Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Garfield Minus Garfield
It turns out that if you Photoshop Garfield out of Garfield, the strip becomes incredibly hilarious.
Edit: It's easier to view lots of them here.
Edit: It's easier to view lots of them here.
Op-Ed Justice League Round-up
That editorial Justice League of America, the NY Times op-ed writers, weighs in:
- Frank Rich has a cleverly written piece comparing Hillary's campaign blunders with Bush's mishandling of the Iraq war. I don't think the Iraqi insurgents have been anywhere near as successful as Obama, but still, worth checking out if you like Frank Rich.
- David Brooks is in full cheer-leading mode for McCain after last week's kiss-and-tell about rifts in McCain's inner circle. I think I basically agree with the thrust of the thing, that the media is being unfairly harsh on McCain for particular instances of backscratching with lobbyists, when on balance he has been an ardent foe of lobbyist's influence in Washington and pork-barrel spending in general. Still, my personal theory is that last week's article landed Brooks in McCain's doghouse (coming, as it did, right in the midst of the fallout from that controversial NYT piece), and that we'll be seeing some more outright cheerleading for a while yet.
- Maureen Dowd phones in another couple of paragraphs of snark contra Hillary.
- Bob Herbert contemplates The Fall Of A Great American in the tragically-flawed Ralph Nader, the progressive-champion-turned-reviled-laughingstock who has declared he is once again running for President.
- New-comer Bill Kristol goes through the motions of an Obama-thinks-he's-the-Messiah column. I wish the Times had gotten someone more inspired for this slot--I would have loved to have seen someone like Christopher Hitchens, or even a thoughtful "values" conservative (they must exist--but where are they?).
Beyond Skullduggery
There is an interesting story developing out of Alabama, where some are beginning to wonder if the former governor there, Don E. Siegelman, was wrongly prosecuted by an overly politicized Justice Department. The erstwhile Democratic governor is currently serving out an 7-year sentence in federal prison for bribery. His alleged crime is rewarding a donor to his pet project with a seat on a hospital board (the pet project: a state lottery program that would raise revenue for education).
Besides the unusual severity of a federal bribery charge for a transaction that did not net the governor any personal gain, there is a whole host of red flags surrounding the case (10 min. 60 Minutes clip here). Fifty-two former attorneys general from 40 states have asked Congress to investigate wrongdoing on the part of the Justice Department.
If the prosecution really was as flawed and politically motivated as it looks--and after reading about the details I think that it was--then this story, I predict, will blow up pretty quickly. The reason I think is simple: there is a big difference between torpedoing an opponent's political career and sending an innocent man to jail for the better part of a decade. The first can be unseemly but it falls within the boundaries of "acceptable" hardball politics and large numbers of political operatives will phalanx up to deflect the ensuing charges of skullduggery until people stop caring. The second, though, is enough to test the conscience of even the most cynical party hack--at the end of the day, being able to sleep at night will win out over keeping a Democrat from occupying the statehouse. Expect the whistles to keep on a'blowin'.
Besides the unusual severity of a federal bribery charge for a transaction that did not net the governor any personal gain, there is a whole host of red flags surrounding the case (10 min. 60 Minutes clip here). Fifty-two former attorneys general from 40 states have asked Congress to investigate wrongdoing on the part of the Justice Department.
If the prosecution really was as flawed and politically motivated as it looks--and after reading about the details I think that it was--then this story, I predict, will blow up pretty quickly. The reason I think is simple: there is a big difference between torpedoing an opponent's political career and sending an innocent man to jail for the better part of a decade. The first can be unseemly but it falls within the boundaries of "acceptable" hardball politics and large numbers of political operatives will phalanx up to deflect the ensuing charges of skullduggery until people stop caring. The second, though, is enough to test the conscience of even the most cynical party hack--at the end of the day, being able to sleep at night will win out over keeping a Democrat from occupying the statehouse. Expect the whistles to keep on a'blowin'.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
When Data Is Beautiful
Those of you who are fans of creative graphic representations of data might like this nifty Flash chart from the NY Times. Not quite the Minard Map, but still.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Exeunt the Clintons?
I think Newsweek guy Jon Alter has it just about right:
I don't know if I'm quite as certain as Alter that Hillary can't pull off a victory without the aid of an Obama slip-up... big wins in Ohio and Texas would light a fire underneath her operation and the media (for once) would be on her side with its "comeback kid" narrative. It'd be a different world: Clinton would be headed into a brokered convention with a full head of steam.
But if she does decide that it's over, I agree that this would be the perfect time for a dramatic exit. Whatever rifts in the Democratic Party her campaign has caused and whatever animosities she has incurred would vanish immediately.
Hillary has only one shot—for Obama to trip up so badly that he disqualifies himself. Nothing in the last 14 months suggests he will.
But imagine if, instead of waiting to be marginalized or forced out, Hillary decided to defy the stereotype we have of her family? Imagine if she drew a distinction between "never quit" as it applies to fighting Kenneth Starr and the Republicans on the one hand, and fellow Democrats on the other? Imagine if she had, well, the imagination for a breathtaking act of political theater that would make her seem the epitome of grace and class and party unity, setting herself up perfectly for 2012 if Obama loses?
I don't know if I'm quite as certain as Alter that Hillary can't pull off a victory without the aid of an Obama slip-up... big wins in Ohio and Texas would light a fire underneath her operation and the media (for once) would be on her side with its "comeback kid" narrative. It'd be a different world: Clinton would be headed into a brokered convention with a full head of steam.
But if she does decide that it's over, I agree that this would be the perfect time for a dramatic exit. Whatever rifts in the Democratic Party her campaign has caused and whatever animosities she has incurred would vanish immediately.
The Emo Version of the Beatles
Lately I've been all obsessed with the Zombies--they are awesome.
And the lead singer looks like my friend Patrick Regan.
And the lead singer looks like my friend Patrick Regan.
An end to Pareto-suboptimal politics? Let's hope so
As anyone familiar with the primaries knows, Barack Obama talks an awful lot about hope--it's gotten to the point where he even addresses this fact in his stump speech. The first instinct is to let this schmaltzy boilerplate float out the other ear, but after a while you start to get the sense that Obama has actually invested some serious effort into developing his hope theme. Over time, in fact, I have come to think of it in terms of the fabled "Prisoner's Dilemma" problem.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment that illustrates how it can be that two self-interested parties rationally make a choice that does not maximize their payoff. In the scenario, two suspects are arrested for a crime and interrogated independently of each other. However, there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, and so the prosecutor must try to get them to testify against each other. Each suspect has two options: he can keep his mouth shut, or he can rat the other suspect out. If he keeps his mouth shut and his partner in crime does the same, then the prosecutor can't make a good case and they both receive a short, 6-month sentence on some minor secondary charge. If, however, the suspect keeps his mouth shut but his partner defects and rats him out, then the suspect receives the full 10-year sentence and his partner--the rat--goes free. Finally, if both suspects decide to rat each other out, then they both share responsibility for the crime and each receives a 5-year sentence.
Assuming that both suspects are rational self-interested agents--i.e., that they both just want to minimize their sentence--what is the best choice? Well, if I am a suspect, then there are two possibilities: either my partner stayed silent, or he ratted me out. If he stayed silent, then the best choice for me would be to rat him out, thereby allowing me to walk out of there a free man while leaving him with the full 10-years. However, if he ratted me out, then my best choice is still to rat him out--because that way I get the 5-year sentence instead of the full 10 years. And so I choose to defect and rat my partner out. Ironically, though, since my partner is just as rational and self-interested as I am, he comes to the same conclusion, and so we doom each other to a sub-optimal result: a 5-year sentence.
It only takes a little imagination to apply the Prisoner's Dilemma to the state of partisan politics over the last two decades. The Democrats and Republicans are like the suspects: locked in a dogged pursuit of their own agendas while all the while maintaining a rational distrust of the other side. When the Republicans control Congress, they shut the Democrats out of the legislative process--after all, why risk sharing power now only to be completely shut out when the Democrats regain control? When the Republicans seek a compromise on Social Security--allow some privatization, for instance--the Democrats reject it in toto. Why risk giving up an inch on Social Security now when the Republicans will surely take miles once they get a chance?
In this political environment, not only does the atmosphere become unpleasant--"poisonous" I think is the word often used--but the results become middling, and the progress incremental. We get Frankenstein legislative solutions--on health care, on energy--that are more about avoiding the worst possible scenario for both sides than actually effectively tackling the problem for the long-term.
However, there is a growing sense that the problems we confront as a nation are beginning to outstrip, in their sheer magnitude, the political mechanism we have created to handle them. Our health care system is not an ideological catastrophe for either side, but neither is it particularly effective. Entitlement programs are not on a sustainable track to accommodate projected increases in the elderly population. And as of today, there is basically no strategy in place for dealing with global warming (hint: ethanol subsidies won't cut it. Neither will ignoring empirical evidence).
In all this, there is a temptation to blame the self-interested nature of the factions involved. Why can't they put the national interest ahead of their own ideological agendas? But I don't think this kind of criticism holds water, because it misses the point: each faction really and truly believes that its ideological agenda is the national interest. The Democrats and the Republicans are doing nothing wrong by pursuing their versions of the political good--on the contrary, this is the very essence of democratic government. So I think it is not so much naive as incoherent to chide Democrats and Republicans for not "setting aside their differences" for the sake of the "national interest". If this is what is meant by bipartisanship, then bipartisanship is incompatible with the notion of representative government.
The proper target of blame is not the self-interested nature of today's political factions--theirs will always and should always be a rational political calculus that maximizes their own ideological payoff. Instead, we should blame the political environment that makes their calculus churn out sub-optimal results. Remember--the reason that politicians don't make effective compromises on long-term solutions isn't because they can't, but because it would be irrational to do so. Today's "5-year sentence" health care system is, after all, much preferable to the "10-year sentence" health care system that would surely result from letting the other side have too much leeway.
The goal, then, should be to change the political environment so as to shake up the political calculus on both sides, so that it is no longer irrational for self-interested political parties to cooperate on a meaningful level. But what does this mean, exactly?
Well, let's revisit our suspects in the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. We might imagine that in this world there is a game-theory savvy Mafia boss who is sick and tired of his hired goons serving long 5-year jail sentences when they could, by cooperating, be back on the streets in a mere 6 months. Our Mafia boss, of course, is under no illusions about the self-interested nature of his goons, and so he decides to introduce an externality that will surely alter the suspects' interrogation-room calculus: he lets it be known far and wide that from now on, anyone who rats out their partner in crime will be tied to a large cement block and thrown into the Hudson River. This move is good news for our suspects! Now, if I am the suspect being interrogated, I know that if my partner in crime stays silent, then I should stay silent too, or else the Mafia boss will kill me upon release. Moreover, the fact that the Mafia boss will kill any rat guarantees that my partner in crime will not be ratting me out. The inevitable and optimal result is that we both get trivial 6-month sentences.
The question is: what kind of externality can we introduce in the political world that would alter the political calculus in such a way as to yield viable long-term solutions? What is needed is for there to be a high degree of confidence among the political factions that the other side will not take advantage of temporary power imbalances in the compromise process to bulldoze its own ideology through. The Democrats need to be confident that the Republicans will not use the limited privatization of Social Security as the first steps toward abolishing Social Security. The Republicans need to be confident that universal health insurance will not metamorphosize into an unwieldy government program that ignores market realities. Specifically, both sides need to be confident that such ideological power grabs will be politically punished--that the electorate will actually vote users of these tactics--the "rats"--out of power.
Enter Barack Obama, inexperienced one-term Senator with no executive background, an oratorical powerhouse that doesn't sound, look, or feel like anything in politics going. Judging him against the conventional criteria of a political candidate, he doesn't stack up all that well: he can spin a good yarn, sure, but substantively he brings nothing new to the table, and his untested meddle is a risk. Indeed, it is by precisely these sorts of metrics that the Clinton campaign has argued that Obama does not make sense as the Democratic nominee. Moreover, viewed from this perspective, the Clinton criticism of Obama's rhetoric as empty and naive is valid: it appears as though Obama thinks that, in thrall to his silver tongue, Republicans will magically jettison their ideological self-interest and support his standardly liberal agenda. Fat chance.
But the Clinton criticism misses the mark, because it fails to understand that Barack Obama is presenting the success of his very candidacy as the externality that will alter the political calculus of Democrats and Republicans and usher in a new era of good-faith politics and bold compromise. His very inexperience and political otherworldliness is crucial to his candidacy, because he needs to be credible as a true "Washington outsider"--someone who is not part-and-parcel of either side in the national political Prisoner's Dilemma, and who will not therefore engage in the same rational dead-end politics that have characterized both sides for decades. Moreover, he needs to demonstrate in his character, his rhetoric, and his political methods that conciliation and empathy are dominant values, and that political opponents will not be shut out of a Democratic regime. Those on the political right need to be assured that their arguments will be heard and taken seriously, and that, yes, they will even be given some power when in the minority to steer and participate in the national agenda. If Obama succeeds in embodying these values--and wins in virtue of them--then he will have remade the political landscape on the day of his election.
The extremely nifty thing about all this is that, if it works, it will not be because of any special talent of Obama's, particularly, or anything specific he is likely to do once in office. Indeed, a persistent rhetorical theme in his speeches is his status as a vessel--the political power doesn't originate from him or his silver tongue, but rather, from the vast and diverse movement for change that he is the arbitrary placeholder for. If he is elected President, he will take office in a radically different political reality, one where a totally inexperienced outsider stormed into office on a message of conciliation and compromise. The mandate will be obvious and indisputable, and it will be all the empirical assurance the Democrats and Republicans need in order to have high confidence that those who abuse political conciliation for undue ideological gain will no longer be tolerated by the electorate.
Viewed with all this in mind, Obama's rhetoric of hope, unification, and change suddenly makes sense, and the words--so deadened over the years by standard partisan boilerplate--turn out to be doing some serious work. His whole body of rhetoric supervenes on the elaborate, technical arguments I have outlined above. "Hope" is not just some sense of vague optimism that everything will turn out okay. It is the confidence we need to have in each other that, though we disagree, we will work in good faith towards pragmatic solutions and not attempt to hijack the process for our exclusive ideological gains, or unfairly demonize the opposition. If Barack Obama is indeed elected on the hope message, then in virtue of self-fulfilling prophecy we will all have a good empirical reason to believe that our hope will be rewarded by the hope of others--after all, we all voted for hope, right?
This notion of hope plays into his other rhetorical obsession--"unity", or "transcending partisan differences". Many commentators are baffled at how Obama can claim to be a unifying force in our politically divided nation while at the same time championing an indisputably Liberal agenda. They wonder what "transcending the partisan divide" means in terms of concrete policy details--does it mean that he will "triangulate" between the two sides and adopt centrist positions? Does it mean he will somehow persuade Conservatives and Independents to rally around traditional Liberal causes? But I think these commentators are mistaking the dynamic property of a candidate's political and negotiation methods for the static property of a candidate's policy preferences. Obama has always conceded that, at the end of the day, he is a Liberal and a Democrat--and, in an ideal world, would like to see the Democratic agenda fully implemented. In that sense, he transcends nothing. But in the sense that he explicitly acknowledges that whatever solutions we do end up passing cannot be defined at present, and that their substantive shape will take form organically in a yet-to-be-determined political environment of mutual conciliation, he really is transcending the partisan divide. It's just that the "transcendence" is in the process, not the policy details--and that it won't take place unless and until he actually gets elected President.
The Clintons once described the nomination of Barack Obama as "a roll of the dice". I agree with this. By nominating Obama as the Democratic candidate, Democrats--and Liberals and left-leaning Independents in general--will be signifying their intention to break free of the Prisoner's Dilemma politics of the last two decades and recast the political landscape as one that is more germane to sober conciliation and compromise. But the other half of the electorate might not be on board with the project. Indeed, if Obama loses the general election or wins on a razor-thin party-lines vote, Obama's political raison d'etre will have vanished, and we will be stuck with either a loser or a President ill-prepared for battle with the vaunted Republican "attack machine".
However, if Obama sweeps into office on the crest of a Reagan-like political realignment--an ideologically diverse mix of Democrats, Independents, new voters, and even some Republicans--then the roll of the dice will have been well worth it. And at this point, I'm not sure what other outcome is worth the hoping for.
***
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment that illustrates how it can be that two self-interested parties rationally make a choice that does not maximize their payoff. In the scenario, two suspects are arrested for a crime and interrogated independently of each other. However, there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, and so the prosecutor must try to get them to testify against each other. Each suspect has two options: he can keep his mouth shut, or he can rat the other suspect out. If he keeps his mouth shut and his partner in crime does the same, then the prosecutor can't make a good case and they both receive a short, 6-month sentence on some minor secondary charge. If, however, the suspect keeps his mouth shut but his partner defects and rats him out, then the suspect receives the full 10-year sentence and his partner--the rat--goes free. Finally, if both suspects decide to rat each other out, then they both share responsibility for the crime and each receives a 5-year sentence.
Assuming that both suspects are rational self-interested agents--i.e., that they both just want to minimize their sentence--what is the best choice? Well, if I am a suspect, then there are two possibilities: either my partner stayed silent, or he ratted me out. If he stayed silent, then the best choice for me would be to rat him out, thereby allowing me to walk out of there a free man while leaving him with the full 10-years. However, if he ratted me out, then my best choice is still to rat him out--because that way I get the 5-year sentence instead of the full 10 years. And so I choose to defect and rat my partner out. Ironically, though, since my partner is just as rational and self-interested as I am, he comes to the same conclusion, and so we doom each other to a sub-optimal result: a 5-year sentence.
***
It only takes a little imagination to apply the Prisoner's Dilemma to the state of partisan politics over the last two decades. The Democrats and Republicans are like the suspects: locked in a dogged pursuit of their own agendas while all the while maintaining a rational distrust of the other side. When the Republicans control Congress, they shut the Democrats out of the legislative process--after all, why risk sharing power now only to be completely shut out when the Democrats regain control? When the Republicans seek a compromise on Social Security--allow some privatization, for instance--the Democrats reject it in toto. Why risk giving up an inch on Social Security now when the Republicans will surely take miles once they get a chance?
In this political environment, not only does the atmosphere become unpleasant--"poisonous" I think is the word often used--but the results become middling, and the progress incremental. We get Frankenstein legislative solutions--on health care, on energy--that are more about avoiding the worst possible scenario for both sides than actually effectively tackling the problem for the long-term.
However, there is a growing sense that the problems we confront as a nation are beginning to outstrip, in their sheer magnitude, the political mechanism we have created to handle them. Our health care system is not an ideological catastrophe for either side, but neither is it particularly effective. Entitlement programs are not on a sustainable track to accommodate projected increases in the elderly population. And as of today, there is basically no strategy in place for dealing with global warming (hint: ethanol subsidies won't cut it. Neither will ignoring empirical evidence).
In all this, there is a temptation to blame the self-interested nature of the factions involved. Why can't they put the national interest ahead of their own ideological agendas? But I don't think this kind of criticism holds water, because it misses the point: each faction really and truly believes that its ideological agenda is the national interest. The Democrats and the Republicans are doing nothing wrong by pursuing their versions of the political good--on the contrary, this is the very essence of democratic government. So I think it is not so much naive as incoherent to chide Democrats and Republicans for not "setting aside their differences" for the sake of the "national interest". If this is what is meant by bipartisanship, then bipartisanship is incompatible with the notion of representative government.
The proper target of blame is not the self-interested nature of today's political factions--theirs will always and should always be a rational political calculus that maximizes their own ideological payoff. Instead, we should blame the political environment that makes their calculus churn out sub-optimal results. Remember--the reason that politicians don't make effective compromises on long-term solutions isn't because they can't, but because it would be irrational to do so. Today's "5-year sentence" health care system is, after all, much preferable to the "10-year sentence" health care system that would surely result from letting the other side have too much leeway.
***
The goal, then, should be to change the political environment so as to shake up the political calculus on both sides, so that it is no longer irrational for self-interested political parties to cooperate on a meaningful level. But what does this mean, exactly?
Well, let's revisit our suspects in the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. We might imagine that in this world there is a game-theory savvy Mafia boss who is sick and tired of his hired goons serving long 5-year jail sentences when they could, by cooperating, be back on the streets in a mere 6 months. Our Mafia boss, of course, is under no illusions about the self-interested nature of his goons, and so he decides to introduce an externality that will surely alter the suspects' interrogation-room calculus: he lets it be known far and wide that from now on, anyone who rats out their partner in crime will be tied to a large cement block and thrown into the Hudson River. This move is good news for our suspects! Now, if I am the suspect being interrogated, I know that if my partner in crime stays silent, then I should stay silent too, or else the Mafia boss will kill me upon release. Moreover, the fact that the Mafia boss will kill any rat guarantees that my partner in crime will not be ratting me out. The inevitable and optimal result is that we both get trivial 6-month sentences.
The question is: what kind of externality can we introduce in the political world that would alter the political calculus in such a way as to yield viable long-term solutions? What is needed is for there to be a high degree of confidence among the political factions that the other side will not take advantage of temporary power imbalances in the compromise process to bulldoze its own ideology through. The Democrats need to be confident that the Republicans will not use the limited privatization of Social Security as the first steps toward abolishing Social Security. The Republicans need to be confident that universal health insurance will not metamorphosize into an unwieldy government program that ignores market realities. Specifically, both sides need to be confident that such ideological power grabs will be politically punished--that the electorate will actually vote users of these tactics--the "rats"--out of power.
***
Enter Barack Obama, inexperienced one-term Senator with no executive background, an oratorical powerhouse that doesn't sound, look, or feel like anything in politics going. Judging him against the conventional criteria of a political candidate, he doesn't stack up all that well: he can spin a good yarn, sure, but substantively he brings nothing new to the table, and his untested meddle is a risk. Indeed, it is by precisely these sorts of metrics that the Clinton campaign has argued that Obama does not make sense as the Democratic nominee. Moreover, viewed from this perspective, the Clinton criticism of Obama's rhetoric as empty and naive is valid: it appears as though Obama thinks that, in thrall to his silver tongue, Republicans will magically jettison their ideological self-interest and support his standardly liberal agenda. Fat chance.
But the Clinton criticism misses the mark, because it fails to understand that Barack Obama is presenting the success of his very candidacy as the externality that will alter the political calculus of Democrats and Republicans and usher in a new era of good-faith politics and bold compromise. His very inexperience and political otherworldliness is crucial to his candidacy, because he needs to be credible as a true "Washington outsider"--someone who is not part-and-parcel of either side in the national political Prisoner's Dilemma, and who will not therefore engage in the same rational dead-end politics that have characterized both sides for decades. Moreover, he needs to demonstrate in his character, his rhetoric, and his political methods that conciliation and empathy are dominant values, and that political opponents will not be shut out of a Democratic regime. Those on the political right need to be assured that their arguments will be heard and taken seriously, and that, yes, they will even be given some power when in the minority to steer and participate in the national agenda. If Obama succeeds in embodying these values--and wins in virtue of them--then he will have remade the political landscape on the day of his election.
The extremely nifty thing about all this is that, if it works, it will not be because of any special talent of Obama's, particularly, or anything specific he is likely to do once in office. Indeed, a persistent rhetorical theme in his speeches is his status as a vessel--the political power doesn't originate from him or his silver tongue, but rather, from the vast and diverse movement for change that he is the arbitrary placeholder for. If he is elected President, he will take office in a radically different political reality, one where a totally inexperienced outsider stormed into office on a message of conciliation and compromise. The mandate will be obvious and indisputable, and it will be all the empirical assurance the Democrats and Republicans need in order to have high confidence that those who abuse political conciliation for undue ideological gain will no longer be tolerated by the electorate.
***
Viewed with all this in mind, Obama's rhetoric of hope, unification, and change suddenly makes sense, and the words--so deadened over the years by standard partisan boilerplate--turn out to be doing some serious work. His whole body of rhetoric supervenes on the elaborate, technical arguments I have outlined above. "Hope" is not just some sense of vague optimism that everything will turn out okay. It is the confidence we need to have in each other that, though we disagree, we will work in good faith towards pragmatic solutions and not attempt to hijack the process for our exclusive ideological gains, or unfairly demonize the opposition. If Barack Obama is indeed elected on the hope message, then in virtue of self-fulfilling prophecy we will all have a good empirical reason to believe that our hope will be rewarded by the hope of others--after all, we all voted for hope, right?
This notion of hope plays into his other rhetorical obsession--"unity", or "transcending partisan differences". Many commentators are baffled at how Obama can claim to be a unifying force in our politically divided nation while at the same time championing an indisputably Liberal agenda. They wonder what "transcending the partisan divide" means in terms of concrete policy details--does it mean that he will "triangulate" between the two sides and adopt centrist positions? Does it mean he will somehow persuade Conservatives and Independents to rally around traditional Liberal causes? But I think these commentators are mistaking the dynamic property of a candidate's political and negotiation methods for the static property of a candidate's policy preferences. Obama has always conceded that, at the end of the day, he is a Liberal and a Democrat--and, in an ideal world, would like to see the Democratic agenda fully implemented. In that sense, he transcends nothing. But in the sense that he explicitly acknowledges that whatever solutions we do end up passing cannot be defined at present, and that their substantive shape will take form organically in a yet-to-be-determined political environment of mutual conciliation, he really is transcending the partisan divide. It's just that the "transcendence" is in the process, not the policy details--and that it won't take place unless and until he actually gets elected President.
The Clintons once described the nomination of Barack Obama as "a roll of the dice". I agree with this. By nominating Obama as the Democratic candidate, Democrats--and Liberals and left-leaning Independents in general--will be signifying their intention to break free of the Prisoner's Dilemma politics of the last two decades and recast the political landscape as one that is more germane to sober conciliation and compromise. But the other half of the electorate might not be on board with the project. Indeed, if Obama loses the general election or wins on a razor-thin party-lines vote, Obama's political raison d'etre will have vanished, and we will be stuck with either a loser or a President ill-prepared for battle with the vaunted Republican "attack machine".
However, if Obama sweeps into office on the crest of a Reagan-like political realignment--an ideologically diverse mix of Democrats, Independents, new voters, and even some Republicans--then the roll of the dice will have been well worth it. And at this point, I'm not sure what other outcome is worth the hoping for.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
No More Mo
So, apparently, in 1980 after he won the Iowa caucus, George H.W. Bush crowed to the press that he had "Big Mo"--i.e., political momentum. Since then, it's been some kind of unwritten rule amongst pundits of a certain age that they must use this phrase at least once per article when referring to political momentum in general.
This has to stop. "Big Mo" is an awful way to denote "political momentum"--it sounds bad, it isn't witty, and its origin is totally obscure and non-witty.
Just saying.
This has to stop. "Big Mo" is an awful way to denote "political momentum"--it sounds bad, it isn't witty, and its origin is totally obscure and non-witty.
Just saying.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
A Debate Question
By the end of the primaries there will have been something like 20 debates between the Democratric candidates. Through all that, there haven't been very many interesting questions posed to them--the debates are typically moderated by creatures of the 24 news cycle, and so the issues and questions raised have almost all been along the lines of whatever media narrative was being played up at the time. At its worst, the CNN moderators were actually changing the wording of audience members' questions when they were deemed not hackish enough.
The question I've always wanted asked was this: "What, if anything, has the Bush administration done in the last 8 years to violate the Constitution?" I think a question like this would really pin down the candidates' views on the limits of executive power, and reveal how serious they are about protecting civil liberties. It would be disappointing to me if they talked around this question in a platitudinous way instead of giving an impassioned condemnation of (what I believe to be) Bush's various abuses of executive power. And there might even be a substantive difference between Clinton and Obama on the issue.
The question I've always wanted asked was this: "What, if anything, has the Bush administration done in the last 8 years to violate the Constitution?" I think a question like this would really pin down the candidates' views on the limits of executive power, and reveal how serious they are about protecting civil liberties. It would be disappointing to me if they talked around this question in a platitudinous way instead of giving an impassioned condemnation of (what I believe to be) Bush's various abuses of executive power. And there might even be a substantive difference between Clinton and Obama on the issue.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
A Constant Struggle
I don't know whether or when we should withdraw the troops from Iraq. I don't know if the troop surge was the right course of action or not. I'm certainly no military expert. And I simply don't know enough about conditions in Iraq to be able to comment intelligently about the right tactics. So in response to this important political question of the day, all I can come up with is a big fat je ne sais pas.
This gulf of not-knowing wants to be filled--but not with knowledge. No, it wants to be filled by the stuff of cognitive dissonance--unfounded convenient truths that just so happen to harmonize with my ideology and my politics. I want to believe that withdrawing troops will be better for the Iraqis. I want to believe that there is nothing more that we can do there, and that our presence there is not required. In short, I want the consequences of withdrawal to be consistent with the principles I value, despite the lack of evidence for or against this being the case. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will precipitate ethnic cleansing. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will encourage more and not less violence toward the West. And, perversely, I don't want it to be true that "staying the course" in Iraq will lead to success. It would be a validation of the opposing ideology. Every time a bit of bad news emerges out of Iraq, I am secretly content, because it is a validation of my own position.
This fact about myself makes me feel ashamed and unliked, and I make a conscious effort to fight it. When I see the death toll reach 3,000, I try to submerge my ugly glee in Socratic ignorance: "I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about...." I try to empathize with the soldier's families, and how it's a dad that's gone forever. I try my best to do this, but I have self-doubts about whether I am doing it authentically enough. In the end I have to settle for a cold fiat from my intellect: the deaths of these soldiers is a tragedy; you are saddened. It is unclear to me whether I ever take this order truly to heart. Maybe I do, sometimes--not when I'm thinking about politics, but about life and death in general. It is then that my mind sometimes wanders sideways to the deaths of those people, and only then that the magnitude of the thing hits me.
So, what am I to make of myself? While other people--my peers and younger--volunteer to fight in the war, away from their families, risking their whole human happiness, I skulk around on the internet coming up with clever arguments and snide, post-modern comments. Politics is a sport that I keep up with and occasionally participate in. But it's just that: a game. Something that I become absorbed in and want to win at. Not something that opens the world up to me in any visceral way; not something that enlightens me or makes me wiser or better. I am tempted to dismiss myself as a hack, with neither the moral clarity nor courage to say anything worth paying attention to.
One more shrill voice in a whole internet full of shrill voices.
But this verdict rings false. It doesn't stick. The reason is because it doesn't make sense to judge myself according to what my first impulses are, or to what feelings I do or do not feel. I can't help it if these are my immediate reactions; it is out of my power to prevent them.
However, it is within my power to correct them. I may not have any say in how I immediately feel about the latest news out of Iraq, but I do have a say in how I choose to reflect on it afterwards. I have the option of earnestly assessing my emotions and beliefs. And it is my choice as to whether or not I accept these emotions and beliefs as decent and reasonable.
In the end, my particular flavor of cognitive dissonance is a part of me and, for better or worse, affects my judgment. But so long as I struggle against it, it will be true that I am not my cognitive dissonance--and, hopefully, not such a shrill voice after all.
This gulf of not-knowing wants to be filled--but not with knowledge. No, it wants to be filled by the stuff of cognitive dissonance--unfounded convenient truths that just so happen to harmonize with my ideology and my politics. I want to believe that withdrawing troops will be better for the Iraqis. I want to believe that there is nothing more that we can do there, and that our presence there is not required. In short, I want the consequences of withdrawal to be consistent with the principles I value, despite the lack of evidence for or against this being the case. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will precipitate ethnic cleansing. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will encourage more and not less violence toward the West. And, perversely, I don't want it to be true that "staying the course" in Iraq will lead to success. It would be a validation of the opposing ideology. Every time a bit of bad news emerges out of Iraq, I am secretly content, because it is a validation of my own position.
This fact about myself makes me feel ashamed and unliked, and I make a conscious effort to fight it. When I see the death toll reach 3,000, I try to submerge my ugly glee in Socratic ignorance: "I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about...." I try to empathize with the soldier's families, and how it's a dad that's gone forever. I try my best to do this, but I have self-doubts about whether I am doing it authentically enough. In the end I have to settle for a cold fiat from my intellect: the deaths of these soldiers is a tragedy; you are saddened. It is unclear to me whether I ever take this order truly to heart. Maybe I do, sometimes--not when I'm thinking about politics, but about life and death in general. It is then that my mind sometimes wanders sideways to the deaths of those people, and only then that the magnitude of the thing hits me.
So, what am I to make of myself? While other people--my peers and younger--volunteer to fight in the war, away from their families, risking their whole human happiness, I skulk around on the internet coming up with clever arguments and snide, post-modern comments. Politics is a sport that I keep up with and occasionally participate in. But it's just that: a game. Something that I become absorbed in and want to win at. Not something that opens the world up to me in any visceral way; not something that enlightens me or makes me wiser or better. I am tempted to dismiss myself as a hack, with neither the moral clarity nor courage to say anything worth paying attention to.
One more shrill voice in a whole internet full of shrill voices.
***
But this verdict rings false. It doesn't stick. The reason is because it doesn't make sense to judge myself according to what my first impulses are, or to what feelings I do or do not feel. I can't help it if these are my immediate reactions; it is out of my power to prevent them.
However, it is within my power to correct them. I may not have any say in how I immediately feel about the latest news out of Iraq, but I do have a say in how I choose to reflect on it afterwards. I have the option of earnestly assessing my emotions and beliefs. And it is my choice as to whether or not I accept these emotions and beliefs as decent and reasonable.
In the end, my particular flavor of cognitive dissonance is a part of me and, for better or worse, affects my judgment. But so long as I struggle against it, it will be true that I am not my cognitive dissonance--and, hopefully, not such a shrill voice after all.
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