http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ en-us aaron@etchouse.com 2008-10-03T18:15:28-06:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001616.html I sure is looking like Barack Obama's going to be the next president, and I'd wager that John McCain's decision to pick a know-nothing beauty queen as his running mate will be seen as a bad move in retrospect, doggone it. This leaves two jobs undone for the American Left. The first is to push to the finish line on this year's competitive congressional races -- particularly the Senate campaigns in Minnesota, Mississippi, Oregon and North Carolina. The second is to destroy Sarah Palin. Think about where this woman has been and where she will go after the election. Until the last few days of August, no one outside of Alaska and a slim band of right-wing crazies had heard of her. She got about a week in the spotlight, a couple weeks in hiding, and then a couple of the worst weeks any candidate has ever had. Now that the VP debate has passed, she probably won't come up for much air for the rest of the campaign. Then what? Her first priority will be surviving Troopergate; then is will be re-election in 2010. Meanwhile, President Obama is going to inherit the worst conditions of anybody since Carter, and maybe FDR. I think it's just about dead certain that Palin -- assuming she gets through the next couple years -- will run for the GOP nomination in 2012. She remains popular in crazy baseland -- Rich Lowry all but said her debate performance made him hard -- and when she re-emerges in the summer of 2011, she'll have spent three years preparing for the campaign. She'll have name recognition and base popularity, and she won't sound like a high-school drop-out anymore. No one will remember much about her five weeks in the public eye in 2008, except that the 2012 version doesn't look like the stories they're hearing. The thing is, she won't be any more prepared to be president. She won't be any smarter, more curious or more engaged with the issues. She will be just as dangerous. She may also be more appealing to the core of the Republican party than Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. What we need to understand is that destroying her now is the only sure way to keep this from happening. Hammer McCain too, of course, but hammer him also through her. 1616@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:43 -06:00 Politics 2008-10-03T18:15:28-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001609.html Imagine if, instead of having on-court officials, NBA games were played like street games -- you call your own fouls. Fans watching at home would undoubtedly get into heated disputes about whether contact was made on a particular play, and if so, how much was too much. The sports press would talk about which players tend to honest about their calls, who tends to take dives, and so on. They'd also probably spend a lot of time looking at replays, doing Around the Horn-type discussions about particular plays, and generally presenting the basketball-following public with a framework through which to understand this now-odd sport. Now let's say one day in this alternate NBA, Kermit Washington coldcocks Rudy Tomjanovich. Literally adding insult to injury, he flat-out refuses to acknowledge the act as call-worthy. With nobody in a position of authority over the contest, there's nothing to do but continue playing, careful to avoid the bloody and near-dead Tomjanovich lying in the middle of the court. I put it to you that Kermit Washington is running for president on the Republican ticket, and that he's counting on our traditional reliance on the honor system to keep anyone from noticing what he's done. The question of what is the motivating drive of campaign journalism is the absolutely central issue to the mockery John McCain is making of this election. Every word out of his campaign -- whether from him, Sarah Palin or one of his surrogates -- is a bald-faced lie. If the point of campaign journalism is to inform voters, they need to confront this garbage much more strongly than they have been; indeed, that the fairly tepid response to McCain "stretching the truth" has been so well received in the liberal blogosphere is kind of embarrassing. McCain is lying to the public about anything and everything, constantly; a press that doesn't point this out in unambiguous terms is helping him. 1609@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-09-14T20:44:38-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001599.html Throughout the convention, ads for DividedWeFail.org and HarryAndLouiseReturn.com have been running on Comedy Central (and probably elsewhere, but I've been watching all my actual convention coverage on C-SPAN and PBS). These ads, respectively, admonish viewers to "demand action" on health care and tell the next president to "make it happen." The balls it takes for the actors from the original Harry and Louise ads, and some of their original sponsors, to reprise this foolishness would make Stephen Colbert jealous. The ads that ran in 1993 were integral to killing the Clinton health care plan, and they salted the earth in their wake. Their scare-mongering then led directly to the problems they cite in the new ads now. DividedWeFail.org's ads are, if anything, stupider and more simplistic. They're being run by the AARP, fresh off getting played by the Bush Adminstration on the Medicare Part D bill. Not surprisingly, they show the same kind of political acumen as John McCain, who's suggested the best solution to the Iraq War is to "sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’" Guess what, you schmucks. Republicans don't want a government health care solution, and they don't particularly care about pushing the private sector into doing anything that might cost them money. This is simply not something that there is a bipartisan consensus for. On top of that, health insurance companies will fight for their very existence against real health care reform. If you want something to be done about the number of uninsured, underinsured and "insured" who can't actually get care, you need to elect more and better Democrats. You need to create a mandate for a health care reform that doesn't strengthen the profit motive. The obstacle to this is not "partisan bickering," it is Republicans. Barack Obama gave his first partisan speech of the campaign tonight (making Mark Warner's horrible keynote all the odder), and I hope it's a prelude to him campaigning with the convention's other partisan warriors (more Bill Richardson, please) and for other Democrats (Oregon Senate candidate Jeff Merkley, Washington House candidate Darcy Burner, Connecticut House candidate Jim Himes, etc.). I think Obama has finally come to realize that whatever his movement is now, it can't survive outside the womb of the campaign without folding into the party. It will soon become apparent to a lot of people that Barack Obama's election is not America's redemption; rather, America's redemption can come from Obama's administration, and what he can accomplish with a strong Democratic Congress. 1599@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-08-28T22:29:24-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001598.html Last night, Bill Clinton demonstrated the real value of political experience -- it's not that it makes you a better decision-maker or a wiser crafter of policy, it's that it makes you better able to see where the contours of power are. And while they exist around individuals, they are much stronger around parties and ideologies. In Clinton's speech, George Bush and John McCain are symptoms of a disease called conservatism. This passage is the most important thing anyone has said at this convention: On the two great questions of this election — how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world — [John McCain] still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years. And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren't as hard-core Democrats as we, it's a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened. They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families' incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance. Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same. ... They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more. In just a couple minutes he articulated an argument that had nothing to do with Obama in particular, and little to do with Bush or McCain in particular, but was all about electing Obama, defeating McCain and expanding the Democratic majorities in Congress. But he fucked it all up by leading in talking about what a great guy John McCain is: The Republicans will nominate a good man who served our country heroically and suffered terribly in Vietnam. He loves our country every bit as much as we all do. As a Senator, he has shown his independence on several issues. Later, Joe Biden gave a solid speech, making quite a few pointed attacks on McCain. Unfortunately, he undercut himself as well: John McCain is my friend. We've known each other for three decades. We've traveled the world together. It's a friendship that goes beyond politics. And the personal courage and heroism John demonstrated still amaze me. It seems that as the convention goes on, John McCain becomes a better and better man and friend of various high-ranking Democrats. So, a request to Howard Dean, Al Gore, Barack Obama and all of tonight's speakers: Please ask your friend John McCain to vacate the premises so that dangerous warmonger John McCain can be brought in for our examination. This man is not your friend, this man is "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." This man is eating cake while New Orleans drowns. This man is overturning Roe and opposing the Ledbetter Act. This man is privatizing Social Security. If this man is your friend, and the harshest thing you can think of to say about him is that he's got seven or eight or twelve houses, kindly piss off. Some of us are trying to save this country and you're not helping. 1598@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-08-28T09:29:14-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001597.html So this month has been ridiculously busy, and I've been sitting on a bunch of Toadies clips from late July that hopefully will be coming out imminently. But right now I'm watching Unity Night at the DNC, and for fuck's sake, I'm seeing another opportunity get pissed away by party leaders that simply refuse to understand the reality before them. This night at the convention is being billed as all about Hillary Clinton's speech, but the unity that's really being sold by the likes of Mark Warner, Deval Patrick and Brian Schweitzer is much darker. There are two words that are not being used nearly enough by any of tonight's speakers. The first is "Democrats" and the second is "Republicans." Speaker after speaker is going hard after McCain as an individual, and tying him to George Bush, and talking about "those folks in the White House" -- and hey, did you hear that McCain has a lot of houses or something? -- without even alluding to the fact that these people represent an entire party that holds the same or worse views on all the issues being discussed tonight. Without mentioning that a vote for a reasonable Republican House candidate is a vote for John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Without mentioning that the Senate remains the biggest hurdle to making real, effective change -- in fact, the closest to any such mention was Barbara Boxer telling us that "60 is the new 50," though that's only true as long as Harry Reid feels that Republicans don't need to actually do their filibusters. Right now Schweitzer is telling various delegations to "stand up," which I think is meant to be a big, dramatic moment, and he's just made one of the night's few (and fairly oblique) references to Iraq, but the message of this night and the convention so far is this: Obama is change, and he apparently doesn't need any help. But the fact is, your national GOP will keep on keepin' on whether Obama or McCain becomes president in January. Bipartisanship, particularly on the campaign trail, is simply not a luxury one party can afford when the other isn't on board. Seeing this happen, again, now, is like a slow-motion daydream: We did this in 1992. To be honest, the results that were borne out in Bill Clinton's first term were probably my most important formative experience with politics, but it was hardly the only example of the modern Democratic Party getting played and torn apart. Hillary just came out and announced herself as a "proud Democrat"; her second paragraph warned against allowing "another Republican" into the White House. It'd be great if some of her people could take the DNCC people aside and tell them about what happens when you don't party-build. 1597@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-08-26T21:23:34-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001585.html Something kind of amazing happened yesterday. After several days of pregnant silence, Barack Obama released a statement on the reprehensible new FISA legislation that essentially affirms his support for the entire enterprise, minus the retroactive telecom immunity, which he will "try" to remove in the Senate, but will vote for anyway when he can't. Russ Feingold, the man who should've been our nominee, had this to say: The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation. The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration. Republicans, for their part, said that they got more than they even thought possible. The upshot of this is that Obama's biggest and most monolithic source of support in the blogosphere, Daily Kos, is undergoing a sudden case of No One Could've Predicted. E.g.: When it comes time to fight global warming will we be regarded as day-old pill bugs? Sure, there's an election on, but what will be the excuse the next time a corporate giant's income stream is threatened? If Hillary issued the verbatim statement that Obama did, this site would be lit up with FPs and diaries calling her a traitor and worse. And I'm willing to bet that you'd be right up there. what you mention is a huge issue, one that is no different than ending the war or the economy to me. And for posters and diarists here to brush that aside, call Obama and the rest of the capitulators mere "politicians" and state they were merely being "political" is a downright insult to our intelligence. Of course I'll still vote for Obama, but what he said was insulting, and that needs to be recognized. And the only way I know how to tell them about this that will make a dent in their world is to act on my frustration. Meanwhile, long-time DKos editor DHinMI: Seriously, please explain how FISA changed anything like whether one gets a job or whether Obama was supposedly spied on. Can you explain why the initial FISA vote in the House last Summer wasn't a problem for most people, why the Senate vote was, and what two provisions that got added by the Senate made it a problem? Do most of you ranting about FISA even understand what is objectionable, or are you just addicted to histrionics? Guess what, Democrats. This is what Unity looks like, and it's Unityman's party now. Expect many more House votes that pass with the support of all the Republicans and 46% of the Democrats. 1585@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-06-21T11:34:45-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001570.html Mark Blumenthal has a comprehensive response to a London Review of Books piece that suggests, among other things, that the problem with primary polling this year has been too-small sample sizes. This implies a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what sampling is on the part of the author, David Runciman, but it got me thinking in general about how we conceptualize error in public opinion polling and how it might relate to the scattershot nature of this year's polls. First, as Runciman correctly points out, there have been plenty of election-eve polls this year that were totally out of the ballpark, and it appears more than the 5% that should be allowed by the standard margin-of-error application. Zogby famously had Obama winning California by six, and multiple concurrent fieldings of head-to-head match-ups are frequently quite disparate. Indeed, Gallup has gotten dissonant findings from their own two concurrent polls at several points this year. Something is going with the polls, and it goes far beyond the hew and cry of the New Hampshire "debacle" that was addressed ad naseum at AAPOR this year. I think there are a couple of major issues that could easily be addressed just in the way polls are handled in the media. The first is something that Keith Olbermann is already doing, and that he's calling the "Keith Number" because nobody else is bothering to follow his lead. This number is the stated margin of error plus the percentage of undecided voters in the sample; so, a poll with Obama leading McCain 47-44 with an MOE of +/-3 would have a Keith Number of 12. Putting aside for the moment that it should be 15, since the MOE moves in both directions, this is a pretty stark change in the way poll stories are framed. When most polls are reported, undecided voters don't exist, and neither do supporters of third parties, unless and until they make enough noise to force their candidate into the polling instrument. Undecideds are a huge part of the story of why polling has erred so much to the Obama side this year -- Democratic primary voters who decided on the last day tended to support Clinton, and those people would've been undecided when the polling was conducted. Another problem is how strength of support is measured. Some polls include leaners -- that is, soft supporters of one candidate or another -- in the same category is strong supporters. But leaners, quite obviously, are much more likely to switch candidates or wind up not voting than are strong supporters, making their inclusion another important source of potential error. This, too, is some that could be clarified by the media. But polling error goes deeper than that. How is it that polls conducted at the same time, purporting to measure the same thing, can be so different? Something that's almost never acknowledged in the reporting of poll results is the impact of question wording and question order. The order of names within a question can matter, whether the question includes individuals' titles or party affiliation can matter, whether the question is built around the word "vote" or "support" can matter, etc. Can this alone explain the wildly divergent results we've seen in some races? Of course not, but this and other methodological factors -- such as live vs. automated interviewer, etc. -- contribute some error in places that are often kept in shadow. When we compare polls not to other polls but to actual election results, the situation is complicated further. For example, Obama won the Missouri primary by about 11,000 votes out of over 827,000 cast. What is the likelihood that 11,000 Missourians thought about voting in that primary, but ultimately decided not to? To take an even more extreme example, what is the likelihood that 538 Floridians wanted to vote for Al Gore in 2000, but got side-tracked on Election Day and never made it to the polls? Close elections are toss-ups for reasons that are anything but political and may not even have anything to do with individual voters -- bad weather, traffic jams, etc. Given all this potential error, how we discuss poll results is incredibly wrong-headed. While journalists give a nod to the margin of error, swings within it -- particularly swings in which the "lead" changes -- are treated as real events. Political scientists are guilty of this as well, as they try to construct predictive models that account for unaccountably close elections, which for all intents and purposes are ties from a data perspective. What I think is clear from this year's polls is that a) we have a media problems, and b) we have a polling problem. I was glad to see AAPOR talking a lot about it at this year's conference, but I'm somewhat concerned that the focus was so acutely on New Hampshire and journalist education, and not on working towards a set of best practices for public opinion measurement. What's within the power of pollsters is to sample better and measure better, and those ought to be the first steps. 1570@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-05-31T16:37:54-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001533.html In the wake of Geraldine Ferraro's awful comments about Barack Obama being "lucky" to be black, it's worth wondering what to think about the person who said this: If he were white...he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. So who said it? Answer here. 1533@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-03-20T11:50:50-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001526.html The Texas primary has been called for Hillary Clinton; meanwhile, the Texas caucus is still being counted with Obama in the lead. The differential is nearly the same in each contest, about 4%. Same electorate, same candidates, eight-point swing. Does this make sense? Is this ridiculous Texas system the perfect illustration of why our primary model is screwed? In social science, we have an idea called reliability. The idea is that you take different measures of the same thing to be sure you're measuring it right. For instance, I might measure somebody's propensity to use blogs for surveillance reasons -- that is, to observe and follow news stories -- by asking whether they use blogs to "learn how politicians stand on issues" and to "help me make up my mind about things." Using a statistical test, I can find out how much these questions seem to be tapping the same underlying idea (in this case they went with four other items, and had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.844). If an election is meant to provide an estimated measure of the "will of the voters," something is unreliable in Texas -- they're coming up different. I don't mean to say that the outcomes are necessarily statistically different -- 52C-48O and 48C-52O are fairly close -- but that these two processes, ostensibly designed to measure the same thing, appear to have different outcomes. That's kind of crazy! Texas has inadvertently given us a field experiment comparing the caucus and primary processes, and given us different results. I find that very interesting as a social scientists, but as a small-d democrat, I find it both baffling and disturbing. UPDATE: A handful more precincts have reported in, bumping Obama's caucus lead to 12 points with 39% of precincts counted. And that will be it, because the rules in Texas make precinct reports voluntary. But rest assured, superdelegates are the real problem in this system. 1526@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-03-05T13:50:53-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001519.html Hillary Clinton got crushed in Wisconsin and has had a bad February, which makes todays new polls kind of surprising. Keep in mind that, as of a couple days ago, Obama was up 7 in the national polls and that he pulled to within 5 in Texas before Wisconsin's primary. Gallup Daily Tracking: Clinton 45, Obama 44 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics National: Clinton 44, Obama 44 Diageo/The Hotline National: Clinton 45, Obama 43 IVR Tex. Feb 20: Clinton 50, Obama 45 Franklin & Marshall College Penn. Feb 13-18: Clinton 44, Obama 32 Caveats apply, of course, but I think it's clear that there's still a lot of room to move in this race, thanks in large part to proportional delegate allocation. If the Obama backlash is on the horizon, Clinton will get an opening that she's got a decent shot of taking advantage of. Either way, the continued splitting of national Democrats is going to make convention season very interesting. 1519@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-02-21T13:45:34-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001518.html Tomorrow morning I'll walk to Lapham Elementary School and cast a vote for Hillary Clinton to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, making me a hypocrite, a cynic, or worse. I've spent more time and energy going back and forth on this vote than any I've ever cast. However, the fact that I was going back and forth between Clinton and a protest vote for Chris Dodd, who dropped out after securing about four votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, ultimately made the pragmatic decision clear. Having just decided on my choice this weekend, I have spent the past couple days coming around to the idea that I can be OK with this, and not just resigned to it. 1518@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-02-18T23:02:14-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001512.html The Obama people may be causing a certain reaction because we don't generally see major candidate supporters acting the way they do, but political cults are nothing new. Minor and third party candidates manage to generate small ones all the time, and Obama's is by far not the oddest of this cycle. That distinction belongs to Ron Paul, whose people have brought in ridiculous amounts of money (especially compared to the rest of the Republican field), little of which has been spent, to win their guy 16 delegates. Paul ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, so there's been a lot of speculation that he was using the GOP primary to raise his profile, but banking his cash for a third-party run. But yesterday he said: With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties — just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican. I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen. So, he all but acknowledges that he can't win, won't run on the Libertarian ticket, is concerned about being targeted Kucinich-style in his primary, and is probably still sitting on a decent amount of money. Campaign finance laws allow him to transfer funds back to his congressional campaign, I believe, but he's in a pretty safe seat. Meanwhile, not a single one of his heterodox ideas got picked up by the other GOP candidates, who love the war more than ever. So what was the point of his campaign? I really don't get it. It's not like a Tom Vilsack or Jim Gilmore campaign, where they had no shot and figured that out pretty early on. There's something about the strategy that's just not lining up. 1512@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-02-09T09:12:17-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001511.html At some point in the evening, a light is going to shine down and you will have an epiphany and you’ll say, "I have to vote for Barack." This line from Obama, reported at CJR, has been going around for the past couple days, and I wonder if it's the beginning of the end. Getting so close to explicit messianicism in his own words can only help to enhance the perception of his most rabid supporters as a cult. If people -- non-supporters and supporters alike -- are getting ready to start talking about how creepy some in the Obama base are, it's going to be a tough narrative to deal with. That's especially true if it happens now, at a time when Hillary Clinton has suddenly found a swath of small-dollar donors to tap. Whether it's her Super Tuesday showing, her urgent e-mails or more reaction to the MSNBC id, her people are suddenly opening their wallets. I can't imagine hearing that Obama thinks he's Jesus is going to do anything but make them pony up more. 1511@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-02-09T00:34:23-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001504.html One of the most generally overlooked pieces of recent political fiction is Warren Ellis's and Darick Robertson's comic book series Transmetropolitan. In the first major arc of the series, a journalist, Spider Jerusalem, comes out of retirement as a presidential election is just starting to ramp up. This guy had made his name going after the incumbent president -- "The Beast" -- who's up for re-election. The Beast is a mix of the worst caricature of Richard Nixon mixed with the id of some primal force of cynicism -- something remarkably like Dick Cheney, though the series launched in 1997. The Beast was a nihilst, whose only governing philosophy was to keep 51% of the population alive. Running against him is a Senator that Jerusalem calls "The Smiler." He's a charming, young figure, pushing for unity and reconciliation in the wake of the Beast's divisive approach. He gets Jerusalem's endorsement largely on the strength of not being the Beast, but it's not long before Jerusalem discovers the superficial campaign hides and much more authoritarian and power-mad approach than anything the Beast had to offer. It's too late, though; the Smiler wins and Jerusalem unleashes his anger by throwing hand grenades off his balcony. Ellis modeled the Smiler on Tony Blair, New Labour and the Third Way -- an optimistic style and a generational shift at the end of a reign of terror, with no mind being paid to what it all will mean in terms of governing. But I'll be honest: It's hard not to think of the Smiler every time I hear Barack Obama speak. He sounds like a well-meaning man whose greatest quality is that he's Not George Bush. I've been thinking of Obama as a new Jimmy Carter, but maybe Blair is the better analogy. I got on this line of thinking thanks to Avedon who recalls a lot of what the Obama people are expressing coming from young Labourites in 1997, only to see it fizzle as Blair and his party suddenly had to deal with the reality of governing. Avedon, in turn, jumps off this post by Roz Kaveney which ends as such: What I do think is that I would rather have a battered pragmatic public servant than an untried personable spinner of wonderful empty words; I see the idealism that has focussed on [Obama] and I remember how many of my friends had real hope from Blair as opposed to voting for him because it was important to get the Tories out. A Clinton Presidency is going to be unexciting, not especially idealistic and only better by comparison with Bush. But it will break no one's hearts. I look at my friends list and see a lot of wonderful ideals and I worry that Obama will break your hearts if he attains power. I hope that I am wrong. Me too. One way or another, 2008 is probably not going to be the only time he runs for president. 1504@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:44 -06:00 Politics 2008-01-30T21:02:28-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001488.html My guy quit the race after Iowa, so I'm paying a bit more attention to tonight's debate than I have to the others held in recent months. These are some thoughts on it. 8:09 CST - John Edwards looks like he's aged more than four years since the 2004 campaign. I'd hoped he might call bullshit on the "If you know where Osama is" question, which is about as reasonable as ticking clock torture questions, but he didn't. No one's actually talking about nuclear weapons, which is ostensibly what Charlie Gibson's question was about, though even he quickly veered into the bin Laden stuff. 1488@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2008-01-05T20:09:35-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001486.html There's been a lot of talk in the last couple days (and generally over the last few months) about the badness of the Iowa caucus system, but how's this for odd irrelevance? Checking out CNN for full results I find that the caucuses are responsible for choosing 45 Democratic and 37 Republican convention delegates. That's out of totals of 4,049 and 2,380, respectively. Barack Obama, for winning, gets 14 delegates, compared to 13 for Clinton and 12 for Edwards (CNN has Edwards in second, but Iowa has some kind of undemocratic delegate allocation scheme). So, to recap: about six months of light campaigning, about three months of heavy campaigning, about three months of really heavy campaigning, tens of millions of dollars, dozens of columns from east coast pundits about how "real" Iowans are, a couple handfuls of petty scandals, and a one-delegate lead for Obama that will be spun as several orders of magnitude more important. (While I was writing this post, CNN took down their projected delegate allocations, but I dare say the point still stands even if Obama heads to New Hampshire with, for example, a four-delegate lead.) 1486@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2008-01-03T21:22:46-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001481.html Matthew Yglesias links to a New Republic essay on the "new atheism," and agrees that it is self-defeating: In a raw power struggle between people who, like Harris, want public schools "announce the death of God" and those who want them to indoctrinate us all in the Gospel, the numbers aren't on the side of the non-believers and the outcome is unlikely to be a happy one for anyone. The liberal consensus, by contrast, has served the country well and undermining it from the point of view of ideological atheism is really no better than undermining it from any other direction. This is essentially a version of the backlash argument that "serious" liberals have used to undermine their "fringe" compatriots for the past several decades. It derives, I suspect, from the fruits of the Nixon era, and all the Brokaw-ian beliefs that certain liberals hold about 1968. As the story goes, the country turned to the right as a result of all those dirty fucking hippies that behaved so horribly at the Democratic National Convention, among other places. Since then, leftist "extremism" has been the boogeyman that has scared the Democratic Party toward the center and allowed the Republicans to push ever rightward in response. Thus, countenancing the idea that secular society ought to be, in practice, secular, is seen as the kind of thing likely to destroy the liberal consensus and take tolerance of atheism with it. This is sort of ridiculous on its face, as atheism has simply never had a seat at the liberal consensus table in the United States -- this was, for decades if not centuries, a passively Christian society until very recently. When people began to suggest that the First Amendment had something to say about that, things moved toward secularism for the most part, and the Christianists dug in their heels. This is a lot like what happened leading up to 1968, when blacks, women and other political minorities stood up and demanded to be given their due. What people tend to forget about 1968 and how horrible it all was for the Left, is that a lot of what was sought was achieved back then. The way it was achieved was by fighting for it. Similarly, respect for secularism won't be achieved by people who pretend that secularism doesn't matter or who are afraid to acknowledge their own beliefs, as well as the logic behind them. And if you don't like the tone being taken by activists without much to lose individually, maybe you should hook up with the national political leaders who actively support secularism, particularly when it comes to issues like the Pledge of Allegiance court case. Actually, there aren't any of those, but thank God for that liberal consensus, eh? 1481@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-12-17T14:33:50-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001472.html My students read about the selling of the Iraq War last week, and I spent some time looking for old polling data so I could describe the public opinion context in which all this stuff was happening. In so doing, I found that the context of 2003 -- pretty strong support for the invasion, but only if the UN comes along for the ride -- was itself made more interesting by the context of 1998. Check this out: FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Nov. 11-12, 1998. N=904 registered voters nationwide. "Do you think the United States should use prolonged military force in response to Iraq's refusal to allow weapons inspections?" Yes 61 No 24 Not sure 15 CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Nov. 13-15, 1998. N=1,039 adults nationwide. "Which one of the following possible goals do you think should be the specific goal of any U.S. attack on Iraq at this time: to pressure Iraq into complying with United Nations weapons inspections, OR, to remove Saddam Hussein from power?" Pressure Iraq 25 Remove Saddam 70 Other (vol.) 3 No opinion 2 Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll. Dec. 16, 1998, 6-9 PM EST. N=543 adults nationwide. "Do you think this attack will or will not achieve significant goals for the United States?" Will 48 Will not 32 No opinion 20 CBS News Poll. Dec. 16, 1998. N=413 adults nationwide. "Do you think getting Saddam Hussein to comply with United Nations weapons inspectors is worth the potential loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?" Worth costs 62 Not worth it 25 Don't know/No answer 13 It's also worth noting that there was a lot of polling relating this matter to the Clinton impeachment, and that majorities consistently did not buy the "Wag the Dog" line -- that Clinton was just trying to distract us -- and did want the impeachment put on hold. Shockingly, many of the same Republicans who are in power today had no problem with impeaching Bill Clinton while our troops were in the field. Anyway, while the rhetoric of the crazy days of 2002 was certainly different from that of 1998, I do find it interesting that public opinion wasn't really all that different. 1472@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-11-06T21:17:37-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001470.html This month's Daily Kos straw poll is happening today, and as it stands Chris Dodd is up to 21% from 7% in September, running second to John Edwards at 31%. His gains appear to have come largely at the expense of Edwards (down 8%) and Barack Obama (down 5%), and are almost certainly reflective of fundraising gains as well -- I threw him another $25 at our last wireless sit-down in Vancouver. This isn't a particularly surprising result, and it's a welcome one; Dodd's the only candidate that's actually strongly pushing for the agenda that the Democrats ran on last fall, and he's in a position to do something about it as a sitting Senator. Perhaps not coincidentally, approval polls for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have also been posted today at DKos -- they're at 12% and 10%, respectively. 1470@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-10-22T14:41:13-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001467.html About a month ago I gave $25 to the Chris Dodd campaign, and added support for Dodd to my Facebook profile. The reason is that he started to be extremely vocal about getting us out of Iraq right away, and also started to make waves about it in the Senate. Unlike Bill Richardson, who has the same approach to Iraq but the worst campaigning style in history and a tendency to sell out domestic Democratic principles, or Dennis Kucinich, who is an elf and a flip-flopper on reproductive rights, Dodd is right on basically all the issues (I hate his national service proposal, but I'm sure it would be a legislative non-starter). He's showing it now by placing a hold on the completely unconscionable bill to retroactively immunize telecom companies for working with the Bush Administration to illegally wiretap American phones and computer networks, and he may get some more money from me for it, depending on how much this Vancouver trip winds up costing. I'm not the only one to fall under the sway of the senior Senator from Connecticut -- he leapt from 2% to 7% in the latest Daily Kos straw poll, and got some public support from Kos himself. This has yet to translate into real world polling support, however, as Richardson's online support eventually did. I have to wonder if there's still time for Dodd -- Richardson broke through into double digits after the bloom was off his online support rose, and he's still there in some polls. With any luck, his pushback on the telecom thing will be enough to break him into some mainstream attention, or at least get him more free airtime on Sunday mornings and in the horribly structured "debates." I'm not prepared to say I'll vote for him yet -- he may not even be in the race anymore once it gets to Wisconsin -- but he's the only candidate that doesn't have a big strike against him in my book, and maybe the only hedge against me writing in Al Gore. 1467@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-10-20T13:01:43-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/001462.html A couple weeks ago, Esther Thorson from the University of Missouri was here to give a talk about the decline of American newspapers. Like most such talks in the academy, it was full of concerns over structural changes in American political media and awful it is that nobody wants to have a civil discussion anymore, etc. In the Q&A, one of our professors raised the idea that perhaps we're not turning away from the traditional press because we want an ideologically-driven one, but because we don't really care about "the news" and we never have. This comment got me wondering something else -- why don't these discussions ever contain any suggestion that there has been a dramatic drop in the quality of American political reporting over the past two decades? There are perfectly understandable practical reasons for this, to be sure, the big one being that even the most scientifically rigorous analysis will be at least a little bit subjective, and thus open to being dismissed by partisan critics. But so what? Social science findings are frequently controversial, both inside and outside the academy. I'm posting this because a couple recent comments by Matthew Yglesias have really gotten me thinking closely about the quality issue and the extent to which journalists and the audience view it differently. As he notes as part of an ongoing debate about why cable news channels spend so much time on tabloid stories -- the common answer seeming to be that it's because they bring in ratings -- there is no allowance for the idea that these news organizations are doing nothing but produced lots of useless crap: Given that the country adds over two million people a year to its population, the fact that the audience seems to have stalled for years at around 1.5 million hardly suggests a wildly successful programming model. Indeed, it seems to me that in some ways the worst damage financial pressures have done to journalism is to let so many people get off the hook by using it as an excuse. It's considered sacrilege in the business to suggest that low quality might be a cause of declining circulation for newspapers or audience for network news broadcasts. Instead, we're supposed to believe that it's the reverse -- problems are all caused by cutbacks which, in turn, are caused by the audience's stubborn unwillingness to cooperate and subscribe. As for the news organizations themselves, they also like to place the blame on the viewers by occasionally doing stories about how much the public likes these tabloid affairs, so jeez, what else can they do? When anybody complains about the content of their rare political reporting, they point fingers in both directions and declare, "Both sides are complaining, so we must be right!" But then they do things like correctly quoting Fred Thompson claiming that Medicare Part D cost $72 trillion, rather than the actual figure of $72 billion, without noting Thompson's error. Yglesias: Now you're walking around thinking a $72 trillion commitment was made. You read it in the newspaper, after all. Except it's wrong! But you shouldn't be un-learning things when you read the paper. The problem here is that, as Yglesias says, people now believe the incorrect figure to be true, because a legitimate newspaper printed it without making note of Thompson's mistake. But the reporter would likely say that there was nothing wrong with her story because, hey, Thompson said "$72 trillion," and that's what she printed. Pointing out his mistake wouldn't have been objective, since it would mean, I guess, taking a position on whether or not Medicare Part D cost $72 billion or a thousand times that much. This inability to apply standards of truthfulness in even the most objectively supported situation is the number one problem with modern American journalism, and it should be a scandal in journalism education. 1462@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-10-13T21:24:17-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/000677.html Yesterday we had a talk from Sunshine Hillygus about political microtargeting via direct mail, and its relationship to cross-party vote-chasing. It seemed kind of out of place, since the general references she made to the Internet in the introduction weren't followed up with anything in the specific talk -- "information technology" was in the title, but the technology in question was data-mining and market analysis. Also, it seemed like there was a lot to be said about intra-party vote-shoring-up that she didn't cover, for whatever reason. This morning I'm introducing Dan Gillmor, whom I'm sad to say is the only OII speaker that I'd heard of before the schedule and syllabus went out. Gillmor is something of a citizen-journalism/net-media evangelist and preach-practicer, so I'm eager to hear what he has to say about the state of the American press and its relationship to the rise of its new competitors. 677@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-07-18T07:52:51-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/000667.html It's things like this that make it impossible for me to support Barack Obama: Let's review: In Act One, Barack Obama clasped hands with the coal industry and promised subsidies for liquefied coal fuel. In Act Two, environmentalists growled that Obama was backing one of the worst technologies ever devised from the standpoint of global warming, and, eventually, the senator backed away, which in turn made the coal industry very upset. So now we've reached the finale, in which Obama tries to pacify all sides with a clever compromise. He's a bad candidate for the same reason that Fred Thompson is a bad candidate: He's accomplished little in government and doesn't seem to know what he's doing. It's hard to fault progressives for not noticing this, though, because our other choices kind of stink as well -- it's the story that's most completely getting buried by the story of the even worse Republican field. As of now I will be writing in Russ Feingold. 667@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-06-25T15:04:20-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/000618.html Much has been made of Al Gore's post-2000 rededication, specifically, to the cause of sane environmental policy and global warming awareness. In fact, most pieces that conclude that he won't run for the presidency again do so on the basis of his unrelenting drive in this area. He's found the passion that works for him, and he believes his current path is the best one to follow to achieve his goals. The artistic, informational, commercial and politic success of An Inconvenient Truth (both the film and the book of the same name) has put him in the most advantageous position of his long pursuit on change when it comes to human activity and governmental policy that affects the climate. He made a splashy appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today to talk about potential solutions to the crisis. He's even putting on a Live Aid-style event this summer to raise money for and the profile of the global warming issue. Meanwhile, he's got another book coming out in May, which will presuming involve numerous promotional appearances, signings, talks, etc. The book could've been a Truth follow-up of some kind, but it's not, at least not in any linear sense. The book is called The Assault on Reason and it appears to be nothing like the autohagiographic campaign books that most candidates and would-be candidates write today. Here's the description listed at Amazon: At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism. We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions. How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste. Gore's larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason's enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds, and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future. Drawing on a life's work in politics as well as on the work of experts across a broad range of disciplines, Al Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking. [emphasis added] I can't help but contrast this with Barack Obama's rather weak-kneed decrying of "the smallness of our politics." Here's a man who, in the middle of a very specific and detailed campaign to get the public to understand a sometimes confusing scientific issue, steps back and looks at the context the debate is taking place in. What he finds -- not at all surprisingly -- is that our culture is epistemologically poisoned. That finding is so much bigger than any one issue, including biggies such as global warming and Iraq, that I cannot help but see his timing in presenting it as the opening volley of a campaign not just for the presidency, but for a true cultural revolution. More to the point, this is a kind of leadership that we have not had in the United States since... maybe FDR? Maybe Lincoln? I don't mean to sound hyperbolic here, but I have to believe this is something that can change our system in ways that tweaking emissions standards or US Attorney confirmation rules or the earned-income tax credit can't. For instance, middle-east "expert" and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said again today that US forces have about six months to get things "working" in Iraq, or else. Friedman, you may recall, was a major booster of the war beforehand, and has declared "the next six months" to be crucial so many times since 2003 that the unit of measurement is now named for him. He is a joke (see Matt Taibbi's takedown for more), he has been wrong about any and everything to do with the war since before it began. He remains, inexplicably, a respected "expert" nonetheless, and has suffered no apparently consequences for his devastating wrongness. And he is not alone. Frankly, he is the product of a culture that does not value being right -- either before or after the fact -- but does value a) certitude, b) boldness, c) counterintuitiveness, and d) narcissism. The kind of leadership we need now is the kind that reconfigures our society so that the Tom Friedmans of the world come to account. 618@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-03-21T15:31:28-06:00 http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/archives/000613.html I've just watching a piece on 60 Minutes about the Iraqi refugee crisis, and specifically about the Iraqis who worked with the U.S. Army during the invasion and occupation, but who are now being left to fend for themselves when it comes to, you know, getting killed by their countrymen. What strikes me as telling about this report and others like it is that so much of the mainstream reporting about the failures of the Bush administration is told from the perspective of a war supporter who feels duped upon realizing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. never really cared about doing a "good job." And yet, these stories belie a complete lack of cynicism on the part of the reporter. When you talk to a Ford administration official about the migration of over 130,000 Vietnamese, then to the corresponding Bush official about the 7,000 or so Iraqis we're willing to bring in -- along with every other screw-up, from body armor to Al Qaqaa -- it's hard to imagine why you don't come to the obvious conclusion. This is not a matter of good intentions paving the road to Hell, or of government failing, or of a lack of political will. Everything that is happened or not happened in Iraq in the last four years has been because of the unprecedented venality of a small handful of officer-holders. The worst President in American history. The Vice-President with the least respect for the Constitution and the American legal system ever. The Defense Secretary who is, frankly, one of the stupidest people on the face of the Earth. This lack of cynicism marks what I see as the ebb in an ongoing cycle of political dominance, and I think it's not coincidental that it's occurring at the same time as the Christian right is experiencing loud disagreements between those who want to go along with the impure Republican Party to get along in American politics, and those who want to extend beyond abortion, gay marriage and stem cells to encompass within their movement issues like social justice and global warming. Technocrats and cynics create ideologues to use as fuel, but the fuel tank explodes when it's too full. The problem for the ideologues that blow up the machine that created them is that cynics prosper in American politics, and there's always another cynical faction waiting to step up to the top spot. The Gingrich/Rove axis kept themselves just out of the red for about eight years, but they've lost many of the true-believer hawks and they're starting to lose the honest Christians. They're so mired in scandal that they can't even get a proper pushback operation started -- I'd wager the calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign are going to make it much more difficult to pardon Scooter Libby in the short term. Meanwhile, Halliburton is moving their headquarters from Texas to Dubai. Will any of our disillusioned press corps wonder if this has anything to do with Dick Cheney wanting somewhere to go in 2009 that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the United States? My guess is no. 613@http://www.etchouse.com/cpd/ Mon, 6 Oct 2008 10:08:45 -06:00 Politics 2007-03-11T18:34:53-06:00