Matthew Locke's Blog

Teabagging John Locke, or: The Problem With Libertarianism

2009-04-14T19:17:30Z

Not sure anybody here will remember me. I started posting daily thoughts around Election Day, shortly before events in my day-to-day life conspired to make things very busy for me. And I'm still busy. But I miss sharing my thoughts with TPM's community. So here goes -- don't know how often you'll see me 'round these parts, but here's hoping I find the time to pop in every once in a while. More importantly, I sincerely hope you enjoy what humble words I have to contribute. Of course, comments are highly encouraged!

As angry conservatives and libertarians giddily prepare for Tax/Teabag Day, I've inevitably been reading more and increasingly strident libertarian arguments against once and future bailouts and stimulus packages. (Predictably, if dismayingly, many left-wing populists have added their voices to the anti-bailout crowd.) Earlier today Megan McArdle, heretofore a relatively sane voice on the economic right, concluded a thoughtful post in favor of fed action with the following, grudging, admission:

I think that the political process will hopelessly screw up the management of this crisis (something which libertarians are perfectly able to see when the government screwing things up is a left-wing populist one in Latin America). But maybe The People, God bless them, deserve to screw up their economy if they want. On principle, I am opposed to saving people from themselves. And anyway, maybe I'm wrong and the wisdom of crowds will prevail.

On the other hand, do they have a right to screw things up for everyone else? Should a populist 60% be allowed to plunge their neighbors deeper into crisis? In the case of America, to plunge the whole world deeper into crisis?

The uncomfortable conclusion I'm coming to is that yes, they should. Ben Bernanke should be hamstrung even though it's likely that this would make everyone worse off. And people who advocate for ending the independence of the central bank should be willing to accept all that this entails: inflationary monetary policy (the people love inflation!), bad and unpredictible banking policy, the collapse of the US economy. I just wish I didn't have to go along for the ride.

Kevin Drum calls this 'the best argument I've ever read for not being a libertarian,' and while his comment has an air of pithy snark, I think it points to a fundamental flaw with libertarianism, at least in its more dogmatic form.
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The Libertarian Prescription

But before we inquire why libertarians are misguided, let us first examine how: What is the mechanism of their warped policy prescriptions?

Hard-core libertarians, of course, believe that the market should be allowed to take its course. The more intellectually rigorous and self-honest among them -- which is to say those who voted for Bob Barr over Ron Paul -- have been (like McArdle) willing to admit the likely consequences of their recommended action: late-20s-style bank runs, widespread insolvency, a vastly deeper economic crisis, probably a systemic and long-lasting worldwide Great Depression. They believe that this would be preferable to extended government regulation of the economy, deepened public debt, inflation, and (broadly speaking) further encroachments upon liberty.

From the other side of the debate, I'm happy to to admit that these are important problems. That stimulative spending will in some ways be wasteful is true (although in my eyes the lesser of all evils); we should endeavor both to maximize the multiplier effect and invest in projects with substantial and long-lasting positive externalities. I recognize that expanded government spending, and waste, will likely persist for some time after stimulus ceases to be necessary; public oversight and a liberal openness to compromise will both be vital to stave off inflation, which, among other things, in the long term really does erode lifelong savings and makes seniors more dependent on government assistance than they'd otherwise be. As important as it is, I know that government regulation can often be pernicious, and market interventions can be distorting. Needless to say, we must remain ever vigilant against encroachments upon or most fundamental freedoms.

These are all important libertarian contributions to political discourse, and they deserve serious consideration.

Moreover, it appears that libertarians agree with honest liberals that there is in this world no easy or clean solution to the economic crisis. With no perfectly clear answers forthcoming, we must rely on our reason and our intuitive common sense as guides to action. But there is no better guide than an appreciation of history.*

A Brief History of Misery and Tyrrany

It's very difficult to argue, without distorting history, that the depth and breadth of the problems of government intervention in the American economy at a time of crisis, even extrapolated over the decades after the crisis, nearly matches, let alone exceeds, the depth and breadth of problems caused by non-intervention. To be sure, if we imagined that FDR's New Deal had not existed, and that the Second World War hadn't happened, it's reasonable to conclude that the Great Depression would have lasted longer -- and grown deeper -- than it in fact did. But we need not delve into counter-history. Simply comparing the misery caused by the actual Great Depression (which thoughtful libertarians admit would be roughly replicated, or exceeded, should the government today let banks fail and gouge the social safety net) with the misery caused by resultant government economic intervention in the years between, say, 1945 and 1983, I think there's little question that the Depression was, in aggregate, worse.

Moreover, if we look at the most illiberal governments of the modern era, almost all arose in reaction to some domestic crisis (or, in the case of Russia in 1917, the domestic effects of an international crisis). Extended periods of economic chaos will destabilize governments, and while there are some radical libertarians that welcome anarchy, anarchy unsustained by civil war has almost always led directly (and rather swiftly) to despotism.

On the other hand, FDR's new deal, while it brought about a generation of Big Government which, in some of its latter-day excesses, probably did unreasonably restrict economic liberty and contributed to stagflation, did not lead by steps to despotism or totalitarianism. The reality is that democratic traditions and a respect for rule of law run deep in America, which is by nature a relatively conservative nation (in the Burkean, not Republican, sense); political trends have a way of ebbing and flowing over long periods of time. Tyranny is to be guarded against, to be sure, but it is not to be predicted. History rarely proceeds along a slippery slope.

With all this in mind, it seems that under the best realistic circumstances the radical libertarian position would lead to much greater suffering in order to protect against the much lesser suffering that would be imposed by government intervention. In worse it could lead quickly and directly to precisely the kind of illiberalism it fears, in its most fantastic nightmares, may descend after several generations of unchecked and unquestioned government expansion.

'Realisitc', we shall see, is the key word in the foregoing paragraph.

The Liberal and the Libertarian

Libertarianism presents a (relatively) well-thought-out, consistent, and logical understanding of political economy, but this is not a virtue. Logic, divorced of common sense and historical understanding, is a poor guide to policy. (It was, ironically, an abhorrence of such 'rational' systems that undergird most of Fredrich Hayek's arguments for what we today call libertarianism.) As Bertrand Russell, speaking of John Locke, argues in his History of Western Philosophy:

No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the cost of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false.

Earlier in the same chapter Russell more explicitly praises Locke's inconsistency, which he sees as an expression of the philosopher's moderation:

[Locke] is always sensible, and always willing to sacrifice logic rather than become paradoxical. He enunciates general principles which, as the reader can hardly fail to perceive, are capable of leading to strange consequences; but whenever the strange consequences seem about to appear, Locke blandly refrains from drawing them. To a logician this is irritating; to a practical man, it is a proof of sound judgment.

This, then, is the problem of libertarianism. As a school of thought it provides important insights -- and a passionate understanding of its fundamental precepts can provide an important check against willy-nilly government expansion -- but if followed to its logical conclusions leads to warped understanding and warped policy prescriptions. And so the libertarian is forced either to be inconsistent with his principles, or else to assert the reality of the unreal and the goodness bad.

It's important to have a basic, and relatively consistent, worldview, which may or may not coincide with the popular definitions of a particular political ideology. (For a thoughtful person it probably won't.) But logical dogmatism is rightly abhored. Instead, one should express a nible willingness to accept the most reasonable wisdom of competing ideologies -- and, more importantly, to reject the more absurd conclusions of one's own.

*I should add, parenthetically, that a person's ethical convictions often play an important, and perhaps decisive, role in one's perception of reality. Probably that is as it should be. But it is rarely explicitly stated, and I think that most libertarians would either assert that their beliefs are purely pragmatic, based on an understanding of economic reality; or, if they are admitted to be founded on ethical notions, then it is an ethic they assert better reflects, in some objective and quantifiable way, the world as it is (or as human beings, if well-enough educated, would desire it to be) and is therefore demonstrably superior to other ethical systems. I am not, however, familiar with any systematic argument putting forth this notion, and it seems to me that most of libertarianism is founded upon a misguided conflation of material well-being with 'the Good' in a broader sense.

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Team of Rivals?

2008-11-18T17:12:55Z

A couple of days after my initial post on the subject, Josh shared similar concerns about Hillary Clinton's potential selection as Secretary of State. I'm now following up my early thoughts with a more complete post. I hope it's clear from this that I'm not outright opposed to Clinton at State, but it does raise serious concerns for me, and I personally doubt she is either the most qualified or the best candidate for the role. This was cross-posted to The Lion and Gun.

At the moment I'm wrapping up Doris Kearns Goodwin's excellent book. (Lest anybody accuse me of bandwagoning, let it be known that I purchased it and have been slowly reading it since long before Obama's victory and transition.) Obviously the book has gained popular currency recently, especially with buzz about President-elect Obama potentially pulling former rival Hillary Clinton into his cabinet as Secretary of State. (I've already made some preliminary remarks on the subject here.) 'Team of rivals' is a good way to describe such an administration -- but a poor philosophy for building it.

Cliché tells us those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. And there's some truth in that. But it does not follow that those who understand history can repeat it at will: what has worked in the particular circumstances of the past usually fails in the particular, and different, circumstances of the present.

There were plenty of good reasons for Abraham Lincoln to bring his rivals into his administration -- a new and fragile Republican party, a fragile nation headed for war. Today's challenges are certainly great, but they are nothing like what faced the new President in 1861, and the Democratic party is much stronger and more unified than the Republicans under their first President. Lincoln's decision to tap the talents of Edward Bates, Henry Seward, and Salmon Chase was fueled by the daunting challenges facing his administration. I fear that Obama's decision to tap the talents of Hillary Clinton has been fueled by a best-selling book.
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Clinton's Qualities

There are arguments in Clinton's favor. For one thing, she's smart as hell. She's tough and determined. She's relentless. All of these are good qualities for the face of the nation's foreign policy, and they should not be underestimated. There are other benefits as well, some of which haven't been given much attention elsewhere. But the appointment, assuming it comes to pass, brings with it some significant problems. And many of Clinton's attributes political bloggers stress strike me as being hollow or not particularly useful. (I also think it's interesting that, from what I've seen, bloggers whose primary interest is domestic policy or political process seem to be celebrating the decision, whereas bloggers more focused on foreign policy tend to have considerable reservations.)

Beyond her innate abilities, Hillary Clinton will bring a significant amount of political capital to the State Department. Obama might be crafting the kind of star-studded cabinet that will strike fear into the hearts of Republicans. Clinton will bring with her the good will of Congress, the Democratic party, and a significant chunk of the American populace. All of this will help to clear any domestic roadblocks to Obama's conduct of foreign policy.

Clinton's star-power will also raise the profile of the (already high-profile) State Department. If Obama intends to shift the fulcrum of foreign policy conduct further from Defense to State this is a good way to do it. With somebody as famously tough as Clinton at the reins, voters (and political rivals) will be less likely to accuse an Obama administration's focus on diplomacy as weak-kneed appeasement. For the President's domestic agenda, but also for much of his foreign policy, he'll have to rally his grassroots, twist arms in Congress, and convince the American people to get behind him. Clinton can help with that.

Senator Clinton's familiarity with the levers of power in Washington -- and, even more importantly, her high profile -- will allow Obama to concentrate more on the gargantuan domestic policy challenges facing the nation without sacrificing Americans' trust on his ability to handle myriad foreign crises and entanglements. This might be the most important reason for choosing Clinton. There are many other candidates who could manage delegated foreign policy and the State Department as well as, or better than, Hillary Clinton. But there are perhaps none that are better known and would be better trusted by the American people.

Clinton's Detriments

Here, however, is where we start getting into thornier problems. Does Obama really want to outsource foreign policymaking to a State Department run by Hillary Clinton? Probably not. Surely one of the lessons of the early Clinton years was that the most important political decision making takes place in the West Wing, not at Foggy Bottom. And in the primaries Clinton staked out a substantially different (and more hawkish) foreign policy vision than Obama. He'll have to keep her on a tight leash.

How will Clinton react to that? Obviously she desired to be President. It's not a well-kept secret that she feels herself more qualified than Obama, and there's been little love lost between them even since the convention. Will she work well in a subordinate role? In public surely she will, just as she heartily campaigned for Obama in the general election. She might not always be so happy to back down in private. Of course, disagreement within policy-making circles, if handled right, can be a good thing. But many of Clinton's advisers have more spleen and less to lose by venting to the press, and the Clintons have always presided over a leaky ship. Obama is famously averse to seeing behind-closed-doors backbiting splayed across the front pages of America's newspapers, but that's exactly what we saw in the final four months of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Of course if such disputes do end up leaking, as they probably will, it would prove embarrassing to Obama. (An un-amicable or forced resignation of his Secretary of State, taking with her a sizable chunk of the Democratic party, could potentially hobble his administration.) More importantly, they could seriously undermine the conduct of American foreign policy.

So, too, could the many (and possibly shady) dealings Bill Clinton has had with foreign leaders. I have written previously about this and won't belabor the point. Let me just stress that impropriety isn't the issue so much as the perception of impropriety. Bill's business connections and donor lists could cause serious (or perceived) conflicts of interest that further complicate American foreign policy. His ties in Kazakhstan, whose oil fields are jealously eyed by powerful neighbors, are especially problematic.

Qualities that aren't Qualities

Meanwhile, the qualities most observers have focused on strike me as being overestimated or not particularly useful. The first, and most easily dispensed with, is that Clinton will heal divisions within the Democratic party. What divisions? Didn't Barack Obama just win the election? Any divisions that remains, obviously not fatal, will be erased (if they can at all be erased) by his conduct as President. If there are any voters who refuse to vote for Barack Obama four years from now because he had the temerity to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 primaries, they either have serious attachment issues or other (more or less legitimate) reasons that are really causing their opposition.

The second, and perhaps most often-mentioned, attribute is Clinton's worldwide popularity. I question, first of all, the veracity of this statement. I don't mean to deny Clinton's popularity, simply its degree. On this point I'm genuinely uncertain, but it seems to me that it was her husband who was really popular overseas. At any rate, I can remember seeing polling during the primaries (I can't recall the source, I'm afraid) showing that, out of a number of foreign democracies, Obama was supported over Clinton by wide margins in all countries save Israel and Britain. Certainly Clinton couldn't draw a crowd of 400,000 at the Victory Column in Berlin.

More importantly, I question the usefulness of having a popular Secretary of State. Sure, it will improve America's reputation abroad, but I think the returns are pretty marginal considering how much and how quickly Obama's election has done that already. Which is as it should be: it's the President who should be popular worldwide, not the Secretary of State. She needs to be the bad cop. Henry Kissinger, arguably the most successful Secretary of State of the post-war period, did not exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feeling worldwide.

Of course, Hillary can be (and often has been) a bad cop. That's another of her supposed qualities, in fact -- she'll be a tough and shrewd negotiator. And I don't doubt her toughness, but I do her diplomatic skills. So far in Clinton's political life her two greatest endeavors, health care and an election campaign, both failed in large part because of her inability to fruitfully resolve conflicts. Building a 1,300 page fait accompli without involving any of the stakeholders is exactly the wrong way to manage a huge a complex negotiation, but that's what was done with health care in 1994. More recently, Clinton's inability to forge a working relationship between the strong personalities on her own campaign team was at the heart of its failure. (And those were all people dedicated to a single goal!) It was, above all else, Clinton's indecisiveness and unwillingness to fire problematic advisers that had her campaign vacillating between different tactics and messages and leaking angry conversations all over the place. This raises doubts about both her ability to lead the huge bureaucracy she'd be placed in charge of as well as her ability to conduct fruitful negotiations between recalcitrant parties.

Others have vaunted Clinton's foreign policy experience and working relationships with foreign leaders. But today's crop of foreign leaders has changed from what she and her husband dealt with in the 1990s, and the extent to which she had a serious working relationship with any of them has been exaggerated by her partisans. So too is her vaunted experience. What experience? I thought that was revealed as bullshit during the primaries. Certainly Clinton has plenty of political experience doing plenty of political things, but foreign policy? She's never been a diplomat, she's never negotiated foreign treaties, she's never studied or written about international relations or foreign policy. The closest she's come (and this is really not so very close) is her seat on the Armed Services Committee.

And, I suppose, the sniper fire in Bosnia.

In all seriousness, this is the claim that I take the most issue with. The received wisdom of Clinton's experience stems from a mostly uncritical acceptance of a carefully crafted political narrative. Clinton has had more experience than Obama, yes, but not more than most professional politicians in their early sixties. And very little of her experience is relevant to a potential position at the head of State. She is, for all intents and purposes, a neophyte, and this was revealed in some of her foreign policy stances and statements (extending America's nuclear shield over its Middle Eastern allies!) during the campaign.

This is one myth I wish would be slayed.

Finally, there's been plenty of attention paid to what this will mean for Clinton's political prospects, or else how it plays politically for Obama. Does it remove a potential problem for his agenda in the Senate? Possibly, but I doubt Clinton would have (or could have) posed much of a threat from the Upper House. She could certainly do more damage, intentionally or not, to Obama's administration from the State Department; more importantly, she could do more damage to America's foreign policy than she could from the Upper Chamber. On the other hand, as I've said, she'll bring with her a store of political capital for Obama to share, so I think that's a wash. And as for Clinton's own ambitions, as Ezra Klein suggests, they are probably realistically at an end. 2016 will be the year for Mark Warner or Brian Schweitzer or someone yet to emerge. Hillary's star hasn't faded yet, but it will. If she still thinks she has a chance, Governor of New York would be a better place to build her movement. If she doesn't, Secretary of State could be her crowning achievement and lasting legacy.

In Conclusion

As Barron YoungSmith points out at The Plank, Barack Obama's own national security adviser-in-waiting, Jim Steinberg, warns against this kind of choice in an upcoming book:

"An examination of how [post-WW II] national security teams functioned suggests some general conclusions about the do's-and-don't's of the appointments process. On the whole, decisions to appoint all-stars or worthies without significant previous personal connection to the candidates has, with the important exception of Kissinger, proved problematic. At best, they have been marginalized or ignored in the decision-making process ... at worst, they have caused significant disruption as a result of being seen as not team players."

None of this is meant either to disqualify Senator Clinton or to predict her failure. In fact, she could be a spectacularly successful Secretary of State; she could be the next Kissinger. She brings many considerable qualities to the position and she's certainly more qualified than, say, me. In fact, her attributes probably outweigh her detriments. But that's not the essential calculus because Clinton isn't the only choice. With other qualified candidates available -- John Kerry, Bill Richardson, Wes Clark, Richard Holbrooke -- we should not so blithely assume Clinton will be the best. I doubt she would be. All those I mentioned (and many others I didn't) have their own mix of qualities and problems; the question is, on the whole, who is best? I think someone like Richardson or Holbrooke fits the bill.

Senator Clinton's appointment would steal a newscycle or two (indeed, speculation already has), and it would guarantee more in the future. It's the kind of bold move most observers, myself included, have come to not expect from Barack Obama. It suggests an eye for political tactics and stunts that was assiduously avoided during the campaign. Maybe it's a brilliant stroke I simply have yet to appreciate.

Or maybe it's the result of reading a popular book of history and assuming the successes of the past could be repeated in the present. Which is the wrong lesson to take. But it's still a damned good book.

Photo provided under a CC license by Ellen Kanner.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

The Case Against Clinton for State

2008-11-14T18:46:58Z

(Cross-posted to The Lion and Gun)

I think it's a bad idea, and I'm sure Obama's transition team agrees.

Ezra Klein suggests that this is just an elaborate show of respect that will ultimately result in nothing, and that sounds about right. One of the reasons Clinton was not seriously considered for Vice-President was her (and especially Bill's) refusal to be vetted. As I've mentioned, however, Obama's transition team is just as carefully vetting applicants for high office. And with State there's not just a concern about the potential political ramifications of some of the Clintons' doings. Certain beliefs and revelations could have a deleterious impact on the conduct of American foreign policy.

Central Asia, for example, with its oil reserves, is being jealously eyed by the Russians, Iranians, Chinese and others, and could become an international flash point in the years ahead. That the American Secretary of State's husband might have had shady dealings with the government of Kazakhstan therefore becomes a real problem. Even the appearance of impropriety could negatively impact America's ability to act.

What about Clinton's Presidential ambitions? As a base of operations for Hillary's plotting State doesn't make much sense. It's a high-profile position but not one that lends itself to politicking. And after that, what? Some have suggested Obama wants to build a 'team of rivals' in the manner of Lincoln; that allusion has a double meaning here, since Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward, was the only Secretary of State in American history to serve two full Presidential terms. It's unlikely Clinton will repeat that. So let's say she rests at State for three or four years. Then what? Madeline Albright and Warren Christopher haven't exactly aged well, politically speaking.

And if she were to make State a base from which to establish a rival or shadow administration -- which is not unlikely -- that would be even worse. The President famously has to wrangle with Congress to get anything done but has a relatively free hand in foreign affairs. Would he want a Secretary of State, then, that's working to undermine him? And how would that affect American interests abroad? Clinton had a very different (and much more hawkish) foreign policy agenda than Obama's during the primaries. What happens if she goes rogue? At some point the President might have to ask for her resignation. That would be pretty harmful to his administration. It hurt Bush's legitimacy when Colin Powell departed amongst speculation that he mightily disagreed with the country's direction in international affairs, and Powell didn't take half of the Republican party with him.

Andrew Sullivan suggests that Max Baucus's recent moves on health care are 'a sign that Obama might have already been signaling this maneuver.' I doubt it. Max Baucus's emergence as the front runner on reform is a natural consequence of Senate organization. Clinton was never going to be able to take the lead on health care from within the Senate unless Harry Reid decided to step aside and open up a path to leadership -- which he hasn't done. Clinton's on the wrong committees and has little seniority. The leaders for health care reform were always going to be Kennedy and, if he got on-board, Baucus. And Baucus has made it clear for the past year that he's on-board.

I'm not sure what Obama should do with Clinton, but my suspicion is nothing. Leave here where she is. Unless a great opportunity opens for her in the Senate she'll probably return to New York and run for Governor. That would be a better launching pad for a second Presidential run in 2016, and it would make a potentially very popular President Obama's life a hell of a lot easier.

Photo provided under a CC license by Chris Dunn

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Sixty Senate Seats Still in Sight

2008-11-13T01:23:17Z

Nate Silver reports that with thousands of votes left to count, Alaska Democrat Mark Begich is quickly catching up with opponent and convicted felon Ted Stevens. Convicted felon Stevens, the incumbent Republican who is also a convicted felon, was leading Begich by what seemed a small but probably insurmountable margin on election night despite being a convicted felon. However, 28,519 ballots counted this morning have reduced convicted felon Ted Stevens's lead from 3,257 to ~~971 votes~~ a deficit of three votes. With the remaining ballots mostly coming from Begich-friendly regions of the state, it now seems fairly likely that the Anchorage mayor will in fact unseat the Republican, who is a convicted felon.

This is important for four reasons:

First, it will give Democrats a shot at a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate. It seems to have been forgotten that the GOP has only secured 40 seats, with three outstanding. If the Dems pick up Stevens's seat -- which now seems like better than even odds -- and if Al Franken unseats incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in the Minnesota recount -- also a strong possibility -- Democrats will only be one away. The upcoming Georgia run-off between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin will provide the opportunity.

It'll be a tall order. Georgia is still a red state and without Obama on the ballot the proportion of African-Americans coming out to the polls will probably be lower. On the other hand, turn-out in any special election tends to be low. Victory is a matter of turning out the base. With 60 seats in sight you can expect Dems to contest the race pretty strongly. Republicans will want to stop them from reaching that margin, but they've been organizationally out-gunned all year and are dispirited after the thumping they received last Tuesday.

Dems would have to run the table to hit sixty. But that's not out of the question -- and the odds of it happening increase every day.

Second, it will give Joe Lieberman more leverage. With sixty votes in sight, Democrats will be loathe to lose one, which increases pressure for a compromise solution. The Democratic caucus, set to vote on Lieberman's fate, is more likely to let him remain in his posts, including the Chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, if keeping him in the caucus keeps Dems at sixty.

(Incidentally, the importance of the sixty-vote margin is, I think, overblown. The way party discipline works in the Senate, or rather doesn't, the marginal difference between 60 votes and 59 isn't substantially greater than that separating 58 and 59. But people think it is, which is maybe enough.)

Third, this would considerably weaken Sarah Palin's position in 2012. If Ted Stevens wins the Alaska Senate race he will be under tremendous pressure to resign; if he doesn't there's a substantial chance he'll be expelled. Conventional wisdom tells us that Palin would jump at the chance to run in a 2009 special election for Stevens's seat. If Begich takes it instead Palin will have to find another ticket to Washington. Republican Lisa Murkowski is up for election in two years, but she isn't going anywhere. Palin could run for Congress that year even if Republican Don Young is sent back to the House this year (Palin previously supported Lt.-Gov. Sean Parnell in his primary challenge to Young), but two years in the House is a weak base from which to launch a national campaign. None of this precludes Palin taking a shot at the Presidency in 2012, but it would sure make it a steeper mountain to climb.

Fourth and finally, Ted Stevens is a convicted felon. I just think it's good on the face of it when the American people don't, y'know, elect convicted felons. I dunno. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

Anyway, we'll know in a couple of days who won. Here's hoping for one more Democrat in the Senate -- and one more Republican behind bars.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Moving the Center in a Center-Center Nation

2008-11-10T20:11:38Z

There is an ongoing debate in the wake of last week's election over whether America has become a center-left nation or remains center-right. I can understand the rhetorical value of staking out ground on the one side or the other, but the argument as a whole seems rather silly. As with so many rhetorical distractions, the more arguments on one side or the other become internalized, the more they'll pose an obstacle to good governance and the liberal (or conservative) movement. Allow me, then, to offer a hopefully obvious (if slightly glib) rejoinder:

America is a center-center nation.

This is not an argument, it's an axiom. After all, claiming that America is center-left or center-right begs the question: compared to what? Compared to other nations? If so, what's the sample set? Compared to most other western democracies there's an argument to be made that America is, indeed, center-right -- but the comparison is problematic, if not entirely nonsensical. The left/right dichotomy is destructively reductive in the context of American political discourse; it's far more so when comparing America to other nations. Different governments preside over different societies facing different problems in different ways.

So, for example, America tends to emphasize small government more than most other democracies, and doesn't have some of the flagship government programs (think health care) that are pretty standard in most advanced nations. On the other hand, America was a pioneer in building the welfare state, which remained comparatively expansive and generous until the 1980s. To this day America has a larger bureaucracy than most of its rivals, tighter market regulation, and higher corporate income taxes. On the cultural side, America is in many ways less liberal than European society -- more uptight about sex and gays and drugs and so on. On the other hand, America lacks the deep xenophobia that makes immigrant assimilation very difficult in many European countries. America is less centralized than most democracies, but more centralized than the European Union. And so on.

No, the proper calculus of comparison is, well, America. And by definition the nation as a whole is center-center, in that its ideology is, well, its ideology. The median voter is the median voter. Terms like 'center-left' and 'center-right' only make sense when comparing some discrete person or party or idea or interest group to the American median voter: so a Republican might be to the right of the country as a whole, making him center-right; but if his ideology is identical to national ideology then he is perfectly centrist. It does not make sense to say that the nation is center-right.

This might all seem like semantics. To some degree it is. But I think it's something that ought to be remembered, and not just because it's useful at deconstructing rhetoric. It's about mindset.

As long as the two-party system remains healthy, one of the parties will always be to the left of center and the other to the right. If you want to govern the nation more from the left, you can do one of two things: you can appeal to the center through promises and rhetoric and convince them to allow you to rule from the left; or you can actually try to redefine the center to be more in line with what is currently to the left. The latter is undoubtedly the more durable, if less easy, strategy, and the former can often be a means to it. But if you convince yourself that the results of an election simply confirm that the nation is already where you want it to be -- that America is already 'center-left' -- then you're less likely to bring about the lasting change you desire.

This, I think, was one of the problems with the Bush administration. Presuming that their narrow victories proved that the nation agreed with their policies and gave them a broad mandate, the administration over-reached. They didn't try to shift the center because they seemed to think it already was where it actually wasn't. In short, they governed without leading. After election day they stopped trying to sell the American people on what they had to offer. And they were punished for it.

Let's not make the same mistakes. Let's dispense with assertions of mandate and the fruitless argument about what the nation's ideology is. Let's concentrate instead on what we want it to be. Because the election didn't make America a more progressive nation, nor did it prove that it already is one. If we want America to be progressive, we must go out and make it so: with a well-run Congress, an administration that fulfills people's needs, a President that comforts and inspires, and a grassroots movement that brings more and more Americans along for the ride.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Update -- I've written a follow-up at The Lion and Gun. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check it out!

On Kicking Ass, Taking Names

2008-11-07T20:22:36Z

Hutch had his Starsky. Murtagh had his Riggs. Bush had his Cheney. Obama needs a bad cop.

His choice of Rahm Emanuel for Chief of Staff has been a somewhat controversial first step for the incoming administration. Republicans have pounced on Emanuel's reputation as a fierce partisan, decrying the hollowness of Obama's appeal to new politics and bipartisanship. Some progressives, for their part, decry Emanuel's ties to Blue Dogs and recruitment of centrists candidates in conservative districts, a decision which has simultaneously expanded the Democratic caucus and shifted it rightward.

Neither criticism really says what it means to say. Emanuel is, indeed, a fierce partisan, but he also spent years in a chastened Clinton White House working with a newly-ascendant Republican Congress, confident and combative, to move legislation forward. Emanuel has groomed middle-of-the-road Democrats and provided them with the inroads to influence that will ease their re-election, but his own politics are further to the left than most of them. He's no Blue Dog.

What both criticisms really reveal is Emanuel's pragmatic political realism and his determination to win.

Politics ain't beanbag. All those hard-nosed Democrats who feared a teddy bear administration would try to cuddle its partisan enemies and find itself brutally de-fluffed have less reason to worry. Bipartisanship really isn't about airy rhetoric and putting aside the politics of yesterday. The rhetoric has its place in appealing to the masses -- in tandem with Obama's huge grassroots organization, still in place -- to apply pressure from the bottom. But the real work of bipartisanship occurs around conference tables in meeting rooms with stale donuts and cold coffee in paper cups. The real work of bipartisanship is a sometimes ugly game of horse-trading and political pressure and trickery. The real work of bipartisanship needs a guy who knows the corridors of power, knows everybody's secrets. Bipartisanship demands a bad cop, not a good cop.

Sausages and legislation, indeed.

So this appointment doesn't necessarily entail a shift to the center. Then again, maybe it does. That remains to be seen. What it certainly shows is a determination to pass legislation as quickly and competently as possible. Previous Democratic administrations spent the first half of their first term flailing, and Obama's team will inevitably make its share of missteps, too. But if they want to minimize mistakes and and maximize legislative effectiveness, Rahm Emanuel is their guy. Whatever his own colorful personality, he still fits into the larger narrative of a no drama Obama.

Speaking of missteps: Some have suggested that announcing Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff before anybody else and within 48 hours of winning the Presidency was a mistake. Whatever Emanuel's merits his controversial selection is a wobbly first step that might bind Obama's hands from tapping equally-controversial Larry Summers for Treasury. As Noam Scheiber puts it:

It's not just that, if Obama picked Summers, he'd suddenly have two people in very senior positions who don't quite fit his "no drama" mantra. It's that he'd have two people who don't quite fit the "no drama" mold as two of his first appointments. Worse, he'd have two people whose mere announcements (to say nothing of they're actual tenures) stirred up more than a little drama--Rahm because of his public anguishing and Summers because of the lefty mau-mauing he's already inspiring. . . . [Y]ou only want so many bad, appointment-related, news cycles out of the gate.

I think that's wrong. If any President gets a honeymoon in his first hundred days -- and for Obama it might be his first two hundred -- the intensity of press adulation in the first 48 hours is even more staggering. Obama has a huge free pass from the press right now which makes it exactly the time to make controversial choices. Scheiber is right that there's a critical mass of divisive appointments beyond which a negative narrative will stick. But I think it would take more than Emanuel and Summers.

The reaction on the left to Obama's choice of Emanuel -- and mere consideration of Summers -- reminds me of the concern trolling in the week or two in June after Obama sealed the nomination. Many in the progressive blogosphere thought their nominee was betraying the cause of liberalism by abandoning campaign finance reform and not taking a strong stand against FISA. Some were convinced it would bring about Obama's downfall at the polls in November.

Right.

So don't listen to anybody who tries to tell you that the very act of selecting Rahm Emanuel -- or, should he so decide, Larry Summers -- is going to hobble Obama's administration. Hell, Obama doesn't even have an administration yet. Seriously, guys: chill.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Republicans in the Wilderness

2008-11-04T18:11:54Z

Note: I originally posted what follows at The Lion and Gun, about a week ago, as 'The Republican Realignment'. It touches on themes I talked about in my previous post and so I thought it would be worthwhile reproducing here. What better time to post it than on an election day that seems set to hand the Republican party their greatest defeat since 1964? Okay, maybe saying that is a little presumptuous. I don't care. I'm feeling bullish.

Anyway, this article is longish but I hope you find it to be worth the effort!

Ideological change is a gradual, halting, imperfect process. It is less the product of stunning events and influential personalities as it is the slow accumulation of received wisdom over long periods of time. Driving it are deep demographic and generational shifts -- the coming of age of baby boomers; the influx of Hispanics over the past fifty years.

Political parties have a role to play in this process. No party ever perfectly captures the zeitgeist; that is not, after all, the role of parties. They aim to squeeze very different policies out of the same electorate and, in the longer term, to reshape that electorate in their own image. Successful political parties will find a balance between these sometimes contradictory goals: to appeal to the nation as it is and nudge it in the direction that it ought to be.

Parties don't always strike the proper balance. Sometimes a party ensconced in power will overreach, provoking a backlash and prodding voters in precisely the opposite direction. Other times a party will be too cautious, taking up a humble stewardship of the nation -- maybe even finding a great deal of electoral success doing so -- without real leadership or staying true to its goals.

And sometimes a party out of power will cleave so strongly to its grand vision in defiance of all political reality that it is rendered an ideologically pure irrelevance.

The good news is that American big-tent political parties, unlike the kaleidoscope of ideological parties littering European parliaments, exhibit a considerable degree of intellectual flexibility. They constantly reinvent themselves as different factions jockey for power and political leaders play with different strategies. Ideological shifts within a party can occur much more rapidly than within the nation at large.

This, however, can be a double-edged sword.

McCain v. Palin

An ideological shift looms for the Republican Party. The choice of path is perhaps nowhere more obviously displayed than in the increasingly public cleavage between the two halves of the national ticket: John McCain, until recently the darling of the party's moderate wing, and Sarah Palin, evangelical firebrand.

Palin may not know much about national and international affairs -- may even be a 'whack job', as one McCain aide recently described her -- but it is becoming clear to me that early appraisals of her political skill might not have been unfounded. She has a history of using powerful allies for political gain and then screwing them over. A week from now John McCain's political corpse might one more victim of a political black widow. Throwing handler-in-chief Nicole Wallace under the bus is simply the most recent in a long line of attacks against her own campaign. By now it's as clear to the public as it is to the pundits and campaign insiders: Sarah Palin is no longer running for Vice-President in 2008. She's running for President in 2012.

But this is not just a tale of personal ambition; it's a battle for the heart of the Republican Party. The lines might have been drawn before 2006, but it's only now that the faithful are lining up on either side. And if Rush Limbaugh and former Bush aide Jim Nuzzo are to be believed, it will be attitudes toward Palin that will determine which side an activist is on.

Before I continue I should make this clear: I don't mean to imply that Palin will definitely be the nominee in 2012, nor even that she'll be the leader of the Republican right's forces -- although she's better positioned for both than anybody else. It's impossible to say what will happen in the next four years. Obama could tank; there could be a serious foreign policy crisis or natural disaster; there could be a rising star in the GOP that eclipses the governor of Alaska; there could be a battle between Palin, Huckabee, and Jindal (maybe others) for leadership of the right; or the conservative base could split allowing another moderate to claim leadership. There are simply too many imponderables. Hell, even the great cleavage between moderates and conservatives might not come to be, or it might be reshaped in the aftermath of this election.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that in the coming weeks recriminations between Palin and McCain camps, and the conservative and moderate wings of the party, will grow more acute.

The Small Tent

The question defining this debate should be, 'What went wrong?' The fractured state of the ticket, however, lends itself to a kind of fruitless simplification that changes the question to, 'Who's to blame?' That debate precludes, in the short run, the kind of compromise that has held the two wings of the party together since at least the days of Goldwater. True, the moderate wing has issued a great deal of thoughtful reflection in recent days -- and the ideological diversity of these 'moderates' (I'm use the term loosely and for lack of anything better) shows how many factions the self-defined conservative base wants to kick out of the big tent.

There's the rub. Rush Limbaugh can say that the McCain campaign failed because '[g]oing after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint;' he can say the loss proves the 'Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work' and call for Sarah Palin to be made the head of the party. He and base conservatives can simply say, 'It's McCain's fault.'

Surely plenty of moderates will be happy to blame the loss at least in part on Palin. But this false dichotomy, McCain or Palin, ignores a lot of the real reasons for Republican failure (some of which, admittedly, were beyond their control): an unpopular President, a tanking economy, an exciting challenger. McCain's campaign really was poorly run. And Palin was a liability -- but then so was the man at the top of the ticket.

Those demographic trends I mentioned at the top of this post mean that Republicans are going to have to refine and sharpen their message. That's the business that ought to be at hand. Instead, if the right gets its way, there will be an argument over blame. All of the failures and challenges and the lessons they impart will be forgotten. And there's no reason to think that won't happen.

After all, blaming the loss on McCain -- and, by extension, moderates -- is easy. It doesn't force self-examination or a confrontation with error. It confirms the biases and proclivities of conservative Republicans. It provides the satisfaction of saying, 'I told you so.' And, perhaps most importantly, it provides the leverage Sarah Palin and party leaders who (perhaps foolishly) wish to make her their tool need to take over the party from more politically pragmatic but less ideologically pure types.

The big tent will be no more. The party four years from now will be as ideologically straight-jacketed as it was in 1964, but instead of representing a rising new force in American politics it will be propping up the corpse of a long-withered idea. In some ways, then, Palin is the anti-Goldwater: the perverted monstrosity of a conservatism let go to rot; the last voice in a fifty-year game of Chinese whispers.

Some see the party reforming itself as a shrill populist scream against modernity: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-Wall Street, anti-trade. In Palin Republicans will have 'a populist, far-right politician with intense celebrity appeal.'

Barring unforeseen Democrat disaster, they won't have a chance in hell.

The strategy is to play for culturally conservative anti-government independents and neocons while ginning up the social conservative and evangelical base -- a coalition of Kaganites, Dobbsicrats, and Limbaughblicans. But in order to win the party will still need its small-government conservatives, its libertarians, its foreign policy realists. It will increasingly need to reach out to pro-choice moderates, to minorities, to today's youth. It will have to persuade moderates that failed to support it this time to change their minds.

The Palin plan explicitly does none of that. It is more likely to drive those voters away. And if Rush Limbaugh is to be believed, that's the point.

Democrats Rising

There is an opening here for a smart, flexible, and pragmatic Democratic administration. If a President Obama proves himself an appealing leader and the party can present a coherent ideology that allows room for defecting small-government, low-tax, and realist Republicans, Democrats can build the kind of broad electoral consensus that's existed on the right since at least 1980 --and that Democrats shepherded in the generation beginning with Roosevelt. They can positively reshape an America that is demographically trending in their direction anyway. They can really shit American ideology. The center-right nation can become center-left.

It won't be easy. A President Obama will face the greatest financial crisis, and probably the longest and deepest recession, since the Great Depression. He'll have to manage two wars and the threat of Islamic terrorism. He will rule a nation that remains, even with a Democratic landslide, more partisan than it's ever been. Yet Franklin Roosevelt faced equally great challenges and triumphed. And Barack Obama's centrist consensus-building, though bound to disappoint many progressives, is probably the stuff we need right now to make it through this mess.

I have no illusions about a permanent Democratic majority. Even if the party makes it through the next four years unscathed -- and the GOP spends that time eating its own head -- Soren Dayton is right when he says that the Republican party will eventually heal its wounds. Conservatism will reemerge, undoubtedly in a new form, and will eventually be ascendant once again. In the meantime a successful Democratic party could force Republicans to move to the middle as they did with Eisenhower and as Dems did with Clinton.

This is no vast shift in American consciousness. Ideological change will remain a gradual, halting, imperfect process. The rosiest future for Democrats has a marginally-left-of-center populace supporting a marginally more left-of-center government. America will still be America. It certainly won't be Sweden. And even that small degree of change is not foreordained. Much will depend on how a President Obama handles the challenges placed before him.

Much more may depend on who wins the heart of the Republican Party.

Photo provided under a Creative Commons license by rev_bri

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Populism, Palin, and the Plumber

2008-11-03T19:43:40Z

So I just finished watching a Sarah Palin rally and what was striking to me was the reception every mention of Joe the Plumber got. The cheers for this guy, who has come to represent the quintessential everyman, are positively greater than the cheers for Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. And this has been somewhat puzzling to me.

But I think I understand it now.

Republicans have been using populist rhetoric to great effect since the days of Joe McCarthy. The success of these appeals to the common man from the party of big business has flummoxed some liberals and disheartened others. Many progressives see in it a disingenuous rejection of 'liberal elitism' and a manipulative attempt to prove that Republicans understand average Americans in a way ivory tower Democrats don't. And of course Republican populist rhetoric does both of those things -- which has spurred many a liberal to hide from his Rhodes scholarship and tell folks he feels their pain.

But this is a misunderstanding, or at least an incomplete understanding. Populist rhetoric is not a simple rejection of pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers; it is an affirmation of the greater wisdom of the people. When Sarah Palin talks about Joe the Plumber's response to Obama's plans to 'spread the wealth' she is not just attacking the skewed values or intellectual elitism of liberal types. She is telling the people in the audience that Joe -- the everyman, the audience itself -- is damned smarter than all the liberal think tanks in Washington combined. When it comes to what's right for the nation, truly Joe knows best.

Plenty of liberals, in the shadow of Richard Hofstadter, think that this conservative anti-intellectualism springs from economic insecurity or status anxiety or the politics of resentment -- that people are, to use Barack Obama's unfortunate phrasing, 'bitter'. And there is some truth in that. But it doesn't give the coherence of populist sentiment, which has run long and deep in American politics, its proper due.

Populism envisions the problems facing society holistically: big government and big business and big labor are all variations on a theme. It is The System that poses a threat to liberty and well-being, and since elite educational institutions are well ensconced within The System, the graduates they produce are by their nature System Men. Only the wisdom of 'real' people can properly reform government; this therefore requires a rejection of the product of America's finest schools.

Republicans have drawn on populist rhetoric for decades but have never exactly been a populist party. Mike Huckabee was the first major Republican candidate in recent memory (possibly ever) who was a true populist with a truly populist program. Sarah Palin is cut from the same cloth. Unlike previous Republican lights she is not a System Man with a better than usual understanding of, and appreciation for, common wisdom. She really isn't a product of those elite institutions. She really did begin her political career in the PTA. She really is a hockey mom.

The possibility of a populist takeover of the Republican party has probably increased since the collapse of the banking industry. Certainly the McCain campaign has made much hay out of populist rhetoric in recent weeks. Of course, McCain's platform -- and McCain himself -- is decidedly not populist, but Sarah Palin represents a possibility for 2012. A populist GOP would stoke the fires of the culture wars, adopt a more aggressively anti-big business stance, grow increasingly critical of free trade, and emphasize anti-immigration and low tax planks in its platform. It would, as I have suggested before, create a new Small Tent coalition of Dobbsicrats and Limbaughblicans.

I doubt it would be a winning strategy, but that might change depending on the length and severity of the coming recession and the (perceived) effectiveness of an Obama administration's efforts to combat it. Regardless, it could provoke a significant shift in American politics. Democrats could pick off disaffected pro-business and libertarian Republicans by reorienting the party pragmatically and technocratically: return, in a way, to the party's Niebuhran skepticism in the 1940s which proffered big government, big business, and big labor as essential checks against one another. Conversely, if such a Republican strategy proved successful, it could provoke a further rightward drift in American politics over the longer term.

I want to assert emphatically that I'm considering hypotheticals here; I'm not suggesting any of this will happen. And it's honestly not something I've pondered at great length. In a way I'm thinking out loud. But it's a topic I expect I'll return to in the future, and in the meantime I'd appreciate your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo provided under a CC license by Rona Proudfoot

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

Racism and the Right

2008-11-01T04:21:31Z

Republicans cannot attack Senator Obama without running the risk of racializing the debate, whether that helps them or not: such is their conundrum. In this they are partly the victims of circumstance. But they are also the victims of their own success.

There's an interesting discussion taking place between Ross Douthat and Matt Yglesias (and Douthat again) about the role of race in this election. Is it true that normally acceptable political attacks (to the degree political attacks are acceptable) have been rendered anathema by Obama's race? If so, is that justified? In other words, is it too much to read race into so many of McCain's ads?

I think Matt is essentially right when he says:

Well, obviously you could read just about anything as a coded racist appeal. And I think a case could be made that you'd be right to.

It's no great revelation to say that political attacks can have more than one meaning; nor is it a great revelation to suggest that many Republican attacks, past and present, have had coded racist appeals. On the other hand, it is reasonable for Republicans to complain if attacks which weren't intended to be racist are being painted as such by the other side. It's entirely possible that Republicans, realizing the sensitivity of the issue of race in this election (and seeing what it did to Senator Clinton's campaign in the run-up to South Carolina), have been approaching the subject gingerly. It's possible that they are creating their ads in good faith -- well, at least as far as race is concerned -- and feel genuinely frustrated to see everything they do twisted back to the question of skin color.

I'm not saying that's probable, but it's possible. I honestly don't know. But Michael Goldfarb's refusal yesterday to utter Jeremiah Wright's name shows at least a recognition of the racial minefield the McCain campaign is now navigating.

What it comes down to is this: Regardless of who it advantages and what their intentions, Republicans cannot attack Senator Obama without running the risk of racializing the debate. This is their conundrum. And they are partly the victims of circumstance -- but also victims of their own success.

* * *

Humans haven't emerged as far from the jungles as we'd like to believe. Buried within each of us are our most ancient ancestors' animalistic fears. From the age of Pericles to the age of McCain political attacks, at least the good ones, have exploited those fears to compel people to action. But it's not just politicians who exploit people thus: it can be anybody, really, who wants to exert power over others. In this way racists across the history of America have manipulated otherwise rational people to believe (and sometimes do) terrible things.

To that extent today's Republicans are victims of coincidence. Their ads are 'racist' because they are of a kind with racist appeals. That is not, however, particularly remarkable. The above suggests that at root politicians and white supremacists share very similar goals -- influencing others to believe and do what they is perceived as right or necessary -- so it is not surprising that they sometimes draw from the same toolbox. That doesn't make the tools, and by extension the politicians that use them, racist or immoral. (Either might be racist or immoral for other reasons, of course.)

But the racist appeal of Republican attacks goes further than just coincidence.

Now, I'm no linguist, but I think it's fair to say that words aren't conjured out of thin air and imparted upon humanity in a pure and unchanging form. Words mean what we want them to mean, and that meaning, both denotation and connotation, will change over time. If meaning is, in one sense, a bundle of associations, then clever people can -- with much hard work over many years -- change the meanings of words by changing their associations.

Since at least the 1960s Republicans have done precisely that. They have understood that for many Americans racialist fears are a direct pathway to that dark unconscious which all effective political attacks strive to touch. And so Republicans have spent decades tying liberal candidates and liberal ideas to 'blackness'. They did it with welfare, they did it with crime. They tied 'Muslim' with 'terrorist'. Now they're blackening taxes. Says Eric Rauchway (by way of Crooked Timber):

Republican voters - richer voters - are less willing to see the federal government [use its authority to help African-Americans]; Democratic voters - poorer voters - are more willing to see the federal government acting that way among blacks. So you look exclusively at income inequality in the South and you say aha! - it's rational politics. If richer whites are more likely to vote Republican, it's because they don't want their taxes raised. They don't want their money taken away; they're strictly protecting their economic interest. That's an incomplete story. You have to say they don't want their money taken away because they are afraid that it will be given to black people.

As I've said, it is entirely possible -- again, I don't know -- that Schmidt et al. are trying to avoid racism in their attacks. Certainly almost everything they've said about Obama they would have said about a white candidate, and maybe more. But then Republicans have been 'blackening' white candidates for years. That's what I meant when I said above that Republicans are victims of their own success: They've managed to turn political attacks, even mundane policy attacks, into coded racial appeals. There are good reasons to believe that in this electoral cycle they don't always want that to be the case, but it's too late now. When Republicans say 'welfare', many people think 'black' -- and many others see that for what it is.

So I think it's hasty to rush to judgment, to blithely brand the McCain campaign racist. They may or may not be racist in intent. And the tactics they employ are not only racist. But racism is an indelible element of their attacks. To some degree this is due to the unhappy, but not necessarily immoral, congruence of boilerplate political attacks and racist fear-mongering. But to a great extent today's crop of Republicans are reaping the rotten fruits of their own party's harvest.

Thanks for reading. If you found this post valuable I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd click 'recommend'! I'd also love to hear your thoughts in the comments below -- see you there.

McCarthy/McCain: The Lattimore Connection

2008-10-31T01:51:24Z

Owen Lattimore was one of America's best-respected scholars of east Asian civilization. For more than a decade he directed the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University; for years he sat on the board of the Institute of Pacific Relations and edited its journal, Pacific Affairs. He was dispatched by Presidents to collaborate with allies and advise foreign heads of state. He was a liberal technocrat disposed to embracing controversial points of view.

In all this the arc of Lattimore's life traces a similar line to Rashid Khalidi's.

Both are the kind of men reviled by many on the right -- refined in taste, scholarly in habit, esoteric in thought, internationalist in point of view. In Lattimore's day they were called 'pin-stripe men' by their detractors; today it's 'liberal elitists'. Both Lattimore and Khalidi attracted the scorn of self-proclaimed patriots because of their foreign sympathies: Khalidi for his support of Palestinians, Lattimore for his tolerance of Chinese communists. Both were murkily associated in conservative minds with ostensible traitors selling out American interests abroad, leaving Israel vulnerable to hostile neighbors or allowing China to fall into Mao's hands. Both were accused of conspiring with the forces that seemed to pose the greatest existential threat to America at the time, terrorism and communism. Both men were subject to angry denunciations by writers at the National Review.

Both now share something else in common: their names and reputations have been publicly dragged through the mud by unscrupulous politicians looking to advance their careers. John McCain and his campaign underlings are accusing Dr. Khalidi of anti-Semitism and trying to link him with Arab terrorists. Dr. Lattimore's accuser called him the 'top Soviet agent' and dragged him before Congress to testify.

The ambitious Senator who called Lattimore a spy was a previously little-known freshman from Wisconsin named Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Lattimore was his first high-profile victim. It was McCarthy's accusations against Lattimore that prompted Herbert Block to coin the term 'McCarthyism'.

Fifty-odd years later the term is used pretty liberally and usually incorrectly. What is happening today is literally its definition.

It is to these depths that Senator McCain has sunk.

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NYT's Nagourney Rides the Tire Swing

2008-10-24T15:37:21Z

Adam Nagourney in the New York Times does some heavy lifting for the McCain campaign this morning:

"The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000," said Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain's chief strategist. "We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up."

This is demonstrably false. From Pollster.com:

Al Gore was down about three points a week before the election; McCain right now is down by eight -- more than double the margin. Then there's this:

"It's an uphill battle," said Karl Rove, who was the chief strategist for President Bush going back to Mr. Bush's first run for governor in 1994. "But I remember seven days out from the Texas gubernatorial race, and everybody was like, 'It's all over, we're cooked!' And we won by seven points."

A quick search of the New York Times' archives put this one to rest. Incumbent Ann Richards and George W. Bush were neck-and-neck two months out; after that Bush's lead opened up which didn't begin to tighten until the campaign's final days.

Nagourney then lays out combinations of states that could win McCain the Presidency without pointing out that a good half of them, with Obama ahead by double-digit leads, are unattainable for the Republican in anything resembling the real world. He goes on to ponder the impact of the Republicans' recent emphasis on taxes and Joe Biden's ostensible gaffe:

Both have entered the campaign dialogue, and it is probably a little too early to tell whether they will have the impact that Mr. McCain hopes they will.

But even conservatives lament that Biden's 'gaffe' is unlikely to hurt the Democratic ticket, and there is demonstrable evidence that the tax attack -- which has been on-going for more than a week now -- has backfired for the Republicans. Then:

Pollsters say there has never been a year when polling has been so problematic, given the uncertainty of who is going to vote in what is shaping up as an electorate larger than ever.

The polling problems Nagourney mentions amount to estimating black and youth turnout -- and almost all pollsters have responded by being very conservative in their estimates. If polling is off because of 'uncertainty of who is going to vote', that probably means Obama's margins are being understated.

While most national polls give Mr. Obama a relatively comfortable lead, in many statewide polls, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are much more closely matched.

Surely there are outliers here and there, but those can and ought to be ignored. What does that leave? What states would Mr. Nagourney be talking about? Most battleground states right now are running ahead of Obama's national polling -- in other words, the margins are wider for Obama. Maybe not in places like Indiana and North Carolina, but those aren't supposed to be battleground states -- they're supposed to be (and until a few weeks ago were) solidly for McCain. Pointing out that Obama isn't ahead by much in states that should be part of McCain's base isn't an argument that the election is closer than national polling suggests.

There's almost nothing in this article which isn't either demonstrably false or a significant distortion of reality. Look, for Democrats it's better that articles like this come out -- complacency is our biggest enemy. And it's not like McCain needs good news for fundraising these days. Nevertheless, this article amounts to nothing beyond a recitation of a McCain talking points memo with no attempt to ferret out, you know, truth. It's pretty shocking when some idiot with a laptop and an hour to spare can do more a more thorough job of fact-checking than the mighty New York Times.

But then the facts wouldn't tell a very interesting story, would they?

WSJ Poll: Obama More Trusted on Taxes

2008-10-23T18:12:00Z

In 2004 the Bush campaign famously took a rival's positive -- John Kerry's military career -- and turned it into a negative. This cycle the Obama campaign has succeeded in the arguably more difficult task of turning a negative into a positive. From the Wall Street Journal:

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that, when asked who would better handle the issue of taxes -- the one area where the Republican nominee once had an edge -- 48% said Sen. Barack Obama, and 34% said McCain. Earlier this month the candidates were tied on the issue and just a month ago McCain was leading.

Obama's decision to emphasize his middle class tax cuts in the debates took head-on what voters typically perceive as a losing argument for Democrats. As with foreign policy, his campaign has shown a willingness to tackle issues Dems normally shy away from; they've done so with the confidence that they can convince the American people they have the better side of the debate. Now after weeks of hearing the arguments on both sides voters are saying, loud and clear: I am not Joe the Plumber.