A different world

Clinton wins Ohio big and edges out Obama in the Texas primary--so it appears my remarks from an earlier post were prescient:

I don't know if I'm quite...certain...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.

For Obama supporters who were looking to finish this thing tonight, it was a bit of a blow. It looks like this primary is going all the way to the convention.

Some are taking it worse than others--Andrew Sullivan, for instance, has turned to drink:

I just had a Jager shot, and hope to get drunk very soon. So this is my last post of the night. Here's what I'll do in the morning: find out who won the most delegates in the March 4 states, and check someone else's math (yes, I'm not going to get it wrong myself) to see who subsequently has the numbers to win. And then take a deep breath. And say what I think. Right now, emotion clouds the mind. Oh, and Jager.

Yikes. I'll probably just end up sending another small wad of cash Obama's way...

Sigh.

Wikileaks domain name reinstated

Wikileaks--which is a Wiki-based site where whistleblowers, muckrakers, terrorists and treasonous dogs can post information anonymously--is back with its proper domain name.

Yay First Amendment!

Predictions

Clinton by 8-12 in Texas and Ohio; Obama by 10-15 in Vermont and Rhode Island. I admit that I'm tendering these a little late, as exit poll data is already available for Vermont and Ohio, but whatever.

How did this get published?

There is a minor uproar over a recent Washington Post editorial that wonders if some women's swooning over Obama can be explained by the fact that women are, in fact, inferior to men. Written by one Charlotte Allen, it is difficult to tell if it's trying to be a politically-correct-defying lambasting of female culture or a tongue-in-cheek parody of the typical chauvinist view of women, or what. But either way, nothing excuses passages like this:

A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. [Emphasis mine]

If you're comparing rates of accidents between two groups, it hardly matters how many miles either group has driven. I mean, this is a pretty basic mistake, right?

Also, there is this egregiously ill-informed paragraph comparing the male and female brain:

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

Ahhhhhh!!!

• The theory "that women are the dumber sex" is not "amply" supported by any kind of empirical evidence--in fact, there is no widely accepted criteria for what makes a person "intelligent" in the general sense that Allen is talking about here.
• Uh, not since phrenology was in vogue have people thought that brain-size tracked with intelligence.
• Ummmmm, since when is there a proven link between mental object rotation and "abstract thinking and reasoning"--and what on earth does it mean to say that this is "the grounding for mathematics, science, and philosophy"?
• IQ is by no means a widely accepted measure of general intelligence! See bullet one!

Holy crap--this thing never would have been published if it had come within five feet of anyone who knew what Science Magazine was. But maybe she's being ignorant like a fox, in order to bolster her own case:

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?).

If she removed the word "female" from that sentence, I think she'd just about have it right.

Aaron's prayers are answered

Brett Favre retires; erstwhile Cal Bear Aaron Rodgers is in.

Finally.

Zero HP

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax died today. Something his wife said surprised me a bit:

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gail Gygax said.

I guess it makes sense--running and participating in a D&D game requires a lot of preparation, performance skills, and off-the-cuff thinking. I can see how playing this in your formative years could give you the extra confidence and imagination to choose a career and do well at it later in life.

At the very least, it seemed to do wonders for Stephen Colbert.

The pot calling the kettle a glass house

From Talking Points Memo, a Congressman makes something of a fool out of himself:

Opportunity cost

From Bob Herbert, who talks about estimates made by a Congressional committee:

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.

...[M]oney spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

The incredible amount of money spent on the Iraq war has rendered absurd any argument coming from a Republican that we must reign in domestic spending. Whatever mechanism is being used to finance the war can obviously also be used to finance anything else, including domestic programs--and everyone knows this. Moreover, since the Republicans never seem to acknowledge that there is any economic downside to this excessive spending on Iraq, they forfeit the ability to lodge similar complaints against domestic spending.

I really think that--for better or for worse--the Republicans have unwittingly opened the door to a new era of gigantic government programs. Ten years ago, universal health care was a pipe-dream--in these days of trillion-dollar elective wars, it's looking doable. The socialists can thank George W. Bush.

Different theories of change

David Brooks has an excellent column today about the core difference between Clinton and Obama in their approach to politics:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

...For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o’clock in the morning.

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

It's a fad these days to make this sort of conceptual distinction within some domain--bottom-up versus top-down, stochastic versus deterministic, decentralized versus hierarchical, etc.--and then go ahead and call it "X 2.0" or otherwise hail it as the Next Big Way Of Things. So I approach Brooks' facile distinction between Clinton and Obama along those lines with some wariness.

Still, though, it seems to me like Brooks is making some keen observations here. Clinton's message is: "I will make it happen". Obama's is: "You will make it happen".

Double standard

In a previous post, I mentioned in an aside that Democrats are held to a higher standard when it comes to foreign policy crisis management and national security in general--and linked to the infamous footage of George W. Bush being told of the 9/11 attacks at a photo-op and just sitting there for seven whole minutes. A Democrat would have been impeached for that.

Well, the door swings both ways: on race, liberals get a free pass. Maureen Dowd has this throw-away line in her Sunday op-ed:

(In fact, there is no red phone in the Oval Office, but maybe Obama will redecorate. He wants to put in a hoops court.)

Coming from the mouth of a liberal, it's a snarky riff on Obama's background as a high school basketball star. If this were uttered by a conservative, however, we'd have a national firestorm on our hands with accusations of racism a-flyin'.

True

From Frank Rich, on Obama:

His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

Yes, it is saccharine. And yes, I am "bone-weary" of those fucking pins.

Obama is consistent on Iraq

My friend Carlos frets about Obama's credentials as a progressive, linking to an article by Matt Gonzalez that casts aspersions on Obama as any kind of lefty at all. Many of Gonzalez' points are legitimate progressive gripes against Obama, who in many ways is not as liberal as the Republicans would like to think. However, one particular argument in the article bothers me, because it is entirely fallacious:

Let's start with his signature position against the Iraq war. Obama has sent mixed messages at best.

First, he opposed the war in Iraq while in the Illinois state legislature. Once he was running for US Senate though, when public opinion and support for the war was at its highest, he was quoted in the July 27, 2004 Chicago Tribune as saying, "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." The Tribune went on to say that Obama, "now believes US forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation ­ a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration."

The article then goes on to mention several bills that Obama voted for in the US Senate that funded the ongoing effort in Iraq.

Let's be clear: there is absolutely no inconsistency in a) opposing the war from the start and b) funding that war--or even supporting an extended, indefinite troop presence in Iraq--given that the invasion has already come to pass. It is quite possible that, though the initial decision to invade Iraq was a mistake, it is nevertheless true that--given that we have already invaded--the best course of action is to maintain a troop presence there, or only gradually withdraw troops. Indeed, it is this second option--gradually withdrawing troops--that Obama has settled on.

So it is not the case that Obama has sent "mixed messages" about Iraq--his view has been entirely self-consistent and, in my opinion, correct. Matt Gonzalez's charge is that Obama lacks ideological purity with respect to Iraq--but if ideological purity means elevating pithy charges of inconsistency over the complex and difficult truth, then so much the worse for ideological purity.

"Just as important"

Via Andrew Sullivan, a snippet of Obama's open letter to the LGBT community:

I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached. Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBTAmericans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. [Emphasis mine]

This emphasis on conciliation and empathy for opposing viewpoints--which comes, mind you, in an open letter to the LGBT community--resonates strongly with what I said in a previous post:

Moreover, [Obama] 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.

Let's hope so.

More Calvinball From Clinton

The AP reports that--now just days before the election--the Clinton campaign has decided that it doesn't like the caucus rules in Texas:

Aides to Clinton said earlier this week they were alarmed at the lack of clarity about many of the caucus rules....

Specifically, Clinton aides questioned a provision allowing caucus attendees to vote to move the location if they choose to do so, and whether people who had cast so-called "provisional ballots" in the primary would have their votes counted in the caucus.

They also expressed concern about the automated phone system precinct chairs would use to call in the results of each caucus, saying the party hadn't yet trained anyone to use the system properly.

The problem with the Clinton campaign's complaint isn't that it's baseless--these all seem like legitimate concerns about the integrity of the election. The problem is the timing: why didn't the campaign raise this issue earlier, before the primary began? It may be because the campaign just didn't bother doing the research on the Texas rules until now--indeed, this is the impression that Clinton herself has given. But this is undermined by Texas party officials, who said in a letter to the campaign that

many of Clinton's senior campaign advisers in Texas had helped to develop the rules governing the state's caucus system.

So it seems to me that the only explanation is that the Clinton campaign complaint is a self-serving one, stemming from political expediency rather than any real concern for voter enfranchisement or principle. Their cynical strategy is to delegitimize any election that doesn't bode well for Hillary's chances by questioning--and attempting to change--the rules mid-game.

Clinton's New Ad

I like it:


It's an emotional appeal, sure, but a fair one. We are, after all, electing someone who needs to be able to function effectively in a security crisis (this is especially true for Democrats, who seem to be held to a higher standard when it comes to these sorts of things). If Hillary Clinton is perceived as stronger than Obama in this regard, then by all means she should be hitting on this point again and again.

Personally, though, I'm not convinced by the ad. Neither Clinton nor Obama have any executive crisis experience to speak of, and so I have to assume that how they will perform in a crisis will track with their general temperament and level of competence. Based on these personal attributes, my intuition is that they would both do just fine.