BUT CAN HE RAISE TAXES? Mark Schmitt reminds, correctly, that the country will need more than an acceptance of moderate deficits over the next few years: It'll need revenue increases. Whatever enthusiasm John Edwards generates for rejecting fiscal conservatism should be tempered by the knowledge that, without tax increases, he'll have very little room for social spending. Relevant here is a question asked at the press conference following his announcement speech. The reporter asked whether tax increases would be necessary to fund Edwards' social spending. Edwards replied:

Well, I'll give you a few examples: We ought to be patriotic as americans, not just as a government, though the government plays a critical role in helping to rebuild New Orleans. We ought to be patriotic in doing something about global warming. And I don't mean in an abstract way -- we walked away from Kyoto unilaterally which was a very serious mistake...[long digression on global warming, which I don't have the energy to transcribe]

Q: Taxes, Senator?

Oh, I'm sorry, the answer to that question is, we do need, in my judgment, to get rid of some of the taxes cuts thats have been put in place, particularly for people at the top. I think it may be necessary to put in place a tax on some of the windfall profits the oil companies are making in order to put in place some of the changes I've just talked about [on global warming], I think it's also really important to be honest with people: we've gotten into a deep hole in terms of our deficit, we have investments that need to be made, I've talked about some of them: investments to strengthen the middle class, investments in poverty, universal health care, which I'm completely committed to do, some of the energy proposals I've talked about today -- these things cost money. So we're going to have to invest if we're going to transport America the way it needs to be transported to be successful in the 21st century, which is going to require rolling back some of these tax cuts.

Were I advising Edwards, I'd sooner quit than sign off on him pulling an early Mondale. The American electorate remains enamored of low taxes and high spending, and since your political competitors won't join in a spontaneous explosion of fiscal truth-telling, he can't, either. Nevertheless, Edwards, in his deficit reduction answer, said that his top priority -- well, below that of getting elected -- is investment, and he appears serious about that. So not proposing tax increases doesn't necessarily mean he won't seek them, it means he thinks he can't sell them.

That said, I'm a little less certain than others that taxes are intrinsically unsellable. Dedicated taxes -- a VAT for health care, say, or a gas tax for renewable energy research -- seem somewhat more politically defensible than mere increases in marginal rates. If the American people know precisely what they're getting, it's a bit more concrete a conversation -- more like a purchase than a donation, and there's a fair amount the government can sell that the public may want. Too often, taxes are but a vague plea to fund government, which seems far more wasteful in the abstract than it does in the specific, and so they're easy to trump with the concrete promise of money in your pocket; you know, after all, where that money will go. Conversely, payroll taxes, which directly fund Social Security and Medicare, have been far safer than general revenue in recent years. When politicians try and cut them, they're cutting something voters can see and feel and touch. That's harder. And so I'd think it'd be proportionally easier to sell taxes in the same way.

On the other hand, I don't actually have to win any elections, so I've the freedom to muse optimistically about tax increases. Three cheers for the fourth estate!

--Ezra Klein

SO SORRY NOT TO HAVE MISSED IT. Gee, thanks, Brother Sam, for not letting that essay by the junior senator from Connecticut slip by me. I was really trying hard not to see it; I saw the headline and said, ugh, him again. Then I turned the page -- only to have it turned back at me. (I do not like that Kosher ham; I do not like him, Sam-I-am!)

I suppose I should be grateful that Joe Lieberman decided not to throw control of the Senate to Vice President Richard Vader Cheney, but this bit of drivel, as Sam pointed out, is hard to take. My favorite bit: Because of the bravery of many Iraqi and coalition military personnel and the recent coming together of moderate political forces in Baghdad, the war is winnable. We and our Iraqi allies must do what is necessary to win it. Pair that with this headline, in today's Washington Post, from an actual news story by staff writer Nancy Trejos: "December's Number Steadily Edging Toward Highest Monthly Tally of '06."

If that doesn't break your heart, there's a beautifully rendered piece in today's Miami Herald by Hannah Allam of the McClatchy News Service that really says it all:

[B]efore I left Iraq in 2005... rings from Kadhemiya were simply sentimental reminders of a two-year assignment here. ..[Today] [s]lipping on a turquoise ring is no longer an afterthought, but a carefully deliberated security precaution.

A certain color of stone worn a certain way is just one of the dozens of superficial clues -- like dialect, style of beard, how you pin a veil -- that indicate whether you're Sunni or Shiite. These little signs increasingly mean the difference between life and death at the terrifying illegal checkpoints that surround the districts of Baghdad...

Now, there are few true neighborhoods left. They're mostly just cordoned-off enclaves in various stages of deadly sectarian cleansing. Moving trucks piled high with furniture weave through traffic, evidence of an unfolding humanitarian crisis involving hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Iraqis.

--Adele M. Stan

THERE'S A WORD FOR THAT "TENSION." IT ALSO BEGINS WITH "T." I know that the words Deficits Don't Matter are engraved over the doorway to the American Prospect offices, so I'll put a little at risk here by pointing out that while the current deficit is entirely manageable, as Ezra says, the fiscal outlook for the next ten years is much bleaker -- an additional debt of $3.5 trillion, under current policies, even without accounting for the costs of the war. At that level, deficits certainly will matter. They are economically unsustainable, they leave no cushion to respond to a recession or other emergency, and they certainly leave very little room to push the deficit up even further to finance public investment, social spending, health care, or other goods.

Anyone who wants to argue that we should move to invest more in those public goods, without addressing in some way the medium- and long-term deficit, is implicitly arguing that this country can handle deficits of $500 billion a year or more, both economically and politically, over a sustained period. That's a hard case to make.

Therefore, when I hear John Edwards say, as Ezra quotes him, "there's a tension between our desire to eliminate the deficit and create a stronger economic foundation and eliminate some of the debt our children will inherit, there's a tension between that deficit and our need to invest and make America stronger for the 21st century," I agree that that's a more honest answer than you'll get from most Democrats. But it's not honest enough.

Because there is a tension, and the tension has a name: It's called TAXES. We face a zero-sum choice between deficit-reduction and spending, or a fight over the relative priority of spending as opposed to deficit reduction, only because revenues, even after a recent uptick, remain well below their historic levels and far, far below the level necessary to sustain the existing programs for an aging population. And we face the choice because the idea of real tax increases, beyond just letting tax cuts expire for the top 1% or those making more than $300,000, aren't on the table.

The Democrats elected in 2006, and those running for president, are promising three things: (1) Fiscal responsibility. (Which, by the way, is not merely an economic question to be rebutted with economics, but a potent symbol of the reckless short-sightedness of the Republicans.) (2) Extension of the middle-class tax cuts and reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which take those cuts away from the upper half of the middle class. And (3) some kind of economic populism, which involves public investment and action on health care. Those three promises are reconciliable, but they can only be reconciled with additional revenues, substantial additional revenues.

I know full well why Democrats don't want to say it. Who wants to be Walter Mondale? ("Mr. Reagan will raise taxes. So will I. He won't tell you. I just did.") But we had better hope they are thinking about it. And I'm not willing to give honesty points to Edwards just because he says "there's a tension" without using the other "T" word in the same answer. (He's much better than others in talking about taxes, as he was in 2004, but he still doesn't acknowledge the magnitude of revenues needed, and the fact that he barely mentions revenues in this long answer is telling.)

I'll have much more to say about this in an article that should be out shortly in another distinguished publication which I won't name here but whose initials are WM.

-- Mark Schmitt

GOOD CALL, CONNECTICUT. Joe Lieberman -- he's ruining my holiday vacation. I'm a bit late in getting digs in at Lieberman's appalling Washington Post op-ed backing escalation in Iraq, but everyone really should take a look at this thing in its entirety. The out-of-the-blue insertion of Iran as our central threat not only in Iraq but in the global war on terror, the non sequitors, the comic book stylings and language, the assertion that "vision, will and courage" is all that we've been lacking and all that we need to secure victory -- it all serves to make the very idea that this writer has staked his political career partly on perceived foreign policy expertise and gravitas truly absurd. The lowlight: Lieberman insists that the troop surge should have "a clearly defined mission." Elsewhere Lieberman describes that mission as defeating "the extremists." Clear as a bell!

--Sam Rosenfeld

EDWARDS VS. THE DEFICIT HAWKS. Des Moines is a very charming town, with some truly fantastic steakhouses. That's particularly if some of your fellow reporters are feeling generous with ther expense accounts. But I digress.

I spent much of yesterday in Iowa watching John Edwards do the Townhall thing. And believe me: The boy got skillz. Speaking to a room of a 1,000+ people (the campaign estimated 2,500; the papers 1,000), Edwards easily outdid his announcement speech from the morning, going far deeper into the policy and at far longer length. And it was an impressive performance, particularly compared to his relative insecurity when discussing such issues in 2004. Afterwards, I couldn't find a member of the crowd -- not that there were none, just that I couldn't find him -- who wasn't now supporting Edwards in 2008. As I said, an impressive performance, But Nick Beaudrot's post on the deficit reminded me of a fairly remarkable exchange from the Q&A that I want to transcribe here.

Q: No one seems to have talked about the deficit, and I see that as a twofold problem. Not only are we going into debt, but we're mortgaging our future to the Chinese -- last time I noticed, they weren't really allies of ours, weren't really our friends. I wonder what would your approach to the piling up of the deficit be?

Edwards: Well, I have to first off say what everybody here knows...when George Bush came into office we had surpluses as far as the eye could see, and now we have deficits as far as they eye can see. I think the honest answer to this question is that there's a tension between our desire to eliminate the deficit and create a stronger economic foundation and eliminate some of the debt our children will inherit, there's a tension between that deficit and our need to invest and make America stronger for the 21st century.

I think that, if we're honest, you cannot it, it's just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious effort to eliminate poverty, to strengthen the middle class, and do some of the work that I think America needs to be leading on around the world, and at the same time, eliminate the deficit. Those things are incompatible. And anybody who claims -- politicians who say 'I'm going to give you a big tax cut, and give you health care, put more money into education, and oh by the way, we're going to balance the budget in the process,' it's just make-believe, it isn't the truth. So I think there's gonna be hard judgments that have to be made -- my commitment is to have universal health care, to do things that have to be done about this energy situation and global warming, because I think they're enormous threats, not only to the people of America but to the future of the world, for America to lead on some of these big moral issues that face the world, and I think America has to do something about poverty, I just do. Those are higher priorities to me than the elimination of the deficit. I don't want to make the deficit worse and I would like to reduce the deficit, but in the short-term, if we don't take a step to deal with these other issues, it in my judgment, undermines the ability of America to remain strong in the 21st century.

--Ezra Klein

WHAT'S NOT THE MATTER WITH KANSAS: Freshly re-elected governor Kathleen Sebelius has some gratifying parting shots for Kansas's outgoing Underwear Drawer Monitor Phil Kline:

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius today criticized Attorney General Phill Kline’s actions in his abortion investigation into George Tiller.

“The story just continues to get stranger and stranger,” Sebelius said in response to questions from reporters.

On Wednesday, a state district judge rejected for the second time an attempt by Kline to file charges against Tiller, a Wichita doctor who performs abortions.

Kline, an abortion opponent, said he would appoint Don McKinney, also an anti-abortion advocate, as a special prosecutor to take over the case before he leaves office Jan. 8.

Asked if she thought Kline’s actions were appropriate, Sebelius said, “I think what the judge found is that he did not follow the law, he did not abide by the steps that needed to be taken. He looked at it twice, and to me that’s not appropriate to have an attorney general who isn’t following Kansas law.”

Sebelius, a Democrat and abortion rights supporter, said she looked forward to Jan. 8 when Democrat Paul Morrison, who defeated Kline, a Republican, in the November general election, would take over the job.

There are two points to be made here. First, any Democratic woman who can win re-election in a staunchly Republican state as an unapologetic pro-choicer really should be discussed more when it comes to potential national candidates. Second, while pundits for whom the solution to what ails the Democrats is always to throw women's reproductive freedom under the bus are cherry-picking cases like Bob Casey and Heath Shuler to make their case, Sebelius shows there's another side to the argument. The evidence that adopting the majority position on abortion has been an electoral albatross for the Democratic Party has never been well-supported empirically or logically, and the recent election results in Kansas (not just the re-election of Sebelius, but the repudiation of Kline) are another case in point.

[Thanks to Julia for the tip.]

--Scott Lemieux

EDWARDS' SHREWD MOVE: While I, like Garance, will reserve judgment on Edwards'announcement speech until I hear it, there is one aspect of his entrance into the race that I think shows that he is taking the right approach: his choice of location. The Ninth Ward of New Orleans has the potential to be the Democrats' Ground Zero--a symbolic space that can be used to rally the public. Having made poverty eradication a centerpiece of his 2004 campaign, Edwards is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the Republicans' weakness on this issue. Hurricane Katrina was the most poignant example of how many Americans have been literally and figuratively left behind, and the Democrats would be wise to follow Edwards' lead in reminding the country of it.

--Ben Adler

EDWARDS IS IN. John Edwards reportedly chose the quiet week before the new year to formally announce his second run for the Democratic presidential nomination in hopes of having the political press all to himself, but things are not exactly going as planned. Gerald Ford's death has created a major competing story, and a website goof today forced him to move up his announcement. Reports the A.P.:

Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards jumped into the presidential race Wednesday a day earlier than he'd planned, prodded by an Internet glitch to launch a candidacy focused on health care, taxes and other domestic issues.

The North Carolina Democrat's campaign accidentally went live with his election Web site a day before an announcement Thursday that was supposed to use Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as a backdrop.

The slip-up gave an unintended double-meaning to his campaign slogan on the John Edwards '08 Web site: "Tomorrow begins today."

Aides quickly shut down the errant Web site but could not contain news of the obvious...

I'll reserve comment on the substance of his announcement until it's online for real, but for now I'll just note that the campaign slogan reported by the A.P., "Tomorrow begins today," was also the motto of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK); a United Nations event in East Timor; and the the Romania Libera newspaper. It's also the title of this Asian Dub Foundation song from 2005. It is, in short, a not infrequently used phrase, and will remind people of something, even if they can't tell exactly what.

It certainly reminded me of something, at any rate: "Tomorrow Begins Today" was also the title of one of the central texts of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, written by Subcomandante Marcos in 1996, and delivered as his closing remarks at the Zapatista-sponsored First International Encuentro (Encounter) for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism in August of that year. It was featured on the posters for the conference, as well, according to the graphics accompanying this article in The New Internationalist.

I'm sure others have used it, too.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

YOU'RE VOTING FOR WHO? There must have been 10 or so of us, sitting around a table at the Commons dinner hall at Goddard College, all examining the absentee ballots we had received from our home states. The year was 1976, and this was the first time any of us would vote to elect a U.S. president.

In residence at one of the most hippy-dippy schools ever conceived (though conceived before the existence of hippies), it was assumed by everyone at the table we would all vote for the Democrat, Jimmy Carter, governor of Georgia. Well, that would be, assumed by everyone but me.

I knew I wasn't voting for Carter. I liked Jerry Ford; he was doing an okay job. I was happy not to have to hear any more from or about Richard Nixon. Furthermore, I did not trust Southerners. But more than anything, I was crazy about First Lady Betty Ford, and thought it spoke well of the president that he had had the stones to marry an outright feminist, and to stick by her as she spoke her outrageous convictions -- especially her support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Jerry Ford never apologized for his wife -- not when she said that premarital sex might lower the divorce rate, not when she said stay-at-home moms should be compensated for their work, not when she compared the use of marijuana by my generation to her own cohorts' love of beer. Best of all, the first lady said she trusted her daughter, Susan -- the same age as me -- to make good decisions for herself in matters concerning sex. And the president never contradicted her -- at least not publicly.

ERA notwithstanding, I lost my place in the Fellow Travelers Club that day at Goddard. I had already been rendered suspect by my unrepentant use of lipstick and a penchant for traipsing across the snowy hills in platform sandals, but my revelation of the cast of my presidential ballot drew looks of incredulity. No one really berated me; they sort of stammered their protests.

My vote for Gerald Ford was the last I would ever cast for a Republican presidential candidate (unless you count the renegade John Anderson), for Gerald Ford was the last Republican presidential contender to maintain a modicum of independence from the party's woman-hating right wing.

In my ignorance, I had overlooked Ford's veto -- thankfully overridden -- of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a move advised, against Ford's own instincts, by then Chief-of-Staff Richard V. Cheney. So, today I scratch my head, as I ask, How did a politician as non-ideological as Ford wind up saddling us with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a government lawyer (then Assistant Attorney General) named Antonin Scalia?

--Adele M. Stan

FORD ALMOST CAUGHT HOOVER. Gerald Ford's death got me to thinking about the power (and length) of recent post-presidencies. Because presidents are living longer after leaving office, there's increasingly more to say about them once they leave the White House but before they depart for the big sleep.

When Ford took over the presidency after Richard Nixon's resignation, Nixon was the only living ex-president at the time -- and, for obvious reasons, not exactly somebody with whom Ford could much consult or consort (at least publicly). And although Nixon would be the next ex-president to die, he didn't until after Bill Clinton took office in 1993. Because Nixon, along with Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were still alive, Clinton became only the second president inaugurated with five former presidents still around. Abraham Lincoln was the first and, as a testament to the increased longevity of presidents in the modern era, George W. Bush was the third. (Nixon died by the time of Bush 43's inauguration but, of course, Clinton was added to the list of the living ex-presidents; our forty-fourth president will, at most, have only four living predecessors on January 20, 2009.)

Ford lived for almost 30 years beyond his service in the White House -- second, in terms of post-presidential lifespans, only to Herbert Hoover's 31 years and seven months. Two more years and Ford would have caught Hoover. And watch for Carter to best them all: He recently passed John Adams into third place all-time, and if Carter lives another four years from today he'll pass Ford into second on December 27, 2010. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, if Carter survives until August 2012, he�ll become the longest living ex-president to date. (I wonder if Carter himself has made this calculation.)

Because Carter is considered one of if not the greatest ex-president, in terms of his policy accomplishments (not to mention his publishing proficiency) his longevity would be a particularly good thing for America. He and Ford worked on many projects together, especially in the area of voting rights and election monitoring; they developed a cross-partisan post-presidential relationship similar to the one that Clinton and his immediate predecessor now seem to be forming. For these reasons and others, I'm looking forward to hearing more of what Carter has to say about Ford's passing.

--Tom Schaller

CARETAKER NOSTALGIA. Gerald Ford served ably during a difficult time and gave a troubled nation what it needed:

After a decade of division over Vietnam and two years of trauma over the Watergate scandals, Jerry Ford, as he called himself, radiated a soothing familiarity. He might have been the nice guy down the street suddenly put in charge of the nation, and if he seemed a bit predictable, he was also safe, reliable and reassuring. He placed no intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens on a weary land...

His former aides, less so.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TO CLARIFY. Good to see someone using the Tapped holiday posting system (the office is down this week and those who are posting are doing so sans Sam Rosenfeld). Mark may be reading a bit more in my item that I intended to put there, however. Of course Hillary Clinton will have significant challenges in winning election -- heck, she'll have major challenges just getting through the primary at this rate. Nothing about her run will be a waltz. But I do think we need to make sure that those of us who write about politics don't look at her candidacy as a totally sui generis thing, or confuse issues common to women running for office with ones specific to her candidacy.

That's especially the case because the politically incorrect historical precedent here is clear. Female politicians in the American system massively benefit from having either a famous political father or husband. This is just a fact. The first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, Hattie Caraway, was first appointed to serve out the remainder of her deceased husband's term; the first woman governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, also was elected to that office after her husband's death; and fully 20 percent of women who have ever served in the U.S. Congress had husbands or fathers whose seats they took after their elected male relations passed away or resigned.

In comparing Clinton to Ferraro or Pirro, I meant only to look at what we know about how women have succeeded in the political arena, and where they have been challenged, and on what grounds, rather than to suggest that they or their husbands have all that much in common.

Whatever Bill Clinton will bring with him, the positive power of being married to a previously-elected man who can no longer serve has, historically, so far outweighed the negative that there is even a name for the political phenomenon of a wife picking up where her husband left off: "widow succession." Indeed, a 2005 story called such successions "the fastest and most historic route to Capitol Hill for women." By 2006, 46 out of the 230 women who had ever served in Congress were either elected or appointed to serve terms upon the death or resignation of a husband or father.

Now, Bill Clinton is very much alive, so this is another admittedly inexact comparison, just like the one to Ferraro. But the underlying social principles at work strike me as being the same. He stepped down, and she became the first female senator from New York. He can no longer serve, and now she's the first serious female presidential contender. And this social phenomenon cuts across party lines: Liddy Dole, wife of former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, also enacted it when she considered a run for the presidency in 2000, and when she ran for -- and won -- a Senate seat in 2002.

So, yes, we will never be able to consider Hillary apart from Bill, and she fails the "did it all by my lonesome" test that we think we apply to male candidates. But female candidates don't need to worry about being perceived as emasculated (as opposed to emasculating), and we also don't yet have a fair system for evaluating and promoting independent female candidates for the presidency -- if we did, there'd be a draft Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius movement, and though I've heard some rumblings from awe-struck young operatives, I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

Of course, Sebelius also comes from a political family, in that her father was previously governor of Ohio. And so does Nancy Pelosi, come to think of it -- her dad was a congressman and later Mayor of Baltimore. Indeed, I suspect that a close study of women in Congress during the 89 years they've been there would reveal that a shockingly high portion of those who did not follow their deceased husbands into office nevertheless came from political families. It's possible this is also the case for men (the example of the Bushes and the Bayhs come to mind, as well as the Kennedys), and that our system is more dynastic than we like to imagine, but I suspect the family phenomenon is more the case for women. If you know more, by all means, add your comments below.

UPDATE: I see Chris Suellentrop wrote a fun little article about Clinton and Dole as new-style political widows back in 2002. And this page on Wikipedia lists America's 87 leading political families, including that of former Mass. Gov. and possible '08 contender Mitt Romney, whose father was governor of Michigan, and whose mother ran for Senate in 1970. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Utah territorial legislature, as well, and an even more distant relation served in the colonial legislature in Connecticut during the 17th century.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE EX-PRESIDENT FACTOR. I see the point of Garance's defense of Senator Clinton against the argument that she is too compromised by her husband to win/deserve election to the presidency, but comparing her to 1984 vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro does Clinton no favors!

As it happens, I also just read an account of Ferraro's brief and unhappy months on the national stage, in Steven Gillon's 1994 book, The Democrat's Dilemma, which uses the career of Walter Mondale as a lens to tell the story of the death of mid-century liberalism. By Gillon's account, Ferraro was woefully unprepared for the scrutiny that went with being her party's nominee. She stonewalled the questions about her family's finances, which she had omitted from her congressional financial-disclosure filings. And as more came out, her husband, John Zaccaro was revealed to have some extremely dubious dealings, one of which involved taking a $100,000 loan from the estate of an elderly woman to whom he had been appointed guardian.

Similarly, Jeannine Pirro's husband, a grand scoundrel, has little in common with Bill Clinton. I mocked the New York Times for that tortured analogy a few months ago, and it's still true. It is true that women in politics are more likely to face scrutiny over their husband's dealings than men are over their wives – partly because husband's in those generations are more likely to have their own baggage -- but the majority of women in politics seem to stand or fall on their own feet. I know that Senator Feinstein's spouse has a complicated financial life, and according to Wikipedia, her financial disclosure is the size of a phone book, but it doesn't seem to have hindered her career. And Mr. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mr. Katherine Harris, Mr. Jennifer Granholm, Mr. Debbie Stabenow etc. all seem to operate on the Dennis Thatcher model.

Garance seems to assume that the main burden Bill Clinton places on his spouse is sleaze, as with Messrs. Zaccaro or Pirro. But the defining characteristic of Bill Clinton, especially among Democratic primary voters, is not that he's a sleazeball but that he was President of the United States for eight years, with all the good and bad that comes with that. I've no doubt the good outweighs the bad by far; if offered the chance to transport myself back to those days, I'd take it. But there was some bad as well, for example, a poorly conceived approach to the critical domestic issue, health care, and on that one, Senator Clinton can't avail herself of the “innocent spouse” protection that Ferraro and Pirro claim.

I'm not opposed to Senator Clinton by any means; she's neither too far left nor too far right for me, and I've been in awe of her political skills and good sense as a New York Senator. But the reason she has 100% name ID and a dominant role in the Democratic race is not because of those accomplishments, but because of her role in the previous Clinton administration, and the role she created for herself, well beyond Eleanor Roosevelt, of an engaged presidential spouse. That's one of her great achievements, but it's also a burden. I'm not sure the assumptions and solutions of the Clinton era are adequate to either the crisis this country faces or to the opportunity to revive an ambitious liberalism. Maybe she's able to go beyond those outdated assumptions and tactics, maybe not, but that's the sense in which her husband, as ex-president, is a complication.

I think comparing her to Pirro and Ferraro is to trivialize both Senator Clinton's accomplishments and the real challenge she faces.

-- Mark Schmitt

THE BILL FACTOR. People who object to Hillary Clinton's potential presidential candidacy often do so on the grounds that it will revive media focus on Bill Clinton in a way that will damage her and Democrats generally, not to mention drag America back into a deeply annoying and contentious moment in our past. Some different woman candidate, one not married to a former president -- and, specifically, not married to him -- might have a less controversial time of it, according to this line of thinking, because her husband would be less of an issue.

To them I would suggest: Take a look at what happened to Geraldine Ferraro. I was reminded of what a major issue her husband became in her 1984 campaign this morning while reading a journalism history book, and it's a history worth considering.

Even today, husbands frequently become issues in women's campaigns in ways they don't in those of male candidates (see: Pirro, Jeannine), because political husbands are more likely than political wives to have had independent careers and finances that can be investigated. Sure, times have changed since Ferraro ran in the veep's slot, but it seems pretty clear that the husband of any woman who runs for president will become an issue one way or another, and certainly will be the subject of indpendent and close scrutiny. The one advantage Bill Clinton would have in such a situation is that he has already been so thoroughly investigated, and subjected such great scrutiny, that the bar for opinion-changing news about him is pretty darn high. Plus, if any political husband in America knows how to ride out negative media attention, it's him.

(Worth noting also is that Ferraro, in 1992, unsuccessfully tried to become the first female senator from New York -- a mantle ultimately claimed by Hillary Clinton just eight years later.)

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRUTHS ABOUT PHARMA. A new report out of the GAO sheds some useful light on that majestic pharmaceutical industry everyone's always talking about. The GAO was asked to look into the industry's trends because, despite R&D increases over the past decade, there's been a sustained drop in the number of genuinely new drugs being submitted to the FDA. The culprits? Well, among other things, entirely 68 percent -- more than two-thirds -- of the drug company's new applications are for "me-too" drugs, knockoffs of other company's blockbusters with enough molecular differences that they evade patent restrictions. Such spending, reports the GAO, is safer than socking money into so-called "New Molecular Entities," the drugs with the potential to offer new treatments. Going for new blockbuster drugs (drugs capable of generating $1 billion a year) or knockoffs of old ones is the easier road to profits.

Other culprits are a lack of qualified research scientists, technological hurdles, and the patent system, which allow for exclusivity on minor changes or new uses for old drugs, thus disincentivizing new research. All fair stuff. But this is an industry driven, as one would expect, by profit, not a desire to find awesome new drugs to better the world. That's for the good -- we need the pharmaceutical industry. But some better and more stringent bargaining by Medicare wouldn't harm things much, and if you channeled that money back into academic research -- and possibly created a new government pipeline through the NIH for translating molecular discoveries into drugs -- you could do quite a bit of good.

--Ezra Klein

RETURN OF THE DRAFT? Even if the Bush administration doesn't support a draft, the Iraq War, the stress it's created on the military, the socioeconomic dispaprities it's laid bare, and all the rest has created a fairly unlikely coalition of folks who do want one.

The Bush administration's VA Secretary, Jim Nicholson, just said that our society would benefit from "replacing the all-volunteer force with a tough draft purged of the deferments that allowed many to avoid service in Vietnam." Meanehile, Mark Krikorian wants a draft so we have a bigger military to fight more awesome wars. And Charlie Rangel wants a draft so we have a more diverse military that will make it nearly politically impossible to fight any wars. Meanwhile, I don't want a draft because, unlike Krikorian, Rangel, and Nicholson, I'd actually be vulnerable to it, so such a plan looks less like an awesome political theory abstraction and more like my life would be in the hands of the fools and knaves currently running our government. I didn't feel this way about national service a few years ago, incidentally. But one effect of the Iraq War was to shred any illusions that our leaders are wise and prudent and take seriously the lives entrusted to their care.

Speaking of which, anybody remember this site?

--Ezra Klein

DEFICITS DON'T MATTER. Nice to see Krugman dismissing the deficit chatter that plagues so many Democrats these days. As he argues, fiscal responsibility has become something of a shell game in contemporary politics, with dutiful Democrats (Clinton) cleaning up after profligate Republicans (Reagan) only to see their demolished by the next GOPer to take the White House (Bush 43). Why enable their tax cuts and giveaways?

Why indeed? But the argument for largely ignoring the deficit isn't merely political, it's substantive. Deficits don't matter. Interest rates have not skyrocketed as the government "crowded out" private borrowers. The economy has not tumbled in the face of Bush's borrowing.

So there's really no urgency in deficit reduction -- the macroeconomy is relatively healthy (though we'll see where housing goes), even if its distribution is quite sick. What there is urgency in is a host of social programs and infrastructure investments long ignored by Republicans and, to some degree, sacrificed by Clintonian Democrats beneath the altar of deficit reduction. For Democrats to handcuff themselves by promising to cut spending for the totally amorphous goal of deficit reduction would make no sense -- there are other, more pressing, priorities requiring the cash. So as Krugman says, making the deficit worse probably isn't a good idea. But the priority isn't making it better, nor curtailing the progressive agenda to clean up after Bush's tax cuts. And if, after a couple more years of deficits that now fund a positive welfare state, the right wants to come to the table and talk about some revenue increases to restore "fiscal responsibility," well, that's all for the good then.

Update: I should weaken the claim here a bit. It's not that deficits never matter, it's that, at this point, they aren't a pressing concern. Yes China could pull out the rug or we could have a national emergency or a variety of other unforeseen circumstances could occur -- all that's true. But it's not all likely, and it doesn't make deficit reduction a more urgent priority than other items on the progressive wish list.

--Ezra Klein

2004 FORESHADOWED 2006. As a follow-up to Sam's point about Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson having argued themselves into a corner on the question of whether the GOP has so many structural advantages that they are somehow unbeatable (something argued more forcefully in Tom Edsall's new book, Building Red America), in defense of Hacker and Pierson it might be said that theirs is more of an argument about the disconnect between policy reach and electoral-political grasp than the disconnect between a party's popular support and their ability to sustain governing majorities. (Though, of course, the two gaps are interrelated...or damn well should be, in a democracy.)

One of the memes I have been pressing (or rather clarifying or reminding) folks is that the 2006 "wave" could be seen in the rather thin victory the Republicans and Bush achieved just two years ago. To recap, on the eve of the 2004 elections the GOP controlled all three branches of government; they had an incumbent president running for re-election, and thus a 2- or 3-year head start in building their election themes and ground operations; they were, we were told by every DC pundit, strategically smarter and tactically tougher and rhetorically more disciplined and better-funded. And, if all those advantages were not enough, the GOP had something it lacked (and longed for) since it began to deconstruct the Democratic New Deal party system in the mid-1960s: A major realigning issue -- which was, to boot, broadcast live on television in ways the Civil War or the stock market crash (the last time people were jumping from Manhattan buildings) never was.

And what was the result of this overwhelming set of advantages against the timid, disoriented, feckless Democrats and their self-imploding presidential nominee? Bush increased his margins over 2000 by a mere 3 points (the lowest for a re-elected president since William McKinley in 1900), and basically gained Iowa (because New Mexico and New Hampshire canceled each other out). In Congress, the three net House seats were more than accounted for by the Texas re-redistricting, and the net four Senate seats (Republicans' biggest achievement) were, again, accounted for by the South, as all five southern Democratic retirees were promptly replaced by Republicans. The Republicans gained no net new governors (winning Indiana and Missouri, losing Montana and New Hampshire), and they lost the state legislative races with about 60 seats nationwide and four net chamber majorities lost. Oh, and Bush still needed those gay marriage ballot measures, 75 percent negative ads against John Kerry, and ample help from John McCain just to produce this thin electoral gruel.

So, if that was all those many advantages could yield, in a presidential election year no less, then one of (at least) two things are true: (1) the underlying demographics are shifting against the GOP; or (2) their policy positions are, well, off-center. Hacker & Pierson would argue the second (and I'd agree), and I'd strongly argue the first.

--Tom Schaller

NEXT UP: CA. It's getting a bit hard to keep track of all the universal health care proposals swirling around right now, but it'll be worth watching what Arnold Schwarzenegger announces on January 9th. He's promised to make reform his top priority in the coming year, and he has every incentive to do so: Being the guy who fixed California's health care system and possibly catalyzed the country's switch to UHC is enough to enduringly erase all doubts about the celebrity governor and restore the national profile that got tarnished during his string of 2005 defeats. Of course, Schwarzenegger won't be pursuing this alone. After Massachusetts produced their plan and Mitt Romney received a firestorm of positive press, other governors are eyeing the issue as a way to make their names national, too. So Arnold will want to move quick. How you create universal health care without raising taxes, which he's promised not to do, puzzles me, though. I assume it involves a rocket launcher, or possibly a robot soldier from the future.

--Ezra Klein

WHEN ONE ARAB CIVIL WAR ISN'T ENOUGH. Not content with baby-sitting the civil war in Iraq, the United States, according to recent reports, has been quietly inserting itself into the growing conflict between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank. According to The San Francisco Chronicle:

The Chronicle has obtained a training manual distributed to officers of the Al-Haras Al-Rayassi, Abbas' Presidential Guard, during a two-week course held in Jericho earlier this year at which the chief instructor introduced himself as a U.S. Secret Service officer who served during the Reagan administration. The manual, titled "Advanced Protective Operations Seminar," is emblazoned with the logo of the Counterterrorism Training Group, which includes the U.S. government seal.

Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, the U.S. security coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth after news of the training sessions leaked out that since Iran is helping arm and fund Hamas political and military activities, the United States wants to prevent "moderate forces" in the Palestinian territories from being eliminated.

"We are involved in building up the Presidential Guard, instructing it, assisting it to build itself up and giving them ideas. We are not training the forces to confront Hamas," Dayton told Yedioth. "Hamas is receiving money and arms from Iran and possibly Syria, and we must make sure that the moderate forces will not be erased," Dayton said....

The United States had helped train the initial security forces, but ended its aid when the Palestinian uprising called the intifada began in September 2000....On Dayton's advice, the U.S. training program began again over the summer.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY MUST END! I've given Democracy (a journal of ideas!) a bit of a hard time in recent months, but their latest issue is genuinely fantastic. It contains a couple of articles I want to talk about, but the most important is Aaron Chatterji and Siona Listokin's ferocious critique of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement. As they argue, liberals have largely abandoned attempts to change the economy through government regulation and action and begun seeking instead to convince individual corporations, by way of PR campaigns and lobbying efforts, to become better economic citizens. This is foolish, in addition to being ineffective.

As Chatterji and Listokin document, corporations have become scarily adept at using the atmospherics of CSR to escape real regulation or public outrage. Here's how it works:

Imagine a world with one voluntary code of conduct governing the operation of apparel factories. Let’s call it the Golden Code of Conduct (GCC). This is a strong code that calls for the provision of a living wage, recognition of unions, and limits on working hours. Now suppose another set of companies who do not want to abide by the code, but still care about consumer perceptions, creates their own code, called the Super Code of Conduct (SCC). Their code lacks many of detailed provisions of the GCC, but it has some vague language about treating workers with respect. Companies must decide which code to adopt, and the SCC is clearly cheaper to institute. For high-minded companies that want to live by the more stringent code, the high costs could make them uncompetitive in supplying retailers. Meanwhile, the benefits are only significant if consumers can tell the difference between the two codes. If a company can retain the benefits of an improved image but not incur the cost of improved working conditions, there is no reason to expect them to choose the less stringent code.

The essential problem here is that liberals are trying to fix market failures by asking market creatures to ignore, well, the market. Corporations are damn good at making profits. The market is damn good at encouraging profits. If society decides, however, that the drive for profit is creating unwelcome externalities, or somehow harming the common good, it has government to step in and set limits on the market. And that's the right order of things. Corporations should do what they do best -- seek profit -- and society should set, if needed, universal and fair limits across industries, enabling useful competition, ensuring a floor of wages and labor standards, and safeguarding the environment. The progressive insistence on CSR promises a whack-a-mole future, where one battle necessitates the next, as other corporations seek to take advantage of the self-imposed standards of their competitors. Government regulation, which is both more effective and far-reaching, is a much better way to go, and progressives should rediscover that.

--Ezra Klein

EXPERIMENT. To add to Scott's able denunciation of Ken Pollack's discussion of the "experiment" of leaving Iraq, it's important to emphasize that anything the United States does from this point forward is an "experiment." Those who denounce withdrawal plans as "assuming, asserting that there would not be any consequences from withdrawal in Iraq," have to give some kind of semi-plausible account of how continued maintenance of a large presence in Iraq will both a.) be better than the status quo, which is almost incomparably awful, and b.) actually lead to some kind of positive end state. Thinking that the explicitly temporary deployment of 20,000 soldiers will win a counter-insurgency war, for crying out loud, has to be.... I don't know. I'm at a loss for vicious, angry epithets. Professional political scientists should know better than this.

--Robert Farley

WHY ARE WE LISTENING TO THIS MAN? In pointing us to this remarkable construction of ice cream castles in the air and destruction of strawmen by Frederick Kagan and Kenneth Pollack at AEI, Yglesias asks: "Whether the Kagan-Pollack meeting of the minds enhances Kagan's credibility or detracts from Pollack's I'll leave as an exercise to the reader." My question: what credibility on Iraq could Pollack possibly have left to lose at this point?

As Matt says, Pollack's remarks consist of a very convincing explanation of why the inevitable chaos in Iraq is going to be a disaster with considerable regional spillover, which constitutes excellent evidence for the foolishness and hubris of the war's advocates but is neither here not there in terms of demonstrating the viability of avoiding such an outcome. Pollack's conclusion, however, sums up the evasiveness and blame-shifting of the pro-war dead-enders effectively:

At the end of the day, walking away from Iraq or even trying to contain it would be a grand social science experiment. Given the history out there, again, I cannot demonstrate… I cannot prove to you that social science experiment would fail catastrophically. But the risks, the warnings of history are stark enough to me, that I would really prefer not to find out.

--Scott Lemieux

D(ECLASSIFICATION)-DAY. In a fairly cool story, The New York Times reports that when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, hundreds of millions of classified government documents will instantly enter the public sphere, including 275 million from the FBI alone. Indeed, the documents, whose quarter century (or more) of secrecy has now ended, will shed enormous light on everything from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War to the Soviet espionage network. Should be fun stuff for the historians. An interesting sidenote here is the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration didn't block or eliminate this declassification. They could've, given that it was a Clinton initiative and subject to executive review, but they're letting it go through. Good for them.

--Ezra Klein

OBAMA-ADJUSTED POLLS. Observing all due caveats about early horserace polls, it's possible to learn something if you remember that these polls are basically distorted by unequal name recognition. When I was a kid, the polls used to always say that Ted Kennedy was going to be the next president, later it was Mario Cuomo, etc.

But since name ID is itself a measurable thing, it's possible, if you're not bound by the strict code of professional ethics governing the polling industry, to extract some useful information by factoring it in. In the current polling, there are four candidates who are almost universally known among voters: Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, Giuliani and Gore. (And John Edwards, probably somewhat less so, but for some reason he isn't in the Newsweek or CNN polls.) And there are two who are not at all well known, Senator Obama and Governor Romney.

(By the way, that thing about the ethical code was a joke. Don't panic, Mr. Penn,.)

In the Newsweek poll, 81% percent say they know "A lot" or "some" about Clinton. Of Obama, only 41% say they know a lot or some, and only 14% say, "a lot," vs 45% who know a lot about Senator Clinton.

So this is a forty percentage point gap in basic ID and awareness. Yet it translates into only a four to seven-point drop-off in support, against the better-known Republicans. The top-line story here was that Clinton beats McCain 50-43 while Obama loses 43-45. But the more interesting thing is that the drop-off from Clinton to the unknown Obama is only seven percentage points, and only four against Giuliani. (That's the Newsweek poll; the CNN poll has the Clinton match-ups tighter, but the Clinton-to-Obama dropoff is about the same 4-6 points.) At 43%, Obama is actually outperforming his name recognition.

Whereas on the Republican side, when you drop from the big names (who I still believe will not get the nomination) to the lesser-known Romney, support disappears completely. Romney drops to 25% against Obama, 32% against Clinton.

That suggests to me some combination of (1) people who do know something about Obama are very favorably inclined toward him, and (2) people are strongly inclined to vote for a Democrat in 2008, which is also reflected in the generic polls. On the first point, it's worth noting that Obama is not significantly better known among Dems than among registered voters generally. It would be interesting to have some polls with matchups like Vilsack-McCain; if it's pretty much the same as Obama-McCain, that would suggest that the Obama support is mostly an artifact of the generic Democrat preference.

These are good polls for Clinton, but I think that given the current level of name recognition, they're at least as good, and maybe better, for Obama. It's awfully scary to think of going into the campaign with a relative unknown, who can be defined by attacks, but if you're going to have a fresh face (and Dems should), better that it be someone with obviously extraordinary political skills and a vision, and who starts off with a strong base of goodwill and admiration.

--Mark Schmitt

CRUDE NUKES. J. at Armchair Generalist highlights this Foreign Policy article about the dangers posed by a crude nuclear device. Long story short, it's not at all hard to construct a crude, cylinder atomic device, as long as you have the material. It can be fairly responded that "Yes, and if I had a Maserati I could go 185", but fissile material is not impossible to get; there's an almost limitless supply of plutonium on the shelf in Russia, and only a very small amount would be needed for a bomb.

Back in late October, Bob Galluci of the Walsh School of Foreign Service scared the hell out of gathered Pattersonites by arguing in an after-dinner speech that a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States was a virtual certainty in the next fifteen years. While Lexington, Kentucky isn't a likely target, many of our graduates go on to live and work in Washington, a fact which had me thinking about what kind of memorial we would build to the alumni lost in the attack. Galluci suggested that the four problems that a terrorist group would need to overcome were will, design, material, and delivery system, and argued that the only of these in question was the third. I don't think that the situation is as dire as he suggested (I think that "will" may also be in question, and that the material will be harder to get than he suggested), but his presentation was, nevertheless, sober and quite frightening.

--Robert Farley

THE FANTASY TENSE. President Bush's tortured grasp of the English language is legendary, but I submit that during this morning's presser he actually provided an important clue to understanding what it is he's been saying about Iraq. He is speaking in a new tense that the rest of us have thus far failed to note the existence of: the fantasy tense. He explains it himself in his response to the following question:

Q Mr. President, less than two months ago at the end of one of the bloodiest months in the war, you said, "Absolutely we're winning." Yesterday you said, "We're not winning, we're not losing." Why did you drop your confident assertion about winning?

THE PRESIDENT: My comments -- the first comment was done in this spirit:
I believe that we're going to win; I believe that-- and by the way, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't have our troops there. That's what you got to know. We're going to succeed.

My comments yesterday reflected the fact that we're not succeeding nearly as fast as I wanted when I said it at the time, and that conditions are tough in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad.

Thus, the present tense when used by Bush lacks its traditional meaning and should be understood, according to the president himself, only as an expression of his desires and beliefs. In short, he is speaking in something that must be understood as "the fantasy tense." The "I believe/I want/I hope this happens" aspect just happens to be implicit, making the tense sometimes hard to recognize.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

NOTES FROM THE SNIPER'S PERCH. Julian Sanchez asks:

You think we're [Libertarians] toxically nuts? Try hitching your wagon to a movement that will use your nice rhetoric about environmental and labor standards as a fig leaf for raw xenophobia. Won't that be fun?

Democrats are betting that if they can ease economic anxieties through social welfare policies, the rumbling xenophobia powering Dobbsian populism will calm. It seems a decent bet. Much better than the Liberaltarian gambit, at least, which counsels ignoring these people in favor of the three percent of the vote that doesn't like the welfare state. Relatedly, Julian warns that the entitlement explosion is coming "either way," which he seems to think militates towards bringing Libertarians into the liberal coalition and I seem to think requires keeping them the hell out and making a forthright argument for more monopsonistic health care policy and, yes, higher taxes. Devolving Medicare and Social Security and turning health insurance into a sea of $30,000 deductibles isn't terribly likely to result in open borders and a rainbow of tolerance.

--Ezra Klein

SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST. The New York Times reports today that Republican former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore plans to form a presidential exploratory committee to look into a possible '08 bid. Close readers of the Prospect will recall that Gilmore, like former Va. Gov. George Allen before him, served on the board of directors of troubled high-tech firm Xybernaut. That involvement became an issue for Allen late in his campaign, and will doubtless be one for Gilmore, as well.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MORE ON LIBERALTARIANS. Brink Lindsey's response to Jon Chait's critique of "Liberaltarianism" clarifies things considerably. If Democrats completely give up on entitlements, Lindsey promises they can expand voucher schools, unemployment insurance, and programs to help urban kids. Such riches, doth mine eyes deceive!?

There's a disturbing lack of specifics in what Lindsey wants to concede and a troublingly large amount he wants to destroy. But in the end, the question is simple: Universal health care, at least in principle, is the sine qua non of modern liberalism. Does Lindsey support it? I don't mean HSAs, or insurer deregulation, or subsidies to the very poor. I mean a restructuring of the health care market that guarantees comprehensive coverage, insulates individuals from the vagaries of fate and genetics, ends the discrimination based on health status, and controls cost with an eye towards cutting corporate profits, not consumer care. If not, then there's nothing to talk about.

Lindsey has proposed the destruction of both Medicare and Social Security -- if he wants his deal to be taken seriously, he needs to offer something real. How about the unions? He's for the Employer Free Choice Act...right?

Meanwhile, Chait's reply was classic stuff. He sums up:

If I understand Lindsey, he is proposing the following bargain: Libertarians will give up their politically hopeless goal of eliminating two wildly popular social programs that represent the core of liberalism's domestic achievements. Liberals, in turn, will agree to simply eviscerate these programs, leaving perhaps some rump version targeted at the poorest of the poor. To be fair, Lindsey offers these ideas only as the basis for negotiation, but the prospects of bridging this gulf seem less than promising.

--Ezra Klein

HORSING AROUND. The horserace surveys don't mean much this far out, but it's worth noting that, over the past month, the big-name Democrats have opened a real lead over the big name Republicans. A new CNN poll has both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore beating John McCain and Rudy Giuliani (Obama loses to both candidates, Mitt Romney loses to everybody, and no other match-ups were tested). More generically, 52 percent of voters say they'll definitely or probably vote for the Democrat, while only 32 percent are oriented towards the GOP (and only 10 percent are "definite" Republican votes!). Again, it's early, salt heavily, etc. But for now, the GOP is suffering from a serious image crisis.

--Ezra Klein

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. Matt has a point that bears emphasis. Among the wingnutty, the argument that restrictive rules of engagement are ruining Iraq has become all the rage. Now, it's possible that rules of engagement for U.S. troops in Iraq are too strict, but the wingnuts have conspicuously failed to make their case. The methodology thus far has been to ask NCOs and enlisted personnel whether they'd like to have more lenient rules of fire. I love NCOs; they're the backbone of both the Army and the Marine Corps, and the U.S. military could not function without them. Their primary responsibility, however, is to keep their men safe and effective, and they aren't paid to make big picture strategic decisions. This is why the Army has officers to determine the ways and means to engage the enemy. Of course the NCOs think that the rules of engagement are too restrictive; they would think any ROE so, because they work counter to the primary job that an NCO has. That some sargeants don't like the ROEs tells us nothing whatsoever about whether those rules are appropriate to the job at hand. Indeed, in any good counter-insurgency doctrine the ROEs will be restrictive, and the NCOs will be complaining, because good doctrine requires putting soldiers in dangerous situations.

So why is this suddenly so popular? The argument carries a lot of wingnut water. First, it emphasizes that the problem in Iraq is that we've been too soft, and suggests that a more hard-line, brutal approach would put the natives in line. Second, it places implicit blame for the problem not on the people who actually designed the rules (the Army, Marine Corps, DOD, and the Bush Administration), but on those who we already know are soft and weak and don't care about American soldiers. Thus, the problem is defined as "Politically Correct Rules of Engagement", suggesting that the villains are likely liberals, Clintonistas, UN-niks, etc. Third, it allows wingnuts to express concern for the well being of the troops in the field, while ignoring the fact that the troops would be much, much safer if they weren't in Iraq, regardless of the ROE.

--Robert Farley

LIBERALS DON'T TAKE THEIR OWN SIDES IN AN ARGUMENT. About our preemptive who-lost-Iraq back and forth, I have to say Scott makes an excellent point. Of course the right will blame liberals, the press, the public, etc., for losing the war -- especially if it's a war the right prosecuted exclusively.

My concern is that, right now, it's precisely the neoconservative project that bears the exclusive blame for the war, and in the broader sense of the public, my guess is that most people think it's Bush's war, full-stop. As liberals, with a better answer to the pressing challenges of national security, we owe it to ourselves to make sure it stays that way. Scott is surely right that the conservatives will shift the blame. But we shouldn't forget how readily we as Americans don't want to accept having lost a war. It was a mere five years between the fall of Saigon and the return-to-glory election of Ronald Reagan, who successfully peddled the noble-cause myth -- and remember, Vietnam was a much more settled argument than Iraq is. Sure, liberals can't stop the right from seeding the bed for the claim that liberals lost the war. But we can avoid stepping into the trap as much as possible, and thereby stopping the forces of reaction from claiming the popular imagination through the media, etc.

The larger point is that if liberals lose the struggle for Iraq-revisionism, we're in for more disastrous, astrategic wars. Bush isn't going to stop the war while he's in office anyway, so the right approach for liberals is to ensure that an antiwar candidate -- like a certain Illinois senator -- has as much breathing room as possible to win the Democratic nomination, and then the general election, on a platform of ending the war. (And then of course making sure he ends the war.) Keeping neoconservatism in braying, dishonest apogee and disgrace is the best way to make Scott's likely scenario a marginal phenomenon, and allowing room for a better national-security strategy to emerge.

--Spencer Ackerman

SISTANI GETS HIS HANDS DIRTY. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has evolved politically, and he has a plan. In short, he seeks to form an anti-Sadr government of "national unity" between his SCIRI party and their Shiite bandwagoners; the largest Sunni party; and the Kurds. Left out in the cold are all the rejectionists -- the hardcore anti-occupation Sunnis; the more intransigent Sunni political bloc, led by Saleh Mutlaq; and Moqtada al-Sadr and his Shiite satellites, including PM Nouri al-Maliki. Now, according to The New York Times, Hakim has the backing of the once-indispensable Shiite figure, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Well, sort of. Sistani loudly withdrew from day-to-day politics last year, recognizing that he was diminishing his influence by association with a government that couldn't deliver anything. According to the Times, he's backing the Hakim faction out of frustration with the civil war.

You might be surprised to learn I think this is fraught with peril for Sistani! The Bush administration -- certainly the Cheneyites -- are enthusiastic about the Hakim gambit because it clarifies matters for them. That is, everyone who's happy to be an occupation proxy is in the government and everyone who isn't is out. Hakim wants to kill a whole lot of Sunnis; the Bushies aren't going to need their arms twisted. Hakim, despite being Iran'd-up, has the virtue of not being Sadr -- and the Bushies are licking their chops for an anti-Sadr offensive after they're done with the Sunnis.

And here, of course, is where Sistani's interests diverge sharply from Bush's. Above all, for years, Sistani has pushed hard for Shiite political unity. Hakim is basically girding himself for a showdown with Sadr in the near future. Maybe Sistani has had it with Moqtada and wonders who will rid him of this meddlesome junior cleric. But Sadr is also far and away the most charismatic figure in Iraqi Shiite politics. There's no guarantee that Hakim can beat him, and if Sistani's fingerprints are all over the purge of the Sadrists, he's putting himself in jeopardy.

--Spencer Ackerman

THE ARMY AFTER IRAQ. The president's plan to expand the military, particularly the Army, reminds me of a discussion I participated in last week at the Naval War College. When the United States finally withdraws from Iraq (whether in 2009 or 2012 or 2015), what's going to happen to the Army? In spite of the forces that work to keep the defense budget high, the end of every major conflict over the last sixty years has seen a significant decrease in the defense budget. The elimination of the direct costs of the Iraq operation will cover part of this decrease. However, the Army, even in this period of high budgets, has been unable to maintain its equipment stocks and is having to cut corners on future procurement and R&D. In an environment of declining budgets and what I expect to be anti-interventionist sentiment, the Army may suffer disproportionately. In particular, I think that the kinds of missions that only the Army can do (conquest and occupation of foreign countries) will become, for a while, anathema to the public and frightening to the political elite. Unlike the post-Vietnam era, there is no Red Army for the U.S. Army to face down, and thus no clear rationale for large land forces. Of course, a similar argument could be made for large naval forces, but the Navy budget includes the Marine Corps and the USN can both project force ashore and protect sea lanes.

Given this, I have to wonder whether it was wise for the Army, as a bureaucratic move, to broach the subject of breaking the 1/3 1/3 1/3 split of the defense budget between the services. The stable split was agreed to as part of an effort to resist Defense Department efforts to pit one service against another in procurement battles. While right now the Army obviously requires a bigger slice of the pie, in ten years the rationale for keeping the Army large may have vanished.

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: SURGING TO DISASTER. Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann offer more reasons why a troop level surge in Iraq is a terrible idea.

--The Editors

CENTERED. Kevin Drum takes a light knock at Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker's hefty post-midterms revision of the thesis of their own book Off Center, which had implied if not quite guaranteed that the GOP's mastery of various tricks and structural advantages would assure continued, "off-center" right-wing rule. (They were more explicitly bearish on the prospect of a Democratic congressional takeover in the '06 midterms in this New York Times Magazine article last year.) As they write now in a new TNR piece, "the 2006 election shows that the GOP's institutional advantages aren't enough to guarantee victory" after all. To indulge in some self-quoting here, I'd say that the first serious challenge to Off Center's vision of the GOP having fundamentally rejiggered the normal rules of democratic politics and policymaking through institutional and procedural manipulations came not with last month's midterms but with the spectacular failure of the president's Social Security privatization plan in '05. As I wrote last year:

All the political-institutional trends and GOP tactics the authors identify would lead a reader to naturally predict that the president's push for Social Security privatization last spring would succeed. That campaign offered a perfect test case for Hacker and Pierson's thesis that Republicans have gamed the system in such a way to allow them to enact radical and unpopular policies and get away with it.

--Sam Rosenfeld

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A UNION HEARING. Jim Grossfeld and Celinda Lake argue that political appeals concerning organized labor actually resonate with economically insecure white collar workers -- if made in the right way.

--The Editors

PARTY OF BIG IDEAS WATCH. A colleague sends word of what should be quite an interesting lecture next month:

The Poverty Issue at the End of History

Lawrence M. Mead, New York University

Monday, January 8, 2007, 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036
Please register for this event at www.aei.org/event1374

The politics of poverty have shaped -- and been shaped by -- the end of history, meaning Francis Fukuyama’s idea that divisions of principle have faded from Western politics. While partisan rivalry remains, it no longer rests on opposed world views to the extent it used to. The end of deep ideological differences over capitalism and race in the 1960s helped to create poverty as an issue in need of attention. Poverty as such could only be addressed once the essential claims of unionists and civil rights marchers had been granted. At the same time, poverty disproved the idea that the market economy was a threat to society requiring government protections. The heart of that fear was that there would not be enough jobs available for all willing workers. But research and experience showed that poverty was mostly due to failure to take available jobs, not a lack of jobs or low wages. In the future, poverty will be debated in terms of morality, not ideology. The question will then be how to achieve good behavior, not attain a good society. This type of moralistic politics is less threatening than ideological conflict, yet more disturbing. No longer do we confront deep differences only in political values, but also in the ability of people to live constructive lives.

The rest is weirder: There's the vacuous and simplistic invocation of "The End of History," an interesting essay at its time, but its time, as I think its author has admitted, was two decades ago. As for the rest, one can only guess at what sentences like this --."Poverty as such could only be addressed once the essential claims of unionists and civil rights marchers had been granted" -- might mean.

Or, "In the future, poverty will be debated in terms of morality, not ideology." It's one thing to say that the great ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism is over, which of course it is. No one much proposes that the answer to poverty is state ownership of the means of production and all that. But in the U.S., they never did. It was always about a safety net, about security from the inevitable failure of the market to maintain a full-employment economy at high enough wages to keep everyone above an adequate level, about education and training that will qualify workers to do the jobs that are available, and about generating economic growth in areas where there aren't jobs, which "research and experience shows" are found in many parts of the "two Americas." To say that poverty won't be debated in terms of pre-end-of-history ideology is a far cry from saying it's entirely a matter of individual morality, that is, get up off your ass and go get a job. (A full-time job at minimum wage does not lift a family of three above the poverty line, by the way, even with the Earned Income Tax Credit.)

But maybe I'm taking this all too seriously. It's just bigotry and self-righteousness dressed up in fancy intellectual clothes, the same formula from the same people who brought us the Iraq War.

--Mark Schmitt

RIGHT-WING SCI-FI. Dave Weigel has a good op-ed in The Los Angeles Times today about the new rash of right-wing sci-fi visions of dystopic futures under Islamist, radical leftist, or combined leftist/Islamist rule.

Be afraid, conservatives. If you survived the victory speeches of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and allowed yourself to think, "Things can't get any worse," get over it. They can.

Two years from now, terrorists under the banner of the "Progressive Restoration" will take over Manhattan in a larger attempt to overthrow the government. Thirteen years later, President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore will haul out the good White House china for Osama bin Laden's state visit. By fiddling with your radio, you may be able to catch an underground broadcast by Sean Hannity. If you own a radio, that is; folks living in states that are under Sharia law won't even be that lucky.

These aren't my fantasies or nightmares. All of these vignettes are ripped from science fiction thrillers that have hit shelves in just the last 18 months. Sharia comes to the United States in Robert Ferrigno's potboiler, "Prayers for the Assassin." In Joel C. Rosenberg's "Last Jihad" trilogy, a steel-spined U.S. president nukes Baghdad, then combats a Russo-Iranian axis, all in fulfillment of Scripture (or so we're told in the nail-biting third book, "The Ezekiel Option"). Hannity and his stone-jawed sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, battle the Clinton restoration in Mike Mackey and Donny Lin's comic book, "Liberality for All." The Second American Civil War is breaking out in Orson Scott Card's "Empire" (book out now, video game on the way).

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE REPLACEMENTS. Senator Tim Johnson's recent health scare got everyone in Washington thinking about the process for replacing a senator who is incapacitated or resigns. Matt explains why we need a new system.

--The Editors

MOVEON HAS INFILTRATED THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. Bush wants to "surge" up to 30,000 combat forces into Iraq for six to eight months. The Joint Chiefs of Staff say no. And take a look at their argument:

The Pentagon has cautioned that a modest surge could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops, the officials said.

The informal but well-armed Shiite militias, the Joint Chiefs have also warned, may simply melt back into society during a U.S. surge and wait until the troops are withdrawn -- then reemerge and retake the streets of Baghdad and other cities.

--Spencer Ackerman

THE TRAGIC INELUCTABILITY OF BUSH'S WAR. People who have seen my writings about Ralph Nader will not be surprised that I tend to be skeptical of "heighten the contradictions" arguments. As such, I'm afraid that on the merits I have to side with Sam over Spencer or Rob on this one. If Congressional Democrats could end the war, then I think they should indisputably do so. This isn't because I think that the narrative Spencer outlines won't play out; it very well might. The problem is, the blame-the-war's-opponents narrative will be trotted out and may hold no matter what the Democrats do. If the stylings of Glenn Reynolds have taught us nothing else -- and they certainly haven't -- it's that precisely because they're unfalsifiable tautologies "stab-in-the-back" arguments can be deployed irrespective of the evidence on the ground or what the Democrats do. (After all, it's not as if the narrative was a plausible explanation of Vietnam either.) There's simply no question that the Republican Party and its lickspittles will blame everyone but the people responsible for conceiving and executing it for the failure of the Iraq war, and whether the narrative will have political force is dependent on factors (press coverage, future election results, etc.) that are both unforeseeable and not fully within the Democrats' control. I don't think it's defensible to continue the senseless destruction of lives and waste of resources in Iraq for political benefits that may or may not materialize.

The good news for blogger comity, but the extremely bad news for Iraq and the United States, is that it's all moot. This war will continue throughout Bush's tenure no matter what. The odds that there will be the votes in Congress to de-fund the war with troops in the field are about the same that Tom Coburn will introduce a constitutional amendment mandating a French health care system with unregulated state-funded abortions. In modern politics, foreign policy rests mostly in the executive branch. Since there's nothing the Democrats can plausibly do to end the war, political considerations are relevant, and while strategy isn't my department making de-funding the centerpiece of Democratic policy probably isn't politically wise.

--Scott Lemieux

POLITICAL PUNDITRY HAS A COLD. Atrios's comments on the ISG touch on a rather important flaw in political punditry:

How is that little old me, one of the blogosphere's most disreputable rabid lambs, understands what's going a hell of a lot better than The Wise Old Men of Washington? Really, I'm just aghast at this. Bush has made it quite clear for months and years that leaving is losing. My brilliant insight isn't based on my ability to look deep into his soul, it is based on my ability to hear what he has said over and over again.

The problem is that the press corps approaches political rhetoric with such reflexive cynicism that it's basically all tossed out as bullshit. In its place, they've substituted characterological analysis, the conclusions of which are generally divined from two days spent hanging with the candidate and a cursory glance at other reports from similar profiles. By peering deep into the politician's soul, writers supposedly assemble carefully observed facial tics and freudian slips into an accurate portrait of the subject's soul, thus illuminating Who He Is and, on a more essential level, what he'll do.

It's crap, of course. Indeed, the nice thing about working at an understaffed magazine with limited lede times, no travel budget, and spotty access is that it's forced me to approach political profiling in a different way. When I did the Gore piece, I was stunned by how much lay write there in the public domain, in his speeches and travels and deeds, but had never been noticed because no one bothered to look. I'm finding the same with the candidate I'm current working on. And I tried to take a similar approach in my profiles of Spitzer, Strickland, and Patrick for this month's cover. Even if these candidates lie, or spin -- the leader they want you to think they'll be says something important about the type of administration they hope to run. Similarly, while Time was looking at George W. Bush's midlife abandonment of alcohol for evidence that he'd follow the ISG's recommendations, Atrios just kept listening to what he said. And it turns out that the leader Bush kept trying to portray himself as was the template to look at.

--Ezra Klein

MOVEMENT PROGRESSIVISM ON THE MOVE. I consider myself a “movement progressive." Though we can and will argue about the tenets and meaning of that term, if the label generally fits you, you’ll be cheered by E.J. Dionne’s column in today’s Washington Post:

When a nation alters its philosophical direction and changes its assumptions, there is no press release to announce the shift, no news conference where The People declare that they have decided to move down a different path. Yet 2006 is looking more and more like one of history's hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways…

When the right seemed headed to dominance in the early 1990s, the hot political media trend was talk radio and the star was Rush Limbaugh…Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America"….Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party.

Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that accusing opponents of wanting to "cut and run" in Iraq would be enough to cast political enemies into an unpatriotic netherworld of wimps and "defeatocrats." Now the burden of proof is on those who claim that fighting in Iraq was a good idea and that the situation can be turned around.

Since the 1970s, supply-side conservatives have been brilliantly successful in redefining economic thinking….Suddenly economic inequality is a problem even conservatives are taking seriously.

--Tom Schaller

THE IRAQI ARMY GAMBIT. Meanwhile, I would add to Spencer's critique of Major Connable's NYT op-ed (about the on-the-ground consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq) and note that the major's account of the collapse of institutions upon U.S. redeployment leaves an unanswered question; if local institutions cannot survive without the presence of U.S. forces, precisely what good are U.S. troops doing? Even if we accept that the consequences of withdrawal will be dire (and I don't fully concede this) there has to be some account of how the presence of U.S. forces improves the situation, rather than simply allowing the maintenance of a hopeless status quo. U.S. troops will leave someday. If the U.S. presence is simply delaying the inevitable, then it's hard to see the point of a continued, bloody occupation.

The magic bullet that Connable (and, incidentally, the ISG) presents is a well trained and effective Iraqi military, one capable of overcoming sectarian division and carrying out a competent and efficiently executed counter-insurgency doctrine without resorting to genocidal bloodshed or fratricidal civil war. In other words, the expectation is that forces inevitably less capable than the units already deployed will be able to solve the problem and prevent insurgent control, bloodletting, brutality, etc. Right. This expectation itself depends on the assumption that an Army which has never been good at counter-insurgency will be able to train, in a remarkably short period of time (as the founding of armies goes) an Iraqi force up to the level of competence it will require to operate without substantial U.S. support. I also wonder if anyone who expects the Iraqi Army to solve this problem has read Kenneth Pollack's first book, in which he expresses deep skepticism about the effectiveness of modern Arab military organizations.

--Robert Farley

SPENCER: MAKING SENSE. I quite agree with Spencer's argument that Iraq remains a minefield even for anti-war Dems. That the public supports withdrawal now doesn't mean that they'll support it in five or ten years time. I think that support for withdrawal is genuine, and likely larger than the polling has captured, if only because there remains a core group of Republican partisans who can't bring themselves to publicly renounce the war, regardless of how they feel privately. But as Spencer has pointed out, that support can vanish in hindsight. It wasn't just Norm Podhoretz who, over time, became re-illusioned with the Vietnam War. Millions of moderate to conservative Americans who had come to support a withdrawal from Vietnam by 1972 found it very easy to convince themselves, by 1980, that the war had been a noble struggle undermined by the malfeasance of counter-culture activists and Congressional Democrats.

On the other hand, the Iraq situation is different. Democrats, even hawkish ones, haven't been implicated in the disaster to the extent that they were in 1968. The insistence of the Republican Party on monopolizing the political and rhetorical space around Iraq has left them uniquely vulnerable. There are two critical opportunities available to the Democratic Party right now. The first is to end the dominance of the Republican Party on national security issues, and the second is to redefine national security competence around a value other than "toughness." I think that both of these can be achieved, and that the second in particular will have long term policy payoffs. Nevertheless, the game still has to be played, because, as Spencer notes, they're already pointing to the imaginary knives in their backs.

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ADVICE NOT TAKEN. What plan for Iraq did one top expert warn was doomed to likely failure when he advised the ISG? The very plan they adopted. Gareth Porter reports.

--The Editors

THE GINGRICH WHO STOLE FREE SPEECH. Gene Healy has an elegant, and important, takedown of Newt Gingrich's craziness, which is too often forgotten these days. It's sort of a problem: Democrats and media types are so happy to see a conservative who's serious about policy that they appear willing to overlook the fact that he's a nutball loon. Healy, helpfully, reminds.

--Ezra Klein

THE SPIRIT OF HOHO. I disagree with Badler that you can attribute Bayh and Warner's exit from the campaign to "a presidential run gets longer, more expensive, and more personally invasive every cycle." Both of them were among the top non-Hillary fundraisers in the race, so neither left for lack of cash. As for longer and more invasive, well, that's certainly a detractor, but they knew that when they started testing the waters. I've trouble believing they would've exited if the race thought it would end in the Oval office.

As for the involvement of Howard Dean in all this, the Democratic Party is now one that he and his movement created. Dean was, of course, little more than a vessel for the base's eruption of anger at the party establishment, but the influence his ascendance had on presidential primary strategizin' is incalculable. That, plus the disastrous trajectory of Iraq and the Donkey's 2006 performance, has convinced most observers and strategists that the base aches for, at the least, a nominal progressive -- and more importantly, that one can win the general election. The center in the 2008 primary will be just about where Howard Dean, the lefty, was in the last one. And his success from that spot was an undeniable force in popularizing it, all the more so because it was proven right by events.

--Ezra Klein

THE POWER OF BAD MEDICAL METAPHORS. Kevin Drum's post about George Packer's New Yorker piece on the conceptual error contained in the phrase "war on terror" and how it distorts our counter-insurgency thinking -- for example, by keeping us from treating terrorism as a social network problem rather than a military one -- reminded me of a concern I have about the the metaphor of Islamic terrorism as cancer, which is something I've been hearing commentators say for years (here's one blog round-up of some instances).

What if Islamic terrorism isn't like cancer at all, but rather like eczema? That is, what if the proper treatment for the condition is not surgical excision, but rather, an anti-inflammatory to calm things down? The idea encoded by the metaphor of cells that grow malignant and out of control and which must be eliminated is very different from the one behind the notion of highly-irritated cells that cluster and rash up at, say, the site of a mosquito bite. Cancer requires obliteration, but efforts to eliminate something like eczema by mechanical means can just exacerbate the irritation.

Indeed, the of use medical metaphors in foreign relations is probably a bad idea no matter what metaphor is chosen, because the American bias in medicine is to treat aggressively under all circumstances, and so medical metaphors will inevitably foster -- and be used to defend -- hawkish world views.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE JAN/FEB PRINT ISSUE. The latest print issue of the Prospect has come out; you'll want to take a look. Ezra's cover story profiles three of the new progressive Dem governors voted into office in November and poised to push serious and consequential liberal reforms at the state level: Ohio's Ted Strickland, New York's Eliot Spitzer, and Massachusetts' Deval Patrick. Elsewhere in the magazine:

• Robert Borosage traces the growing electoral isolation of conservatives and the Republican Party they control.
  
• Brad Plumer reports on the push by arms manufacturers to weaken federal controls on armament exports.
  
• Ann lays out the political significance of new findings that RU-486 might be used to treat cancer.
  
• Sasha Polakow-Suransky reviews Jimmy Carter's hot-potato Israel-Palestine book.
  
• And Mark Schmitt explains why November's elections proved that Karl Rove was … right after all!

--The Editors

THE REAL REASON NO ONE RUNS: Not to take anything away from Howard Dean, but I'm not sure where Ezra -- himself a former Deaniac -- finds the causality between Dean's campaign and the progressive tilt of possible Democratic candidates in 2008. First, I think a couple notes of caution are in order: the only major prospective candidates who opposed the Iraq War from the start, Obama and Gore, have not declared and may still not run. It's true that even if they do not run, two of the major candidates who are more certain to run, Edwards and Kerry, have found their voices in opposing the war. But they have done so more strongly after the 2004 campaign, suggesting to me that they were influenced not by Dean but by the deteriorating situation in Iraq and the public's losing patience with it.

I think Ezra's observation about Warner and Bayh, that with the party moving to the left they saw no significant niche to Hillary's right, is astute. But I also think one could as easily attribute the reluctance of so many candidates to get in the race this time to the fact that a presidential run gets longer, more expensive, and more personally invasive every cycle. I wonder if there are changes out there, maybe something with the primary schedule, that could ameliorate that.

--Ben Adler

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BARE NECESSITIES. Graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi's latest is the tale of her great-uncle, a famed musician who loses his beloved instrument and his will to live. Writes Noy Thrupkaew:

Plums is Satrapi's most structurally daring narrative, and perhaps her most subtle in its depiction of her hotbed homeland, Iran. In her past three works, Satrapi has made a name for herself by braiding together intimate, memoir-ish narratives with Iranian history. In Plums, a eulogy to the death of pleasure, Satrapi works on both the personal and political scale once again. Her references to Iran are more allusive than in her previous works, but just as haunting.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

THE POST-DEAN PRIMARY. Evan Bayh's decision to forego the 2008 campaign is an interesting one. Bayh joins with Mark Warner and Russ Feingold as serious candidates who, in an open year and facing a broad field, decided to ease off the trigger and unload the gun. And the three of them make for an illuminating bunch. Warner and Bayh were both supposed to uphold the New Democrat consensus, the triangulating Southern moderation perfected by Bill Clinton. Feingold, on the other hand, was supposed to play the insurgent, the serious lefty in a field Hillary had tilted right.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the caucuses. In presidential primaries, "space" is the definitional attribute. Niches get filled, interest groups sated, and constituencies satisfied. And so it has happened in the Democratic primary. Hillary has settled on the center, while all of the excitement and other candidates have veered to the left. Obama, Edwards, Gore -- say what you will, but this crew currently controls the buzz, the assumptions of "electability," and the excitement of the base. And every one of them is a progressive.. Warner and Bayh both dropped out because there was little space to Hillary's right and even fewer voters waiting in it. Feingold dropped out because he couldn't be Howard Dean -- the campaign was packed with progressives who appeared more likely nominees than he. The dynamics of this field are friendly only to liberals, and serious, electable ones at that. Indeed, for better or worse, this is the first presidential in recent memory where the initial action and jostling is happening in the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Howard Dean should be proud: He really did change the party.

--Ezra Klein

SMELLS NICE. Via Drum, see this American Footprints rundown on the Iranian elections, which did not go well at all for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies. The post makes an important point at the end: "The results will certainly please Western capitals. Not that we should expect any major shifts in Iran's foreign policy, which in any event isn't controlled by Ahmadinejad."

Meanwhile, was Ahmadinejad's list of allied candidates really called the "Sweet Scent of Service" coalition? Is that alliterative in Farsi?

--Sam Rosenfeld

W STANDS FOR WOMEN WAHABBISM. During the build-up to the Iraq war, you may recall various Bush apologists who have less than no interest in women's rights domestically using women's rights in other countries as a prop to advance the administration's foreign policy (often spiced up with dishonest claims that American feminist groups ignore violations of women's rights in Islamic countries). Exactly how the Iraq War was supposed to improve women's rights was unclear, and not surprisingly replacing a brutal secular dictatorship with a quasi-state beholden to Islamic radicals for social control has made things even worse:

Life has become more difficult for most Iraqis since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra sparked a rise in sectarian killings and overall lawlessness. For many women, though, it has become unbearable.

As Islamic fundamentalism seeps into society and sectarian warfare escalates, more and more women live in fear of being kidnapped or raped. They receive death threats because of their religious sects and careers. They are harassed for not abiding by the strict dress code of long skirts and head scarves or for driving cars.

For much of the 20th century, and under various leaders, Iraq was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries in its treatment of women, who were encouraged to go to school and enter the workforce. Saddam Hussein's Baath Party espoused a secular Arab nationalism that advocated women's full participation in society. But years of war changed that.

In the days after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many women were hopeful that they would enjoy greater parity with men. President Bush said that increasing women's rights was essential to creating a new, democratic Iraq.

But interviews with 16 Iraqi women, ranging in age from 21 to 52, show that much of that postwar hope is gone. The younger women say they fear being snatched on their way to school and wonder whether their college degrees will mean anything in the new Iraq. The older women, proud of their education and careers, are watching their independence slip away.

--Scott Lemieux

IRAQ: GROTESQUER AND GROTESQUER. Sam sounds a powerful call in his last post:

While Reid's line on this, taken word for word, is quite logical and in keeping with his call for withdrawal, I too must admit to yearning for a cessation of all deliberate ambiguities and bank-shot calculations in Democrats' stated reactions to the president's Iraq plans, now that the policy direction under discussion is set so squarely in the face of overwhelming public opinion, as well as basic humanity.

It goes a little something like this (hit it): Democrats take over Congress in 2007. Bush begins a troop increase, allegedly in the name of bringing the war to a desirable conclusion. It has all sorts of anticipated ill effects: increased deaths, increased chaos, mounting strain on the military. Bush demonstrates no willingness to back down. Increasingly, liberal anti-war legislators in safely blue precincts calculate that the only way they can stop the war is to stop funding it. When other Democrats in the House and the Senate start equivocating on a funding cut-off, liberal activists start recruiting primary challengers who endorse the plan. Bush comes out swinging: "If they really want to end the war," he says again and again, "they should show where they stand and vote against funding the war." Karl Rove's plan is a simple one: facing a rising popular tide against the war in general, he needs to force the opposition into an antiwar position that isn't popular in particular -- like cutting off funding while the troops are in the field.

Let's say the Democrats do it. Congress cuts off the funding; the Dems win in 2008 as the Republicans descend into an acrimonious inter-party feud about the meaning of Iraq. With the Democrats in power, the troops come home, but the expected human calamity for the Iraqis materializes. Bush, in exile, starts saying how the war was on the verge of being turned around, but then the radical Democrats, in an anti-American frenzy, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Instantly, this becomes the Republican and conservative line -- the unprovable counterfactual that the war was about to be won. Over the next fifteen years, this becomes accepted wisdom. A younger generation of liberals, tired of being bludgeoned with the charge, more or less accepts it themselves. Another Republican gets elected, and sets to work combating Iraq Fatigue. We get another war.

Sound crazy? In every particular, it's happened before. It pains me to say it, but it's probably better over the long run to continue doing things like funding a God-awful war rather than allowing Bush to, as they say, heighten the contradictions.

--Spencer Ackerman

IRAQ: THE GROTESQUE PHASE. Cliff May informs us that he is one of the anonymously quoted party attenders in the truly lovely opener to this new Fred Barnes piece:

It turns out you only have to attend a White House Christmas party to find out where President Bush is headed on Iraq. One guest who shook hands with Bush in the receiving line told him, "Don't let the bastards get you down." Bush, slightly startled but cheerful, replied, "Don't worry. I'm not." The guest followed up: "I think we can win in Iraq." The president's reply was emphatic: "We're going to win." Another guest informed Bush he'd given some advice to the Iraq Study Group, and said its report should be ignored. The president chuckled and said he'd made his position clear when he appeared with British prime minister Tony Blair. The report had never mentioned the possibility of American victory. Bush's goal in Iraq, he said at the photo-op with Blair, is "victory."

--Sam Rosenfeld

SCHOOMAKER: I AM NOT A SHILL! I caused a bit of a kerfuffle on my blog today when I suspected General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, of shifting his views on whether or not the Army is breaking under the strain of current deployment to suit the tenure -- and now departure -- of Donald Rumsfeld. After I wrote the post, I spoke with Lieutenant Colonel Gary Kolb, Schoomaker's spokesman, who "absolutely" denied that pleasing Rumsfeld played any role in his shifting stance on the health of the Army. "I'll personally vouch that General Schoomaker will tell you what's on his mind, and he'll be blunt and candid," Kolb told me.

Kolb emphasized that what Schoomaker is worried about is the Defense Department's policy regarding how long after a deployment a National Guard or Army Reserve unit can be certified as fit to redeploy, without what's called "cross-leveling" -- that is, taking soldiers from other units to get the full unit back up to deployment readiness. And in Schoomaker's testimony on the Hill yesterday, he certainly emphasized that the policy is too restrictive. According to Kolb, the head of the Army National Guard, Lieutenant General Clyde Vaughn, favors a more-restrictive policy on Guard-unit redeployment -- understandably, from Vaughn's persective -- but Schoomaker hasn't come to a decision on what the new policy should be.

OK, but it's not as if Schoomaker suddenly figured out that the deployment schedule is onerous. Kolb wouldn't answer my questions as to when exactly Schoomaker grew so alarmed as to speak out in public, or what the "magic number" is for when a Guard or Reserve unit is "ready" to redeploy back to a combat zone. He did, however, emphasize that when Schoomaker over the past year said that the Army isn't "broken," he was not addressing whether the Army was "breaking." So I hope that's clear to everyone.

--Spencer Ackerman

CATASTROPHE KEEPS US FROM THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION. As someone who has long been a proponent of "Hillary Myth #2," I was very interested in the data adduced by Garance. I do think that Matt Yglesias gets at a couple of possible limitations. First, I definitely agree that Clinton won't be perceived by Democratic primary voters as substantially more liberal than her reputation, but whether this will be true of the general electorate remains open. And second, I also agree that Clinton probably won't be seen as more liberal than an African-American Senator from Illinois, but it does seem to me that there would be a major gap in perceived versus actual progressivism when comparing Clinton to, say, John Edwards.

Still, given the likely dynamics of the 2008 election, I concede that Clinton being perceived as an arch-liberal may well not be a significant problem. This theory, however, comes with a very large downside. Given that the Iraq war will still be raging and almost certainly still an abject disaster, foreign policy will again be central to the 2008 election. In this context, Clinton's purported liberalism may be largely negated by her Iraq hawkishness. This is a serious problem, however, because running an Iraq war hawk as the Democratic candidate is a terrible idea. I think it's a major liability for Edwards, who at least turned against the war relatively early and unequivocally. With Clinton, it's even worse -- not only because her position has been catastrophic on the merits, but because she would be essentially unable to exploit what should be the biggest albatross for the GOP in '08. Having an election discourse that consists primarily of variations of the incompetence dodge would probably be bad for the Democrats, and certainly bad for the country.

Fortunately (from my perspective), I also think that this factor makes Clinton's primary chances all but DOA. As the disastrous toll of the war becomes more and more indelible, being the biggest Iraq hawk among the major candidates just isn't going to be a viable position from which to take the Dem nomination.

--Scott Lemieux

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: EXCESS BAGGAGE. Greg Anrig reports on how the incoming Democratic majority will face an uphill battle to undo the damage done during conservatives' years in power.

It is crucial to understand that it’s not merely Republicans’ incompetence or political pandering that has left the government in shambles. Rather, many of their acts of sabotage were premeditated, often hatched in right-wing think tanks. The central if unstated mission of those idea factories, and their leading funders, is to weaken the public sector in order to minimize its capacity to tax and regulate the private sector. But because the general public doesn't actually share conservatism's deep hostility toward government, their most effective tactics rely on subterfuge and operate in ways that can't be easily detected.

Now, Anrig writes, it's up to the Dems to shine a light on these practices, and connect the federal government's failures since 2001 with the conservative ideology out of which they were born.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

THE BUSH-MCCAIN WAR PLAN. The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports some interesting news on John McCain's problematic Iraq war proposal:

Unless the president's new strategy proves a clear success by the beginning of 2008, Mr. McCain could find his judgment on matters of national security being called into question.

The chairman of the American Conservative Union, David Keane, said yesterday that Mr. McCain risks having opponents in the 2008 campaign refer to the new war strategy as the "McCain-Bush plan." And the editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report, Stuart Rothenberg, called Mr. McCain's war position "risky." "He is not purely the guy offering the criticism now. Democrats and his fellow Republicans could criticize him for owning the policy," Mr. Rothenberg said.

Mr. Bush has kept mum on any details of the new Iraq strategy, which he will unveil next month. But administration officials say he is planning to spurn the advice of his top commanders and call for up to 30,000 more troops in Iraq by extending the stays of some active-duty personnel already there and calling up their replacements earlier.

The plan is similar to the ideas Mr. McCain first outlined on ABC's "This Week" on November 20, when he said he could not support the war unless the president sent enough troops to fight it.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

MYTHS ABOUT HILLARY. The new Washington Post-ABC News poll on the '08 contenders busts a couple of developing myths on the Democratic side.

Myth 1: Hillary Clinton can't rely on support from women because women are ambivalent about her due to her marriage and because women, more generally, are just awful to each other. In fact:

Clinton receives significantly higher support among women than men (49 percent to 29 percent).

Myth 2: Clinton is a moderate who people think of as a liberal, while Barack Obama is a liberal who is perceived as a moderate, and thus more electable in a nation that's afraid of liberals. People, it turns out, are smart enough to figure out who actually stands for what, even at this early stage of the game:

Clinton...is favored by more moderates than liberals. Obama has almost equal support among men and women but has twice as much support among liberals as among moderates.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CURIOUSLY STRONG. As Badler notes, John Edwards continues to demonstrate surprising strength in polls, beating John McCain in head-to-head match-ups even as McCain outruns both Obama and Clinton. Add in Edwards' astonishing lead in Iowa, the union support which should help him out in Nevada, and the hometown connection with South Carolina, and the genial Southerner can probably afford to wait out the Obama boomlet.

In a weird way, Obama and Edwards occupy similar slots: They're both charismatic, eloquent, "electable," and young. But, in 2008, they'll be running precisely opposite campaigns. Edwards is staking his claim on a politics of populism: Ferociously pro-union, fiercely critical of Wal-Mart economy, profoundly engaged with problems of poverty, and so on. Obama, by contrast, looks to be positioning himself towards a politics of moral uplift, one everyone from David Brooks to Rosa Brooks can get behind. In other words, Edwards will be hoping his sharply carved out positions win him intensity votes, while Obama will be trying to draw from a middle he believes craves inspiration and purpose. Should be an interesting contest, particularly when Obama has to start sharpening his policies (David Brooks and Rosa Brooks, after all, disagree on fairly consequential matters) and Edwards has to defend his wide appeal. For now, though, the merry populist shows no signs of compromising his messgae, as this bit from the other night's Hardball should demonstrate:

--Ezra Klein

STUDY THIS. It's been a rather bizarre week for the Iraq Study Group's report. A mere few days ago, all of Washington was buzzing about the politically irresistible proclamation that the Bush administration must bring in Iran and Syria while committing itself to a gradual drawdown of US troops. The outcome? The Bush administration has firmly rejected talks with Iran and Syria and is inching towards a build-up of troops. In other words: screw off, James Baker.

At this point, however, shouldn't the media be freaking out? Bush has contravened the bipartisan sanctity of the ISG, ruled out the treasured solutions of every pundit whose paychecks aren't signed by Murdoch, and promised to do precisely what the American people overwhelmingly voted against in November. The obstinance of this crew has emerged an almost transcendent quality -- and yet you still have Tom Friedman begging Bush to become an environmentalist, David Ignatius suggesting he talk to Syria. When will the media realize Bush doesn't care what they think, cease talking about what he should do, and begin, relentlessly and mercilessly, talking about what he is doing?

--Ezra Klein

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: FINAL FANTASY. Apropos of Tom's post, AEI's Fred Kagan unveiled a new Iraq plan yesterday called "Choosing Victory," which calls for, among other things, a significant infusion of new troops. In a new article, Spencer is a bit skeptical:

Kagan, in his writings for The Weekly Standard, has been a vociferous critic of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military leadership, whom he believes have jeopardized America's fortunes in Iraq through their insistence on both a relatively light military footprint and a rapid handover of security responsibilities to Iraqis. That makes it all the more painfully ironic that his plan is so Rumsfeldian: it seeks to essentially re-fight the invasion of Iraq; it substitutes wishful thinking for sound military strategy; it presumes that American military resources are both omnipotent and inexhaustible; and it's agnostic to the point of indifferent about what political settlement is to follow military operations.

--The Editors

DOUBLING DOWN. So Charles Krauthammer, after denigrating the members of the Iraq Study Group and their findings, says he wants us to "'double down' our military effort" in Iraq? ("This means a surge in American troops...") The thought that anyone in the administration listens to this guy is frightening.

The time for sending sufficient troops has long since passed. Even though I thought this war was a bad idea, once there, as late as autumn 2004 I still argued for more troops because it was clear that George W. Bush had violated every tenet of the Powell Doctrine, including the most important one: overwhelming force. Later, when I read Paul Bremer's book, I wondered how it is that somebody like me -- with no security clearance and no security adviser -- could figure out from my professor's perch in Baltimore that we had sent an underwhelming force (not in the quality of the troops, but their number). Bremer confirms that the first week he arrived in Baghdad, he was handed a military study showing that previous, successful occupations had one troop per 50 citizens. We had one per 150. He mentioned the report to Donald Rumsfeld, who never got back to Bremer about it. (Rumsfeld, of course, remained defense secretary for another three years, in accordance with this administration's general policy of maintaining an inverse relationship between competence and longevity of service.)

Sorry, Charlie: Just like in blackjack, the time to double-down is before you go bust, ideally when you have 11. What Krauthammer is proposing is doubling down on hard 20. If you try that in Vegas, most dealers will try to stop you, as a matter of courtesy. If you insist, the dealer usually notifies the pit boss, because such behavior is so erratic that the casino thinks you're either cheating in some way or you're a crazy fool.

--Tom Schaller

MORAL CLARITY. Via Drum, I see that in his new LA Times column ("Iraq Needs a Pinochet") Jonah Goldberg argues that you can't make an omelet without throwing a few people out of planes, and that the baseline for measuring the quality of a country's leadership should be Fidel Castro. (This must have been the grading curve his colleague John Podhoretz was using when he called George W. Bush a "great leader.")

Of course, if one was inclined to be charitable -- and when it comes to people who supported this disastrous war for many years, I'm not -- it could be pointed out that the current situation in Iraq proves that pretty much any state is better than having no effective state, which is true enough. But consider how much is being conceded here. Evidently, it was never plausible to think that Iraq was magically going to turn into a stable, pro-American democracy after the invasion, which means that the immense cost in lives and resources was going to be expended in a war in which the best-case scenario was a mildly less repressive dictatorship, and the rather more likely scenario was a theocratic quasi-state that would be worse for the Iraqi people and far worse for American interests. Somehow, I don't think this argument would have flown during the run-up to war -- and Goldberg, who has said he bought the argument that "standing-up a stable, democratically inclined government was supposed to be comparatively easy," certainly wasn't invoking a claim that the invasion might produce a state marginally better than Castro's Cuba when it mattered.

--Scott Lemieux

EDWARDS' STRENGTH: John Nichols of The Nation highlights a poll that shows John Edwards is the only Democrat to beat John McCain in a head-to-head matchup. Nichols ascribes Edwards' advantage over Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his position "as the far more progressive candidate in the race." A more cynical progressive might point instead to the facts that Edwards is the only one to have ever been on a national ticket, that he has looks and charisma, or the that unlike Clinton and Obama, he is a white man.

Nichols also seems to take Edwards stronger positions against the war and Bush's Supreme Court nominations at face value, when they may be largely explained by the fact that being out of office gives him more leeway. Even so, Nichols is probably right to point to Edwards' "concern about the growing gap between rich and poor in what he describes as 'two Americas,'" as one reason for his appeal. I know a few people at this magazine trumpeting the return of populism who would agree.

--Ben Adler

THE COMING BLOG PEAK. Via the BBC comes the prediction that worldwide blogging activity will peak next year, then level out at about 100 million. And also this not totally surprising news:

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs...

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Mr Plummer said.

"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LORDY. Good to see Eason Jordan, of all people, legitimizing an absurd right-wing mau mau campaign against the press.

--Sam Rosenfeld

QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT. For our DC readers, Tom will be at Olsson's in Dupont Circle tonight at 7:00 PM discussing Whistling Past Dixie -- all are welcome and Tom's eager to say hi.

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JUSTICE DEPORTED. When immigration enforcement agents raided six meatpacking plants on Tuesday, officials said it was because the workers were using stolen identities. In fact, as David Bacon reports, immigration agents wanted to send a message to unionized workplaces. They also wanted to send a message to Democrats:

After six years in office, ICE's choice of this moment to begin their campaign is more than suspect. It is designed to force the new Democratic congressional majority to make a choice. The administration is confident that Democrats will endorse workplace raids in order to appear "tough on illegal immigration" in preparation for the 2008 presidential elections. In doing so, they will have to attack two of the major groups who produced the votes that changed Congress in November -- labor and Latinos.

Read the whole thing here.

--The Editors

BLAME CONGRESS. Glenn Greenwald and Lyle Denniston have excellent analysis of the decision of District Court Judge James Robertson to dismiss the habeas corpus claim of Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Under the circumstances, the decision is actually about as good an outcome for opponents of arbitrary detentions as could be expected. Robertson held that Congress has not suspended the writ of habeas corpus for American citizens--it lacks the power to suspend the writ because there is not a n ongoing "rebellion or invasion." Admittedly, it's easier for courts to construe the statute more narrowly when doing so doesn't require ruling against the administration, but this is as least one reason for cautious optimism.

Still, for the most part this decision is depressing; as Denniston notes, it is unlikely that many detainees will be able to take advantage of the inapplicability of the statute to American citizens, even assuming that other courts will construe the statute similarly. The key thing to remember, to quote Glenn, is that the "principal fault here lies with the 109th Congress (and, of course, the administration it so faithfully served), not with Judge Robertson." Robertson's application of the statute was, at least, reasonable; the biggest problem is that Congress has shamefully refused to place significant constraints on the administration's assertions of arbitrary power.

--Scott Lemieux

WYDEN 3: COST CONTAINMENT STRIKES BACK. I need to spend some more time reporting out the cost containment provisions on the Wyden plan, but since that appears the primary objection, let me go into the underlying strategy of the legislation for a moment: As I explained in my last post, the legislation seeks to tame the insurance industry by imposing community rating, thus ending the competition for healthy individuals and the race to price out the unhealthy. That has a secondary, and possibly greater, impact than simply ending price discrimination. Indeed, it's the foundation of the plan's cost containment strategy.

You often hear that health insurance isn't a market. That's not true. It is a market, only the goods being sought are healthy individuals, and the efficiency gains are aimed at finding ever better methods for separating the well from the sick. The market works precisely as it's supposed to, creating an enormously effective conveyor for industry profits. What it doesn't do is construct a good or just system for health care consumers. The imposition of community rating and an individual mandate fundamentally restructures this market. Suddenly, there's no more competition based on health, no more money spent identifying those who will require care and avoiding them.

Yet the plans must still compete. Aetna still needs to attract customers -- 300 or so million of them -- away from UnitedHealthGroup, who needs to block Kaiser Permanente. So on what grounds do they compete? The easy answer would be they reduce services, offering ever barer packages, hoping to get the healthy applicants who want to pay less. Problem is, the plan mandates insurance packages with benefits that are actuarily equivalent to or greater than the Blue Cross Standard Plan offered to federal employees on January 1st, 2007. They can't reduce their benefit packages.

You know where this is going now: The grounds left for competition are price, benefits, and quality. The hope is that if insurers can no longer eke out advantages by denying or reducing health coverage, they will be forced into competing to offer the most comprehensive services at the lowest cost. If they can bargain down the price of care, offer more integrated disease management, or find efficiencies that allow them to lower deductibles below their competitors, they will attract the enrollees. In this way, the market will "work" for health consumers, not providers, and it will control costs in precisely the way other industries do.

I can tell you that efforts to restructure insurance provision around wellness and management programs have proven able to control costs. The CEO of Safeway Inc., who was at the Wyden event, explained how his company rebuilt their health insurance around those principles and, last year, amidst major health inflation, saw their plans drop in cost by 11 percent -- 7 percent of which they put towards lowering employee costs. Their projected cost growth this year is...nothing. So that, in essence, is the cost management strategy. It's not explicit, it's not a global budget or price controls, it's the hope that you can restructure the market into forcing competition on grounds that benefit the insured, the taxpayer, and the system.

And as a final point, one that the Wyden folks would almost certainly deny, it's my read that the plan enables more serious cost containment attempts in the future, if they prove necessary. If remaking the market doesn't work, the reorganization of health care provision into a coherent, government-provided system creates a structure within which drastic cost containment measures can be imposed, if necessary. That's not something you have in the current system, and it's not something, I predict, that you'll get as an explicit feature of any new system. Cost containment through rationing or price controls will trigger hostility and opposition on an epic scale, and getting there, if need be, sneakily, isn't a bad idea.

--Ezra Klein

SHOUT-OUT. Readers may recall the tech troubles we had a few weeks ago that shut down the blogs. While we managed to fix things enough to start back up and keep content flowing, we've had lingering issues on the back-end that have been a real headache for this small-staffed office lacking resources or much tech support. Now that the problems have actually been fixed, we'd be remiss in not giving a plug to EchoDitto, a member of whose crack staff found the database problems and made it all better with dispatch. Those folks really know what they're doing, and we thank 'em.

--The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: JOHNNY COME LATELY. John Edwards has completely reversed his pro-war stance, and now he appears to be gearing up for another run at the Democratic nomination. Zack Pelta-Heller reports that Edwards' plan for the immediate withdrawal of 40,000 troops from Iraq could distinguish him from the more centrist candidates.

--The Editors

BUT IS IT GOOD ENOUGH? Lot of interesting feedback on the Wyden plan, some of which I want to explore a little further. But first, I want to ask a question: Can anybody truly see Congress passing a piece of legislation and a president signing a bill that, in one stroke of the pen, dissolves Aetna, UnitedHealthGroup, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross, and all the rest? We're talking about the full dissolution of multibillion dollar corporations that employ thousands and thousands of people, contribute heavily to a wide swath of politicians and provide massive tax revenues to a large collection of states, and have been the sole providers of health coverage for nearly a century now. Forget whether you, or I, think their demolition would be a good idea: Do you see it as a possibility?

I've tried to imagine it. Believe me, I have. But I can't. Not in the near-term, anyway. Which why I'm somewhat unimpressed by demands that Democratic proposals start from a single-payer stance and condemns any that don't as "signal[ing] a sell-out by the Democratic congressional leadership." Politics is the art of the possible, and so long as the health system is genuinely harming millions of Americans, the perfect can't continually be the enemy of the good -- the question must be whether what's achievable is good enough.

That said, insurers are a problem. But what you can't destroy, you may be able to reform. That's the strategy of the Wyden plan. Insurers long ago realized the easiest way to make money was to expend vast amounts of energy and resources figuring out who will actually use health care, then deny it to them. So they identify everyone who is sick, has been sick, or possibly, one day, will be sick, and price them out of the system. We're left with a system that excludes precisely those who need it. Wyden's plan imposes "community rating," which means insurers can't price discriminate between applicants. Instead, they have to cover everyone for precisely the same price. You could have an enlarged heart, a missing limb, and a lazy eye, and you're getting the same deal as the triathlete down the block.

Of course, this system could make the triathlete down the block opt-out while the ill and the old rush in, thus destroying all insurers and bringing the system to its knees. Thus the individual mandate: With everyone forced to buy in, the young, the old, the sick, the well, and everyone in between spreads out cost, ensuring no single group too heavily tilts the pool. Some folks don't like individual mandates -- I'm not one of them. Single-payer, after all, is an individual mandate too -- you just pay for it through income or sales taxes. The problem with such systems is affordability, but the Wyden plan has a genuinely robust set of subsidies, reaching all the way up to 400% of the poverty line. It is, in other words, determinedly progressive.

The real problem, as I see it, is cost containment, which will be better than our system's but worse than a nationalized system. That said, any sort of coherent, national structure opens the door to serious cost containment mechanisms down the road -- something we definitively can't implement in the current structure. Nevertheless, I'll get more information on the cost containment mechanisms as the day goes on, and report back what I find. Any other questions?

--Ezra Klein

IRAQ 25K. At icasualties.org, the site which tracks American and coalitional deaths and woundings, there is a fantastic slideshow essay put together by Glenn Kutler for Newsweek to mark the 25,000th American casualty -- about 22,000 wounded, and nearly 3,000 dead -- in Iraq. (Click on the impossible-to-miss graphic in the top-right corner of the site to start the slideshow.) It is sobering to watch.

So far this month, there have been 48 American fatalities through 14 days which, should that pace continue, will result in 106 total fatalities by month's end. There have never been back-to-back triple-digit fatality months during the war, and this month will be no exception, since November brought only 69 fatalities. But if this month continues at its present pace, it will mark the second time there has been two triple-digit fatality months within a three-month span. The other such window? That would be November 2004 when, after six months of waiting for Bush's re-election to begin the assault on Fallujah, we lost 137 Americans, followed soon thereafter by 107 fatalities in January 2005. In fact, if December 2006 does, tragically, reach 106 fatalities, the Oct-Dec 2006 will become the deadliest calendar quarter of the war, with 281 fatalities. During the fourth quarter of 2004, which included the Fallujah counter-offensive, there were just 272 American fatalities.

I'm compelled to ask: Has anyone else in the media noted the 25,000 threshold? Will they, at month's end, note this as the deadliest quarter in the war should that reality, sadly, eventuate? Given that almost nobody mentions the fact that more Americans have been killed in Iraq than were killed on September 11, 2001, I seriously doubt it. And, of course, although the Iraq Study Group report has generated a momentary upsurge in mentions of Iraqi deaths, woundings and displacements, discussions of overall estimates of Iraqi fatalities will soon return to the category of the rarely-mentioned. Happy holidays.

--Tom Schaller

SHARK ATTACK. Dr. Evil:

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here!

Back in the spring, I figured this research was in its earliest, most basic stages -- getting a sense of what makes a shark tick. Not so. Boston University professor Jelle Atema can actually "steer a shark" -- either through "electrical stimulation of the brain" or by delivering "little odor pulses" of "squid juice" to the predator's nose.

--Robert Farley

JOHNSON SEMI-UPDATE. Just to update Ezra's post, see his comment thread for information showing that there's some conflict and confusion in SD law about when a special election would be held (either soon after the vacancy or not until the next general election). That's just an informational update, and for now we'll wait for actual word of Johnson's condition before saying anything else.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TIM JOHNSON. Word is that South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson has suffered a serious stroke. A call to his office produced only the information that he'd been feeling poorly this morning and was now in the hospital -- in other words, no denials. It's testament to the tunnel vision of DC that my friend informed me of this with an IM saying "We [Democrats] may have just lost the Senate." But, in fact, if Johnson's condition leads to retirement or worse, South Dakota's Republican legislature and governor will have to appoint a replacement, who'll likely be a Republican, overturning the Senate. In a Senate this close, acts of God and ravages of age assume a powerful role, and the voters are hostage to their whims. For that reason, the succession strategies in place nationwide have always struck me as totally bizarre -- why doesn't the retiree's state party pick the successor (and that goes for such events on both ends of the aisle)?

In any case, all thoughts are with Johnson and his family. May his recovery be swift.

Update: Okay, my information was faulty. South Dakota actually has the fairest of all coping mechanisms. The Governor has to call an election within 10 days of a vacancy, to be held no more than 90 days later.

--Ezra Klein

HUMILIATION & JIHAD. The new issue of Democracy has an important piece by Peter Bergen and Michael Lind about the root causes of Islamic terrorism, and the contribution of feelings of grievance among upper- and middle-class Arabs to radical anti-Americanism. They conclude that material global inequality is not issue, it is global inequality in status:

While bin Laden and his allies must simply be defeated, their appeal to potential new recruits can be limited by policies that reduce feelings of collective humiliation in the Arab and Muslim worlds. According to a recent National Intelligence Estimate, the American occupation of Iraq is now inspiring jihadists in the way that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, Russian control of Chechnya, and Indian rule over Kashmiri Muslims long have done. Ending the humiliating occupation of Muslim populations by non-Muslim nations will remove some of the major grievances that jihadists use as a recruiting tool. Conversely, to perpetuate these deeply resented occupations in the name of fighting "Islamofascism" will only help the jihadists...

Reducing poverty in the Middle East and around the world is a laudable goal in itself, for humanitarian reasons. But it would be a mistake to treat prosperity as a universal solvent that can deprive jihadists like bin Laden of allies and sympathizers in populations that feel humiliated by foreign domination or frozen out of politics. Ultimately, both foreign occupation and domestic autocracy are political problems that must find political, not economic, solutions. The campaign against jihadism and the campaign against global poverty are both justified. But they are not the same war.

As they say, read the whole thing.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

DOES HILLARY ACTUALLY WANT DENVER? A Rocky Mountain News story about Hillary Clinton benefiting from Denver being selected to host the 2008 Democratic National Convention is spot-on. Yet a source close enough to the site machinations told me last week that Clinton is really pushing for New York. I confirmed with Clinton blogger nonpareil Peter Daou that, in fact, Hillary wants NYC to host the convention.

As an advocate of the pan-western strategy for Democrats, with special focus on the Interior West and Midwest, I think it would be a tragic error to have the 2008 convention in New York. So long as Denver has sufficient facilities (I’m told it does) and can raise the money (I’m told this is the major impediment), Democrats could send a key signal to western voters by hold their first convention since 1928 east of California and west of Chicago. Surely Mike Stratton, a key Clintonite in Denver and one of the smartest Democrats I met while touring the country researching my book, knows that Denver is a far better site for a Clinton coronation than Manhattan.

All of which makes me wonder if the Hillary teams is really providing any resources beyond lip service to secure New York as the site. Sure, Clinton has to do her home-state advocate duty by superficially pushing for New York. But for the party’s sake -- and really, her sake -- I’ve got a hunch that she’s privately working behind the scenes to ensure that Denver is selected. If her instincts are as sharp as we’re told, she’ll feign disappointment that Manhattan lost, while privately clucking.

--Tom Schaller

THE HEALTHY AMERICANS ACT. It's been some time since I've run across a genuinely new health care proposal, but the comprehensive reform legislation Ron Wyden's unveiled today is just such a beast. Wyden, a gangly goofball of a Senator who last turned heads for his tax reform ideas, must have decided fully restructuring the tax code was thinking too small, so this morning, he took over the Senate Finance Committee's hearing room, brought in an array of union leaders, CEOs, and health wonks, and argued to totally scrap the employer-based health system.

Here's how it would work: The Healthy Americans Act of 2007 would begin by dissolving all employer-based insurance. Instead, it would mandate that every employer who had covered his employees in 2006 convert the total they spent on insurance into salary increases creating, in one day, the single largest pay raise America has ever seen. Now, why would employers go along with that? Well, legislatively they'd have to, but, as Len Nichols explained to me, they'll also want to: Health costs are accelerating, every year costs 10 or so percent more than they ear before. By freezing the total at what employers paid in 2006, Wyden's plan would exempt them from 2007's increase.

Meanwhile, an individual mandate would be implemented, forcing every American to purchase one of the options offered by their state's newly formed Health Help Agency (HHA). The HHA's will have a menu of private insurance plans, all of which must provide coverage equal to or better than the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Plan used by Congress. All plans will be community rated by the state, meaning an end to adverse selection and preexisting condition problems. The only acceptable variables for price will be geography, family size, and smoking status. Subsidies will be offered up to 400 percent of the poverty line, will full coverage provided to those below 100 percent. Employers will contribute through a set equation related to business size and yearly profits. There's quite a bit more, but that's the basic outline.

I have to spend some more time with the legislation ("c'mon baby, open up to me, tell me your secrets..."), but my snap reaction is heavily favorable. It isn't everything I'd want, but imposing the combination of community rating and an insurance floor will be a huge step forward. The cost stability offered to employers seems very, very savvy, as does the forced conversion of 2006 health costs into salary increases. The Lewin Group, the gold standard in health care actuarial data (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence), has evaluated the plan. Their conclusion? The plan would cover more than 99 percent of Americans, we'd save $4.8 billion in the first year and $1.48 trillion over the next decade. How's that sound? To me, it sounds like precisely the sort of big thinking Democrats need to be doing now that they're back in the majority.

For those want to dive in, there are more materials at Wyden HQ.

--Ezra Klein

PINOCHET'S NON-LEGACY. Reacting to the "communist dictatorships (Cuba!) versus right-wing dictatorships (Chile!)" discussions kicked up by Augusto Pinochet's death, Matt offers a unified theory of the terrible right-wing foreign policy approach to both countries. Meanwhile, via MaxSpeak comes this very interesting 2004 Washington Post piece pushing back on the conventional wisdom about the glorious legacy of Pinochet's free-market liberalization. Chile's modern economic success, Jon Jeter argues, owes much to state interventions that occurred after (and as a corrective to) Pinochet's reforms.

The difference between Chile and the rest of the continent can be stark. When Bolivian demonstrators in October forced their president to flee the country in violent protests against globalization's unevenness, the first Starbucks was opening in Chile. Nearly half of all Brazilian workers do not have a job contract; for Chile the figure is 1 in 5. The number of Argentines living in poverty has quadrupled since 1989; over that same period, Chile has reduced the ranks of its poor by half.

"What makes Chile different from the rest of Latin America," said Manuel Riesco, an economist with the Center for National Studies of Alternative Development in Santiago, "is not that we embraced the free market more than our neighbors. What we realized is that the free market is like a car. There is no doubt that it is the best way to get you from point A to point B. But you have to steer. If you take your hands off the wheel, you will end up face-down in a ditch."

Said Dani Rodrik, professor of international economics at Harvard University: "The myth is that Chile's success is purely the result of fundamentalist free-market policies. But the truth is quite a bit messier than that. Government activism and management in Chile did not stifle the power of the free market. It unleashed the power of the free market."

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CAGING THE INFLATION HAWKS. EPI's Jared Bernstein says the Fed was right not to raise interest rates yesterday, and ought to lower them the next time around.

--The Editors

WHY THE "PARTIAL BIRTH" CASE MATTERS: AN ANTI-REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM PERSPECTIVE. Hadley Arkes, one of the pro-life movement's most prominent intellectuals, has an article in First Things about the upcoming "partial birth" abortion decision. It starts off strangely, with the claim that "people on both sides seriously expect the Court will use its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade." My question -- such as who? I read as much as I can on the subject, and I certainly haven't encountered anyone saying this. The "people" adduced here would seem to be comparable to the extensive list of Castro lovers in academia and the media that Tailgunner Glenn Reynolds claims to have.

What many pro-choicers have argued is that the partial-birth case can be used to water Casey's "undue burden" standard down to pretty much nothing. And where Arkes's essay is useful (in addition to previewing the highly unconvincing ad hoc justifications that will be trotted out if Clarence Thomas makes the unprincipled decision to uphold the statute on federalism grounds) is its confirmation of the pro-life strategy of covertly destroying Roe's underpinnings:

...if Roberts and Alito help simply to overturn that prior decision on partial-birth abortion, my own judgment is that the regime of Roe will have come to its end, even if Roe itself is not explicitly overruled. What the Court would be saying in effect is, "We are now in business to consider seriously, and to sustain, many plausible measures that impose real restrictions on abortion."...That would invite a flood of measures enacted by the states.

The other interesting thing is that while Arkes would like Roe to be overturned through the back door, he seems to think that the Court will duck the case: "The voters who have backed two Bushes and Reagan, expecting something dramatically different, may discover once again that the judicial world is fixed in a mold that will persistently break their hearts." I certainly hope that he's right about this, but I don't think that he is.

--Scott Lemieux

CARVILLE SAYS HILLARY CAN WIN FLORIDA. A week ago I wondered aloud what southern states, if any, Hillary Clinton-backer James Carville thinks she could win, if nominated, in the 2008 general election. Yesterday, at an event at Northern Virginia Community College co-sponsored by Carville and Charlie Cook, I got to ask him myself.

Carville puts Arkansas, Florida, and Virginia in Tier 1, with Louisiana and Tennessee in Tier 2. That makes sense in terms of ranking, but I pressed him to pick the one state he thought Hillary was most likely to flip, if she were to win only one. He picked Florida. Though I'd agree with his ordinal rankings, I'm not sure she can win any of them. But yes, Florida is the most likely.

Asked to scratch out a list of Bush-won seats from 2004 that he thinks Hillary can win, regardless of region, Carville listed Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa -- the last two, of course, being states John Kerry lost that Al Gore won. He didn't mention Missouri, West Virginia or Kentucky. He's not sure Hillary can win the Bluegrass State, and I readily agree. (Sidebar: Carville stopped to ask me, "Did we win Kentucky in 1992?" I had to remind him that the Clinton-Gore ticket carried it narrowly in both 1992 and 1996. His uncertainty made me realize he's not, in fact, forever living in 1992, like the political-consultancy equivalent of Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, repeatedly waxing nostalgic about life "back in '81.")

I also pressed Carville on his post-election comments about Howard Dean, and asked DCCC's Karin Johanson what she thought about Carville's outburst. I'll say more about that later today or tomorrow. Stay tuned.

--Tom Schaller

STUPID NAMES. Like Atrios, I wish that people would stop naming foreign policies after fantastic interpretations of what one president or another was supposed to have thought. Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan set the stage for this kind of nonsense with their 1996 article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy", a set of recommendations so "neo" that they bore no recognizable resemblance to the actual foreign policy of the Reagan administration. As a general rule, I'd prefer that progressives not try to emulate Kristol or Kagan. More to the point, the project of trying to derive specific recommendations from the invariably complex foreign policy of a presidential administration that operated in a completely different context will never yield good results. All that these efforts amount to is an attempt to associate the author's pet policy recommendations with the warm fuzzies supplied by the word "Truman" or "Reagan" or "Roosevelt".

All right, enough of that. Now time to get back to my magnum opus, "Fifty-Four Forty AND Fight: Towards a Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy.

--Robert Farley

THE FIGHT KUCINICH CAN PICK. Over at The Nation, John Nichols drops a dime for Dennis Kucinich, who is attempting to build on the 70 delegates he managed to pick off in 2004 and take another shot at the White House. The Cleveland congressman's announcement would have invited potshots regardless, but his timing is especially awkward, stuck as it is on the high-rising heels of Barack Obama's weekend blitz on New Hampshire. Indeed, Kucinich's anti-war appeal in 2004, though sincere, was in large part overshadowed by the extra-Beltway rhetoric and populist fire of Howard Dean. This time around the challenge is much the same: Obama, like both Kucinich and Dean, opposed the Iraq war from the get-go, and his star is burning bright enough at the moment to have kept Russ Feingold bolted to his committee seats. To the extent Kucinich is going to distinguish himself and his candidacy on this issue, it will be, as Nichols points out, by forcing a debate on the question of funding for the war.

--Jim Cavan

HISTORY VS. AMERICA. While Tom makes some good points about meta-historical attitudes towards women, I think the question at hand is really much smaller and more specific: In America, in recent history, in the political arena, what are the precedents? Nagourney wrote:

Many analysts suggested that changing voter attitudes can best be measured in choices for governors, since they, like presidents, are judged as chief executives, rather than legislators. There will be one black governor next year -- Deval L. Patrick in Massachusetts, the second in the nation since Reconstruction.

By contrast, women will be governors of nine states, including Washington, Arizona and Michigan, all potential battleground states in 2008, a fact that is no doubt viewed favorably by advisers to Mrs. Clinton.

That said, Obama has already begun to appeal to people in ways that are unprecedented. And history doesn't always have to be taken as a guide. Precedents are useful for thinking about pitfalls on the path forward, but if people took them too seriously society would never evolve. In New Hampshire Sunday, Obama asked people to remember that America itself was, at one point in its past, also without precedent. Matt Y., writing about the weekend's Obamarama, said: "I'm still a bit unclear from the coverage what, exactly, Obama said." You can read my take on the politics of the visit here, but after thinking about it it seems to me that the essence of the Obama message is that he is asking people to be brave and to be one nation and to imagine and create a better society. He's not just saying the words -- he's really asking them to do it, because if they can't do it, he can't win.

That's pretty much it.

(Walter Shapiro has a more in-depth take here.)

--Garance Franke-Ruta

EXPLAINING OBAMA. So the Obama hype has been a bit puzzling to many. Myself, at times, included. But watch this video of the speech he gave in New Hampshire. Just watch five minutes of it. It's one of the most remarkable addresses I've ever seen, and, in its soft and irresistible way, it explains the whole of the buzz. In possibly the most telling section, he gives a great riff on health care, which manages to totally inspire while not actually saying anything sweeping or controversial. Watching it, you'd swear he just promised the stars, the sky, and universal insurance, when he really just committed to electronic records. And yet, you scarcely mind, if you even noticed. That's some powerful political mojo.

--Ezra Klein

GOOD NEWS! The president's decision to delay his big policy speech on Iraq until the new year (via The Plank) means that he'll be able to extend his current, public listenin'-consultin'-contemplatin'-ruminatin' process for a while longer. And that means that he'll have more time to incorporate the prescriptions of the imminent neocon ISG answer record into whatever plan for a "way forward" he eventually comes up with.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE NUNS WERE RIGHT. As pointed out by several commenters on my earlier post, I did indeed make a most grievous error in my use of bad Latin, labeling mistletoe as fauna, not flora. The nuns always whispered that we public school types would make for lesser Catholics, and I fear they were right. Leave it to Jim, Brendan and Brian to set me straight. (Sounds like a Celtic conspiracy to me.) As for Bragan and Lemuel, who failed to see the humor in my referring to myself as "almost gay," (indeed, I stand accused of not "owning" my bisexuality), all I can say is, it's a joke, fellas. (Everybody knows that men have no sense of humor, so I presume these posters to be of the dour sex.) Brad referred to "gay, Wiccan cellists" in his amusing TAPO piece, "No Holy Night", and I gleefully took up their cause. However, I cop to not "owning" my bisexuality; I prefer being known as a person with no fixed sexual orientation (NFSO). But "queer" will do.

--Adele M. Stan

BARACK IS MORE ELECTABLE. As somebody who has studied race and politics for some time -- my first book is about black state legislators, and my second addresses a variety of racial issues in modern politics -- I think Adam Nagourney has the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama gender-race hurdle issue backwards in the piece that Garance flagged yesterday. Although the idiosyncratic abilities (and liabilities) of Clinton and Obama may disprove my general thesis, I would suggest that it’s easier for a black man than a white woman to win the White House, ceteris paribus. Why?

First, sexism is a more universal phenomenon than racism. There has been ample racial and ethnic violence throughout human history, to be sure. But notice that conquerors tend to butcher males and then subjugate women as a spoil of victory and, more to the point, a vehicle for and shared expression of what conquest means. Though there are both evolutionary-reproductive and security reasons for killing men and subjugating women, doing the reverse would imply that women are more a threat to power than men. Obviously, this would not be the case whenever women are viewed as property or a mere commodity but other men are considered rational, self-determined actors. Put more simply, while racism may be a common if not pervasive form of making societal distinctions and justifying violence, sexism is the more universal idea: Men recognize differences between and among themselves by race, but express their shared gender identity across ethnic and racial distinction through their willingness to dominate the “fairer” sex.

Second, and on a related if sad note, there are women who express doubts over what political scientists call “fitness to rule” abilities of their fellow women; rare is the person who believes his or her racial cohorts are fundamentally unfit to serve. That is, there are some white women who don’t think a woman is capable of being president; but there are few blacks or whites who will think that’s true of fellow racial cohorts.

Finally, turning to the American experience, despite the resistance of Jim Crow and other forms of disenfranchisement, remember that black and other non-white men were nevertheless granted suffrage four generations before white women -- a fact that speaks to relative American acceptable of equality across gender and race. Although there is greater gender equality than racial equality in today’s U.S. Senate, this is an artifact of threshold effects in winner-take-all statewide elections; in the House, there is greater parity in racial representation than gender representation, as is the case in state houses and state senates. (N.B.: African Americans are more likely to elect women than men.)

Ample experimental studies show that minorities and women receive lower support than white males in side-by-side comparisons of fictional “candidates” accompanied by dissimilar biographies. (When the biographies are switched, that is, the white and/or male candidates tend to do better with the pre-judged “weaker” biography.) All that said, both Hillary and Barack will have to clear some tall psycho-political hurdles. Despite her huge resource advantages, I think he is certainly more nominatable (if that’s a word), and may even be slightly more electable in the general than she. That may be more a circumstance of her particular biography as former First Lady than as a woman generally. But I also think that Hillary winning the nomination and the White House are the higher set of hurdles to clear.

--Tom Schaller

PRESIDENTIAL STYLE. To make a quick point on Jeff Greenfield's bizarre riff suggesting that Barack Obama's sartorial sense recalls Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Greenfield's not only making a dumb comparison, he's reaching for it. The Ahmadinejad looks is not, as Greenfield seems to think, "a jacket, a collared shirt, but no tie." It's a tan jacket and no tie. Indeed, when Time magazine sat down with the Iranian firebrand, they observed, "[h]e is wearing blue-gray trousers, black loafers and the trademark tan jacket that even he calls his "Ahmadinejad jacket."

Hear that? "Trademark tan jacket." Ahmadinejad doesn't have patent on business casual, what he's known for is a specific item. Which is why when Spackerman decided to dress up as Ahmadinejad, he faithfully followed the templete, as you can see here. Obama, dressed in a black jacket and a crisp white shirt, did not. So not only is Greenfield's comparison grotesque, unfair, and oddly weak -- what sort of superpower starts demanding ties because some two bit foreign leader eschews neckwear? -- it's also wrong. Ahmadinajad does have sweet style. But Barack wasn't biting it.

--Ezra Klein

POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: ISG FOLLIES. Two new pieces inspired by the Iraq Study Group report are now up: Peter Dreier notes the absurdity of Jim Baker -- that Jim Baker -- being recast as a noble bipartisan consensus-builder. And Matt lays out the cognitive dissonance on display in the ISG's report -- a dissonance that really amounts to a "sickening exercise in denial and evasion:"

Bad ideas for Iraq are nothing new, of course. What's especially egregious about the ISG's recommendations is that the commission clearly recognizes the nature of the problem, as evidenced by the opening section of its own report. It then fails to address its own analysis simply because the only reasonable conclusion to draw from it is the politically unacceptable one that we've lost and we need to leave. The result, simply put, is a gross abdication of responsibility.

--The Editors

THE CHESS GAME BEGINS. Not that these polls mean anything this far out, but CNN yesterday released a poll of voters about the potential '08 candidates, and it's interesting to note that the only discernable trends thus far are a decline in support for John Edwards and John Kerry, and a rise in the percent of undecideds, over the course of the fall. Hillary Clinton draws more than twice the support (37 percent) of Barack Obama (15 percent) or Al Gore (14 percent), the next two leading potential contenders.

That's not fabulous news for Edwards. He's managed to frame himself as being well-positioned in Iowa, where Clinton has not made major investments as yet, but I'm starting to hear other Democrats now framing Edwards' race as Iowa or out, because failing to capture the state twice won't give him enough momentum to carry him through the other contests. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack will be running, but he may not have enough of a presence in the race to give people a reason to discount the importance of Iowa as a launching pad. Pre-Obama-mania, it looked like Edwards would need to knock out Vilsack in Iowa in order to be competitive with Clinton heading into New Hampshire, after which, even if he came in second, he could rebound heading into the friendly territory of South Carolina. (The Nevada caucuses, which will come between Iowa and NH, are a real wild card.) But if Obama runs, he'd need to nip all that in the bud, which means he'd need to try to knock out Edwards in Iowa and at least come in second to Vilsack, if not win outright, to get momentum heading into the rest of the contests.

Which means that, despite all the committees and changes, what happens in Iowa will continue to matter far more than it should.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHO'S BUYING? You occasionally hear that the American economy is really six types of awesome because, though inequality is widening and wage growth has been weak, Americans buy a lot of stuff. And middle class and working class Americans are even more determinedly consumptive than their upper class brethren! Problem is, it just ain't true. Those with lower salaries does spend a great percentage of their incomes buying stuff, but they do not outspend the rich. According to The New York Times, consumer spending from low income households is down sharply since 2001. Not so for the high-income households. In 2005, the top 20 percent were responsible for 39 percent of all consumer expenditures -- the highest share since the government began keeping track in 1984.

--Ezra Klein

THE WASHINGTON POST AND DOUBLE STANDARDS. In the midst of apologizing for Pinochet, The Washington Post drops this bombshell while apologizing for Pinochet-apologist Jeane Kirkpatrick:

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

--Spencer Ackerman

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY? Tom Edsall spouts a meme I'm getting a bit tired of:

The head of the pack is a dangerous place for a Democrat to be. Democrats excel in cannibalizing their front-runners. Just ask those who were knocked out in the primary season (Lyndon Johnson, Ed Muskie and Howard Dean) or those who limped from the ring after 15 rounds (Walter Mondale and Al Gore).

Republicans, by contrast, honor hierarchy. For four decades the G.O.P. has nominated the early favorite. Unlike Democrats, Republican voters have a long history of rejecting rebels and underdogs.

The idea that Democratic primaries are somehow more contentious or unpredictable than their Republican counterparts is a myth that springs from the media's belief that Republicans adore order while Democrats are still chaotic college kids. That it isn't true and can't be backed up by the facts doesn't, I fear, much matter, but should be pointed out anyway.

--Ezra Klein

DEEPWATER. Lotta stuff out on the problems with Deepwater, the Coast Guard's expensive modernization program. Shockingly enough, the program is over-budget and under-successful. Nadezhda at American Footprints has a good discussion, but also see this long article in the NYT. The Coast Guard has taken it on the chin in both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, getting lots of responsibility without much prestige or increased funding. The Deepwater program was intended to recreate the fleet (by itself one of the largest navies of the world) but has fallen prey, according to many retired Coast Guard officials, to perverse incentives created by privatization of the acquisition process:

Insufficient oversight by the Coast Guard resulted in the service buying some equipment it did not want and ignoring repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe, the agency acknowledged. The Deepwater program’s few Congressional skeptics were outmatched by lawmakers who became enthusiastic supporters, mobilized by an aggressive lobbying campaign financed by Lockheed and Northrop.

And the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors, according to government auditors and people affiliated with the program.

--Robert Farley

MUSICAL CHAIRS. The New York Times reports on U.S. plans to attempt to curb Moktada al Sadr's influence by fostering a new coalition that gives enhanced power to SCIRI's Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. As Laura herself notes, she reported on variations of these plans for TAP Online recently:

The plan would be to try to forge a new and more effective Iraqi government coalition that would include the Sunnis, Kurds, and the Shias, while engineering a tilt within Maliki's Shia coalition away from Sadr and toward fellow Shiite leader Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its attendant Badr Brigade militia. (Hakim is scheduled to arrive in Washington next week on an official visit.) The Mahdi Army loyal to radical young Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr would continue to be the enemy. Washington would also engage Saudi Arabia and regional neighbors to encourage Sunni support for Maliki, and Syria and Iran would be pressured to limit their support for combatants.

...Among the views advanced at the Veterans' Day weekend meeting was one seemingly at odds with the gist of the Hadley memo: This option, described to me as a fallback position supported by Cheney's office and elements of the National Security Council, would have the U.S. abandon the immediate goal of national reconciliation and instead pick a side -- the Shia. The "unleash the Shia" option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley's memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MORE ON PROLIFERATION ROLLBACK. Via Brad Plumer, this discussion from Jeffrey Lewis elaborates on the point I made last week regarding the British nuclear program:

The debate over Trident is somewhat surreal because, frankly, the UK’s nuclear weapons are irrelevant: they don’t deter anyone, confer any status or, frankly, threaten anyone. They are not particularly good or bad.

--Robert Farley

HANDS OFF THE MISTLETOE, BUB. While I was tickled to read Brad Reed's prescription, here on TAP, for a liberal jihad on Christmas, as a gay (well, almost) Wiccan (well, not exactly) ukulele-player (yes, really), I must request exemptions for yuletide and mistletoe. The former refers to the time of year once called "Yule" by the pagan Anglo-Saxons, who celebrated the winter solstice with a ceremonial fire that is also known as the burning of the Yule log. (According to the Heathen Calendar on the Web site, Normannii Thiud & Reik, "The Yule log ideally should be made out of oak, a wood that is sacred to the thunder god Thunor.") Thus, the celebration of Yuletide is inherently anti-Christian. As for mistletoe, it is the magical fauna of the Celtic Druids (also pagans, y'know), who employed it at solstice time for the enhancement of fertility. As Steve Tatler writes:

Because of the colour and juice of its berries mistletoe was regarded as the 'sperm of the gods', containing divine potency and waiting for the moment of conception....When cut down at the Winter Solstice as the sun is reborn, this divine spark of the gods is drawn down to earth symbolizing the moment of conception, although the plant is prevented from actually touching the ground and its sacredness preserved by catching it in a white cloth.

--Adele M. Stan

UNIFORMITY AND CONFORMITY. Yesterday, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell detailed the lack of diversity among Post columnists and then concluded, "The point is not to toss excellent white male columnists; the point is to add more and lively voices to The Post." Today, however, Ezra bemoans the lack of excellence and accountability among those throngs of white male columnists, and how op-ed pages are the one part of newspapers where no one ever loses their job for getting major matters of national importance completely wrong.

It's hard to imagine these two issues -- lack of diversity and lack of accountability -- are entirely unrelated. Indeed, it seems like this might be a good time for editors to really think about what defines excellence, and what their obligations are to their readers, and whether the similarity of the opinion writers' backgrounds is so great that it might contribute to a dangerous uniformity in the opinions they express, and so increase the risk that the paper will present readers with a single, uncontested, and ultimately mistaken view on critical issues. It's important not to confuse personal characteristics that inform perspectives with topic areas worth reporting on (for example, hiring more Latino columnists and adding more coverage of the region's immigrant communities are two totally separate tasks), or even with particular viewpoints, but, that said, it's also likely that a greater diversity in backgrounds and lived experiences among those granted columns might lead to a fuller and more rigorous examination of the issues before the country and so better serve readers' interests.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GETTING SPECIFIC. I think Max Sawicky is getting at something very important here:

The task for those who have come around to oppose this war is to extrapolate wisely in order to cope with the bouquet of calamities elaborated in the article. It pretty much comes down to Iran. Will the U.S. permit Iran to become a regional, nuclear power, or will it precipitate yet another lurch down the slopes of disaster. In principle, I would say that is the number one issue for the next presidential campaign.

A truly disastrous engagement with Iran is on the table, and will be for the next two years; what do people think about it? What do people think should be done? As with the debate over what to do now in Iraq, people ought to be compelled to step up and speak clearly on this.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PORK PRESERVES. This rather misses the point of what the GOP did last week:

The hero of the lame-duck session was freshman Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. He was instrumental in blocking a Senate-House conference on a military construction appropriations bill, which would then be used as the last train out of town to carry pork.

--Ezra Klein

QUESTIONS FOR JOHN CARROLL. Greg has emailed a few good ones to the man.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Carroll tells Tom that the mistakes will be addressed in an on-air "Beat the Press" segment as well as on the show's blog.

--Sam Rosenfeld

MAKING FLEX-TIME RESPECTABLE ... by portraying it as "macho"? A radical idea! If all employees make use of flexible hours and paid family leave, then women are less likely to be penalized for doing so. The Wall Street Journal (subscription req'd) reports today that some companies, including the accounting firm Ernst & Young, are attempting to do just that by "redefining the issue as a quality-of-life concern for everyone."

While flex-time and other family-friendly policies have long been touted as a way for women to get ahead in the corporate world, they often carry the "mommy track" stigma, making many women reluctant to take advantage of these options.

In a survey of 2,443 women college graduates released by her center and the Harvard Business Review, 35% of respondents thought they would be penalized for taking advantage of their employer's work-life policies. ... about two-thirds of professional women who stop working would stay if they had a "recognized and respectable" way to scale back.

Ernst & Young -- which employs a flexibility-strategy leader and has amenities like on-site child care -- is leaps and bounds ahead of many other U.S. firms that still lack basic flex-time options. But their thinking on this, that employees (regardless of gender) should create schedules, hours and career tracks to fit their personal needs, might have a positive effect on the way other companies (even those that are significantly smaller) approach work-life policies. After all, this isn't just some feminist group releasing yet another report calling for women-friendly workplaces. It's a huge firm that's already instituting these changes and attempting to do so in a gender-neutral fashion, which makes it a much more concrete step in the right direction.

--Ann Friedman

CRY FREEDOM! Being a nanny-state lovin' liberal, I'm perfectly pleased with the ban on trans fats. The freedom of fast food joints to inject a cheap, near-poisonous substance into their foods doesn't strike me as a liberty I need worry too much about (I fear this will be another nail in the coffin of liberaltarianism). That said, things like trans fats have always struck me as a sort of market failure. Only X percent of the population knows what they are, only Y percent knows they're bad, and only Z percent would ever think to ask restauranteurs if their foods contains the nasty buggers. And Z is small. So you've got an information asymmetry. That's why, when the FDA forced producers to put trans fats on their labels, they largely disappeared from packaged food. And part of it, too, is a class issue. Studies show a sadly limited percent of the American population can accurately interpret nutrition labels. But since those labels go out to rich and poor alike, producers can't continue exploiting the poor while pacifying the rich. The same, of course, is not true in restaurants.

Restaurants don't have labels. And they're not one size fits, or serves, all. You could force a big sign in each establishment that uses the substances, or a little emblem next to each food that carries the fats, and that would be a perfectly acceptable solution. On the other hand, given that there's no conceivable social good in consumption of the fats, and as Scott points out, no conceivable consumer restrictions caused by eliminating them, there's really no sense in simply ensuring that only those without sufficient choices will continue consuming the stuff. Indeed, the ban simply decides that there's no real reason to preserve the freedom of businesses to minimally cut costs by harming the health of their consumers, most of whom won't know they're being damaged till far too late. Indeed, it's the freedom to not be needlessly poisoned so businesses can save a few pennies. And that's a freedom this nanny-stater is willing to protect.

--Ezra Klein

LOOKING BACK. In fall 2006, the United States turned on the NeoCommentators. Their smug, wrongheaded chatter had helped lead the country into a catastrophic war and then, without missing a beat, turned to condemn those who sought to end it. Infuriated, readers nationwide began agitating for their removal from op-ed pages, magazine columns, and television roundtables. And so began the Pundit Purge of '07 -- the first time in recent history that the predictive failure of an ideology led to actual occupational consequences for its peddlers.

Historians differ on what, precisely, sparked the upheaval, but no small number point to a December 10th column by David Brooks, which pretended to peer back at America's foolish withdrawal from Iraq from some point far in the future, when it was well understood that the folly of exit had triggered what Brooks termed "the Second Thirty Years' War." Experts differ on what proved so infuriating about this column: Some name Brooks' total avoidance of better solutions for a disastrous conflict he'd helped create; others point to the intellectual sleight-of-hand that identified the withdrawal from Iraq, rather than the invasion of it, as the start of the disaster. And yet others believe the column's conceit was so insufferably irritating and superficial that reprisal was inevitable.

What isn't in doubt is what came next: Widespread disgust, not only at Brooks, but at the entire class of pundits who had helped enable the doomed invasion, and upon its heartbreaking disintegration, miraculously and shamelessly retained their sense of moral superiority. These columns, speeches, manifestos, and appearances all followed the same structure: Acknowledgment that Iraq had deteriorated into a murderous hellhole, though with no mention of how we got there or how enthusiastically the speaker/writer had stumped for the invasion. Then would come a dark, despairing portrait of the death and chaos that would follow withdrawal, followed by insinuations or explicit assertions that the left was being naively, or even maliciously, irenic. And there would be absolutely no alternative proposals or explanations of how a different approach could calm the forces tearing the country apart -- such constructive asides would only distract from the central aim of proving the writer a higher moral being than those he was lambasting.

The problem was, the left had enlarged. By the end of 2006, it included most of the middle, and a fair bit of what had once been called the right. A poll taken by Newsweek on December 6-7 found that nearly 70 percent of Americans thought we were "losing ground" in Iraq. Barely 20 percent thought we were "making progress." And 62 percent thought we should set a timetable for withdrawal. It turned out these same majorities were tired of being hectored by discredited pundits peddling nothing but warnings that abandoning their doomed project would bring...doom. And so they rebelled. Letters poured into op-ed pages. Subscriptions were canceled. Calls erupted for the elevation of a couple -- at least a couple -- of pundits who'd called the Iraq War right, and were willing to offer up something beyond dodges and projection. And they were heeded.

Hah. Yeah right.

--Ezra Klein

SET YOUR BOOKMARKS. The Hammer's got a blog. As a signal of open intellectual engagement with the left, Delay has even breached the ideological divide to include Mickey Kaus on his blogroll...

--Sam Rosenfeld

UNEVEN PROGRESS. Adam Nagourney's smart Week in Review piece definitively answered the question Ben Wallace-Wells asked in The Washington Post about a month ago: "Is America too Racist for Barack? Too Sexist for Hillary?" Nagourney's answer: when it comes to winning elected office, America has proven more enduringly racist than sexist.

Over the past of the past eight years, in the view of analysts from both parties, the country has shifted markedly on the issue of gender, to the point where they say voters could very well be open to electing a woman in 2008. That is reflected, they say, in polling data and in the continued success of women running for office, in red and blue states alike. "The country is ready," said Senator Elizabeth Dole, the North Carolina Republican, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2000. "I'm not saying it's going to happen in '08. But the country is ready."

By contrast, for all the excitement stirred by Mr. Obama, it is much less certain that an African-American could win a presidential election. Not as many blacks have been elected to prominent positions as women. Some high-profile black candidates -- Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat running for the Senate in Tennessee, and Michael Steele, a Republican Senate candidate in Maryland -- lost in November. And demographics might be an obstacle as well: black Americans are concentrated in about 25 states -- typically blue ones, like New York and California. While black candidates cannot assume automatic support from black voters, they would at least provide a base. In states without big black populations, the candidate's crossover appeal must be huge.

All evidence is that a white female has an advantage over a black male "for reasons of our cultural heritage," said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for president in 1984 and 1988.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

A (QUALIFIED) DEFENSE OF THE TRANS-FAT BAN. This probably won't help increase comity between progressives and our newly receptive libertarian brothers and sisters, but as William Saletan and Lindsay Beyerstein point out, the case for New York City's much-derided ban on trans-fats is actually very compelling. I tend to start from quite libertarian premises on such issues, and I certainly for the most part don't think that it's a legitimate role of state coercion to mandate asceticism or conformist aesthetic values. But this isn't what this ban will accomplish. There are many problems with making reducing obesity in itself a primary goal of public health (starting with the fact that, as an independent variable, being overweight has a weak impact on one's health), but in this case it has had the ironic effect of making the case for banning trans-fats look weaker than it actually is. To be clear, this ban will not cause New Yorkers to become thinner, or result in a significant reduction in the availability of fast food; rather, foods now prepared with hydrogenated oils will be perpared with equally caloric (but healthier) alternative fats. As such, the case for the ban is actually very strong, unless you're a libertarian purist. The problem with trans fats is not that they make you fat per se but that they're particularly unhealthy (because they not only increase bad cholesterol but actually reduce good cholesterol) whether they make you obese or not. The ban will eliminate a public health risk, which is the result of companies trying to save money, in a way that won't have a large impact on consumer choice. It's hard to argue that the cost-benefit analysis isn't with the city on this one.

I can still see a couple reasons to get wary. First, Saletan implies that there's a slippery slope here, that the ban on trans fats might be extended to a ban on saturated fats. I don't believe this is true, but if it is then that's where I get off the bus, for the reasons I mention earlier -- once consumer choice is severely affected, then the cost-benefit analysis swings inexorably against state coercion for me. A second argument would be that it would be better, at least as a first step, to compel restaurants to inform costumers about trans fat content and its health risks, and hope that the market will largely stamp out trans fats on its on. In most similar public health cases, using the state to create informed consumers rather than compelling certain choices is preferable, so it's a reasonable position. But given that the restrictions on consumers are so minimal and the health effects so strong, in this case I think the city is right. The impact of this ban will bear watching to see if it's worth trying elsewhere, or if less intrusive measures turn out to look better.

--Scott Lemieux

TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN. Randy Paul helpfully supplements the NYT's list of important dates in the life of the late Augusto Pinochet:

• September 1974: Has DINA, his secret police organization plant a bomb in the car of General Carlos Prats, his predecessor in Buenos Aires. The bomb kills General Prats and his wife, Sofia. Debris from the explosion is found on the ninth floor of a building across the street.
• October 1975: Has DINA, through Italian fascist terrorist Stefano Della Chiae, attempt to murder Christian Democrat politician and regime opponent, Bernardo Leighton in Rome Italy. Leighton and his wife survive, but live in constant pain for the rest of their lives.
• September 1976: Has DINA blow up the car of Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, killing Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.
• November 1978: The bodies of fifteen men who were "disappeared" are found in an abandoned limestone mine in Lonquen.
• June 1990: The bodies of 19 men who disappeared in the 1970's are discovered in a mass grave in Pisagua.
• September 1991: The bodies of 127 victims of Pinochet's regime are found buried secretly, two to a grave in some cases. Pinochet responds to television reporters by praising the economy of burying two to a grave.

As Randy says, Satan's probably getting more than he bargained for...

--Scott Lemieux

MCCAIN TRUE COLORS WATCH UPDATE. Ari Berman at The Nation reminded us on Friday that there's more to Terry Nelson, the campaign hatchet man whom John McCain has hired, than the racist tv "bimbo" ad attacking Harold Ford that Nelson created this year. He has also engaged in anti-democratic trickery. An unindicted co-conspirator in Tom DeLay's scheme to raise illegal corporate cash for Texas state legislature candidates, and the supervisor of the staffer who purposely jammed Democratic Party phones in New Hampshire in 2002, Nelson is an all-around class act. It's ironic that McCain, who made his name by supposedly attempting to restore American faith in democracy through his campaign finance laws and "straight talk," has decided that merely selling his positions on issues to the nastiest elements of the GOP's base isn't enough. Apparently he's going to engage in their underhanded tactics as well.

--Ben Adler

HIGH DUDGEON, LOW STANDARDS. This is making the rounds and is too funny not to share. On Friday, a WBGH (Boston, MA) commentator reporter named John Carroll ran an "investigative" piece about bloggers for the "Beat The Press" segment on Greater Boston, a local commentary program. Carroll's report was basically a distillation of the recent op-chart in The New York Times, but he tried to spice it up by doing some "real" journalism of his own -- and quickly got himself into trouble.

Carroll falsely reported that MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong is actually the person behind online pseudonyms Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Scott Shields. (In response to the Times chart, Jonathan Singer had written this tongue-in-cheek post making that claim, which Carroll took literally and cited in the piece.) As anyone who actually spends time in the blogosphere -- you know, instead of cruising through for a drive-by "expose" chock full of high dudgeon but skimpy on reportage -- knows, all three men actually exist. A one-minute Google search would have turned up any number of photos of them. Carroll, who teaches mass communication at Boston University, then further misled his viewers by patching in a video quote from a Boston-area blogger named David Kravitz that made it sound like Kravitz was assuring him that Armstrong would eventually be exposed, when in fact Carroll never brought up Armstrong to Kravitz.

If this were not sad enough, coming as it did from an Edward R. Murrow award-winner, the high dudgeon didn't end with Carroll's set piece. His fellow Greater Boston roundtable guests chimed in with their unfiltered outrage. "I was shocked -- I think this is damaging, not that [bloggers] had great credibility anyway," scoffed host Emily Rooney. "There is no accountability in the blogosphere," sneered Joe Sciacca of the Boston Herald. "I think we're just scratching the surface of this problem of credibility with the blogs," lamented journalism professor Paul Niwa of Emerson College.

A final irony: Greater Boston has its own show blog. We'll see if Ms. Rooney or Mr. Carroll use that space to post a correction and an apology. It would be the blog-appropriate thing to do.

UPDATE: Carroll has emailed me to say that he believes the program will address the problem of last Friday's episode, both on-air and on the blog.

--Tom Schaller

AN END TO ABSTINENCE FUNDING? Backers of abstinence-only education are starting to worry that their funding will be cut off when Democrats assume control of Congress. A Christian news service reports that a "Republican source" says "the staff of liberal Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman is in the process of rewriting the set of definitions of what is considered an abstinence program."

Sweet! Could this mean they'll push to start funding comprehensive sex education, which discusses abstinence but also teaches students about contraception? At the very least, they could impose greater restrictions on programs that receive abstinence-only money, ensuring that the curricula are free of medically inaccurate information, religious themes and gender stereotypes. Since 1996, abstinence-only has been the official sex-ed policy of the U.S. government. But with Waxman in a better position to act on the content of his widely read report on the subject, I'm hopeful about reform.

--Ann Friedman

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NO HOLY NIGHT. Reveling in the vast, left-wing anti-yuletide conspiracy, Brad Reed explores the possibilities for using the power of the newly Democratic Congress to kill Christmas for good. Here at TAP, we've got the non-denominational holiday spirit.

--The Editors

FALLING INTO THE TRAP. Jeffrey Rosen has a detailed argument on behalf of the "compromise" position that John Roberts seemed to be urging at oral argument in the "partial birth" cases last month. Rosen claims that "[I]f Roberts can persuade his colleagues to embrace this compromise, he would disappoint liberal and conservative extremists. But the country as a whole could breathe a sigh of relief." But his defense of the position raises more question than it answers.

The big problem is that Rosen focuses on the "undoing" of Roe --which nobody thinks was going to happen directly in this case--rather than the watering down of Casey's "undue burden" standard, which the "compromise" he's advocating would certainly accomplish. (Rosen doesn't even mention the legal standard the case is supposed to be applying.) As is his wont, Rosen wedges the "partial birth" ban into his preferred policy framework of legal early-term abortions and illegal late-term abortions. But the problem is that not only do such bans apply to some pre-viability abortions, but they do not prevent a single late-term abortion from being performed. (Rosen, like most supporters of "partial-birth" bans, elides the question of the state's interest by describing the procedure as "gruesome" without explaining why the procedure is more "gruesome" than the D&E procedure, which involves the dismemberment of the fetus in the womb, or how the distinction can justify any burdening on women's health.) Precisely because the legislation is so arbitrary and unconnected to any legitimate state interest, the effect of upholding it would be to allow state and federal governments even more latitude to increase to pass abortion regulations, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with post-viability abortions. The other puzzling aspect of Rosen's article--which is particularly amusing given the fact that he used to rail against Sandra Day O'Connor's flagrantly unprincipled difference-splitting--is that he completely fails to provide any legal rationale for his preferred outcome. To uphold the ban while claiming thatStenberg is still good law would be utterly disingenuous, and to construe the statute as to only apply to D&X abortions is simply to emphasize its irrationality. And Rosen's attempt to defend reading a narrow, judicially-created health exemption into a statute when Congress specifically declined to include one (because, of course, the point of this law was not to achieve a substantive policy goal but to chip away at Casey while creating an effective symbolic issue) as "judicial restraint" is Orwellian.

But the biggest problem with the argument is that Rosen's "compromise"--which would allow state and federal governments to pass virtually any abortion regulation short of an outright ban, which in practice means sacrificing the reproductive freedom of some classes of women to preserve access for women who have access to safe abortions under any legal regime anyway--is heavily skewed toward the anti-choice position. Not only would such a decision not stop the expansion of the anti-choice regulatory obstacle course--quite the opposite--but the lack of candor that Roberts is advocating is a bug, not a feature. If the Court is going to engage in a slow-motion project to reduce Roe and Casey to a shell, it is much better for advocates of reproductive freedom that this be done openly rather than covertly. Of course, given that Rosen is a staunch opponent of Roe v. Wade, one suspects that this is the point.

--Scott Lemieux

HUMORLESS MEN. Reading The New York Observer's Media Mob column about The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar's little tiff with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter over the Christopher Hitchens piece on how women aren't funny, I couldn't help by be struck by how everyone seems to be misinterpreting Hitchens' argument. He wasn't arguing that women are humorless -- i.e. have no sense of humor or capacity to be entertained and amused -- but that they are less likely to entertain or amuse than are men, because they have less need to. The Observer's Choire Sicha wrote:

Ms. Sklar had inserted herself into the big feminist bear-trap Mr. Hitchens had set. (The game, which dates to at least the mid-70's, is traditionally played like this: You write an article like that, and those who humorlessly complain are then treated as the proof in the pudding of the article. Which doesn't of course make the complainers any less humorless.)

But it seems to me that's really not the issue. If men are, as Hitchens asserts, funnier than women because masculine humor develops on account of sexual selection -- i.e. because women want them to be funny, just as peahens prefer their mates to have glorious decorative peacock tails -- then doesn't it follow that negative reactions to an article like Hitchens' is an example not of female humorlessness but of male failure in the psycho-sexual humor realm? If men are funny in order to seduce women, isn't an article that women find enormously irritating and off-putting the very definition of something humorless and lacking? After all, in Hitchens' own terms, we ladies are the ultimate judges here -- the "audience," he says, for the male performance -- since masculine humor's foundational purpose is to "make the lady laugh."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE INSURGENT. Minnesota reporter Conrad Wilson gives us a better look at Congressman-elect Keith Ellison. Check out Ellison's description of his decision to snub a social invitation from President Bush in order to attend an AFL-CIO gathering:

Ellison said there was little question in his mind as to which event to attend. “President Bush supports the war; he’s the author of it. I’m opposed to it. President Bush is not in favor of increasing minimum wage. I’m in favor of it. President Bush doesn’t support the Employer Free Choice Act … I think it’s essential to improve the situation for American people.

“It was not a close choice; it was easy to make,” Ellison said, adding quickly that he would have attended the reception had there not been a conflict. “The intent was not to disrespect the presidency,” Ellison said. “Would it have been better for me to say ‘screw you’ to the AFL-CIO? To tell the organization that represents people who work so hard in this country every day on low wages with either no insurance, or expensive insurance that they can barely afford, who are sending their kids to die in a war that we don’t know why we're fighting? I’m suppose to tell them no, I’ve got to go hobnob with Mr. Bush? No."

Read the whole thing.

--The Editors

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTE. I haven't yet read Larry Kahaner's AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, but I reallly want to. Kahaner summarized the meaning of the AK-47 thus in a recent WaPo piece:

The AK-47 has become the world's most prolific and effective combat weapon, a device so cheap and simple that it can be bought in many countries for less than the cost of a live chicken. Depicted on the flag and currency of several countries, waved by guerrillas and rebels everywhere, the AK is responsible for about a quarter-million deaths every year. It is the firearm of choice for at least 50 legitimate standing armies and countless fighting forces from Africa and the Middle East to Central America and Los Angeles. It has become a cultural icon, its signature form -- that banana-shaped magazine -- defining in our consciousness the contours of a deadly weapon.

As a political scientist I'm forced to quibble with some of Kahaner's characterizations; I wonder, for example, how the market would have replaced the AK-47 if it had never been invented. On the other hand, this leads to some interesting thoughts about how a product of the Soviet national security state has so often turned out to be the answer in the modern small arms market, and about how the AK has, as an impediment to the ability of the United States to carry out its foreign policy, outlasted the superpower that created it.

--Robert Farley

THE PAUL AND TOM SHOW. Good day on the New York Times op-ed page today, where Krugman and Friedman make two of the more important, and overlooked, arguments for this juncture of the war debate.

First up is Big Paul, explaining that, both in Greek mythology and the Iraq War, Cassandra was right. And so he offers up an honor roll of prominent and marginalized politicians who presciently opposed war from the start -- and paid a political price for doing so. Now, however, most agree that their foresight would've saved us from a disastrous, murderous conflict whose legacy will be measured in body counts and deficits. Nevertheless, not one of these pundits or politicians has become an honored voice in the national debate, not one of them is sought after to apply the analytical chops that could've stopped this to the conflict's current trajectory. As Feingold argued the other day, the Baker-Hamilton Commission was a "who's who: of hawks and establishmentarians -- it was not a roll call of those who got it right. Props to Krugman for offering one, and here's hoping the left begins a concerted effort to elevate such voices in the debate.

It's a bit rarer for me to shower unvarnished praise on Friedman, but he deserves it today. In the Iraq debate, public opinion has led elite consensus, sensing our failure and the need for withdrawal far before any Wise Men O' Washington saw the same. For that reason, we skipped a step: The debate became withdrawal "when" rather than withdrawal "why." That's allowed folks like McCain and Lieberman and Packer and TNR to merely wring their hands over the horrors of such a plan while proposing flimsy -- or no -- alternatives. Without having to actually argue again the logic of withdrawal, they can simply fret over the dangers of it.

But as Friedman argues, withdrawal is now the best hope for Iraq. It is the only option that offers us leverage, the only option that requires Syria and Iran to intervene against catastrophe (rather than against us), the only option that eliminates an enemy and target from the Iraqi landscape. Friedman has become justly famous for the Friedman Unit -- a 6-month, endlessly renewable time period that will prove critical for Iraq. But he should now also be given credit for Friedman's Choice, which states that "our real choices in Iraq are 10 months or 10 years. Either we commit the resources to entirely rebuild the place over a decade, for which there is little support, or we tell everyone that we will be out within 10 months, or sooner, and we’ll deal with the consequences from afar. We need to start the timer — today, now." And those who want to argue with withdrawal should have to explain to the American people why a 10 year continuation of troop deployments, American deaths, and current trends is a good idea.

--Ezra Klein

RUN, KERRY, RUN! Though John Kerry could scarcely be less popular with Democratic voters, there's one group of Democrats that's keen to see him toss his hat into the presidential ring: Massachusetts politicians. It's not that they are out of touch with America. Far from it. They just want him to stop clogging up the local political system.

The problem, as it was recently described to me by a young local politico, is that both of Massachusetts' senators have been so long-serving. Kerry has been in office since 1985, and Ted Kennedy since 1962. That means that, for the past 20 years, no Massachusetts politicians holding lower-level offices have been able to move up and into Congress's upper house. The congressmen can't move up by running for Senate, because the Senate seats are both unassailably taken, and the state senators can't move up by running for Congress, because the congressmen have become so long-serving in their turn. Secure incumbency at the top has created stasis throughout the entire system, leaving young ambitious would-be pols to either wait for someone to retire or try to knock off long-time incumbents just to get to the statehouse. If Kerry would just move on, by trying to move up again himself, then Barney Frank, Ed Markey, Marty Meehan, and Steve Lynch could all potentially contend for his seat, and a domino effect could be unleashed across the system. For that to happen, though, the first domino has to fall, and Kerry has to run for president again.

So if you wonder who on earth is encouraging Kerry to take another crack at it, the answer has to include: Massachusetts politicians.

UPDATE: The Political Insider blog has more.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FUN FACT OF THE DAY. There was a bit of debate on this site and elsewhere this fall about whether the female editor of The New York Times editorial pages, Gail Collins, who was stepping down, could have had more of an impact than she did on the percent of women published on that page. Having been looking into a variety of questions around women and opinion journalism as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard this fall, it's come to my attention that The New York Times op-ed page actually got its first woman editor in 1974 -- when former women's section editor Charlotte Curtis took the helm after transforming the women's page into a must-read -- so Collins is a bit less of a pioneer in this arena than people might have supposed (Similarly, the The Nation magazine had a female editor from 1933 to 1955, Freda Kirchwey, making Katrina vanden Heuvel that magazine's second female chief.) I'm unaware of any data comparing Collins' tenure to Curtis' tenure (which was, admittedly, in the position David Shipley now holds and so not identical), to the tenures of other editors, but from all of my research it seems pretty clear that the forces that had the most significant impact on changing women's patterns of publication came from the demand side. When, in the 1970s, women demanded more and different sorts of articles by women, and women journalists simultaneously sought more diverse professional opportunities, the sorts of articles in the paper and the sorts of jobs available to women journalists began to markedly change.

In our own era, there is almost no demand-side pressure from the public at large, and only a modicum of demand for more women from within the profession. Hence: the period of stasis we are in.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE COUNTERMOBILIZATION MYTH -- CANADIAN EDITION. Gay rights litigation has been very successful in our neighbor to the north, with major victories at both the federal and provincial levels (including with respect to marriage benefits. According to oft-cited conventional wisdom, this success should have been a disaster for the gay rights movement, mobilizing a huge backlash and setting the cause back for generations as citizens were incensed by decision by "activist" courts. The problem is that this is not, in fact, true. Not only did Parliament end up formally recognizing gay marriage, but gay marriage has continued to become more popular, now commanding the support of almost 60% of the Canadian public.

I do not mean so suggest that we can therefore expect a majority of Americans to support gay marriage right away too. My only point is that there is no evidence whatsoever that using litigation has anything to do with it. Courts are likely to provide the initiative with respect to issues that cross-cut existing coalitions (even on issues, such as civil rights and abortion, where national majorities favor reform), and there's no reason to believe that favorable court decisions will stop inexorable generational trends that will increase support for gay rights. But then, the "countermobilization" argument has never been about evidence. What's useful about it is providing a component of an ages-old shell game, where complacent elites who aren't burdened by the status quo nominally support the goals of social change but for who it's somehow never being accomplished at the right time or in the right way.

--Scott Lemieux

HOPE SHE'LL GET A "THANK YOU" CARD FOR THAT. Via Eric Alterman's indispensable McCain Suck-Up Watch comes this bit from Anne Kornblut:

Commenting on Sen. John McCain's proposal to send more troops to Iraq, The New York Times' Anne Kornblut claimed that "McCain is proving that he is nothing if not an independent-minded maverick on this."

--Ezra Klein

JOIN IN THE FUN. Greg has a suggestion for a contest that folks might want to get in on, though I'm worried reading one entry after another might get a bit nauseating.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE FREEDOM TO BE VILIFIED. On Ann's post below, one thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is accept vaguely acceptable-sounding or politically popular bills in an effort to remain in the center, believing their group's moderate credentials -- see also their early endorsement of Lincoln Chafee -- somehow important. The alternative strategy -- practiced by the NRA, among others -- would be to wage all-out war on even these minor encroachments, thus fighting to shift the center left.

This strategy of trying to join the center rather than move it is a damaging one. If NARAL were totally dogmatic and absolutist, that would make life much easier on Democrats who could occasionally show their "centrism" by voting against NARAL-opposed legislation that actually doesn't much matter. Instead, however, to demonstrate independence on choice, Democrats end up supporting much more onerous and repulsive legislation, because just aping NARAL's priorities line doesn't win them any points in the media. Elected politicians, after all, often have to remain "in the center." Independent interest groups, on the other hand, can spend their time trying to redefine what "the center" is. NARAL -- and others on the left -- should do more to exploit that freedom.

--Ezra Klein

FETAL PAIN IN THE ASS. As expected, the House rejected the ridiculous fetal pain bill, which would have required abortion providers to inform women that fetuses are capable of feeling pain, and offer the option of fetal anesthesia.

The legislation would have applied to any woman carrying a fetus "20 weeks or more after fertilization." As Broadsheet pointed out, defining the age of a fetus by the weeks past fertilization, rather than by the woman's last menstrual period (as every ob/gyn in the country does) was a back-door attack on hormonal contraceptives, many of which don't prevent fertilization, only implantation. To boot, research shows fetuses can probably only feel pain beginning at 28 weeks, at which point abortion is illegal, anyway.

While most pro-choice groups opposed the fetal pain bill, NARAL took a "neutral" stance, saying it was in favor of women having "all the information" about fetal anesthesia options. Apparently they're a-OK with the fact that, in this case, the information is inaccurate and misleading. It's also disappointing that NARAL failed to note this bill considered a fertilized egg the same thing as a developing fetus. They should have opposed this legislation on the basis of that alone, given that they're a staunchly pro-contraception organization.

Happily, the legislation isn't likely to come up again next session.

--Ann Friedman

THE KOOCH STRIKES BACK. News that Dennis Kucinich is willing to swoop in and provide the Democratic Party with a real bigfoot for 2008 isn't terrifically surprising. It's the same thing with Mike Gravel or, to some degree, Biden: Whether you think you'll actually become president, for a certain type of politician, actually running for president is a lot of fun. People listen to you, you participate in closely watched debates, you join in the pageantry of a campaign, you get face time in the national press and, always lurking at the edge of the probability distribution, you could just unexpectedly break through. Indeed, what's surprising is not that so many folks run for president, but that so few do. I guess it's a rare ego that can take the inflation of a campaign without being too afraid of the likely rejection at the end of it.

--Ezra Klein

SALVAGE. It would be fair to say that few are as battleship obsessed as I, so this series of articles at The New York Times may be less interesting than I think. The articles, censored during Worlds War II, discuss the salvage efforts on the battleships sunk on December 7. Interesting to me because of the basic subject matter, they also give some indication as to the real reasons that the United States won the war, causes that have less to do with "will" and high-flying rhetoric than with technical expertise and economic strength.

--Robert Farley

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BORDER PATROL. Gershom Gorenberg writes about the Israeli education minister's controversial new proposal to include the Green Line border in school textbook maps.

For nearly 40 years, Israel has treated its own border the way Victorians treated sex: It shapes society, but explicitly portraying it violates respectable conventions. Those who do so are seen as daring, not quite part of polite society. Bright children know the border exists from adult conversations, know it will be terribly important when they come of age, and are not quite sure what it looks like. My daughter, child of an impolite father, asked her high school geography teacher why the Green Line was missing from a map he handed out, and left him wordless.

--The Editors

MARKETERS-IN-CHIEF. Regarding the Blair-Bush press conference this morning, is it just me or is Tony Blair becoming less eloquent and coherent the more he stands side-by-side with Bush? By comparison, watch this most frightening of videos from September 2002, when Bush and then-White House Chief of Staff Andy “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” Card were rolling out the administration’s marketing campaign for the Iraq war.

The video is of an outdoor Q&A at Camp David after the two leaders just got off the Marine 1 helicopter. Looking like a seven-year-old slowed by an overdose of Ritalin, Bush practically gets propped up rhetorically by Blair. That was four years ago. Sadly, today, it’s getting harder and harder to tell these two listing chief marketing officers apart.

--Tom Schaller

YOU'RE KIDDING! Turns out the World Bank's development projects aren't lifting as many people out of poverty as had been hoped. Among the 25 countries examined by the Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 saw reductions in poverty since the 1990s. To some degree, that may not be the World Bank's fault: Famine, war, AIDS, and a variety of other confounding factors might mean holding a country's deterioration to modest levels is a triumph. But it's hard to assume the best when you have such head-bangingly obvious conclusions as this one:

The study emphasized that economic growth is, by itself, no fix: How the gains are distributed is just as important. In China, Romania, Sri Lanka and many Latin American countries, swiftly expanding economies have improved incomes for many, but the benefits have been limited by a simultaneous increase in economic inequality, putting the spoils into the hands of the rich and not enough into poor households, the study concludes.

In Georgia, the Bank has helped foster growth by lending in support of the oil industry, but this has created few jobs, so the impact on poverty has been negligible, the study found. Brazil, on the other hand, has seen little growth but significant advances against poverty because wealth has been distributed more evenly.

"For a sustained reduction in poverty over a period of time, it really pays to worry about both growth and distribution," said Vinod Thomas, director-general of the Independent Evaluation Group. "It has been a mistaken notion that you can grow first and worry about the distribution later."

--Ezra Klein

NO CREDIBILITY. As the Iraq War continues to get more and more hopeless, we're sure to start hearing more of the tautological trump card inevitably played by the dead-enders of ill-conceived wars: we need to maintain a ruinous war in order to preserve American "credibility." As Daniel Davies pointed out in comments about Michael Novak's particularly insane version of this argument, this would seem to be the “if something is not worth doing, it has to be done at ruinous cost” theory of deterrence. Or, as he put it in his more extensive discussion of why this doesn't work even as abstract game theory, "It is certainly true that one of the benefits of doing something stupid is that it saves you from having to spend money on maintaining your reputation as an idiot. However, is the reputation of an idiot really worth having?"

As our colleague Rob has pointed out in detail, the idea that one should keep fighting a ruinous war to preserve "credibility" or "reputation" is one of the dumbest ideas ever sent down the pike. Not only because a country has no effective control over its reputation, and there's no reason to believe that continuing with a failing effort actually is reputation-enhancing, but because logically it means that absent clear victory you can never get out of a bad war. If we keep fighting because pulling out will "send the wrong message" to terrorists or whatever, then we can never get out, even if the anarchy we've created in Iraq is obviously creating more terrorism. This is all fundamentally unserious. If we can't achieve our objectives, we should get out, period.

--Scott Lemieux

HOPE IS A PLAN. IT IS IT IS IT IS! Jonah Goldberg, amid a column bashing the ISG report for a lot of good reasons, takes an ill-advised whack:

Nowhere does the commission ever seriously consider how to win the war in Iraq. Why? Because winning is no longer a possible consensus position. And pulling out isn't a consensus position either. So rather than a real strategy about Iraq, we get Laodicean tripe about how the Iraq Study Group is our last best hope to unite Americans. I'm sorry, but that wasn't its mandate.

Indeed, despite all the commentators calling for a renewed push towards triumph, I'm hearing a lot more sentiment than strategy. For instance: Jonah Goldberg has an LA Times column and a popular blog. If he knows of a way to spark national reconciliation en route to a pluralistic, peaceful democracy in Iraq, I'm sure the rest of us would be happy to listen. But from now on, that should be a rule. If you want to demand America start thinking about winning again, you have to give some outline or argument that makes clear why winning is a possible, rather than merely desirable, outcome.

--Ezra Klein

NON-PROLIFERATION AND BRITISH NUKES. In the non-proliferation community there's some tension between the goals of non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. It's often argued, not wholly unreasonably, that convincing Iran, North Korea, etc. to eschew nuclear weapons is pretty difficult when the great powers refuse to give up their own nukes. The NPT includes a formal commitment to disarmament, which the recognized nuclear powers have largely ignored. Thus far, nuclear disarmament has occurred only in a few debatable and highly unusual cases, including the decision of Ukraine to give up Russian weapons on its soil, and the dismantling of South Africa's atomic weapons shortly prior to the end of apartheid. I've been pretty skeptical of disarmament both as a practical possibility (hard to put the genie back in the bottle), and as a policy focus for non-proliferation efforts. I find it almost impossible to imagine a situation in which the major nuclear powers would be willing to give up their weapons, both because nuclear weapons carry a significant amount of prestige and because deterrent concerns still matter.

The sole exception to my skepticism is the United Kingdom, which I believe is the best candidate for disarmament. The UK's nuclear capability is built around four Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines, each carrying thirty-six warheads. Although Tony Blair has formally requested development of a new generation of missile submarines and eventually a new generation of missiles, the debate in the UK on the wisdom of the program is genuine. As the UK has close alliances with both France and the United States, the strategic rationale of the British program isn't completely clear. The prestige question (nukes proving that a country is a great power) is, for a host of reasons, less salient in the UK than in France. In spite of Blair's decision to continue the British nuclear program, I can imagine a day in which the United Kingdom leaves the nuclear club.

--Robert Farley

NOT REALLY A JOKE. Wonkette 2.0 Alex Pareene joked on Tuesday that John Edwards's new hire and potential presidential campaign manager David Bonior will be "key in the important race to determine which white dude will win the support of the powerful 'won’t vote for a negro or a lady' bloc." He was being snarky, and using that as cover to get at this obvious but somewhat politically awkward-to-mention probability: If Barack Obama really does run for president, the race for the Democratic nomination in '08 moves from being about Hillary Clinton and the TBA anti-Hillary into a three-way contest between Hillary, Obama, and whoever is able to beat out the rest of the contenders for the role of credible white man. That's the spot Evan Bayh, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, and possibly Wesley Clark will all be vying for, hoping to make the campaign a three-way contest where the more centrist first-ever candidates (Clinton and Obama) wind up somehow either destroying or cancelling each other out. Which means that the person who winds up being most hurt by Obama's entry into the race isn't Hillary -- it's poor New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

(Unless, of course, Obama helps Richardson by knocking off Edwards in South Carolina, leaving him to pick up union and Hispanic votes in Nevada, but that's way too many chess moves in the future to start thinking about.)

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FCS TRIMMED. Future Combat Systems, the integrated, high tech system that the Army has been pursuing for the last few years (sort of the eqivalent of the F-22 or the Zumwalt destroyer, and more likely to be used than either) has taken a significant hit in the latest Army funding request. Land Warrior, a system designed to make individual infantrymen part of a high-information network, has temporarily been shelved. For those interested in the latest zombie fighting techniques, Land Warrior featured prominently in a chapter of Max Brooks' World War Z. Anyway, Defense Tech has a good discussion, including some speculation that the cut is strategic and that the Army expects to get everything back from the incoming Congress.

--Robert Farley

HITCHENS ISN'T FUNNY. I'm disappointed in myself for allowing Christopher Hitchens' idiotic "provocation" to, um, provoke me. If you don't want to bother reading the whole convoluted essay, I'll summarize his key point: Women are nothing but baby-makers. For this reason, they are serious about everything and have deeply impaired senses of humor.

I guess this is to be expected from a straight white dude who is all in favor of using racist, sexist and heterosexist slurs. And I'm used to reading this sort of shit on Men's News Daily, World Net Daily and other crazy, largely ignored websites. But this "provocation" appeared Vanity Fair. An established and respected publication. Ugh. Echidne has a nice takedown.

Also, when I first looked at this article I thought it was Christopher Hitchens who was pictured, not some "humorless woman." Turns out, I wasn't that far off. Check it out:

--Ann Friedman

TAIL-BETWEEN-THEIR-LEGS CONSERVATIVES. Kevin Drum notes that a number of administration appointees plan on high-tailing it out of Washington in advance of the coming Democratic congressional investigations. The American Conservative Union, meanwhile, is massively tweaked about Republicans who've put their tails a bit lower. From a web-based letter-writing campaign they're hosting, which I was notified of by good old GOPUSA (remember them?):

Majority Leader Bill Frist and Senate Republicans could have played hard-ball. They had the power to bring the nomination out of committee and to the Senate floor, where Bolton would have been easily confirmed.

Yet they did NOTHING. They cringed behind their desks, determined to sneak out of Washington this week, tails between their legs!

Last month, the American people went to the polls, turned about two dozen RINOs OUT OF office and DEMANDED conservative government! And unfortunately in the process, the GOP lost its majority and a few good men like Rick Santorum, Jim Talent and George Allen.

But apparently our leaders did not get the message!

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NO MIDDLE GROUND. As Spencer promised below, here's his take on the Iraq Study Group's confused report -- and why Heidi Klum could teach this commission a thing or two.

--The Editors

WHY, BAYH? Luckily for Evan Bayh, John Judis's savage recounting of his role in the 2001 Bankruptcy Reform bill has been obscured by the release of the ISG. But it really deserves a bit more publicity:

Feinstein offered a very mild amendment to the bankruptcy bill. It capped the debt limit on credit cards for minors at $2,500 unless they could obtain parental consent or proof of financial independence. Dodd's amendment was somewhat tougher. Companies could only sign up minors if their parents co-signed the credit card agreement or if the minors could prove financial independence or agreed to take a financial management course. Both amendments lost--Feinstein's by 55 to 42 and Dodd's by 58 to 41. The great majority of Democrats voted for these amendments, but not Bayh. He joined the credit card companies and the Republicans in opposing both.

Bayh talks repeatedly about helping families make "higher education more affordable." He and Lincoln recently formed a "Parents' Caucus" in the Senate, declaring that "parents deserve a government that is more supportive of parents' efforts to support their children." But, when he had a chance to protect parents and their children against the greed of the credit card companies--and to do so without paying a great political price--he took what seems like the easy and unprincipled way out. That's worth keeping in mind as Bayh begins his run for the presidency.

--Ezra Klein

MORE IMPORTANTLY? I spent my morning at the Iraq Study Group's press conference on the Hill. (I'll have a piece for TAP on all this imminently.) Many bizarre things were said, but one that revealed the ISG's midset particularly well was this, courtesy of co-chair Lee Hamilton:

"We have one last chance at making Iraq work, and, more importantly, one last chance to unite this country on this war."

--Spencer Ackerman

WHAT IF WE JUST ASK NICELY? Matt, whom we all miss terribly, has a terrific summary of the ISG report. As he notes, there's a somewhat sad dynamic underlying all this, which is that even good policy and competent leadership can't obviate the fundamental tensions and rivalries powering the annihilating devolution of Iraq.

We all want, on every issue, to be able to craft the right set of policies and programs to fix systemic problems. Problem is, in government, as an occupying power, we only have access to certain levers and buttons. And in Iraq, none of them control the relevant actors and forces. So we can craft all the enlightened policy we want -- without a way to make the Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds stop hating each other, we'll not get anywhere quick. Iraq lives or dies on grounds of national reconciliation, and despite the reports frequent calls for Iraqis to pursue it and Iranians to force it, nobody relevant seems sufficiently interested in achieving it by methods more desirable than the obliteration of other groups.

--Ezra Klein