The young blogging elite

In response to Lindsay's comment: no, Ross Douthat is like 29. Matt Yglesias is my age, and Ezra Klein is somewhat younger, I think like 25. Maybe that serves to strip those blogs of the patina of old-guy wisdom they may have had...

Yglesias demoted

Before today, my top political bloggers were Sullivan, Yglesias, and Klein, in that order. But after Yglesias' dumb post today and Klein's several awesome ones, Klein is my new #2. This is especially true now that we are in full DC-inside-politics mode with Obama building his administration and gearing up for the legislative battles ahead.

Let me filter some excerpts from Ezra Klein's blog, which has been on fire:

On Daschle and healthcare reform:

CNN is reporting that Tom Daschle will not only be Health and Human Services Secretary, but also health reform czar under the Obama administration. This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players.

...

Compare the choice of Daschle to Clinton's decision to task Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner with health care reform. Neither Clinton nor Magaziner had any relevant experience in Washington, either with the health care bureaucracy or with the legislative branch. They did not have deep relationships on the Hill or a nuanced understanding of the players. Hillary Clinton had spent the last few decades in Arkansas. Magaziner had helped Rhode Island build a new economic plan. Both of them were, fundamentally, policy wonks. And so they built a process that was, in essence, by wonks and for wonks. The resulting bill might have passed a meeting of the Brookings Institution's Executive Committee. It was an elegant and innovative policy idea. But it was not a robust piece of legislation. It was not responsive to the concerns of the public, and it was not built to win votes in Congress. All of this is explained at greater length in the lessons of 1994.

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well.

On Lieberman:

Here's what you need to say about Lieberman: His heterodoxies have remained contained. Unlike John McCain, who conveyed his post-2000 disgust with the Republican Party by sponsoring a lot of liberal legislation on essentially random issues, Lieberman's fight with the Democrats has not strayed from foreign policy. For instance: His 2007 AFL-CIO voting record was 84 percent. That's exactly the same as his lifetime AFL-CIO voting record. In the most recent Congress, his score from the League of Conservation was 96 percent (which is actually a recent career high). Lieberman is, arguably, an extremely reliable Democratic vote. The exception, of course, is foreign policy, where he's an extremely reliable Republican vote.

On Rahm, Hillary, and the generally centrist feel of Obama's administration so far:

Rahm Emanuel sez:

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

Of course, the key is not what they want to achieve, but what they can achieve. The clear theme of Obama's transition team, White House staff decisions, and leaked cabinet appointments has been experience. Rahm Emanuel. Tom Daschle. Eric Holder. John Podesta. Hillary Clinton. Jim Messina. Pete Rouse. Phil Chiliro. And on, and on, and on. There's not much "change" here. Rather, the emphasis is on folks who know how Washington works, with the clear operating theory being that they'll know how to get things done. That's a different conception of "change" then presidents who come in and bring a lot of new people, which is what Clinton did (though, to be sure, Clinton didn't have a successful recent administration he could draw on for talent).

...

...[D]eciding to shorten the executive learning curve as much as possible and appoint folks with the experience to harness a transient opportunity isn't an implausible strategic decision. The staff will carry out the president's agenda. What's being sought out, then, is not brilliant new ideas for what that agenda should look like, but indisputable technical competence.

And there you have it.

Where does he get those wonderful charts?

You can always count on Ezra Klein for a good chart. Here is one that breaks down the greenhouse gas impact of different kinds of food as it moves from the production phase to the transit phase:

As you can see, the first three colors--the ones that cover the greenhouse gas impact of the transportation of the food from the farm to the supermarket--are just a small sliver compared to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during food production. In fact, according to this report, a mere 11% of greenhouse gases emitted because of food consumption are attributable to the transportation of the food. And so this whole "locavore" movement, while tasty, does not have much of a ecological impact.

If you really want to cut back on the ecological impact of your diet, you'd do well to keep cows out of the picture, as they account for about half of all greenhouse gases emitted from food production:


So all you vegetarians out there, this is your free pass to take longer, hotter showers.

Ok that got weird.

EDIT: Eric sensibly asks how much of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food. The report says: "For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home." So food transportation accounts for 11% of 13%, or 1.4% of every U.S. household's emissions.

Reporting the vector

I think a deficiency of campaign reporting is that it tends to report not the point, but the vector--which is to say, the story is not how well a candidate is doing in an absolute sense, but whether that candidate's electoral fortunes are rising or falling. It is the direction and speed of movement that is emphasized rather than the actual location in space. Nowhere is this more apparent than in coverage of debates, where the punditry judges the candidates' performances against the meaningless baseline of how well the punditry expected them to do going into it. Thus, if a candidate--like Sarah Palin--is deeply in the negative, but does better than expected and rises a little bit, then the candidate is rewarded with very positive coverage, and the viewer comes away with the belief that the conventional wisdom is that the candidate indeed "won".

This, I think, contributes to the pendular nature of campaign reporting, where you will get a week or two of coverage that seems to favor one candidate, followed by a subtle shift in positive coverage to the other candidate for a time. At work is a positive feedback loop, similar to the one that drives the booms and busts of a speculative market: positive motion gets reported as positive news, and positive news in turn drives positive motion, and so on, creating a sort of media bubble. But the higher that bubble wafts, the more routine and expected--and not-newsworthy--it becomes that the candidate will do well, thus causing the engine that drives the bubble upward to run out of steam. In the meantime--and because of the zero-sum nature of campaign coverage in a two-party system--expectations for the other candidate will be so low that any modest improvement results in a large vector of movement, which will result in significant positive news, in turn causing more positive motion, etc., until this other candidate becomes the one propelled by a bubble effect.

This process, though, only seems to occur in the absence of hard information that would otherwise be driving each candidate's fortunes. As bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias often observe, what decides elections is not this or that gaffe or campaign ad, but rather external events, like financial collapses or terrorist attacks. But this, again, is similar to what we see in markets: a speculative market occurs when there is uncertainty: people start using the behavior of others as a proxy for real information, piggy-backing on their presumably sound analysis, and the result is a herding effect. But when some real information emerges, the market reacts to it and prices quickly snap to reality. In this campaign, there has been an abundance of "real information" generated by the unfolding economic crisis, and so voters are responding to this rather than piggy-backing on the analysis of campaign reporting. As a result, the fortunes of the candidates has been marked not by the boom-and-bust cadences of campaign reportage, but by the performance of the stock market (which for many is the de facto barometer of economic health), which this chart from Ezra Klein strikingly illustrates:



It is worth mentioning as an aside that all of this explains why the McCain campaign is desperately--and futilely--trying to change the subject away from the failing financial system. So long as the election is determined by outside events, the McCain campaign is powerless to help its candidate win.

Nothing new under the bloggy sun

I was going to write a post called "Parity" in which I noted that according to the RCP meta-poll, 538, and Intrade, the race was about even--but then I saw that Paul Krugman has beaten me to it with a post called "Even Odds". Then I was going to write another post about how the McCain campaign is lying its pants off when it claims that Obama called Palin "a pig with lipstick", but half the internet has got that one covered.

For what it's worth, I think things are about to start turning around for Obama and the Democrats, and that this latest outrageously false claim from the McCain campaign is one outrageously false claim too far. Following Ezra Klein's insightful post the other day, the media renders the continuous onslaught of news data comprehensible to consumers by framing it within running narratives. I would add that--perhaps out of an obligation to "balance", or maybe just because of a bias towards closer and more interesting races--there is a somewhat pendular motion to press coverage, such that a week or two of positive coverage for a candidate tends to be balanced by a period of negative coverage.

I think the press is getting antsy with its rosy McCain-surging-from-convention-and-Palin-pick narrative, which is one that has emphasized Palin's star turn over the steady drumbeat of false claims eminating from the McCain campaign. However, in order for the shift to occur, there has to be something for the media to affix its narrative to. This pig/lipstick nonsense could be it. In the first place, it's a deception that is readily verifiable in print and on video, so mainstream outlets can comfortably show it without fear of seeming impartial: they can just run a clip of McCain people accusing Obama of making the insult, and then juxtapose it with footage of what Obama said in context, with no need for a reporter to connect any dots. Second, it plays into what has become a pattern of questionable or outright false statements from the McCain campaign, giving the story a direction to run in: does the McCain campaign have a truth problem?

Of course, these things don't happen entirely on their own. Obama is going to have to drive the narrative in speeches, through surrogates, and in campaign ads. He is going to have to actively call out McCain and Palin for campaigning on personal attacks, misrepresentations, and outright lies, and for their silence on issues like health care and the economy.

Biden is already sounding the notes (via Fallows):



And looking around the internet, some people have submitted some pretty good-sounding examples of "what Obama should say". From a Sullivan reader:

"Yesterday I talked to a group of voters about how the McCain campaign is trying to call their continuation of just about every single Bush-Cheney policy of the last eight years "change." In doing so, I used a common, hundred-year-old phrase that we all understand: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Now the McCain campaign demands that I apologize for saying this. Everyone, it seems, wants to hear my answer. Here it is: NO.

No, I will not apologize for telling the American people the truth: That McCain and Palin represent a stunning, and disastrous, continuation of Bush and Cheney's policies. Policies of sacrificing the middle class to give huge tax cuts to millionaires and big corporations. Policies that prevent Americans from getting the health care they need. Policies that would privatize Social Security and take away a woman's right to choose.

[...]

There's a word I've heard from the McCain campaign recently: "deference." No one is going to ask Sarah Palin a question, they say, unless they show her "deference." Joe Biden points out that they oppose all stem cell research, and they are offended he even mentioned it. I point out that their claim of bringing change is ridiculous, and they demand an apology. Apparently we are not showing them enough deference.

Let me explain something to Senator McCain and Governor Palin, as deferentially as I can: This is a democracy -- not a monarchy. You don't get to demand "deference" from the American people as if they were your royal subjects. You -- and I -- and everyone who seeks elected office must defer to the American people, and answer their questions, and fight for them even when it's politically inconvenient. That is what I promise to do. Thank You."

And from Nate Silver at 538:

My opponent's chief strategest just said, "this campaign isn't about the issues." Well, I've got news for you, America. The Republican Party is desperate. They are going to do anything to try and hold onto their power, because they know the damage they've done to our country, and they don't know how to fix it. They know that people are out of work, and they don't know how to help them. They know that people are dying because they don't have health insurance, and they don't know to save them. They know that families are struggling to put food on the table, and they know don't know how to provide for them.

So they're going to try and distract you, America, because that's the only thing they know how to do. They're going to try and scare you. They're going to try and tell you stories, instead of offering solutions. And yes, folks -- these are the same people that have been lying to you for the last eight years -- and they're going to lie to you again.

We'll see how it goes in the next couple of days. McCain has been in the driver's seat for the last week or so, but he's sold his soul to do it. If Obama can regain the momentum, he will be in a strong position heading into the final two months.

The fratricide strategy

Ezra Klein aptly articulates what many in the pundit class now believe: Clinton's only viable strategy at this point is to make Obama unelectable. Quote:

Clinton has no road to the nomination save for the literal destruction of Obama's candidacy. There's no affirmative argument for her campaign that's strong enough to overwhelm his lead in pledged delegates. Rather, she's basically got to cripple him so badly that he can't make it over the finish line. Mark Penn not only has to say that Obama is unelectable, he has to believe he can make it true. And what a shame. What a shame to see Hillary Clinton reduced to this, left insulting the intelligence of the voters and entirely reliant on the politics of personal destruction for her success.

It is as if the shame of it must outlive her.*

*Pointless Kafka quote.