basic legitimacy of the state isn't in question, is the sign of a healthy polity, not a dysfunctional one.
NEEDLE EXCHANGES COME TO THE DISTRICT. In a bit of good news for the District, the Democratic Congress has lifted the ban on clean needle exchanges within Washington, DC. According to The Hill, the White House isn't expected to make a fuss, and the programs could come online as soon as October. Clean needle exchanges are one of those issues where the desires of politicians to look tough on crime literally cost the death of thousands of their constituents. DC, with its absurdly high AIDS rate -- the highest among all medium-sized cities in the country -- has been particularly hard hit.
CUTBACKS IN HISTORY, SCIENCE, ART, AND MUSIC. According to a new study from the Center on Education Policy, 44 percent of elementary schools nationwide have cut down on subjects that No Child Left Behind considers non-essential in order to focus more instruction time to reading and math skills. CEP has some very sensible recommendations on how to update NCLB to maintain its focus on skill-building without depriving kids of an education in American history, the fun of science experiments, or the joys of art and music:
- Stagger testing requirements to include tests in other academic subjects. Because our
survey data indicate that what is tested is what is taught, students should be tested in math and English language arts in grades 3, 5, and 7 and once in high school, and in social studies and science in grades 4, 6, and 8 and once in high school.
- Provide federal funds for research to determine the best ways to incorporate the teaching of reading and math skills into social studies and science. By integrating reading and math instruction into other core academic subjects, students will be more ensured of a rich, well-rounded curriculum.
Not surprisingly, NCLB "failing" schools are the most likely to substantially cut back on non-reading and non-math instruction time, while schools with predominantly white, middle, and upper class students are doing a better job of providing a complete curriculum. But across the board, 71 percent of all the schools surveyed -- whether in urban, suburban, or rural areas -- have neglected subject specific instruction time in favor of teaching to reading and math tests.
This isn't encouraging news, but as I've argued before, the phenomenon of "teaching to tests" isn't necessarily a reason to gut NCLB. First, it shows we need better trained, more creative, higher-paid teachers. And secondly, test-based accountability pushes us to create better assessments that value critical thinking and the accumulation of the kind of historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge that shapes someone into an educated person. It's uniquely American to feel outraged at the idea of the government testing school children in a uniform way.
We really ought to be asking why this Democrat leadership won't allow Congress to move forward on serious policy debates," Mr. Kyl said, when asked about the talking-points memorandum he is circulating.
"Americans have been disappointed by a majority leadership that stages one show debate after another, while the only consistent legislative work getting done is the renaming of post offices."
The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, criticizes Mr. Reid for letting legislative priorities languish, including the drop of the Defense Department budget authorization bill -- which would have approved funds for equipment and troops' pay increases -- after Republicans last week blocked an amendment that set a spring deadline for a pullout.
Seriously? They really want to go there? The same Republican Senate leadership that is well on its way to shattering the record for filibusters? Good luck with that guys, let me know how it works out for you.
We constantly hear conservatives condemning talk of withdrawal as "helping the enemy." We don't want to withdraw from Iraq and "hand bin Laden a propaganda victory," or some such. Leaving aside that it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, whenever that may occur, is not spun as a victory by Islamic extremists, as Lynch makes clear, the propaganda victory that Bush is handing al-Qaeda is not a matter of prediction. It is happening. By continuing to cling to and defend a failed policy by inflating al-Qaeda's power in Iraq, by treating al-Qaeda as a top-down organization with command and control capability, rather than a loosely affiliated ideological network, Bush is effectively waving al-Qaeda's flag for them. He got us into Iraq by misrepresenting Saddam Hussein's capabilities, and he's keeping us there by doing the same with al-Qaeda.
Indeed. By rhetorically attaching the Iraqi insurgency so tightly with Al Qaeda, the administration manages to make Al Qaeda more legitimate in the eyes of those who believe that the Iraqi resistance is justifiable. Disaster ensues, but that's nothing new.
UNIONS OUTSOURCING:The Washington Post had an interesting front page story yesterday on the carpenters union's habit of using unemployed people, typically pulled from homeless shelters or SROs and paid around $8 per hour, to picket outside buildings that use non-union construction labor. I tend to side with critics of this practice. I think that for passersby to see sometimes disheveled or unenthusiastic picketers doesn't create a very positive image of the labor movement. Also paying people just a couple bucks more than minimum wage with no benefits seems hypocritical. I'd urge unions to instead hire a few full-time grassroots activists to whom they pay a living wage plus benefits and can present their message more effectively.
WHY BOTHER NEGOTIATING? In an effort to do... well, something, the administration has essentially written a blank check for the Indian nuclear weapons program.
The agreement — also known as the ‘123 agreement’ — grants India “prior consent” to reprocess spent fuel produced by U.S.-supplied equipment and fuel, a key requirement for the Indian side, though the specific arrangements will be worked out subsequently within a finite time period.
The agreement reiterates the fuel-supply assurances provided in the March 2006 separation plan and commits the U.S. to the “continuous operation” of any reactor it sells to India. Officials also say the irksome issue of fallback safeguards and the ‘right of return’ — as mandated by the U.S. Atomic Energy Act — of American-supplied material in the event of cessation of cooperation have also been satisfactorily resolved.
Moreover, 123 includes a specific clause that the purpose of the agreement is not to hinder anything India does with its strategic programme or to affect unsafeguarded or military nuclear facilities.
I'm all for a close U.S. relationship with India; it is, after all, the world's largest democracy. But such a complete disregard on the part of the U.S. for non-proliferation concerns really does hurt efforts at arms control around the world, and increase the chances that new nuclear states will arise. We're moving rapidly from the non-proliferation regime that managed nuclear weapons development from the 1960s (and managed it rather well, all things considered), to a regime that is governed, essentially, by the interests of the United States. Countries we like get blank checks, while those we don't get dire threats. Since international institutions depend on mutual consent and a belief in long-term gains, this kind of behavior doesn't improve global stability. Moreover, even "benevolent" U.S. hegemony depends on the belief by most that such hegemony is basically a good thing; to the extent that it's arbitrary and self-interested, the project is self-defeating.
A FEW MORE WORDS ON HARRY'S POLITICS. Right, that's Harry Potter. I got some interesting comments here and here responding to my argument that there's a socially conservative undercurrent to J.K. Rowling's series.
First, as I tried to make clear in the piece, my critique of the books' gender ideology lies not in their depiction of individual female characters, who, yes, are quite diverse, but in the depiction of the structure of wizarding society. At one point in Deathly Hallows, consumed by guilt over his central role in the war that is ravaging his world, Harry expresses regret that he's prevented the Weasley brothers from working -- no mention of whether their wives, too, have careers waylaid by the resistance movement. The assumption I've made, and that I think is well backed up by the entirety of the epic, is that witches are often stay-at-home moms. That's why I linked to Rowling's explanation on her website that magical children are home-schooled before the age of 11. One parent must be doing that work, right? I think that through characters like Hermione and Tonks, Rowling flirts with upending traditional gender roles, but that the larger society she's created actually conforms to them.
As to my analysis of Rowling's racial ideology, which I knew would be controversial, goblins do indeed interbreed with humans. Professor Flitwick, for example, is part goblin. Neither Harry nor Griphook comes off very well in the tale of the sword. Harry plans to trick the goblin, and the goblin lives up to the stereotypes of himself as greedy and backstabbing.
I think it's fair to say that the books show individual characters, such as Dobby, rising above the stereotypes they were born into, but that they also follow the fantasy script of obsessive categorization. The "Sorting Hat" is a prime example of this. Who isn't fascinated by the idea of a hat that, when placed on the head of an 11-year old, can instantly predict whether the child will turn out good or evil, courageous or cowardly, intellectual or simple? Toward the end of Deathly Hallows, we learn that Professor Dumbledore had doubts about the hat's ability to correctly predict a person's character. Yet the entire wizarding universe is predicated on this hat's sifting ability. Children who read the books understand this, and are attracted to this element of the series. At Rowling's website, they ask her which houses various adult characters belonged to as children at Hogwarts. There's a strong element of predestination present in the series, whether because of family history or membership in a certain species.
Commenter jfaberuiuc makes a good point that when Harry rejects unifying the deathly hallows, he in many ways rejects his own pure-blood heritage. And Matt Zeitlin says it is Harry's ability to love, not to fight, that ultimately saves the day time and time again in the series, which seriously undermines the warrior misogyny of traditional fantasy. These are ways in which Rowling updates the fantasy genre, and I appreciate that. But in reading the last book and considering its appeal, I believe that one reason Harry Potter is so popular is because his world sates one of our more conservative cultural needs: the desire to sort groups of people out from one another.
DECLINING HOME PRICES CAUSE STOCK MARKET SELL-OFF. The news yesterday that many home owners with good credit ratings are defaulting on their mortgages led to the biggest one-day drop in the S&P 500 in five months. Home prices are down 2.1 percent from a year ago, after rising 11 percent between 2005 and 2006.
This is proof that housing insecurity is being felt far beyond the unstable subprime mortgage market, which preys on indebted buyers who cannot afford regular mortgage payments. Also risky are adjustable-rate mortgages and second mortgages, both of which are far more common, and indicative of the pinch working- and middle-class Americans are feeling across their financial lives.
AGAINST FEDERALISM.Right. Additionally, it's a real luxury to conceive of issues like gay marriage and abortion mainly as fascinating political problems to be solved. It's not merely the moral qualm that if abortion is actually murder, then it's actually murder in both California and Wyoming. It's that if Wyoming outlaws abortion, and a woman in rural Wyoming needs an abortion, she can't get one. Or, if she can, it'll be in a back alley somewhere.
The resolution to these issues will have real consequences, and no one on either side of the debate believes that it's more important to come to a soothing political equilibrium than actually stop a genocide of blastocysts/ensure women have control over their reproductive health. It's certainly true that many columnists are primarily interested in the political ramifications and resolutions on offer, but since they're not the ones keeping these fights alive in the first place, it's a little hard to see how solutions that primarily accord with their priorities, but not the priorities of those involved in these issues, actually matter.
YOUTUBE AFTERTHOUGHTS. To contradict my own devaluing of the YouTube debate, it did have one huge upside: The whole thing was posted to YouTube, in easily digestible and sortable chunks. That's quite a big deal, I think, and it makes the whole exercise significantly more useful than if it had just served the population who happened to tune in that night. There's no reason these debates should be lost the second they go off the air.
Speaking of those folks who actually watched the thing, the overall ratings were disappointing -- a bit lower than the last Democratic debate -- but among 18-34 year-olds, the YouTube debate pulled in 407,000 -- setting a record for cable news programming.
Lastly, rewatching some of the chunks, I think my impression of the debate was partially so negative because Anderson Cooper gave the Democrats so little time to answer the questions. I could be wrong, but I'm nearly certain that the last debate afforded more minutes for response and exposition. So maybe what I'd like to see is an actual YouTube debate, with 25 questions chosen by the audience, and each candidate getting to record a response at a length they choose. That way, you'd not only get more substantive answers, but viewers could pick and choose who they wanted to hear from, and the marginal candidates couldn't complain they were getting shafted on time.
CONGRESS AND THE POLLS. For all the talk of Congress's low approval ratings, congressional Democrats are doing a whole lot better than congressional Republicans. According to a new Washington Postpoll, Reid andPelosi's forces attract a 46 percent approval rating, while the Republicans are down at 36 percent. This may actually be the relevant measure: Too often, when we talk about the favorability of Congress as an institution, we forget that such numbers measure opinions of both the minority and majority parties -- not just the majority party.
It's interesting, too, that opinions of the two congressional delegations have been pretty static over the past decade or so. Save for a few months in 1994, Democrats have posted favorability numbers between 41% and 51% with startling consistency. And Republicans have remained between 34% and 48%. That data is a little patchy, misseing key years like 2002, what with its post-9/11 bump, but it's interesting to see that there's really been no macro trend effecting either group.
AT LEAST IT ISN'T NEW TIMES. The Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper will be bought by Creative Loafing Media, which owns alt-weeklies in Atlanta, Tampa, Charlotte, and Sarasota.
Since moving to D.C. I've developed the typical local feelings about the City Paper: appreciation of smart, savvy coverage like this expose on conservative online social networking community Late Night Shots, but confusion as to why the paper would devote a year of time and research to a seemingly grudge-motivated cover story hatchet job on investigative journalist Murray Waas. Still, the coverage of D.C.'s quick development and gentrification is consistently interesting. So here's hoping the new overlords won't clean house on the news pages.
Perhaps Hayes ultimately finds Cheney inscrutable, but the narrative demonstrates a surprising lack of curiosity about what drives the man he's devoted so much effort to covering.
As a result, it's hard to escape the suspicion that Hayes isn't really interested in Dick Cheney. He's interested in Stephen F. Hayes. Cheney is his chosen vehicle to vindicate the last book that Hayes wrote, The Connection, which argued that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda. Hayes is at his most vigorous when he presents Cheney's dubious or refuted assertions about the gossamer links, largely because they're the same ones that Hayes has made his career promoting.
Steve Simon and Jonathan Stevensonwrite that comparisons of the Iraq war to the conflict in Northern Ireland reflect only false hope, not reality.
And posted yesterday, Dana Goldstein read the last of the Harry Potter books, and came away thinking that J.K. Rowling subtly critiques, yet ultimately hews to, a fantasy script dependent on stereotypes culled from real-life racism.
BIG OL' BOATS Under congressional pressure, the Navy is taking a look at the possibility of building a 25000 ton nuclear cruiser, which would be the largest new U.S. surface combat warship since the Alaska-class battlecruisers of World War II, and roughly similar in size to the Russian Kirov class battlecruisers of the 1980s (two of this class are still in a form of "service"). Defense Tech:
Two cruiser designs are being considered. The first is a new warship based on the controversial DDG 1000 (Zumwalt class) destroyer, which features the controversial “tumblehome” hull. This design is being called an “escort cruiser” to protect aircraft carrier strike groups. It would have gas turbine propulsion, as do all other U.S. cruisers, destroyers, and frigates.
The second cruiser would be a much larger, 25,000-ton, nuclear-propelled ship with a more conventional hull featuring a flared bow. This ship would be optimized for the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) mission.
The "tumblehome" design is controversial because critics have asserted that the ships will capsize in rough seas. Fortunately, at a cost of only billions of dollars per ship, we'll soon find out whether the boats float or not.
The bigger ship is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, given continuing high oil prices, Congress wants the Navy to look into nuclear propulsion for surface vessels again. The Navy built a number of cruisers during the Cold War with nuclear propulsion, but decommissioned and scrapped all of them in the 1990s (well short of their expected service lives), in part because they had proven less cost-efficient than their conventional counterparts. Extremely high oil prices, the reasoning goes, will change that calculus. The Ballistic Missile Defense element is also kind of interesting, because it involves both a strategic and a tactical calculation. Naval vessels will be expected to make a contribution to missile defense, either in the "boost phase" (sitting off the coast of an enemy and shooting down ballistic missiles as they go up), or in the midcourse or descent phase (sitting off the coast of the target and shooting the missiles as they come down). Work has proceeded much quicker on the latter than on the former.
The latter also has a tactical application. Some naval authorities expect that the Chinese will soon be able to produce guidance systems for ballistic missiles accurate enough to hit aircraft carriers. This is no small technical task, as a carrier is (relative to, say, Taiwan) a small target, and it moves fairly quickly. Since fleet air defense is largely based around the threat of cruise missiles, however, it could also prove quite devastating. The USN has declared this capacity dangerous and destabilizing, which it is... for the USN. Nevertheless, the strategic impetus for BMD lends itself to the tactical, and vice versa.
All that said, these ships may never get built. The history of the Navy is littered with projects that sounded interesting but never went to sea.
S-CHIP UPDATE: GOP LOSES ITS NERVE. Last week Republican senators pleaded with President Bush to accept the bipartisan plan to use cigarette taxes to finance an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover millions of uninsured kids. Today, The New York Timesreports:
In an unexpected turn of events, the top two Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Trent Lott of Mississippi, said they opposed a bipartisan bill that the Senate Finance Committee approved last week and would offer an alternative on the Senate floor. ...
Top House Republicans objected to the House Democrats’ plan to finance their proposals, with increases in tobacco taxes and cuts in subsidies for private health plans serving older Americans on Medicare. Republicans say public coverage would in some cases replace private insurance.
“Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back,” Mr. Boehner said, referring to the Clinton administration plan for universal coverage.
So the Republican leadership is now parroting back the same Bush claim of catastrophe for private insurers that Nancy Pelosicalled false and "absolutely immoral" yesterday. The reason why we need this bill is because poor children don't have health insurance, not because they do and we want to transfer them to a government plan. And here comes the "Hillary care" panic flag. Looks like this fight really is shaping up into "spring training for universal health care."
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RECOMMENDATIONS. Pharmaceutical policy is toweringly important for containing costs, improving our health, and saving the lives of millions in the third-world. Health care delivery policy (insurance, in other words) often dominates the conversation, but there's a fair argument to be made that pharmaceutical policy is actually more important.
On that note, I can't recommend Arnold Relman's examination of the pharmaceutical industry highly enough. It's too good, and too comprehensive, for me to have much to say about it, but I think it's one of the most important and useful health policy articles I've read in years. Read that and, if you're interested in the subject, Marcia Angell's New York Review of Booksarticle on The Truth About Drug Companies. It's important stuff, and both pieces are marvels of clear, opinionated, long-form policy writing by experts in the field.
SO WHAT ABOUT IRAQ? It's difficult to forget that we're celebrating a minimum wage increase that isn't even adjusted for inflation when you consider that we've also spent about $400 billion on the Iraq war, or about $12 billion each month. Speaking to bloggers today, Nancy Pelosi said that given Congressional Republicans' failure to impose a deadline for troop redeployment and Bush's certain veto of any legislation aimed at ending the war, the Democratic leadership is planning on introducing a series of incremental antiwar bills. Goals include stopping the creation of permanent bases in Iraq, guaranteeing troops 15 months home for every 15 months deployed ("still far too long," Pelosi sighed), and curtailing war-profiteering by outlawing no-bid contracts and contracts without performance evaluations.
"We can't whine," Pelosi said. "We just have to keep pushing."
RAWLS AND THE DEMS. I have no clue who in the Democratic Party is wandering around justifying their policies based on Rawlsian appeals, but if any such people do indeed exist, Linda Hirschman is right that they should probably stop. But I don't think they exist. References to Rawls are the sort of rhetorical approach I associate with libertarians more than actual political types. Democrats were fighting for an expanded social safety net and a more equal society before the 1971 publication of Rawls' A Theory of Justice, and they were fighting for much the same things, in much the same terms, after 1971. Indeed, Mike Tomasky's "Common Good" approach, which Hirschman identifies as an alternative to the tired Rawlsian rhetoric of yesteryear, is actually a throwback to rhetoric from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, something Mike acknowledges explicitly in his article.
There's lots to criticize about Democrats, to be sure. But an over-reliance on on philosophical first principles just ain't on the list.
"AN IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION AGENDA." That's what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told bloggers this morning Congressional Democrats are calling their set of economic proposals on everything from the minimum wage to increasing access to higher education, from affordable housing to developing "green collar" job opportunities. It's a smart tack to offer Americans security from the ups and downs of globalization without using language that vilifies immigration, trade, or internationalism. In fact, it's what the Prospect termed a new progressive populism in our election 2006 recap issue. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) explained, "When America looks at the globalized world, we see an America that’s not prepared. We don’t have a health care system that works in the globalized world. We don’t have a pension system that works in the globalized world. We don’t have a wage system that works in the globalized world."
Helping people find decent, affordable places to live is an often-overlooked part of the progressive economic agenda, as are many questions related to land use, the infrastructures of our urban and suburban communities, and our reliance on the automobile. Rep. Barney Frank, the outspoken Massachusetts liberal, told me this morning that under his leadership, the Committee on Financial Services plans to "get the federal government back in the business of providing affordable housing." Frank expects to pass in the fall a bill appropriating an additional $1 billion for affordable housing, and he has the support of both realtors and home builders. This is a great start, but it would be a drop in the bucket, especially considering Bush administration cuts to programs that refurbished run-down housing projects and provided rehabilitative housing for drug addicts.
It's almost impossible to imagine, however, the current Congress doing more. As Miller told TAPPED, "You have Republican leadership in the House that’s insisted that every piece of progressive legislation has to beat a filibuster. ...You can send troops to Iraq with a majority, but you have to beat a filibuster to bring them home?"
FROM MY TINFOIL HAT FILES. Congressman Peter DeFazio recently asked to have a peek at the plans the government has for keeping control under various apocalyptic scenarios. He has the required security clearances. But the White Housewouldn't let him:
Last Wednesday, DeFazio received word that his request had been denied. Through Homeland Security Committee staffers, he learned the White House had initially granted his request, but that it later was rejected. There was no explanation of why - and no word about who made the final decision.
Bush administration spokesman Trey Bohn refused to shed any light. "It is important to keep in mind that much of the information related to the continuity of government is highly sensitive," he said.
That famous secrecy of this administration strikes again. Too bad that it creates a situation where the tinfoil manufacturers will have a growing market for their products. If the government will not provide information, conspiracy theories will take its place.
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? I didn't think it was possible for an American politician's ratings to get this low, but Chris Orr notes over at The Plank that President Bush has just a 1 percent approval rating among Democrats in the latest ARG poll. A uniter, not a divider, indeed.
ATHEISTS: CONSISTENT IN BEING IMMORAL.ViaJohn Derbyshire, I find The Christian Post is reporting that a recent survey by the Barna Group shows evangelical Christians and atheists exhibit the most consistency between their faith and practice. Of course, for atheists, this means a "fundamental dismissal of social conventions and participation in favor of more self-centered views and behaviors helped them to stand out from the crowd in a different way."
A few thoughts: First, coverage like this makes it less than surprising that atheists are perhaps the most stigmatized group in the country. A 2006 article in the American Sociological Review found they are more distrusted than Muslims, gay people, and other groups large numbers of Americans are leery of. People view them as "other" in a way that doesn't seem to make sense in a society becoming more tolerant of various faiths. The ASR article, however, argues this is precisely why atheists are stigmatized: With tolerance increasing for a variety of beliefs, the all-purpose target becomes non-belief.
Second, prior to reading this article I wasn't familiar with the Barna Group. According to their website, their goal is to "provide leadership and unique, strategic information and resources that help facilitate spiritual transformation in America." The Wikipedia article on founder George Barna claims his group's polls are "the most quoted polls within Evangelical circles." And, somewhat obviously: "They are generally interpreted from an evangelical perspective."
GIULIANI THE PANDERER UPDATE.The New York Times ran a very long piece Sunday on Rudy Giuliani's complicated history with racial politics. Most of the information was not new to people familiar with recent New York history. One tidbit I hadn't known, though, and found quite striking was that Giuliani initially attempted in his 1989 mayoral run to position himself to the left of Democratic incumbent Ed Koch on racial issues. Giuliani hoped to pull a significant portion of the black vote away from Koch, but when David Dinkins beat Koch in the Democratic primary Giuliani instantly shifted to rightward, labeling Dinkins a "Jesse Jackson Democrat."
This reinforces a suspicion I've long had about Giuliani: not that he's a racist, but that he's a soulless panderer. I disagree, though, with those who think this makes him even more frightening as a potential president than a true-believing social conservative like Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback. Since most of the country isn't as conservative as the Republican base it makes me suspect that Giuliani would govern somewhere to the left of most of the other GOP candidates. But if he's doing so out of pure expediency, without a shred of moral commitment, that's pretty cold comfort.
WOMEN ON THE MINIMUM WAGE. More than any other group in America, women will benefit from today's minimum wage increase. Sixty-five percent of minimum wage earners are female, and of the 7.4 million of them who received a pay raise today, 1.4 million are single moms. Even after today's hike, it will still take two minimum wage earners to keep a family with children "reasonably" afloat, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, told TAPPED. But as Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee pointed out, a few extra thousand dollars a year can make the difference between staving off hunger and buying groceries; or between having no health insurance and purchasing a minimal plan.
In addition to raising wages at the bottom, universal health care is the number one thing we can do to help single parents, not to mention increasing the supply of affordable housing (more on that later) and improving our schools. But we must also recognize that the disproportionate number of women earning the minimum wage reflects a larger problem in our economy and society: Women, across the board, are paid less than men, even for the exact same work. In May, the Supreme Court made it almost impossible for employees to establish a pattern of pay discrimination, and Congressional Democrats have responded with legislation that would reverse the decision.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi told TAPPED this morning she would like policymakers to think more structurally about the dilemmas facing working mothers. "How is it that we have a country that calls women into the workforce during World War II, that draws women into higher education, and yet we don’t say, 'How can we assist with quality day care?' It’s very unusual. In other countries, caring for children is a value, and here we don’t make it a priority."
THE CUBA QUESTION. One final debate note. A political practioner friend who's no Hillary Clinton shill pointed out something very interesting in Barack Obama's debate answer on meeting with anathema regimes .
Hillary nailed him...for a...reason, subsumed within the larger distinction between their answers: The Cuba issue. It would be bracing if a Democratic candidate coherently and bravely made the case to change our irrational policy toward Cuba. But that's not what Obama was doing -- he just checked off a list of authoritarian leaders and said, "Sure, I'd be willing to talk to these guys." He barely noticed that one's opinion about one of these "guys" can decide a presidential election. If a Dem candidate could shave the GOP Cuban American edge from 80-20 to 60-40, they wouldn't have to worry about Ohio because they'd win Florida.
So the political trouble with Obama's answer is that every Cuban is South Florida heard it (still 9% of the electorate in Florida). Note that Hillary specifically named Castro among the people she would NOT be willing to talk to unless a lot of things changed -- that was soley directed toward Little Havana and nowhere else. The move of an experienced, cynical pol -- Obama looked like a naif.
I still think Obama connected best during last night's debate, but sometimes the ability to connect emotionally only gets you so far.
UPDATE:Howard Kurtzhas more on the local media reaction in Florida, where The Miami Herald ran with the headline "Obama, Edwards say they would meet with Castro, Chávez" for the story on their debate remarks on "two leaders who top South Florida's most-hated list."
AFRICOM. I can't find myself nearlyas agitated at the prospect of AFRICOM as Brad Plumerappears to be. I guess that the first and most important caveat that I'd offer is that AFRICOM does not represent a sudden expansion of U.S. military influence into the continent of Africa; Africa had previously been divided between three combatant commands, each with their own authority for conducting military diplomacy, managing military relations, and planning potential operations. Thus, it's really difficult for me to sympathize with this...
Anyway, there's a serious debate about U.S. hegemony to be had here. Is there a chance that this military presence in Africa could be a force for good--one that could stabilize the continent and help governments build up their security forces and maintain order? Or is this neo-colonialism just going to wreak havoc, as we arm and equip nasty regimes that violate human rights; strong-arm poor countries into adopting economic policies favorable to U.S. corporations--as has been done in Latin America for the past fifty years; and end up getting the U.S. military involved in an endless series of conflicts and quagmires?
...since the U.S. already does all of these things, only under the aegis of CENTCOM, EUCOM, and PACOM instead of a unified African Command. Now, given that Africa is a large and diverse continent, it could plausibly be argued that lumping it all together is kind of stupid, but then lumping parts of it together with Iceland (EUCOM), Kazahkstan (CENTCOM), and Alaska (PACCOM) is probably even worse.
Barnett tells the story of how Africa Command got sucked into Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia last December. The U.S. signed on mainly because we were jazzed about killing some unspecified number of fighters in Somalia. (Says one official: "Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all.") As far as anyone can tell, nothing positive has come from our involvement in--and support for--that war.
While that's fair enough on the big picture, Barnett doesn't actually say anything about AFRICOM's interference in the war, for very good reason; AFRICOM wasn't authorized until after the war was started, and won't be up and running for another year, at least. CENTCOM participated in the war, because that part of Africa comes under CENTCOM's purview. The existence of AFRICOM might not have changed the situation, but then again it might, given the fact that we have different commands in order to focus on and develop plans and expertise for different parts of the world. That CENTCOM understood the Ethiopia-Somalia dispute as an extension of Iraq is unsurprising, but that's more of a reason to create AFRICOM than to assail its existence.
What Brad really wants to argue against, I presume, is the institution of geography based combatant commands (privileged by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986), and the increasing importance of these commands in diplomatic and political issues in their areas of responsibility. See Dana Priest'sThe Mission for more details on what these organizations do, especially in the context of Africa, where the U.S. military has been conducting training, relief, and diplomatic missions for some time. That's fine, but within that structure the creation of AFRICOM doesn't exactly represent a profound shift towards neocolonialism, or herald plentiful military interventions on the African continent. While it's possible that this re-organization of institutional responsibility will have all kinds of negative effects, I'm far from convinced.
YES HE MAKES A GOOD TIRAMISU, BUT WHAT ARE HIS VIEWS ON ROE? We knowKarl Rove and the Bush administration gave briefings on Republican chances in the 2006 elections to at least 15 agencies, including many that are ostensibly nonpartisan. Clearly this is bad and likely illegal, but beyond that I'm a little confused why this happened at all. What exactly did Rove hope to achieve by politicizing the Peace Corps, for instance? Why did he go to the trouble of briefing the U.S. Counsel to Bermuda about 55 key house races? With the prosecutor purge it's clear what the goal was -- get the Justice Department to use it's authority to taint various Democratic candidates. But what can a staffer for USAID do, even illegally, to sway the outcome of a federal election? How can a Treasury Department aide help the Republicans?
One possible answer is that some briefings were given as cover for others that were intended to help campaigns, but I tend to think this is unlikely because it would indicate a degree of care that the administration seems to wholly lack. Instead, my guess is it's an example of political thinking becoming so dominant that questions like these become irrelevant. If you think of every part of the government as a political tool, it doesn't matter what they can do for you specifically. The political briefings become a way of changing the agenda of the whole government from policymaking to politicking.
Is this a viable strategy? Maybe, but I think it also reflects Rove being trapped by his own rhetoric. After a while, under this theory, he stopped thinking about each act of politicization individually and simply sought to add politics to everything -- even when it wasn't particularly helpful to him. We've seen this pointless partisanship everywhere, from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the NASA, and I'm sure the next White House pastry chef will have graduated from Regents university. This is, of course, very bad, but Democrats will have trouble explaining it. That suggests this scandal won't get he kind of play that the attorney purge has -- unless someone gets indicted for violation the Hatch act.
TAKING THE VA TO COURT. The BBC reports veterans are suing the VA over denied mental health treatment and disability pay. This is more evidence that the VA is too understaffed (despite the fact that they are leaders in post traumatic stress disorder treatment) to deal with the influx of former soldiers suffering from PTSD. It will be interesting to see how the courts deal with such a case. If they throw it out, the only recourse is to put pressure on Congress to pass legislation which would increase funding for disability pay and treatment for veterans with PTSD.
BRING IT ON. You know, I'd agree with Ezra about the pointedness of the questions if it weren't for the fact that the candidates, in the main, handled them so beautifully. I think one of the reasons the Vietnam question stood out so much is that it was directed to Mike Gravel, and answered by him.
QUESTION: My name is Don. I’m from West Virginia.
My question is for Mike Gravel. In one of the previous debates you said something along the lines of the entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain.
How do you expect to win in a country where probably a pretty large chunk of the people voting disagree with that statement and might very well be offended by it?
I’d like to know if you plan to defend that statement, or if you’re just going to flip-flop.
Thanks.
I think the biggest difference between the CNN/YouTube debate and a standard MSM-questioner debate is that no one would have bothered to frame a question around something Gravel had said in an MSM-scripted debate. Sure the questions to the field were tough, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama answered the very dicey race and gender questions posed to them just wonderfully, with poise and grace, and Clinton dispatched the "are you a liberal?" question she was obviously going to get at some point with a deft and thoughtful answer. I would be shocked to learn such a reply came to her on the spot, as well. Any Democrat who's running for president who doesn't have a good answer to that question already memorized by the time they enter the debate arena is an idiot, and Clinton is hardly so delicate a flower that she could be thrown by a question that's been lobbed at Democratic presidential candidates for more than 20 years. Just because Mike Dukakis flubbed this one doesn't mean Democrats have to do so into perpetuity.
Indeed, what the debate showed last night is that for the first time in a very long time the Democrats are blessed with a field of people who can take whatever's dished out and turn it into dinner, rather than weeping into their soup-cups.
"ABSOLUTELY IMMORAL." That's what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi just called President Bush's assertion that he won't sign off on the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program because he's worried children currently covered by employer-provided health insurance would become eligible for the public plan. The Senate's plan uses cigarette taxes to cover 10 million kids, the vast majority of whom currently have no health insurance at all. And S-CHIP pays private companies to insure these children, so the loss to the private sector--as if that would even compare to children's health -- would be negligible.
"What gives me hope is that Republican governors support S-CHIP," Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) told me. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, told TAPPED, "People saw the minimum wage as an issue of fairness. People view children going without health care as the same kind of issue. It's an issue of values, and I think that will overwhelm the president's opposition."
THE DEBATE AND FRIVOLOUS ISSUES: Although I found the questions and answers on marriage equality last night to be very interesting (particularly Bill Richardson's shrewd answer that he'd get the lesbian couple from Brooklyn "everything I think is politically feasible" thus hinting that he has no problem with full marriage equality but avoiding taking the political risk of saying so outright), I thought all the time spent on it was sort of a waste. Of all the important issues facing the next president, gay marriage simply isn't one of them. That's not to say it isn't an important issue. I think full marriage equality is a crucial civil right that no one should be denied. But since I've been following its progression I'm well aware of the fact that marriage laws are set by the states, and the conflicts between state laws will mostly be adjudicated in the courts. The one major national proposal on gay marriage is a constitutional amendment to ban it which stands no chance of passing, wouldn't be supported by any of the Democrats running for president, and the president has no power to vote for or against anyway.
So why is it that so many debates in the last couple elections, both in the primaries and the general have featured questions about this? My best answer is that it fits broadly into the characterological preference of the mainstream media. They ask about gay marriage for the same reason they ask Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama how they respond to inane allegations that they aren't feminine enough or black enough, respectively. It's because they're more fun to ask, and because it allows the media to create supposedly non-ideological narratives about the candidates. I'd rather see more questions on how the candidates would actually govern the massive federal bureaucracy, but maybe I'm not the typical voter.
MINIMUM WAGE DAY. Today, for the first time in a decade, the federal minimum wage will increase, from $5.15 to $5.85. Over the next two years the wage will rise incrementally to $7.25, a change that still won't make the wage's real value equal its 1950s and 1960s high, but that nevertheless represents a major victory for the new Congress. Democrats bundled the legislation along with Iraq war appropriations in order to avoid a presidential veto. But this is more than just a political accomplishment -- 13 million hourly workers are affected by the increase, including 7.4 million women, 3.3. million parents, 6 million children, and 50,000 military families. Under the old minimum wage, average family health care costs exceeded the salary of a full-time minimum wage worker. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi just told a group of progressive bloggers (myself included) who were invited to the U.S. Capitol Building today, "People who went to work yesterday and go to work today will make more money than they made yesterday." It's that simple. And by 2009 the pay raise will equal $4,400 each year.
Bush's looming veto threat over the State Children's Health Insurance Program was preoccupying Congressional representatives today, as was the building showdown with the administration over Iraq. So check back today for more updates from Congress.
THE PEOPLE SAY... My friend Julian Sanchez has a very good idea for actually harnessing the Power o' the Tubes to make the debates more substantive and rob the candidates of their ability to dodge.
TIT FOR TUBE-TAT. I’m with Garance in really liking the debate last night. But let’s also remember that, while the questions were submitted by “ordinary”
Americans, CNN had selection power over submitted entries. And it seemed to me that some of the questions chosen -- especially in the first 30-40 minutes -- were those intended to probe if not embarrass Democrats on sore-spot issues: gay marriage, race reparations, and so forth. (CNN this morning said the reparations question got the lowest meter rating from its approval-dialing focus group.)
So, while there was not a question about immigration there was a direct question to Hillary Clinton about whether she would describes herself as a “liberal” -- a question which the liberal cynic in me sounded like one submitted not by a Democratic or independent, but a clever Republican. And at one point, when asking a follow-up at one point, host Anderson Cooper raised his brow and reminded the candidates and audience that it was not “my question.” All of which suggests that the media is more likely to ask an uncomfortable question when they have the cover of serving as translator-editor, rather than questioner-writer. Which is fine -- although it is also a tacit admission that the media would not have the guts to ask certain questions without the ability to deflect responsibility for them.
And it brings me to this question: When the Republicans have their own YouTube debate on September 17, is CNN going to select some equally uncomfortable questions? And I don’t just mean queries on Iraq and immigration, major issues causing Republican headaches. I’m talking questions like these:
Do you believe in the rapture? (I confess to stealing this question from Joe Klein.)
Gov. Romney is a Mormon, so I’d like to ask each candidate if he believes Mormonism is a cult religion?
How many people in your family have served in the military, and why did you serve or not serve when you were age-eligible? (A version of this question was asked of Democrats.)
Sen. McCain and Mayor Giuliani: Both of you are divorced, so why should Americans take cues or lectures from you about family values?
Conservatives say they believe in free markets, but then support everything from farm subsidies to no-bid contracts for contracts in Iraq. What capitalist principles are animated by subsidies and non-competitive contracting?
Of every hundred conceptions, 50 end in natural abortion without a mother ever knowing she is pregnant and, of the remaining 50, about 10 end in known miscarriages. If life “begins at conception,” abortion is a sin, and God is all powerful, why does God terminate six of every 10 conceived lives?
Hillary Clinton has a good shot of becoming the first woman president. In your opinion, is she capable of leading the country?
...OK, you get my point. We’ll see if CNN selects such uncomfortable, on-the-spot questions of the Republicans, presuming they are submitted.
P.S. Is there really any doubt that John Edwards’ video spot was the best -- both in production quality, content and the sheer brilliance of turning the haircut story into an indictment of the media instead of him?
CITIZEN MEDIA PROS. Hey, will you look at that. You know those funny men with the thick Southern accents who asked the Democratic presidential contenders last night if their feelings were hurt by the way people keep talking about Al Gore joining the race? Turns out they're a regular online comedy duo, Red State Update, and even have a weekly gig with Salon magazine.
This is where it would be nice if comments were working, because I'd ask if any one else can identify questioners from last night's CNN/YouTube debate as online media personalities rather than random citizens. Alas, we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way. E-mail me at gfranke-ruta at prospect dot org if you come across anything, and I'll write it up for the site. Thanks.
LONG VERDICT. The debate was fine, but I have to break with my colleague Garance's heaping of praise on the YouTube format. Letting CNN choose from a storehouse of thousands of questions was, I thought, quite bad for the event. It allowed them to wander through and pick questions that would've been far too "gotcha" oriented for the host too ask, but were perfectly fine when hidden behind the constructed authenticity of user-contributed -- but elite-filtered -- content.
A good example here was the question asking if soldiers were dying in vain, either now or in Vietnam. There is literally no hint of illumination an answer to this question could offer. It's merely a baldfaced attempt to force the candidates to tightrope between their opposition to the war and their need to constantly offer encomiums to the troops. If Anderson Cooper had asked that, a candidate could have accused him of divisiveness. Not so with the blurry representative of the vox populi appearing over webcam. It would be one thing to have the users actually vote on questions and direct the debate. But the appearance of authenticity under the control of the same-old cable news crew was, I think, both a bit damaging and quite a bit misleading.
NATIONAL WHAT? My colleague Robsays most of what needs to be said about Jonah Goldberg's inevitably failed attempt to turn the Iraq catastrophe into a policy problem for... liberals. I'd like to address this:
If you can justify causing genocide in order to end a nation-building exercise that -- unlike similar efforts elsewhere -- is fundamentally linked to our national interest, then how can you ever return to arguing that we should get into the nation-building and genocide-stopping business when it's explicitly not in our interest?
The problem here should be obvious: attacking a country that posed no threat to the United States in order to install an Islamist quasi-state that would be a breeding ground for anti-American terrorism was not in the national interest; indeed, it was dramatically contrary to the national interest. Which is why conservatives started a cynical, largely ex post facto attempt to sell it as a humanitarian intervention. If Goldberg means that it would now be in the national interest to find a large network of unicorn stables in Iraq, I can't disagree, but this would seem to provide an easy out for the strawliberals who want lots of ineffective military interventions with no consideration of the national interest: just raze a country's government and completely botch the occupation, and then the intervention automatically becomes in the national interest! Rational liberals, of course, can continue to ignore Goldberg's silly dichotomy altogether, and will also remember that the fact that outcome x would be really nice doesn't magically produce the capacity to make it possible.
WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT EDWARDS' HAIR. Watching the coverage of John Edwards has been pretty depressing lately. It's obvious that a significant proportion of the political press corps has decided they just don't like him, and they're going to do whatever they can to destroy his candidacy. The principal vehicle through which this destruction is currently taking place is the haircut story, the vivid, emblematic tale that is supposed to tell us all we need to know about what a big, fat phony Edwards is. They drop it into story after story, no matter what the context is about, just as a reminder.
This could be lethal. It brings to mind the lie that "Al Gore said he invented the internet," which appeared in literally thousands of stories during the 2000 race. The Gore campaign never figured out how to handle it. At first they tried to explain that it wasn't true, but reporters just didn't care -- they kept repeating it anyway. Then they tried to joke about it, and that didn't work either.
Up until now, the Edwards campaign has gone through the same motions with the haircut story, with the same result. But now they're trying something different. If you watched the CNN debate, you saw this video:
This suggests that the campaign realizes how problematic the story is, and they're willing to try something radical. And it just might work.
What they seem to be doing is working to make the haircut story bigger, not smaller. They want it to be an issue. They're trying to change what people think about when they think about John Edwards' hair. Instead of "What a phony," they want people to think, "God, that press corps is so ridiculous, why can't they talk about something that matters? Why do they have it in for John Edwards? Just what about him scares them so much?"
Whatever you think about the things he's proposing, Edwards is certainly running the most substantive campaign of any candidate on either side. And yet his coverage has been more consumed with trivia than that of any other candidate. If his campaign can initiate this conversation and make "John Edwards' hair" shorthand for the shortcomings of the news media, not only will people be talking about Edwards, the damage of the haircut story could actually be neutralized. It might not succeed, but you have to give them credit for having the guts to give it a shot.
UPDATE:Over at Time, Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC's The Note, says this about Edwards: "His submitted video took on the infamous $400 haircut with cutting humor — but in a fashion that might have been too slick for some." So Edwards' video takes the press to task for focusing on haircuts and not issues, and Halperin thinks this is "too slick for some." And who, pray tell, might "some" be? Journalists like Mark Halperin, who already think Edwards is a phony?
QUICK VERDICT, THE CANDIDATES.Barack Obama owned this debate. He started off with a series of clear, crisp answers that deftly turned questions to his advantage, and he was doing that Obama thing that he does where he manages to look luminous and transcendent, as if he just stepped out of a Wordsworth poem, trailing clouds of glory. (He doesn't do this all the time, but when he does, watch out -- this is when he binds people to him.) Hillary Clinton was excellent, as well, and better on the question of meeting international leaders than Obama. She was calm, measured, and certain; her answer about being a modern American progressive should please a lot of liberals. John Edwards seemed to knock her off her stride a little on the question about who was best for women, when a hint of sourness entered her otherwise controlled and regal performance, but she soon regained her composure. And was it my imagination, or did her voice sound more melliflous than it has in the past in answer to all but two questions?
Edwards, for his part, was a clear driver on some of the debate subject matter (poverty), and his warning to those who would vote for him because of the gender or race of the others was first-rate, and worth repeating. The lameness of his response on the gay marriage question was a direct consequence of the debate format -- it's so much harder to explain to real people why they don't deserve certain rights than it is to talk about issues in the abstract. Joe Biden fought hard for a minority foreign policy view on the stage, and created an opening for others to speak more realistically, too. He also opened up a little about the family deaths in his past, which had to be hard for him. Chris Dodd seemed memorable during the debate, as well, and was endearingly one of the few on stage who felt he could not afford to work for a minimum wage given his kids' tuition needs. Bill Richardson was fine, but not particularly memorable, and Dennis Kucinich managed to show a sense of humor that made him seem like one of the gang for a change, instead of an angry and resentful outsider.
Mike Gravel was the lone embarassment on the stage until the final question, when everyone got just a little too punchy for comfort. Word to the wise: a debate between Obama and Edwards on what Clinton is wearing is that kind of thing that makes women want to knock their heads together. And I think someone needs to remind Biden that there's a commandment against coveting another man's wife.
QUICK VERDICT, THE VIDEOS. This was a fantastic, fascinating, illuminating, moving debate -- a true realization of the potential of the new technologies to bring the voices of ordinary citizens into the political process. The citizens in the videos made every issue more real, and every answer more serious. They added levity, and creativity, and concrete examples that cut through the bland anecdotes that candidates tend to trot out at these things.
But the candidate videos were a waste of time. The identifying side print saying which video was which was too small for me to tell whose video was whose for all the candidates, except in retrospect, by process of elimination. Joe Biden's was clear, as were BIll Richardson's and Barack Obama's, which was the best video overall. Hillary Clinton's video involved hand-drawn flash-cards that passed so fast that I couldn't read them, however, because of the size, speed, and font. Ditto for the citizen-videos with text or signs. Trying to read rapidly shifting hand-drawn text on a three-inch square, which is the size the text boxes were on my TV, from 14 feet away made some of the videos feel like eye tests.
So, a word advice for next time: Get rid of the flash cards. Oh yeah -- and Mike Gravel, too. That guy has got to go.
LEFTIEST, YOUNGEST DEBATE EVER. What's so different about this debate? The people asking the questions. Maybe because only people under 30 can operate a webcam, the men and women addressing the candidates here have a very different set of priorities. A lesbian couple from Brooklyn asks if they should be allowed to get married. A young black man demands that the candidates reveal if they support reparations for slavery. A student wonders if 18-year old women should be required to register for the draft.
I'm watching the debate on DVR, so I'm behind. But from what I've seen so far, a highlight was Obama saying he'd meet in person with the leaders of Iran, South Korea, and Syria within the first year of his administration. Hillary wouldn't make the same promise, saying she feared rushing into such a meetings would lead to her being used for propaganda purposes, and Edwards agreed with her. Saddest moment? Edwards saying he was personally against gay marriage because of his Southern Baptist faith. I can't presume to know how Edwards truly feels about marriage equality, but either he has a moral view I deeply disagree with, or he's pandering to an extent with which I'm uncomfortable.
BEST. DEBATE. EVER. This is the best Democratic debate so far. The questions are sharp, funny, thoughtful, and focused on issues that too infrequently get an airing. And, best of all, the debate, now half-over, has focused on domestic issues for a change. They should do this format more often.
DISSEMBLE HARDER. Wow. Perhaps highlighting right-wing media dishonesty is played out. I'd like to limit myself to one post a month. But if you thought Tom DeLay won this month's title for most jaw-droppingly hypocritical DC establishment type -- and I sure did -- you were wrong. The headline from John Yoo's opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal: "Contempt and Congress: The Democrats' attack on executive privilege shows blatant disregard for the Constitution."
IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST. With the Democratic Party-controlled Congress unable to even bring a Senate a measure to a vote on the war, I have been loath to call for impeachment. It would take so much time and energy that would be better spent elsewhere. The Dems would never get enough Republicans to go along with them. And, heck, the Dems are poised to win the White House, anyway; let's just tough it out.
Problem is, the Constitution can't tough it out. Somebody has to defend it. If Bush and Cheney are allowed to walk out of office with out the stain of impeachment on them, the Constitution will still exist, but it will be gravely wounded -- perhaps mortally.
A recent poll by the American Research Group shows that 54 percent of the American people support impeachment of the vice president; 45 percent would like to see Bush impeached. And that's without a whit of organized marketing of the impeachment product (see the Bush administration's "show of force" brand, as described by the Rand Corporation), which would surely drive those numbers up.
So, start with Cheney while simultaneously marketing the notion of impeaching Bush. I'm open to suggestions for impeachment slogans.
PROFILES IN HYPOCRISY.The Politicobrings us a new milestone in journalistic excellency: Tom DeLay criticizing Democrats for corruption:
despite repeated pledges to the contrary, Democrats have made no move to require members to disclose earmark requests. Regarding the lowest of low-hanging fruit -- cleaning up the earmarking process -- Democrats have simply adopted the practices they once called corrupt.
I'll admit the marginal interest a publication might have in seeing an ex-majority leader comment on Congressional politicking (even if he is still enmeshed in legal battles). But this is this sort of flamboyant insult to the short-term memory of its readers that should make a daily political gossip rag consider going... at least weekly.
SLIGHTLY UNDERHANDED POLITICAL IDEA OF THE DAY.The Washington Postreports today that the USDA makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in farm subsidy payments to dead people. Prospect blogger Dean Bakerpoints out that this is slightly overblown since the actual cost is about 52 cents a year to each American. Nonetheless, the whole affair gives me an idea for an underhanded political trick that could be used by opponents of farm subsidies. Why not take a page out the Republican play book and do our best to whip up a controversy about this along the lines of the hearings Republicans had about the IRS in the 1990s? Those hearings managed to convince many people that IRS agents were running amok -- throwing small children out of second-story windows and firebombing the homes of anyone who took an improper deduction. Resulting restrictions lowered enforcement of tax law and government revenues. Similarly, a hard, well-publicized, and perhaps slightly sensationalist investigation of USDA farm subsidies might lower the amount we pay to farmers, either by reducing fraud, or by imposing stricter standards for receiving farm aid. At the very least it would publicize further just how absurd farm subsides are. Best of all, as this article shows, unlike the Republican attack on the IRS, such a strategy would involve no lying.
NOT THE UNWASHED MASSES! Media types wailing and gnashing their teeth about having a debate (gasp!) not controlled by a Respected Media Professional may wish to remember, say, Ted Koppel's ridiculous performance in the last Democratic primary debates:
You can forgive him for experimenting with a couple of questions about the horse race. But when the experiment failed and he persisted, that's on him. When he asked inside-baseball questions and got substantive answers instead, he chided the candidates for failing to stoop to his level. First he asked John Kerry why Howard Dean couldn't beat President Bush. Kerry talked instead about why he would make the best president. Koppel then turned to Dick Gephardt and said, "I'm not really asking you -- at least, I wasn't then -- whether you think you're the better candidate. I was simply asking you whether you thought that Howard Dean could beat George W. Bush." Later, Koppel asked Carol Moseley Braun whether Al Gore's endorsement of Dean would make blacks loyal to Dean. Braun talked instead about what Democrats should stand for. Koppel then said, "Sen. Edwards, what I was trying to get to with Ambassador Braun was whether loyalty can, in any way, be transferred by an endorsement." Edwards wisely ignored the question as well.
I dunno, it's hard to imagine the YouTube public doing any worse.
JAPANESE DEFENSE. There's a good article in theNYT today about Japan's increasingly aggressive defense posture. In addition to slight increases in defense spending, the deployment of assets farther away from Japan, and the purchase of new weapon systems, the Japanese Self-Defense Force is carrying out more aggressive and realistic training exercises.
For a few reasons, this doesn't bother me a bit. First, the dichotomy between "offensive" and "defensive" weapons is and always has been nonsense. Almost any weapon (including a wall, or even a missile defense system) can be used for both offensive and defensive purposes. The inter-war arms agreement negotiators tried to ban offensive weapons, but failed to come to any plausible determination of what constituted offensive and defensive. Political scientists have played around with the "offense-defense balance" concept for years, with few sound results. The idea, therefore, of a military organization built around "defensive" weaponry suffers from some serious conceptual problems.
In the specific case of Japan these problems are exacerbated by Japanese dependence on foreign trade. While Japan remains under the U.S. security umbrella, it doesn't need to worry too much about attacks on its supply lines. If that umbrella ever weakened, or if Japan wished to contribute more, defense would necessarily include deployments well outside Japanese waters. Similarly, an attack on Chinese, US, Korean, or Russian missile or air bases capable of striking Japan could plausibly be defined as "defensive." Long story short, the idea of a "defensive" Japanese military makes no sense whatsoever outside the context of American military hegemony. As long as the U.S. conducts all of the distant operations for Japanese defense, we can pretend that Japan has a Self-Defense Force instead of a military, but that designation amounts to little more than a charade.
Of course, all things military are also political, and Japanese defense re-organization (Japan is already heavily armed, so re-armament doesn't make any sense) has political effects at home and in the region. Rightist politicians have long argued for a more substantive military profile, but such arguments don't weaken the case itself. China and the Koreas have expressed a lot of concern about Japanese revanchism, and could meet a more aggressive Japanese military posture with additional spending of their own. Since China is already increasing its defense spending (and orienting that spending around Taiwan, rather than Japan), and North Korea is pretty much tapped out, this puts South Korea on the spot. Call me a sap, but if Japan and South Korea go to war again in my lifetime, I'll buy every reader of TAPPED and LGM a Coke. Nationalist politicians in China, South Korea, and Japan have become remarkably adept at playing off one another for domestic political gain over the past twenty years or so; re-organizing or re-titling the Self-Defense Force isn't going to change that, or even affect the dynamic very much.
PUPPET PRESIDENT? The new season of 24, a terrorist-killing, torture-loving television series not known for its progressive politics, will feature a female president, though she's appointed, not elected. I don't watch the show, so I can't really explain what all this means. But I'm suspicious.
TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. In light of David Vitter's unimpressive public apology, Sam Boydtakes a look at the research about which apologies are most effective, and then applies it to politicians.
Chris Van Burensits down withJosh Rushing, former U.S. Marine captain turned Al Jazeera English correspondent.
And Adam DosterreviewsThe Trap, a new book about how conservative economic policies have made it harder for young progressives to take jobs that line up with their values.
TEXTBOOK WATCH. Last week it was Russian kids learning Putin and Stalin propaganda. Today newspapers report that a new third-grade history textbook for Arab-Israeli schoolchildren refers to the 1948 founding of the Israeli state by its Arabic name, Al Naqba (The Tragedy), for the first time. The book, called "Living Together in Israel," also admits that 700,000 Arabs were involuntarily displaced by Israel's War of Independence, and that until 1966, Arab citizens of Israeli were subject to military rule. The books were created under the watch of Labor Party Education Minister Yuli Tamir. The conservative Likkud Party has called for her to be fired.
Jewish and Arab children, for the most part, attend segregated schools in Israel. The Education Ministry says it has no plans to introduce the Arab narrative into textbooks targeted toward Jewish elementary school students, and that Jewish high school students hear a much more complex historical narrative. But if Arab-Israeli third-graders are expected to balance what they learn at home with other perspectives, why aren't Israeli Jewish kids being held to the same expectation?
SCREW THE TROOPS! You will be shocked to learn that William Kristol does not, in fact, believe that various left-of-center magazines "support the troops." Indeed, they're not only not supporting the troops, but "those on the cutting edge of progressive opinion are beginning to give up on even pretending to support the troops. Instead, they now slander the troops."
Heavens! The evidence is a Nation article and New Republic piece in which actual troops talk about various instances of brutality and depravity occurring in Iraq. Supporting the troops apparently means silencing all those troops who would offer a view of our military's comportment in Iraq that conflicts with officially sanctioned war-porn. But this sort of thing is old hat for Kristol. The American Prospect doesn't get special mention in the article, but shortly before the war started, he gave an interview to The National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez, in which he said:
Lopez: Is there anyone you can think of (nation, pol, constituency) the Bush administration has not convinced that going into Iraq is necessary who should and can be convinced?
Kaplan & Kristol: Liberals. Not liberals at The Nation or The American Prospect, who can always be counted on to favor tyranny over anything that strengthens American power, however marginally…
It's true. I mean, if given the choice between making America 62 percent stronger and giving Iran's leaders the power to ban Q-Tips -- pretty marginal, I'm sure you'd agree -- we'd totally side with a build-up of earwax benefiting tyranny. Later in the interview, Kristol goes on to say "Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower," further proving that Bill Kristol gives the greatest interviews anywhere.
COMMENTS STILL DOWN. Apparently our system is dealing with a huge amount of spam, which is why comments aren't working and the blog is slow to load. Our tech folks are working on it, though. Apologies for the inconvenience.
OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. Human-rights advocates are, not surprisingly, dismayed by the executive order that authorizes the CIA to use severe interrogation methods on terrorism suspects being held overseas. Over the past two and a half years, I have spoken with individuals who have described some of the harsh techniques, including exposure to extreme heat and cold as well as methods not on official lists (i.e. the use of Taser-like devices), used on them in U.S. custody in Iraq. “We are above the law,” one interrogator reportedly told an Iraqi prisoner I interviewed -- along with other lines that sounded as if they had been lifted from a B-movie script. Cliched or not, the dialogue seemed to capture a sense of impunity the interrogators felt.
These interrogators may be even more emboldened by the president’s order. There are other problems. The harsh interrogation techniques are approved only for the CIA. But those employed by the CIA, or “Other Government Agencies,” as it is sometimes known, often work alongside Army interrogators, according to human-rights advocates. It may be difficult to maintain two sets of standards -- one for the CIA and a stricter one for the military -- when they are both assisting in the interrogation of the same prisoner.
FOOD CHAIN GAMES. The FDA is planning a decisive response to the recent worries about tainted foodstuffs: It's going to get rid of seven of the current thirteen FDA laboratories, including the only one that specializes in detecting radioactive elements in food. Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbachdefends the move as a way to bring the FDA laboratories into the 21st century. Perhaps, but surely this particular announcement was very badly timed, given news like this:
Even when products are flagged by the FDA, importers have learned to manipulate the system, investigators said. For example, the FDA relies on results obtained from private labs, but those labs produce results driven by financial rather than scientific concerns, investigators told the subcommittee.
Investigative counsel Kevin Barstow said he was told by an unnamed FDA deputy lab director that "none of the test results he's seen are completely accurate."
"The words he used were 'not good' and 'spooky,'" Barstow said.
Importers also can reduce the level of scrutiny by having their products test negative five consecutive times, according to the investigators. Since some large fish, including tuna, can be flagged for high mercury levels, importers will arrange to have five lots of smaller fish -- generally younger and with comparatively less mercury -- tested to obtain an all-clear from the FDA. Once the monitoring decreases, the importers can then resume bringing in larger fish that otherwise might not pass muster, the investigators said.
"You're saying the importers know how to maneuver around the FDA?" asked Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.
"Yes," said committee senior investigator David Nelson.
Some potentially problematic seafood imports are being steered to enter the country in Las Vegas to avoid the scrutiny they might receive in San Francisco and other West Coast seaports, according to Nelson and other investigators.
The problems go beyond food. In Puerto Rico, investigators learned importers were getting around the FDA's blocking of imports of Chinese-made toothpaste made with an antifreeze ingredient by co-packaging them with toothbrushes. Examples of the tainted toothpaste included a Crest knockoff called "Crust," he added.
How many games can you count so far? I see at least two, the first one being the media game and the second one the game the importers play. There is at least one more game in all this, the game of FDA bonuses:
The FDA's granting of bonuses, some worth tens of thousands of dollars, also came into question Tuesday. In 2002, the agency gave out just $3.2 million in bonuses worth $5,000 or more. That grew to $9.5 million last year - roughly the same as the additional money the agency is dedicating to food safety.
And what is the meta-game behind all these games playing with the food we eat and feed our children? My bet would be the Republican game of making sure that the government can't work efficiently.
IDENTITY POLITICS & REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY. My piece on John Edwards and the poor from earlier this week has generated some very interesting and provocative discussion, and, in light of Mark Schmitt's item from yesterday and Ezra's unearthing of 15-year-old advice from one of America's leading poverty experts, I thought it would be worth adding that I'm not sure it would help Edwards electorally at all to put forward a critique of poverty that included a sharper critique of racial inequality. I agree with Mark that it would be much more daring -- absolutely -- but I also don't know that it would help Edwards per se, because the problem, as I tried to outline, is not so much what Edwards is saying or proposing, but rather, the difficulty of making a convincing argument for the unequal democratic status quo as a solution to problems that stem from the self-same unequal democratic status quo at the very moment voters are also being offered an opportunity to overturn several hundred years of historical precedent and make American democracy more fully representative.
As well, I'm quite aware that white people are the majority of the low-income and poor -- as I'd have to be, having been fed by school breakfast and lunch programs in public schools, had parents benefit from the EITC, and gone to college thanks to Pell grants and subsidized government loans -- and that anti-poverty programs have to be pitched as broadly as possible in order to avoid stirring up resentments, and also for simple fairness reasons. But to focus on that, as some commenters did, was to miss my point, which was different from Mark's.
My point was simply that a lot of likely Democratic primary voters (55-60 percent of whom overall will likely be female, and nearly 50 percent of whom will be black in SC -- though not Iowa, NH, or Nevada) are excited by the prospect of democratic change that Clinton and Obama -- two very qualified candidates in their own right, though perhaps more centrist than some in these parts might like -- also represent, and that we can't discount the appeal to members of historically disenfranchised groups of having a democracy where, all other things being equal, they also get to see people who have shared their social position represented in positions of power where they can help determine solutions, for good or ill, to public problems, through reasoning together with others.
It is a sad fact of American life that the populations with the most disproportionate levels of poverty have also tended to be tremendously underrepresented in elected office. That is not a coincidence. Who governs matters, and has a huge impact on policy. I have no doubt -- can anyone doubt? -- that if this country had had more than 2 percent female members of Congress and 2 female Supreme Court justices since its founding, its policies today would look very different. The same holds true for other groups who have lacked access to the reigns of legislative influence until very recently. I mean, around the same time Wilson was writing that article that Ezra cited -- just 15 years ago -- our Congress was only 6 percent female. Six percent! And there was only one black woman -- one! -- among the hundreds of members of the House in 1990.
A lot of people, including poor people, understand instinctively that their economic prospects and community problems are connected to larger questions of the representativeness of our representative democracy. That's not an argument for identity politics -- it's an argument for democracy. There is pent-up demand at the level of the Democratic base for democratic change that involves expanding the sphere of who governs.
Edwards has a great and comprehensive plan for addressing poverty, should he win office -- a plan I'd hope others would steal liberally from, should they win, instead. And maybe he has to talk tepidly about the power-structure issues than underlie the economic problems many communities have so as to avoid seeming inordinately inflammatory. Certainly neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama are addressing such issues all that much more directly, either (I disagree with Mark's take on that), because the moment you do you get into extremely unpleasant and inflammatory arguments of the sort they both need to avoid in order to be the acceptable change agents people have rallied behind.
All of that said, Clinton and Obama have one huge advantage over Edwards as they reach out to historically disenfranchised groups with disproportionately high rates of poverty, which is that they don't have to make certain arguments explicitly in order for people to hear them. They get to practice dog-whistle politics, and people with ears attuned to certain frequencies can hear their more subtle messages, loud and clear.
UPDATE:Chris Bowers has more here on ideology versus identity as a determinant of voting patterns.
THEY'VE GOT TO BE PROTECTED, ALL THEIR RIGHTS RESPECTED, 'TILL SOMEONE WE LIKE CAN BE ELECTED. Over at the Atlantic, Ross Douthatresponds to Robert Kagan, who seeks to put the Bush administration in historical context. Kagan writes:
Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a "preponderance of power" in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation" by forces of oppression, to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend freedom, to seek "democratic enlargement"in the world, and to work for the "end of tyranny." They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of "maximalism," seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies.
Douthat has some issues with this:
Yes, every American President since 1945, and several before it, have shared similar premises (at least publicly) and employed similar rhetoric about the United States' role in the world. But our chief executives have differed significantly in how they went about implementing the "indispensible nation" vision that Kagan limns in this passage. America's finest postwar Presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, were distinguished by their restraint in the use of military force; they intervened frequently around the world, yes, but surgically rather than sweepingly, and they deliberately avoided investing large numbers of American soldiers to open-ended commitments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Bush, by contrast, seems likely to be remembered as part of a tradition of American overreach that runs from through Woodrow Wilson, the decision to drive to the Yalu in Korea, the disastrous slow-motion escalation in Vietnam, and now the attempt to democratize Iraq.
It's true that some presidents have been less willing to actually invade other countries, but, until the 90s, no president has had any restraint at interfering when it suits us. I just finished reading Tim Weiner's excellent Legacy of Ashes, a lucid and angry history of the CIA which makes clear (if anyone really needed to be convinced of this) that even under Ross's supposedly restrained presidents the U.S. did some truly awful things. Under Eisenhower we overthrew the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced him with the dictatorial Shah, all because he had the temerity to want to get a fair market price for his nation's oil. The operation, incidentally, was steadfastly opposed by the supposedly "overreaching" Truman.
Similarly, in 1957 we tried to mount a coup against Indonesia's democratically elected President Sukarno which resulted in U.S.-backed rebels fighting against Indonesia's military, which was led by a group of U.S.-trained generals who called themselves the "sons of Eisenhower." A disastrous coup in Guatemala in 1953 also led to decades of bloodshed and violence for no particular reason (Russia didn't get involved in Latin America until after Castro took power in Cuba).
Under Reagan we hardly did much better (and would have done far worse if Congress hadn't imposed some restraints on covert action). We sponsored a coup in Chad which resulted in the loss of a number of stinger missiles that could be used to down commercial airliners. We tried and failed to overthrow the, admittedly odious, government of Ethiopia, and of course there was the idiotic and illegal interference in Nicaragua. In Lebanon, after CIA-sponsored Maronite militias killed hundreds of civilians amidst a worsening crisis, the U.S. sent in the Marines only to pull them out again after Hezbollah bombed the U.S. barracks -- a withdrawal that left the nation worse off than it had been before we intervened.
None of these things amount to large-scale military interventions, but they do reflect an almost universal instinct (Carter was the only real exception during the Cold War) towards intervention and arrogance. Kagan, I think, is actually right about the prevailing attitude of U.S. presidents over the last 60 years as far as restraint goes. However, his mistake is taking presidents at their word when in actuality we've done anything but support democracy, however much lip-service we've paid to it. Tom Lehrer had it right.
FEAR. Suppose that you get up in the morning, see the wonderful sunrise and amble downstairs to the kitchen for your first cup of hot coffee. You sit down at the kitchen table and start reading the newspaper, and this is what you read:
Nearly six years after the United States set out to crush Al Qaeda, the terrorist network has "regenerated key elements" of its ability to attack targets in America, and is intensifying its efforts to put operatives inside the country, according to a sobering new report released today from U.S. intelligence agencies.
The document warns that the United States is "in a heightened threat environment" because Osama bin Laden and other senior leaders of Al Qaeda have taken advantage of a more secure environment in their hiding places in remote Pakistan to reestablish their leadership of the far-flung network and refocus its energies on striking the United States.
The report also concludes that Al Qaeda "will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities" of its violent offshoot organization in Iraq, where the war has given a new generation of operatives lethal experience and helped the broader organization raise money and recruit.
What emotions would all that elicit in you? My guess is that the average reader (not a political geek) would feel fear laced with some anger. A 2005 article by Paul Vallely, written after the London bombings, addresses the psychology of terrorism and especially the reactions it hopes to elicit in the real objects of the attacks: the survivors:
Terrorism works not just by instilling fear in us, but by inducing a sense of helplessness. That is why its violence is random. Indeed, the more indiscriminate it is in selecting its defenceless victims, the better it suits the terrorists' purpose.
Outrages take us into mental territory which is beyond our normal comprehension. And the sheer irrationality of this psychology of fear makes it hard for us to construe what is happening around us. [...]
Psychologists talk here of the "anticipatory anxiety" as the population waits for the next bomb to go off. They add in the notion of the "learned helplessness" as we come to terms with the fact that there is nothing or very little we can do to stop it. A profound sense of loss of control results. And control, according to Joanna Bourke, is a key ingredient in combating fear. [...]
Intriguingly, what in the United States came to be called 11 September syndrome was not something which affected those directly involved in the trauma. Rather it affected people across America, in epidemic numbers, and was most prevalent among those who had remained transfixed to their television sets for hours, watching the towers crash over and over again. If the propaganda value of 9/11 was immense, the response of a TV-addicted nation made it even more so. "If there were no television the terrorists wouldn't bother," ventures Dr Reddy. Terrorists want a lot of people watching, more than a lot of people dead.
Helplessness, anticipatory anxiety, the role of the television in spreading what I think amounts to a national post-traumatic stress disorder. Hmm. Is the U.S. media perhaps doing the work for the terrorists here, quite without intending to do so? And what is the role of the Bush administration in reducing the fear that terrorists wish us to feel?
This may be a good place for that old quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt about fear, especially as the above psychological musings set it into sharp contrast with the way we are reacting today:
This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
"WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS IN PRISON?" The controversial Glen C. Loury, one-time Reagan appointee reborn as a self-identified "black progressive," surfaces in the Boston Review advocating reform of our criminal justice system. It's an issue finally picking up steam among progressives; Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame is devoting his next book to it, and word on the street is that left-of-center think tanks will soon be tackling the problem. Loury writes:
Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history. ...
The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program.
Loury explains the paradox of less crime and more prisoners by diagnosing our society as one that is aggressively "punitive," and he links this to our history of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow. "We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them. Incarceration keeps them away from us."
But as I've written, the outrage surrounding Paris Hilton's preferential treatment proves that Americans are punitive not only when it comes to poor, black men, but also when it comes to rich, white women. We see prison as an effective and fair response to substance abuse, for example, even though we know mental health counseling and rehabilitation work much better. Or maybe the rabid Paris-hating was, on some subconcious level, a way of assuaging our guilt about the massive number of poor people of color we've incarcerated?
REVISING AND EXTENDING MY REMARKS ON EDWARDS AND POVERTY. I'm not sure whether what follows will be seen as walking back my earlier post about John Edwards and poverty (which I'm not afraid to do; I don't think the point of this medium is to be right all the time, but to put out ideas, let them get beat around, and refine them if they don't stand up), or reaffirming it, but I should say a little more. [UPDATE: Answer -- It's the walk-back. A complete retraction.. See original post.
First, I can't know whether John Edwards "really cares" about poverty or not, and I shouldn't have put it that way. Because I know better than to think it matters. As a friend put it in an e-mail, "Your respondents may have taken too much to heart your earlier point.... from many months ago, that authenticity is overrated." That's true -- it doesn't matter to me whether a politicians' stated commitments come from deep personal passions or from calculated ambition or from political fear. In fact, calculated choices, in response to political pressure, may be more resilient and reliable than personal passions. (Although that's not true if the choices are calculated to win a party primary, and then quickly abandoned for the general election, which happens all too often with over-cautious Dems.)
That said, Edwards presents his focus on poverty in a certain way: He says he talks about poverty mainly because he cares about it personally, and because of his own background, damn the politics, and damn the risk. And yet, as I point out, he actually talks about poverty in a relatively safe way that treats it purely as an economic issue and he often (though not always) avoids the issues of race, racism and power that are inherently connected to entrenched poverty, especially urban poverty. His major speech on poverty last fall mentioned race only as something that used to be a problem, whereas now income is the problem. (Exact quote: "it was wrong we once lived in a country legally segregated by race. Too many places today are segregated by class.") Even his incredibly daring proposal the other day for school integration adopted the "class, not race" formula of "economic diversity" that politically savvy liberals have been recommending as a safe back door to integration for years. It may be smart politics, and I wouldn't want him to adopt stupid, self-destructive policies. But his economics-only analysis of poverty seems to me a little thin and careful for someone who claims to come to it from pure passion, and as a result, I don't quite feel the passion. And the reason I brought his background into it is because (1) he does and (2) I find it implausible that a white southern liberal of that era would not see poverty in racial terms, and so the choice to not talk about in that way seems calculated and safe.
When I say, bring race back in, I'm not arguing for a politics that says, "give lots of benefits to black people." I'm talking about a language that acknowledges that persistent poverty in the U.S. is not simply an economic problem, but deeply related to place, to power, and to culture. I will say, I thought Senator Obama handled it well in his speech Wednesday, in which he said, "poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence; failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community," and then cited the Harlem Children's Zone as an example. It's a matter of opinion, but I thought Obama's language and policies, because they are not purely economic, is richer and more compelling, and Edwards a little thin by comparison.
Two articles in yesterday's papers that I hadn't read before posting are also relevant. One was the comparison between Obama and Edwards' plans in the Washington Post, which notes a key difference: Obama is advocating high-intensity efforts to transform poor communities, across many dimensions (what are sometimes called Comprehensive Community Initiatives), whereas Edwards is staking his policy on "dispersal" of poor people to where jobs are. Neither strategy has an overall positive record, although recent efforts at dispersal have been limited and unsuccessful, whereas comprehensive initiatives have had both successes and failures, such as the Clinton-era Empowerment Zone initiative. Again, I think a focus primarily on "economic integration" rather than revitalization of poor communities is limited, and sees poverty largely in economic terms, and I think improved urban governance and a return of jobs to urban areas generally make revitalization strategies more likely to succeed. (This
article byDalton Conley is a good summary of this recent debate, and ends with a provocative alternative.)
In a totally different take, though, the Times reported yesterday yesterday that Edwards was "broadening" his message at the end of the poverty tour: "the 'two Americas are the very rich and everybody else' -- not only the extremely impoverished but all workers who are struggling because of a lack of adequate benefits and wages." So maybe he's not really talking about "poverty" at all, but moving toward a kind of economic populism that tries to unite the concerns of the poor, the near-poor, and the middle class, as against the very wealthy -- what Matt Bai in his article about Edwards a few weeks ago called "pre-distributionism." If that's the case, then I don't know where my points stand. A few months ago, at the end of a post bashing the group Third Way (whose supporters don't fight back as hard as the Edwards backers do!) I created a little taxonomy of five ways one could talk about the economy, the middle class, and poverty. Here are two of the options:
2. You could argue that both the middle class and the working poor face increasing stresses, anxieties and insecurities, and there's a need for either universal programs that address that shared experience of insecurity (universal health care, wage insurance) or fundamental macroeconomic changes that would lead to a tighter labor market. That's more or less the position represented by, say, the Economic Policy Institute's "Shared Prosperity" project.
3. You could argue that the middle class is doing okay, but those below the median income -- not just the poor, but those hanging on the precipice of the middle class and trying to climb up -- are having a hard time of it, and we need policies that help their mobility, out of a moral obligation and out of our vision of America as a land of opportunity. This would be more or less John Edwards' "Two Americas" of 2004.
If the Times is not just taking one quote out of context, then perhaps Edwards is moving from option 3 closer to option 2 -- away from the particular to the universal. And maybe what's disconcerting is just that he says he still says he's talking about "poverty" when he's really talking about the middle class. Which, again, is good, responsible, universalist politics, and he's showing plenty of policy nerve in being explicit about tax increases and big programs. But I think that both the language and policies on poverty (to the extent he's talking about poverty and not general economic anxiety) could be richer and more daring, and could send a more compelling message about his personal commitments.
One thing I did resent in the comments was the accusation that much of TAPPED is engaged in "Edwards-bashing." My rank-order preferences in the Democratic primary are very close to one another (Joe Lieberman would call it a "four-way tie.") They're all good candidates, but they all can do things a little better: I want Edwards to be as sharp and daring on poverty as he says he wants to be; I want Senator Clinton to rid Democratic politics of the baleful, narrowing influence of Mark Penn and her own caution, I want Obama to show a greater appreciation of conflict and that not all issues can be resolved by people learning to get along.
WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, EDWARDS, POVERTY, AND THE AMERICAN PROSPECT WAYBACK MACHINE. Yesterday's conversation on Edwards left me hunting for some of poverty expert William Julius Wilson's work to see how much symmetry there was between his arguments and Edwards' appeal. My past reporting on Edwards had seen his name come up a lot, but he's a famous guy, so it wasn't clear whether he was being mentioned for enhanced credibility, or because he was a real influence. And since I'm always looking for opportunities to publicize the awesomely rich and totally free TAP archives, here's Wilson in our pages -- in our very first issue, in fact (ignore the date on the article, it's wrong) -- advocating for a "Race-Neutral Policies":
a change of emphasis is overdue. In the 1960s efforts to raise the public's awareness and conscience about the plight of black Americans helped to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However, by the 1980s the civil rights strategy of dramatizing black disadvantage was backfiring. The "myth of black progress" theme, frequently invoked to reinforce arguments for stronger race-specific programs, played easily into the hands of conservative critics of antibias policies. The strategy reinforced the erroneous impression that federal antidiscrimination efforts had largely failed, and it overlooked the significance of complex racial changes since the mid-1960s. It also aroused concern that Democratic politicians' sensitivity to black complaints had come at the expense of the white majority.
The tortuous struggles of the 1960s produced real gains. To deny those achievements only invites demoralization among both black and white advocates of racial justice. Yet the movement for racial equality needs a new political strategy for the 1990s that appeals to a broader coalition and addresses many problems afflicting minorities that originated in racist practices but will not be solved by race-specific remedies. [...]
These programs should be presented, however, not as ways to address the plight of poor minorities (though they would greatly benefit from them), but as strategies to help all groups, regardless of race or economic class. After all, Americans across racial and class lines continue to be concerned about unemployment and job security, declining real wages, escalating medical costs, the sharp decline in the quality of public education, the lack of good child care, and crime and drug trafficking in their neighborhoods.
So in fact, it looks like Edwards' rhetorical strategy on poverty is something akin to a direct lift from William Julius Wilson, who's fairly well steeped in the racial inequalities of the subject. I don't know if that's the best approach, or the one he should be taking, but it does appear to have a lineage, and some sort of rationale.
And to delve into the real point of this post, TAP has been around for over 15 years, and the number of remarkable intellectuals and authors who have graced our pages is impressive. We keep our archives open and free, and an afternoon spent wandering around the author list can be quite profitable...
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I'll second Steven White's sentiments below. There's an odd subtext in liberal conversations about Southern voting patterns that seems to suggest economics are the only political concern worth casting a ballot on. But if you really do believe that abortion is creating an incalculable human genocide, is it so crazy that you'd vote on that rather than vague economic promises? And what, exactly, are these economic policies that Democrats support and are sure make such an intense difference in the lives of middle class voters? Poor voters already do cast ballots for the Democrats -- it's those a bit higher up the income ladder who shift to the right. And why not? Save for universal health care, which Democrats have proven pretty incapable of passing, there's not much in the Democratic agenda that would amount to a huge economic benefit for these folks. There are portions of it that would be significantly better indirectly -- no crazy wars would mean less in taxes down the road, no unfunded tax cuts would mean our infrastructure wouldn't be crumbling, retaining the estate tax would be directly beneficial, etc -- but the degree to which some Democrats appear to believe that their ascension into the executive branch results in huge piles of money appearing before everyone who makes less than $65,000 a year is actually quite odd.
And so long as I'm speaking in praise of sincere disagreement, the occasional advice from reverse-elitists to "respect" conservative ideas, norms, and so forth is unbelievably condescending. To imagine that the political beliefs of these voters are so weakly held as to be disarmed by some affirmation and attentive listening is utterly absurd. These are serious arguments, and they deserve to be taken seriously. What's required is persuasion, not "respect."
WHEREIN I GIVE FUEL TO TOM SCHALLER'S FIRE. I like Sasha Abramsky's review of Joe Bageant's new book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, except for one off-handed comment in the last paragraph. While praising Bageant's work, Abramsky writes, "No single book will ever be able to fully explain why so much of impoverished America so consistently votes against its own economic self-interest." This assumption is a powerful one in liberal circles. Call it the Thomas Frank Theory of Why People Don't Vote For Us.
Why would any working-class Southern white guy ever vote Republican? Well, maybe he really thinks an aggressive military is necessary. Perhaps "freedom isn't free" is more than an ironic statement for him. He might really believe criminals deserve punishments that only a Republican could dish out. Ditto on guns, abortion, affirmative action, etc. The point is, this has to be understood as being about more than the economic part of social class. Class is also cultural.
And different cultural values exist depending on one's privilege and cultural location. My old peers from east Tennessee are way more conservative on social and foreign policy questions than I am. They also still live there. While they may be distinctly working-class, many of them would laugh if you told them the Democratic party represents their self-interest. Class in economic terms alone doesn't determine voting. To a large degree, culture does. And when you consider the array of issues cultural preferences affect, this isn't as superficial as it sounds.
OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY UNDER FIRE. Public health advocates warn say thatRep. Joe Barton (R-TX) is expected to introduce an amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Bill that would divert funding away from NIOSH, the agency charged with defining and enforcing occupational safety regulations. The amendment would restrict the sole source of federal support for NIOSH's Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) program. In its original form, the House bill would have allocated $88.365 million for NORA, a sum that looks like small change in comparison to the estimated $128 billion -- $155 billion that occupational illnesses and injuries cost our economy every year.
The Rayburn building isn't exactly rife with occupational hazards, which might explain why Rep. Barton doesn't sympathize with the 5,734 workers who died on the job in 2005 -- not including an additional 50,000 who died from occupational diseases like "Popcorn Lung," a fatal condition resulting from prolonged inhalation of diacetyl vapors released in the production of artificially flavored popcorn.
Or maybe the man described by the Washington Post as a "determined ally" of industry simply doesn't think his personal entourage of coal lobbyists should have to sacrifice profits in order to protect their employees. Anything that's good for workers must be bad for business. Maybe Barton is worried that if NIOSH gets the $88.365 million, someone might actually hold industry accountable for maintaining minimum safety standards.
CALIFORNIA PREFERS DEFICIT REDUCTION TO MASS TRANSIT. Apropos of debates over whether sprawling Los Angeles or dense New York City will lead the way in fighting global warming, the LA Timesreports Sacramento will use $1 billion raised from a gasoline tax on drivers not, as planned, to extend the Expo light rail line, but instead to reduce a long-term, multi-billion dollar state deficit.
Legislators say they need to bring their three week budget impasse to a close. But according to the Times, "Local transportation officials said the tax was created specifically to fund transportation projects. They characterized the cut as a major setback, warning that certain projects could get delayed for years. ... The budget deal will impart a 'ripple effect through our entire long-range plan,' said David Yale, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's deputy executive director for regional programming."
It's not uncommon for large metropolitan cities to have their progressive policies stymied in this fashion by backwater state capitals. Mike Bloomberg and Antonio Villaraigosa can bond over this one.
WE REPORT, YOU SCRATCH YOUR HEAD. These are three very odd paragraphs from The Washington Post:
A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the program would require about $14 billion in new money over five years -- on top of the current $5 billion in annual funding -- merely to keep covering the same number of children, in part because of rising health-care costs. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt, accompanying Bush yesterday, said: "We disagree with that number."
In the 15-minute interview, Bush also rejected the charges by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the administration's political appointees routinely rewrote his speeches, blocked public health reports for political reasons and screened his travel.
"I can't speak to some of the complaints the surgeon general made," Bush said. ". . . He worked energetically in his job. And, obviously, at some point in time, he became very disgruntled and spoke out about it. But ours is an administration that attracts very smart, capable people. I'm very interested in their points of view, and I expect people to speak out. I also have my own points of view and feel very strongly about a lot of issues."
Some unanswered questions: First, why does the administration disagree with the CBO's number? Is there any legitimacy to their complaint, or is it simple crud tossed at the reporter to make this look like a factual, rather than ideological, dispute? The CBO, which isn't known for making up numbers and whose data is routinely reported by the Washington Post, deserves either a defense or to be held accountable. Serious questions about their credibility shouldn't just be allowed to float around at the end of paragraphs.
Second, did Bush actually dispute Surgeon General Carmona's claims? It seems to me that he first removed himself from commenting on them ("I can't speak to some of the complaints...") and then made a lot of unrelated points, including the hilarious kicker, "I also have my own points of view and feel very strongly about a lot of issues." Given that Carmona had specific grievances about the politicization of research and science, for Bush to dispute those claims would require him to say they're not true, and possibly explain why they're wrong. Seeming emotionally displeased with their existence is not the same thing.
EDWARDS VS. OBAMA ON POVERTY. In today's WSJ, Christopher Cooperwrites that John Edwards "seems to be playing an outsized role in driving the terms of the party's debate -- generally to the left -- on everything from Iraq to health care." Poverty also comes to mind. Referencing back to the 2004 election, Cooper writes:
Mr. Edwards seems to feel freer to address issues that might alienate the party and business establishment. Just as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean pushed the Democrats toward more staunch opposition of the Iraq war four years ago, Mr. Edwards seems to be having a big impact on forcing the pack to follow his agenda.
Whether Cooper is right or not, Barack Obama did recently offer some poverty proposals of his own. As the Washington Postputs it:
Edwards has focused on the malignant effects of the concentration of poverty in inner cities. He has argued for dispersing low-income families by replacing public housing with a greatly expanded rental voucher program to allow families to move where there are more jobs and better schools.
[cut]
Although Obama offered some of the same proposals as Edwards, such as a transitional jobs program and an expanded earned-income tax credit, he presented a sharply different overall objective: fixing inner-city areas so they become places where families have a shot at prospering, without having to move.
As an example, he cited the Harlem Children's Zone, an initiative that seeks to improve one section of that New York neighborhood with an array of services, including prenatal counseling, early childhood education and free medical services. Obama urged replicating the program in 20 cities, which he estimated would cost a few billion dollars a year. "If poverty is a disease that infects the entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation," he said. "We have to heal that entire community."
PRIVACY IS FOR RICH PEOPLE.Mattbeat me to the obvious point about David Ignatius's defense of David Vitter: the transaction in question can't be "private" for one of the individuals involved but criminal for the other. And in this case, it's compounded by the fact that the person being given a pass for his lawbreaking is a public official with the power to change the laws he doesn't seem to think should apply to him. Moreover, I don't think that the criminal law should apply to either party but if you're going to punish one party in a prostitution case, it makes far more sense to punish the john than the sex worker.
This gives me an excuse to quote one of my favorite passages in the United States Reports, from Robert Jackson:
The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally. Conversely, nothing opens the door to arbitrary action so effectively as to allow those officials to pick and choose only a few to whom they will apply legislation and thus to escape the political retribution that might be visited upon them if larger numbers were affected. Courts can take no better measure to assure that laws will be just than to require that laws be equal in operation.
And this is why critics of the Supreme Court's "privacy" jurisprudence are dead wrong to say that it has no connection to due process. It's not a coincidence that most "morals" legislation -- laws banning "sodomy," abortion, prostitution, etc. -- inevitably rely on extremely arbitrary enforcement to stay on the books. The selective invocation of "privacy" being invoked by Vitter's defenders is an illustration of why this is unacceptable. If the laws shouldn't be applied to Vitter, they should be repealed (and, in many cases, can properly be struck down by the Courts.)
HILLARY POLL. Sixty percent of Americans believe Hillary Clinton will be the next president and 80 percent believe she will win the Democratic nomination, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. Forty percent of voters have a negative view of her, 40 percent like her, and the rest are undecided. More younger, single, working class people are sympathetic to Hillary, while more older, married, and wealthier voters are skeptical of her.
One voter polled did call Clinton "socialist." And another, a 59-year old woman who supported Bill Clinton, said she was “not ready for a lady president.” Oy. But among liberal women, a key Clinton constituency, voters expressed a changing view of the candidate. "I think some of that softening is coming through,” one 57-year old woman told the Times.
CLOUT DOUBT. In their book, Foxes in the Henhouse, my bete noir, Mudcat Saunders and his more level-headed co-author, Steve Jarding, express indignation that too many Democrats "can't count." You don't need an abacus, they argue, to realize the South is simply too big to dismiss.
For a moment, let's put aside the South's electoral count in favor of its financial clout. The Institute for Southern Studies has analyzed the contributions to the top five Republican and Democratic campaigns during the first two quarters of 2007. The results? Although the southern states -- the ISS defines them as a baker's dozen, pooling Kentucky and West Virginia with the former Confederate States -- account for 31 percent of electoral votes, southern donors contributed just 16 percent of all monies.
Trust me when I say it won't take a tote board to count the number of times facts like these are mentioned when the political conversation turns, as it always does in every electoral cycle, to the South's critical role in American politics.
RUSSIAN KIDS LEARN PUTIN ROCKS. The Bush years have sucked, but at least American text books aren't edited by the current administration. According to the Washington Post, Russian history and social studies text books "reflect the themes dominating official political discourse here: that Putin restored Russian strength and built what the Kremlin calls a 'sovereign democracy' despite American efforts to isolate the country."
The books say the American empire may be nearing a "final collapse" and that the Ukrainian Orange Revolution snatched a fair victory out of the hands of Russian forces in the country. Stalin is lauded as "the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R."
TODAY IN TAP ONLINE.Sasha Abramskyreviews Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant's new book about growing up in small-town Virginia, moving to the West Coast and becoming a liberal, then moving back to his hometown.
Part ethnography, part sociology, part just good, old-fashioned storytelling, Deer Hunting With Jesus uses an insider's perspective to explain, generally successfully, why parts of rural America, especially in the South, are so conservative, so suspicious of "big city liberals," and so willing to cast their lot with right-wing politicians who swiftly turn around and bite these working class supporters in their collective ass.
Also today, Judith Stadtman Tuckerresponds to the results of a new Pew survey showing that a minority of working mothers believe the trend toward full employment for women with young children is ideal for families or beneficial to society.
And Joe Rosenbloomfiles a dispatch from the campaign trail with Bill Richardson in New Hampshire.
VOTING REFORM NOT UNTIL 2012. Another strange effect of the earlier primary schedule: House Democrats say they've given up on the idea that electronic voting systems can be overhauled in time for the 2008 presidential election. Instead of switching from computerized machines to hand-marked ballots scanned optically, the new, scaled-back goal is to have all voting machines equipped with a small printer in time for the election. But critics say those printers are delicate and unreliable.
Under the more modest voting bill, New York, which still uses voting booths with mechanical levers, is the only state that will have to completely overhaul its system by 2008.
WOMEN'S HEALTH CLINIC DIRECTOR ARRESTED FOR CURSING. OPERATION RESCUE ALLOWED TO TRESPASS WITHOUT ARREST. When is it against the law to curse on your own private property? When you're the director of a woman's health clinic in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Operation Rescue protesters have invaded your parking lot, that's when.
At least that's what clinic staff say happened on Tuesday, July 17, to Gloria Gray, director of the Western Alabama Women's Center, when she confronted antiabortion protester David Lackey in the clinic parking lot, and defied a policeman's order to go back inside the clinic. Rachel Joy Larris at Real Women, Real Voices has the poop, including an exclusive interview with Lorrie Foss-McGaha, a registered nurse at the Western Alabama Women's Center who gives her first-person account of Gray's arrest. (Full disclosure: Larris is my colleague at the National Women's Editorial Forum, where I serve as research director.)
The protest at the Tuscaloosa clinic came as a bit of a surprise, since the group's permit for a public gathering was issued for the following day, July 18. Less surprising was the group's protest, announced earlier, in front of the New Woman All Women clinic in Birmingham -- the clinic where Eric Robert Rudolphkilled one person and seriously injured (and permanently disabled) another when he detonated a bomb spiked with nails outside the clinic.
Tonight, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America will celebrate with a rally featuring Roy Moore, the disgraced former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who is known for refusing a court order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments -- which he commissioned -- from the rotunda of the state's Justice Department building. Moore is a fitting choice: Like Rudolph, he apparently sanctions violence against gay and lesbian people. In an opinion on the custody rights of a lesbian couple, Moore wrote:
The 30-page opinion called homosexuality "detestable and abominable" and an "inherent evil" that goes against biblical scripture and Alabama law. Moore’s document specified that in Alabama, those who break the law are subject to "confinement and even execution. [The state] must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle."
The actions taken by the righties in Alabama are part of Operation Save America/Operation Rescue's annual attempt to shut down targeted clinics for a week at a time. Taking place concurrently are similar actions in Witchta, Kansas, where abortion provider Dr. George Tiller has been targeted personally. Tiller survived being shot twice by wingnut Shelley Shannon of the terrorist organization Army of God. He's been the longtime target of former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who was recently deposed by the Kansas electorate after he subpoenaed the medical records of women who had obtained abortions in Tiller's clinic.
But, back to Alabama... Who says there's no such thing as trickle-down? Looks like when the executive branch suspends habeas corpus, local cops assume free rein to put the gag on mouthy broads.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS. You see these sorts of laundry lists laying out Hillary's progressivism fairly often, but they always strike me as making the case against her more forcefully than they make the case for her (the supporters, they doth protest too much). I mean, that's a technically impressive record, but it's decidedly in the center of the party. There's nothing on there that Obama or Edwards disagrees with, and I'd say they're more programmatically liberal than her on a good number of the issues -- particularly health care, where she's spent years explicitly embracing tepidity. Worse, there's often this caveat that Hillary is a women, and so you can write off her sustained hawkishness as a sop to America's misogynists. But the pressures on a woman to appear tough don't end when she enter office. They increase. So if Hillary is willing to buckle on issues like Iraq while in the United States Senate -- and to be clear, I don't think she buckled, I think she's a genuine hawk -- there's no reason to believe she'll act differently once elected.
To my mind, there's a fairly strong "competence" argument in favor of electing Clinton. She has a deep and broad understanding of the executive branch, and will be able to hit the ground running. She's just not interested in running very fast. With Clinton, you have something close to an assurance that, domestically at least, she will pursue a series of useful and progressive small bore policies in a determined and sustained way -- and many of them will likely be enacted. Edwards seems more like a bet on the possibility of grand change -- with the attendant increased likelihood of real failure. And Obama strikes me as occupying something of a middle ground between careful, consensus-driven politics and transformative change.
That doesn't get into the electability arguments, which I don't really have an opinion on. I think Hillary's a pretty skilled politician, and will do much better than many liberals currently believe. I think Obama has the greatest potential upside as an individual candidate, and I think Edwards has the greatest likelihood of running a campaign that helps mainstream progressivism. On the downside, a lot of people really hate Hillary and she'll energize the Right, Obama is an uneven politician who could really flameout, and Edwards has made a series of boneheaded, careless errors that speak poorly of his political discipline.
So yeah, tough decisions to be made. But I just don't buy the argument that Hillary is even nearly as progressive as her two nearest competitors. This election is taking place in a context where all the candidates are actually quite progressive, so saying she's relatively less so is different than saying that she's conservative, but on everything from foreign policy to health care to cultural issues (like flag burning and video games), she's repeatedly demonstrated a broad centrist streak -- which is perfectly defensible, just not an orientation I share, or one that her supporters should ignore.
HOW NOW TO END THE WAR? If you want a great run-down of the legislative prospects for redeploying troops now that GOP Senators have rejected one good faith attempt, check out Spencer Ackerman's reporting and analysis at TPM. Spencer concludes that Republicans are planning to finally change course in September, when General Patraeus makes his report on the status of the surge:
Two weeks ago, it was hardly clear that September would be the beginning of the end, as opposed to a potential rallying point for Republicans when Petraeus comes to Washington. But thanks to how the July debate unfolded, come September the GOP's victory today could look like a Pyrrhic one.
It looks increasingly likely that Bush will change his tune in September as well, and begin to cautiously support some kind of draw-down. But perhaps that makes too much sense.
RE: RE: EDWARDS AND POVERTY. One element of the Edwards poverty appeal that has gotten very little attention, including from me, is the book he just released, Ending Poverty in America, which is wonky enough that even I haven't set aside the time to read it. I'm out of the office so I don't have it handy for a flip-through, but a glance at the table of contents is useful here. One of the chapters is "Why We Should Be Concerned About Young, Less Educated, Black Men" by Ronald B. Mincy and Hillard Pouncy, and another is "A New Agenda for America’s Ghetto Poor," by William Julius Wilson. Now, how much involvement Edwards had with the book, and how closely he read these chapters, aren't questions I can answer. But I do know he's spent a lot of time talking to Wilson, so he's presumably versed in some of these arguments.
RE: EDWARDS AND POVERTY. I find disagreeing with Mark Schmitt about matters of social policy to be almost absurdly discomfiting, but his post on John Edwards and poverty genuinely surprised me. Mark has got to be the first liberal in years who wants to restore race's primacy in the political discussion over poverty. I thought severing that linkage was 60 percent of the justification for welfare reform! Indeed, the most interesting part of Edwards is his ability to universalize the rhetoric of poverty into a story that includes, and even features, the white working class, while still upholding policies of broad applicability. This is a guy, after all, who just offered up a white paper on racially integrating the nation's schools.
Mark's post appears to me to conflate two separate issues. The first is whether Edwards draws much support from the actually impoverished. The answer to that appears to be no -- and one could imagine a variety of hypotheses for why that might be so. I think it's hard to argue, though, that the poor in this country always -- or even ever -- support the candidate most likely to focus on their plight. The second is whether his focus on poverty ignores race. And on that, I'm baffled by Mark's answer. He says, for instance, "in his announcement speech in New Orleans, [Edwards] never mentioned race, even though the lack of political power of the Ninth Ward's African-Americans was more fundamental to their abandonment than their lack of income."
I feel that Mark is possibly giving too little credit to the fact that John Edwards announced his candidacy in New Orleans' 9th Ward -- particularly since Mark then praises Obama for merely mentioning a series of black communities in a speech. How does the one not outweigh the other?
Indeed, it's an article of faith among liberals that Reagan sent a strong message by beginning his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- a town famous solely for the murder of three civil rights workers. If you're looking to send a message of sympathy as to the inequities facing African-Americans, though, there's no more racially charged location in America than New Orleans' 9th Ward. One of the primary topics of conversation among reporters in the audience was how Obama, completely unfairly, could never announce his candidacy in a similar setting -- it was simply too explicit about race for anyone but a white southerner to touch.
Or take Edwards' recent speech on economic fairness took place at Cooper Union -- the same Cooper Union where Lincoln famously argued that the federal government could regulate and limit the spread of slavery to the nation's newest states. Again -- I don't know how much more explicit the racial aspects can be here.
Moreover the Cooper Union speech usefully illuminates my central concern with Mark's argument: I tend to think Edwards' broad rhetoric is a feature, not a bug. The speech was about predatory lending -- an issue that primarily affects minority communities (Hispanics also have it quite bad). But it was framed in terms of wage stagnation from the 70s, and the decline of union power, and the rocketing incomes of the rich, and the spread of lobbyists in Washington, and dozens of other small asides that tried to untether predatory lending from urban minorities and make it an issue of economic fairness of relevance to us all. At the end of the day, though, the policies proposed would primarily effect urban minorities. That seems...wise.
Lastly, Mark writes that "John Edwards just doesn't seem able, at least to me, to talk about poverty in a way that convinces me that he has done more than choose to talk about it because he wants to seem like the kind of person who would choose to talk about it." That seems like a distinction without a difference. If Edwards makes poverty a legislative focus because he wants to be the kind of guy who makes poverty a legislative focus, I'm having trouble separating that from if he makes poverty a legislative focus because he wants to make poverty a legislative focus. At the end of the day, it's the "legislative focus" part that strikes me as important. Being the kind of guy who wants to care about poverty and so does all sorts of poverty-reduction work strikes me as awfully close to, well, caring about poverty.
FINDING STRENGH IN WEAKNESS.Nicolaus Mills's article today comparing Elizabeth Edwards's grace in publicly facing breast cancer to FDR's strength in disability is very moving. The FDR memorial on the Tidal Basin here in Washington, D.C. is, I think, the most progressive landmark in the city, filled with anti-poverty, pro-peace messages. FDR's civil rights record is wanting; he interned Japanese Americans, turned away European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, and capitulated to Southern Democrats on issues such as lynching. Nevertheless, Mills shows how FDR's paralysis (the result of a polio infection) helped him identify with other victims of hardship. I wonder if this helps account for FDR's focus on social programs to lift up the poor:
Howard [University's] president, Mordecai Johnson, asked Roosevelt if the students could see that he was crippled. They had been so damaged because of their race, Johnson declared, that the president's example would inspire them. Roosevelt agreed. He let himself be lifted from his car in full public view, and then as the Howard students watched, he walked slowly and awkwardly to the platform from which he spoke.
The second exception occurred in 1944, when Roosevelt visited a military hospital in Oahu, Hawaii, following a strategy session with General Douglas MacArthur. Roosevelt asked the Secret Service to wheel him through the amputee wards occupied by troops who had lost one or more arms and legs. Stopping at one bed after another and chatting with the men, he made a point of letting them see how he coped with legs that no longer worked. The visit ended with Roosevelt himself near tears.
CONGRESSIONAL WITHOUT AID. The WaPo has a large feature today on members of Congress who are moms. The piece focuses a lot on the guilt of being a working mother and how difficult it is to commute a long distance far away from a family, with quotes like:
"It feels like someone's ripping my heart out," [Debbie Wasserman Schultz] said. "No matter how good your spouse is, kids want their mom when they're sick."
There's been little reporting on work/family balance issues faced by members of Congress, perhaps because up to recently, members of Congress were either men or women with grown children.
"Men have this fixture called a wife that's going to take care of the children," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. "We hear very often from women who are running or elected that they wish they had a wife, someone to deal with the children, have fresh food in the house, pick up the dry cleaning."
So where are the husbands? I read the entire article, looking for husbands who had given up their careers to stay home to support the kids, but alas. In fact, there wasn't a single quote from the husbands of these women or even an indicator they were doing more to pitch in and help with the family. But the article did indicate that even if a husband was available to take charge of the family and a congresswoman did a good job, she might lose reelection anyway:
"For male candidates, people think having young children is a total plus -- people think, 'Oh, this is great, he's going to be concerned about family issues, he'll be more future-oriented,' " [Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster,] said. "A male with young kids, everyone likes it -- men, women, seniors." For women, it's a different story.
"If the kids are grown, then it can be a real positive," Lake said. "But if it's younger kids, people ask, 'Who's taking care of the children?' " [...]
It's women voters who are hardest on women candidates with young children, Lake said. "Perhaps it's their own sense of conflict or they know firsthand how difficult it is," she said. "Or maybe it's jealousy. The idea of 'If I can't do this, you can't do it.' Or 'You're putting yourself over your family and that's not a value I share.' "
It seems that women can't choose to focus on their career in public office totally or they risk being ousted by voters for being a bad mom. In many ways, the story of these congressional mothers isn't any different than the lives of regular working women. They're still the ones pulling the majority of the family responsibility, even though they have demanding and prestigious jobs. Instead of women having to do it all exceptionally well, when will partners start making the sacrifices that women have been making for their husbands for years? Those kinds of stories are few and far between.
WHY CAN'T JOHN EDWARDS CONVINCE ME HE CARES ABOUT POVERTY? [UPDATE: See below -- I've come to think that this post is completely incorrect.] I appreciate Paul Waldman's citation of one of my favorite posts from my old (and soon to be revived) blog, the one in which I wrote, "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you." He uses my point, appropriately, to note that John Edwards's focus on poverty, like his attention to detailed policy plans, is not so much a direct appeal to the economic interests of poor people, as it is a way of portraying the kind of person he is, in order to appeal to people like, for example, me -- a middle-class, white liberal who cares about poverty, but even more than that, is attracted to the kind of candidate who has the nerveto talk about poverty, rather than the safe middle-class pabulum that the typical Democrat's pollsters tell them they should talk about.
But I'm not quite feeling it. In fact, the more I hear, the less persuaded I am that Edwards has any instinctive feeling about poverty at all. And that has nothing to do with the haircuts or his personal wealth. In part, it's related to
the points Garance makes in the excellent article that Paul was responding to: It would be a lot easier to think of Edwards as the candidate who cares about poverty if he seemed to be leading a grassroots movement that had actual poor people in it. RFK and Bill Clinton appealed to non-poor white liberals, but they also had enthusiastic support among poor people, and the two cannot easily be separated. Plus, we each get a vote, and there are a lot more poor people than there are people like me.
More important, though, is a point that Garance doesn't state as bluntly as I'm about to, but which I take to be the main point of her article: Edwards talks about poverty with race (and gender) left out of it. Poverty is not just an economic problem of lack of income, to be solved by getting people some income; it's integrally related to imbalances of power that have their roots in race.
And I just don't see any indication that Edwards understands or appreciates those inequities, or if he does, he doesn't have the nerve to talk about them. Take his personal story about poverty: He talks about empathizing with poverty because he grew up "modestly" in Seneca, SC, where his father worked in a textile mill. Here's a key fact: The textile mills of the Carolina Piedmont in the 1950s and 1960s were absolutely segregated. Almost no blacks worked in the textile mills when Edwards was growing up. African-Americans did not have even the minimal economic opportunity that Edwards' family enjoyed. So Edwards may have been near-poor by national standards, but in the world of mid-century South Carolina, his family, merely by being white, and with a father steadily employed in the mill, were royalty. There were indeed two South Carolinas and his was the advantaged one.
Yes, they may have had to walk out of a restaurant occasionally because they couldn't afford the prices (gee, I hope that never happens to me!), but for a white southerner to see poverty primarily through his own experience, rather than the vastly worse-off conditions of African-Americans, is a little disturbing. And I suspect it's why his pitch is unpersuasive to Southern African-Americans, to whom "son of a mill worker" sounds like a fairer deal than they ever got. (In yesterday's article in Time, he tells the story a little differently: his father "moved up the ladder" into the middle class, which is, he says, "the way it's supposed to work," and implicitly, no longer does. This nostalgia for South Carolina in the 1950s would presumably fall on deaf ears among those for whom it never worked that way.)
It's not that Edwards never talks about race and discrimination -- in his 2004 convention speech, he said, "From the time I was very young, I saw the ugly face of segregation and discrimination. I saw young African-American kids sent upstairs in movie theaters. I saw white only signs on restaurant doors and luncheon counters. I feel such an enormous responsibility when it comes to issues of race and equality and civil rights." But it seems to come from a completely different place than his discussion of poverty. Similarly, in his announcement speech in New Orleans, he never mentioned race, even though the lack of political power of the Ninth Ward's African-Americans was more fundamental to their abandonment than their lack of income.
To talk about race solely in terms of movie theaters and lunch counters is safe. It's the approved, Rosa-Parks-was-tired narrative. To talk about poverty is a little more daring, but only in that most politicians don't do it at all, and want to talk only about "the middle class." But to separate poverty completely from race and power is still playing it pretty safe. And for a politician from the South -- and not just the South but the state that brought us John C. Calhoun, Strom Thurmond, and the last confederate flag -- to so carefully cut around issues of race and power, even while talking about poverty, is more than a little disconcerting.
Contrast Obama, in his speech on urban poverty yesterday: It weaves between questions of economic poverty, the isolation of poor (black and Latino) communities, and issues of male responsibility. He doesn't talk about race a lot, but it's an imminent presence, even in the invocation of names of communities: "the streets of Compton and Detroit, and throughout the mining towns of West Virginia... the 9th Ward and the rural Gulf Coast." (Three or four identifiably black communities to one white.) It could be a little more explicit about power, but he does pretty well, saying at the very beginning that the people of Anacostia (the poorest area of DC) "suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the most money, and influence, and power."
Garance contends that Edwards' poverty message is unappreciated by poor people because, unlike the era of the Kennedys, they can now vote for an African-American or a woman, and would choose that expression of identity over the policy message. That may be. But it's also a problem that John Edwards just doesn't seem able, at least to me, to talk about poverty in a way that convinces me that he has done more than choose to talk about it because he wants to seem like the kind of person who would choose to talk about it. I strongly supported Edwards in 2004, and I was initially inclined to do so again. But something's missing.
[UPDATE: There are some very good points made in comments, and I'll mention a couple points that correct or clarify my comments:
1. Although Edwards' New Orleans announcement speech did not mention race or power, the visual image was of him with African-American kids in the background. And, of course, as Ezra points out, New Orleans has significant racial symbolism of its own at this point.
2. I said that Edwards would me more convincing on poverty if he had a movement that had a poor constituency. While some commentors argued that poor people are too busy to join a movement, which writes out the entire history of community organizing in America, the more accurate point is that Edwards does have a strong alliance with the most important poor-people's organization in America, ACORN, and its president, Maude Hurd, and they worked together on minimum wage issues.
[FINAL UPDATE: Sometimes in the course of blogging you get something completely wrong. And without editors, we rely on commentors to call us on it. With Chris Bowers as a model, I completely and categorically retract this post and apologize for aspects of it that some found offensive. In particular:
-- It is ridiculous to suggest that a candidate, to show he cares about poverty, must also invoke issues of race at every turn. I've put my point better in the follow-up post, which is simply to point out that poverty is not purely an economic question.
-- Whatever point I was trying to make about Edwards' background -- which was basically that it was disconcerting that he didn't talk about the racial aspects of poverty in the mill towns of South and North Carolina -- was not conveyed well and is not right in any case. Poverty was white and black in the South; Edwards does not describe his family as "poor," and so the point is irrelevant.
-- I've been arguing for a decade or more that a Democratic candidate should be upfront about poverty, and not couch everything in a mushy middle-class economic message. I don't know why I would want to nit-pick when a candidate does that, not once but twice (that is, in 2004 and 2008.)
My thanks to all those who commented, as well as Ezra and others on other blogs who made important points.]
BUSH: LESS POPULAR THAN STALIN. Whenever I see approval ratings for President Bush, I always think of a Harper's Index stat printed in January of 2006 that compared Bush's popularity among Americans to Stalin's popularity among Russians. Of course, that statistic was printed 18 months ago, when the two ratings were neck-in-neck at 37%.
So a new poll from Strategic Vision (via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) finding Bush's latest rating at a dismal 19% puts our president a far cry below the iconic leader of an oppressive communist regime who systematically murdered millions through forced famines, labor camps, and political purges. Enough said.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. TPM Election Central has gone through each campaign's filings to determine which publications they subscribed to in the last Month. As it turns out, Barack Obama is the only candidate to subscribe to the Nevada papers, Rudy Guliani subscribes to "A&E television networks" and everyone blew a heck of a lot of money on LexisNexis. Oh and Obama subscribes to... The American Prospect.
TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. So we all know Americans take fewer vacation days than all other developed nations. Ezraexamines why we don't rally behind an annual month-long, French-style vacation, despite how much we'd would like to.
Also today, Harold Meyersoncalls out the supposedly now anti-war GOP members of Congress who aren't doing much about their professed views.
A QUESTION. Here’s something that's been on my mind -- and I think on the minds of some commenters -- especially with all the Democratic Party blogging lately: What, exactly, makes Hillary Clinton a strong candidate? Not just a "good" candidate, but a candidate worth supporting with one's primary vote?
My take is that both John Edwards and Barack Obama are simultaneously more liberal on the issues than Clinton but perceived by the electorate to be more moderate. This seems like a dream combination for progressives. Clinton, on the other hand, is the relatively centrist candidate, but perceived by many to be extremely liberal, which actually seems like the worst imaginable combination. Not to mention the fact that a Hillary Clinton presidency means four people from two families will have controlled the White House for at least 24 years (32 if you count the first Bush's vice presidency). Aside from the identity politics discussed by Sam and Ezra, what am I missing? If Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, I will cast my vote in her favor, as no doubt will many other progressive voters. But why in the world would progressives support her in the primaries?
First, a fuel bank would help solve the dangerous dual-use problem. Currently, signatories to the NPT are allowed to develop the full fuel cycle, as long as the fuel is used for civilian rather than military purposes. Unfortunately, many of the facilities that can create civilian-oriented nuclear fuel can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. A fuel bank, combined with an amendment to the NPT, might resolve this problem, as it could ensure access to fuel without the necessity to develop the entire cycle in every state.
Second, the fuel bank could provide states with the security that they need in order to give up the fuel cycle. Several of the proposed resolutions on Iran's nuclear program involve the supply of nuclear fuel from the U.S. or Russia to Iran for civilian purposes. The problem is that such a supply arrangement would leave Iran in a dangerously precarious position; if Russia or the US suspended shipments, the Iranian energy situation could be devastated. A nuclear fuel bank wouldn't entirely solve this problem (it would be controlled multilaterally, and the US can throw around a lot of weight in multilateral institutions), but nonetheless would represent an improvement. If Iran feels more secure, Iran is more likely to give up its weapons program.
As a multilateral initiative that involves nuclear power, I suspect that this proposal will meet with howls of derision from the conservative community. That's solid evidence that it's a good idea.
"AUTHENTICITY": STILL MEANINGLESS.J. beat me to it, but Marc Ambinder is obviously dead wrong to say that "John Edwards's haircut was a valid story to cover." The idea that only poor people or, more relevant to a presidential campaign, people who pretend to be poor, can advocate policies that help the poor is transparently illogical, and as J. says artificially skews politics to the right. (Was FDR more conservative than Reagan? According to the logic of Ambinder's argument, this is a fair assumption.)
This is all premised on the completely useless and always tautological concept of "authenticity;" as we can see from his post, these kind of personality critiques can always be spun so as to apply to Democrats but not Republicans even when they're engaged in objectively similar behavior. Ambinder also ignores that this smear isn't just about poverty hypocrisy but also about feminizing the Democratic candidate. But perhaps the most remarkable argument in Ambinder's failed defense of political discourse as dimwitted junior-high-school gossip is this:
There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.
Fairly or unfairly? Granting that Ambinder isn't quite endorsing it, I'm amazed that anyone can see the question of whether or not reporters should use their reporting not to inform readers but to irresponsibly indulge their petty superficial prejudices about the individual candidates as a fairly debatable proposition. This open press corps contempt for Gore defined campaign 2000, and personally I think there are a lot of dead soldiers and Iraqis who think that what a president will actually do in office is more important that his or her suits and haircuts. Apparently, if the Democrats nominate Edwards we can look forward to another year of this kind of abominable conduct by the nation's political reporters, and hey, it doesn't matter to most of them if Antonin Scalia becomes the median vote on the Supreme Court.
BUSH TO SENATE: LEAVE THE KIDS BEHIND. The president has rejected a bipartisan proposal to offer health insurance to 3.3 million low-income children for the cost of $35 billion over 5 years. The plan was to raise the funds by increasing the tax on cigarettes. But Bush objected:
I think it's going to be very important for our allies on Capitol Hill to hear a strong, clear message from me that expansion of government in lieu of making the necessary changes to encourage a consumer-based system is not acceptable.
Ideology trumps children's welfare again! And speaking of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, educators agree that poor kids do much better in school when they receive adequate health care and are well-clothed and fed. So President Bush, why can't you get behind S-CHIP as part of your education reform strategy?
GENDER: A GOOD REASON TO VOTE FOR HILLARY BUT NOT THE ONLY REASON.Ezracriticizes my earlier post, saying that "insofar as it assumes that gender would be an insufficient reason to support Hillary Clinton." Insofar as Ezra is saying we should never vote for white men, I disagree with him too -- he just isn't saying that, just like I wasn't saying that we shouldn't take candidates' gender or race into account in our voting.
What I do still think is insulting to Clinton is the suggestion that the only reason she has been successful is her gender. Has it helped her? Of course and rightly so. Do I think that she would still be a viable candidate if she wasn't a woman? Yes. She has unique experience in how an executive branch is run, she has been a great success as a senator, and she has a reputation for competence that attracts many people.
Suggesting that one reason people support her is gender is obviously true and, as Ezra so carefully and correctly explained, not a problem. What gets to me is when people like Elizabeth Edwards use that fact to suggest that her campaign is only successful because of identity politics. It denigrates the rest of her accomplishments and it undermines all women who seek public office. It's also obviously false -- or we'd all remember the triumphant presidential campaign of Carol Moseley Braun.
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