The very good program put in place by Clinton and Gore was, I assume, the one popularly known as Nunn-Lugar. Hint: it didn't get that name by accident.

No one "compromised" with Lugar on this one. -- The whole point of what I wrote earlier was: Max is conflating "unifying the country" with "accepting centrist positions". That is not the only meaning it might have. Obama working with Lugar is an example of not compromising on principle, but finding points of agreement and working with them. I offered it because someone asked for evidence that Obama was interested in doing this, as opposed to compromising on principle.

Posted at August 16, 2007 11:36 AM in response to United We Sit

Thanks -- I had a sudden fit of shyness ;)

Posted at August 15, 2007 8:47 PM in response to United We Sit

Yes, actually. During his time in the Senate, Obama several times found Republican Senators with whom he surely disagreed on a lot, but who agreed with him on one particular issue, and worked with them to get legislation on that issue enacted. Specifically: Lugar on nuclear non-proliferation and eliminating stockpiles of conventional weapons abroad; Lugar again on avian flu; lobbying and earmark reform with Tom Coburn; Katrina oversight legislation with Coburn (again); Lugar, Nrm Coleman, and Gordon Smith (and three other Democrats) on raising CAFE standards.

In each case, as best I can tell, he did not compromise his principles (or at least: while I'm sure he must have given a bit here and there, looking at the resulting legislation I think: gosh, this is very good legislation!, not: god, what a sell-out. Whatever the compromises are, I can't spot them.)

What he did do was: first, to increase dramatically the chances of his legislation getting passed by getting GOP sponsors; second, reach out to people on the points on which he agrees with them, rather than compromising on the points he doesn't; third (to judge by the number of repeats in the list above) build up trust with people so that he is more likely to get them to work with him again.

I think it's great.

Posted at August 15, 2007 1:59 PM in response to United We Sit

Mark: I was just asking myself this very question. I suspect there are different answers for different US Attorneys. But Tim Griffin is the one most likely to explain the provision slipped into the Patriot Act removing the need for Senate confirmation, and in his case, I suspect the answer is:

Send the Republicans' chief oppo researcher to Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton spent most of her adult life, with subpoena power.

At taxpayers' expense.

Posted at March 22, 2007 12:10 PM in response to What was the U.S. Attorney Purge Meant to Achieve?

In addition, it's worth noting that one of the things Obama took an interest in while he was still running for Senator was Nunn-Lugar, the program for securing ex-Soviet nuclear materials and sites, and that he then worked on expanding it, with Lugar, to cover caches of conventional arms.

Working on Nunn-Lugar indicates to me an interest in getting serious about preventing proliferation, and doing so by getting into the wonky details of where exactly someone might acquire e.g. fissile material. Trying to expand it to conventional arms indicates to me an interest in doing something serious about the lethality of smaller conflicts around the world. And in both cases, a willingness to try to work through the details to ensure that we don't arrive at the point where we have to start taking sides in conflicts; that we deal with things, as much as possible, before they become big problems.

Moreover, he was one of the first people to get serious about avian flu, and he did so in part (according to him) because, having spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, he understood immediately what it meant in that part of the world to have a disease that might start spreading to humans at loose in the poultry running around in everyone's back yard.

Posted at January 24, 2007 7:18 AM in response to Hillary's Foreign Policy

Movement, schmovement.

I'm doing this for several reasons. (a) it's fun. (b) Back in 2004, when I was asked to join Obsidian Wings , I really wanted to do something, anything, to change someone's mind about voting for Bush. The trouble was, I didn't actually know anyone who was planning to vote for Bush. Joining a joint liberal/conservative blog let me engage people.

But also: (c) Back during the whole Lewinsky mess, I thought: one reason people are focusing on this is that they understand it. The government could do, and has done, horrible, scandalous stuff about, say, tax policy or occupational safety: stuff that should make everyone absolutely livid. Most people don't know enough to appreciate how scandalous some of this stuff is; they read about it and their eyes glaze over. But everyone knows about married guys having sex with interns.

I wanted to do whatever I could to change this. It's something you have to do one person at a time: providing whatever bits of background might, over time, enable people to see why, say, the Bankruptcy Bill was worth getting mad about. Blogs do that.

Also (and this is probably peculiar to being on a liberal/conservative blog): I think a lot of some conservatives' motivation comes from a stereotype of liberals. For whatever reason, it's pretty hard to think this stereotype is true of me. I'm an ethicist by profession: do I really not care about values? I'm generally friendly to religion (as atheists go), though hostile to people who abuse it, and as an ex-serious Christian I can tell when people are taking the name of the Lord in vain. I am not a moral relativist. I do not hate my country. Blah blah blah. I don't have to try not to be what conservatives hate; I'm sort of the antithesis of their caricature, except for being liberal. So I thought: hey, why not?

The point is: most of this involves dialogue, and it involves both trying to change people's minds, and giving them the chance to change mine. It's about creating a more informed citizenry, in which I include making myself more informed, in the way that having to defend one's views inevitably does. I imagine other bloggers have other aims, similar in using this particular medium, with its particular strengths; undoubtedly different in a lot of respects.

But we're all in communication with one another. We all (I assume) read a certain number of other blogs. Our commenters can bring stuff to our attention, and if other people think it's important it can get a lot more play than it would have if that commenter had remained upset in isolation. It's a great tool for communicating arguments and facts, for facilitating dialogue, and for making the people who participate to any significant extent a lot more informed than they would otherwise have been.

And it makes the process of becoming informed fun, which I think is an enormous advantage.

I would never want to say that this is the only tool there is for organizing, or that everything has to work through blogs (take that, union locals and city Democratic committees and chapters of ACORN!) -- That would be nuts. I do think that it's a way of making other organizations more likely to be effective, by making people more informed about why they matter.

Blogs are a large number of efforts at achieving goals that can, I think, only be achieved in little steps: goals like having a more informed citizenry. They aren't the only way of achieving those goals, but for me, at least, they're the best I can do.

Posted at January 17, 2007 9:59 PM in response to Quick Thoughts

Personally, I think that blogs are certainly just a medium, and those who use them can have any ideological orientation or none at all, but that the way progressive blogs have developed makes them more like a movement than one might expect. Because one thing blogs do is to make policy arguments that would once have been known mostly to professionals available to everyone.

Think of Josh Marshall's Social Security work, for instance: one thing about it was that if you read his blog during that period, you ended up knowing a whole lot more about Social Security than most people ever knew before. How big the alleged problem with is was, the pros and cons of various plans, what 'bend points' and 'price indexing' are -- I mean, this level of knowledge, among a reasonably large number of people who don't analyze Social Security for a living, was pretty extraordinary. And there are any number of smaller points: the number of people who, when told that Sen. X voted against evil bill Y, promptly ask: but how did s/he vote on the cloture bill?

Similarly, those of us who read blogs are in a position to make, read, and respond to a lot of pretty serious policy arguments and those of us who actually hang out in the comments sections of our own blogs (and have smart commenters) have to field objections from people armed with masses of statistics we've never encountered before.

It's a much richer discussion than one could get from reading a paper (much as I love newspapers.) And it's wide open to anyone who wants to participate.

It's a normal consequence of this sort of environment that people will sometimes actually convince one another, and that at least some people's opinions will start to converge. And this makes for movement-like possibilities, I think. It will probably never be a disciplined movement, but therein lies its strength, I think.

About the annoyance with various media pundits: at least in my case, it has two sources. One is that the picture they paint of bloggers is completely at odds with what I see. It's as though they were having some collective 60s flashback. Speaking for myself in particular (not that I suppose I'm who they have in mind, but since a lot of them just talk about 'bloggers', who can say?): I'm a mild-mannered philosophy professor in my 40s, and when I read that I am, unbeknownst to myself, actually an angry rabble-rousing blogofascist with no standards, it's kind of funny.

Second: so many of them were so wrong about Iraq. They were so wrong. Reading their arguments, and their subsequent changes of heart, is like (groping for an example here) talking to people who said: gee, 9/11 showed me that there was evil in the world! I actually heard someone say this once -- a teenager, so he had an excuse -- and read op-eds that said similar things, and I thought: what exactly did you believe about the world before? I mean: if you're not a teenager, it shouldn't take 9/11 to show you that.

A lot of the commentators writing about Iraq before the war had, to me, this same surrealistically naive quality to them. I would read what they wrote and think: huh? And these are people who are, unlike my teenage friend, adults who are paid to think interesting thoughts about current affairs.

And I suppose a third thing is this: a lot of them still seem to make the assumption that the people who opposed the war were weird hippies who just oppose all wars. And gosh, who could have supposed that people like that could be right? -- Again, it infuriates me to hear this. There were lots of people like, oh, Jim Webb and Brent Scowcroft who are not those unserious peaceniks we keep hearing about, and who managed to oppose the war before it started.

Me too. I'm not a professional. I'm also not a pacifist. I supported Gulf 1, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the unfortunately nonexistent intervention in Rwanda. It wasn't that hard to see reasons to oppose the war: noticing that Saddam and bin Laden were deeply unlikely allies helped, as did seeing that the Bush administration was already botching Afghanistan, as did the thought: why on earth should the suspicion that Saddam might have WMD, though no means of delivering them to us, somehow entail that we must invade? Don't any of these people remember the Cold War, when a horrible country had a whole lot of nuclear weapons attached to actual missiles, pointed straight at us, and yet we somehow survived?

There's something about reading people who got this so thoroughly wrong when they are paid to get it right talking about the likes of Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum and Atrios and Matt Yglesias as strange angry hippies who are, of course, completely unserious about policy that makes me rather annoyed.

That's all.

Posted at January 15, 2007 8:12 PM in response to Medium and Movement

Besides, if I hadn't written about this, I wouldn't have gotten to write the sentence:

"Because we all know how firmly Kant supported wild sex orgies, continual wallowings in mud and feces, and not needing food and water."

And my life would have been the poorer for it.

Posted at July 21, 2006 6:18 PM in response to Nihilism Continued

I commented on it because, well, I'm a philosophy professor (if Matt were about ten years older, I would have been his TF), and the phrase 'Kantian nihilism' was more than I could bear.

Chris Muir showed up in our comments, and (if it was indeed him) he's even dumber in person. The link I gave is to his first appearance; read about fifteen comments or so to get the full flavor of his cluelessness.

Posted at July 21, 2006 6:13 PM in response to Nihilism Continued

Where can we get a copy of this study?

Posted at July 21, 2006 6:06 PM in response to Credit Cards, Bombs and Politics