The Second Citizen

Will HCR Reduce Costs? [Updated]

2010-04-23T10:13:00.012-04:00

A new report from the Medicare's Office of the Actuary says no. Coverage will expand to 34 million more people - but overall medical spending will increase about 0.9% in the first decade to achieve that goal. A couple of notes:

1. Even if this report turns out to be accurate, I'd argue (as the White House does) that HCR is still a bargain.

2. This is a rather pessimistic analysis (that's not to suggest it's flawed; in fact, pessimism is helpful in these sorts of matters). That's just a way of saying that it's extremely difficult to predict the costs of such a sweeping bill (and besides, it's way beyond my expertise). It should also be noted that this report concerns total medical spending, not the deficit specifically. But on the question of the deficit and costs more generally, I would point you to the arguments and analyses of some leading economists and health care experts* who would disagree with this report's finding. Bottom line: it's a tough question! The consensus seems to be that the bill either lowers costs or - in the new report's more pessimistic prediction - comes really close. For a bill that extends insurance to 32-34 million Americans, that's pretty impressive.

3. The fact that I came across this article on the Huffington Post says something about epistemic closure: namely, that it is largely a right-wing phenomenon with no liberal analogue (at least not right now).

*The Commonwealth Fund study I linked to dates from December 2009; for a more updated look at the bill's costs from David Cutler, a Harvard health care economist and one of the study's authors, see this WSJ editorial. He concludes that the bill will cut costs and gives most of its saving measures "passing" grades (Subscription required.)

UPDATE: Some helpful analysis from Jon Chait here. He points out that the Medicare Actuaries are extremely reluctant to factor behavioral changes into their analyses, meaning that their findings sometimes underestimate savings that are created by changing incentives. (This was one of the reasons that the office overestimated the cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill by 37%.) And this bill is chock full of programs aimed at changing behavior and incentives - at least some of which will produce major savings, just not savings which can easily be predicted.

Keep This in Mind

2010-04-15T10:10:00.004-04:00

Next time you hear somebody cite First Things as a home for intelligent Catholic conservatism, just respond with this. Joshua Keating is good-natured enough to poke some fun.

It shouldn't shock me anymore, but somehow it still does: this is the opposition.

Maybe I'm Just Being a Puritan, But...

2010-04-13T21:40:00.007-04:00

...I think it's really beneath the dignity of the President and the presidency to hawk a t-shirt, especially this one, to commemorate a legislative achievement.* First of all: this is health care reform, not the Stanley Cup. It doesn't need a t-shirt.

More importantly: the DNC and Organizing for America should know better than to stick the Obama brand on something that refers to a major political achievement as a "BFD." (Frankly, I find a lot of the official Obama marketing and media outreach to be cheesy and distasteful. But whatever.) It's not that I disagree with the shirt - getting health care done was a big effing deal, and I'm glad it happened. But can we show a little more respect for the office than this?**

*Yes, I realize this is technically the work of the DNC and Organizing for America, not the White House. But still.

**Also, if you're going to comment that there are other, more serious offenses that harm the dignity of the presidency (like lying about torture), don't bother: I realize this, and I agree with you. But this one is beneath Obama, and it should have been a no-brainer to whatever bozo was running the shirt design contest.

In Which I Write About Television

2010-04-12T20:03:00.003-04:00

Or something. Actually, I'm not going to say much, since (as you may have noticed from the lack of posting) I'm incredibly busy right now. But I wanted to say that I find something a little odd about the pieces I keep reading by people who take 30 Rock personally. Or, to put a finer point on it, by people who seem to be reading way too much into the show. I don't think Tina Fey is out to mock single women in order to feel better about the dullness of her real-life marriage, or that we're actually supposed to think Liz Lemon isn't attractive (that's part of the joke!), or that deep-down the show promotes conservative politics.

The most bizarre example of this trend was Feministing's take on 30 Rock a few months back, in which the writer came so close to getting the joke:

The most frustrating thing about 30 Rock, an otherwise excellent show, are the constant references to the fact that Tina Fey's character Liz Lemon is ugly. The thing is, Tina Fey fits conventional standards of female beauty almost to a T.

That's why it's funny! The entire Liz-Jenna dynamic set up by the show is one big joke: Liz, who is constantly referred to as plain or homely, is naturally beautiful. But Jenna, the heavily made-up blonde TV star who always talks about her good looks, has that faded-beauty look to her: you can tell that she was attractive when she was younger, but her refusal to deal with her age gracefully means she always looks like she's grasping (unsuccessfully) for some of her past glory. Hence her absurd dismissals of Lemon's looks: that she could never be an actress "because of her neck" and so on. It's a joke. Maybe we should just laugh - and refrain from suffocating the show's humor with forced political readings of our favorite episodes. (Unless I'm doing a political reading. Then it's OK.)

Healthcare Is Passed! [UPDATED with link]

2010-03-21T23:29:00.005-04:00

And I was the first caller on C-SPAN! (Yes, yes, I know, the real credit goes to President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid, for their historic leadership, but let me have my blogger's day in the sun! I'll have more thoughtful reactions later when I've calmed down...)

Apparently my performance was loved by some (or at least one!)...

"Im loving this first caller into #CSPANright now, 'I think this will go down as a wonderful day in American Legislative History'"

UPDATE: Link to video here - call starts just before the 35-minute mark.

Getting it Wrong on Reconciliation

2010-03-11T10:27:00.009-05:00

Megan McArdle doesn't seem to grasp the details of the current discussions over reconciliation and the healthcare bill, but she sure does enjoy "dismantling current liberal talking points!"

In a post that I'm kind of baffled by, McArdle admits that she doesn't care that much about the legitimacy of using reconciliation to pass healthcare reform, but still, liberals are wrong and they're doing something really crazy with it. Just sayin'.

To that end, she cites a post by Prof. Joyner at Outside the Beltway noting that just over half of the major bills passed by reconciliation had supermajority support. This, Joyner says, shows that historically, reconciliation hasn't been used "as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote," so using it to bypass a filibuster and enact major legislation "is exceedingly rare, having happened at most 7 times since 1980." Joyner concludes, "using reconciliation to avoid a supermajority on health care reform would simply be unprecedented."

In response, McArdle wrote, "The word "unprecedented" doesn't strike me as all that troubling--we're not in court. But to the extent that you care, this use really does seem to be novel." So to sum it up: she doesn't care. But if you care - which, just to remind you, she doesn't - Democrats are totally wrong and are tossing historical precedent out the window. Again: just sayin'.

There's just one problem: both McArdle and Joyner have their facts completely wrong. The Senate already passed healthcare with a supermajority. Does anyone else recall the massively important 60-39 vote to pass healthcare on Christmas Eve? Or the constant reminder that both the Senate and the House have already passed bills, and the only remaining task is to reconcile the two bills? Does Megan McArdle not understand this, or did she simply forget that the bill has already been passed?

No one - no one - is talking about using reconciliation to pass comprehensive healthcare reform. The only use of reconciliation would be to make changes in the Senate bill's taxing and spending provisions in order to reconcile it with the House bill. This really isn't that complicated, but Megan McArdle is apparently not alone among major journalists in failing to understand it. Jon Chait recently banged his head against a wall trying to explain it to Politico's Mike Allen. "In the grand scheme of things," Chait wrote, "the changes in the reconciliation bill will be minor [...] I understand perfectly well how intelligent people who don't follow this debate closely might not catch on to the distinction. But this is what Mike Allen does all day -- and, as I understand it, much of the night and the wee hours of the morning as well. How can anybody still not understand this?"

I wonder the same thing myself - but here's a stab at an answer: lots of people don't want to understand it. Having a clear grasp of the facts makes the bill's (impending?) passage more difficult to criticize.

A New Direction? [Updated]

2010-03-10T21:27:00.009-05:00

The story here is still coming together, but it seems that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who I criticized in a recent post about this very issue, may be changing his stance on workplace protections for LGBTQ Virginians:

After a day of legislative maneuvering and protests, Gov. Bob McDonnell issued an unusual executive directive saying workplace discrimination, including bias against gays, is prohibited in Virginia.
McDonnell’s pronouncement doesn’t make the anti-bias statement law, but says it must be obeyed in Virginia because such discrimination would be against the state and U.S. Constitutions.

When taking office, McDonnell stopped short of signing the executive order that previous governors signed - one which would have banned such discrimination. And it's not clear that he's actually calling on the legislature to make the change into law. Additionally, his statement is meeting with some opposition from Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who was on his ticket and shares a solid Christian right background. We'll see what happens, but it's a positive sign. Hopefully McDonnell will press forward with this welcome change. I argued that he was and remains a culture warrior, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

UPDATE: Marc Ambinder explains the "executive directive" as carrying less force than an executive order, but nonetheless directing the state to treat McDonnell's earlier executive order as if it did protect gay workers. Ambinder notes that the decision seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by fear of appearing like too much of a culture warrior - and he adds that "it does say something that the very conservative Republican governor of Virginia understands that it does not look good to be seen as endorsing discrimination against gays." It's pretty revealing that Republicans are just now realizing this, but there you have it.

The President's Ear

2010-03-03T14:01:00.006-05:00

There's a lot of argument right now about who has it. Some of the more liberal members of the party are convinced it's Rahm Emanuel and that he is cynically destroying the Obama presidency by caving on every liberal goal. Steve Clemons has been making this argument in a series of increasingly obnoxious, uncharacteristically fact-free posts that seem to add up to - well, I couldn't really say. His most specific piece of advice is this head-scratcher:

Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, G. John Ikenberry, Brent Scowcroft, Joseph Nye, Rita Hauser, Susan Eisenhower, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.

What does this even mean? Is there going to be a "Team B" room where respected academics team up with publishers of an internet tabloid to tell Obama that Guantanamo should be closed by now, as if he didn't know that? And besides, nearly all of these people are either writing blogs, regular opinion columns, academic papers, or magazine pieces - or appearing regularly on TV. Is there any reason to think their opinions aren't already known, or that they're not in contact with the White House already? (If you think Tom Daschle's not communicating with the White House right now...) This is exactly the kind of gimmicky nonsense that the White House doesn't need.

Anybody can read my complaints about this presidency right on this site, but one thing you won't see me claim is that this president is indifferent to progressive causes. He might not always go as far as I would like, but I simply cannot see this portrayal of Emanuel as a cynical, unprincipled Machiavellian running the White House into the ground and abandoning all progressive goals as nothing more than a lazy caricature. Ezra Klein seems to agree with me, and he offers some helpful perspective:

In fact, what appears to be happening is that Barack Obama is listening to his policy people. He didn't scale back the health-care reform bill because they convinced him that the different pieces didn't work on their own. He's trying to close Guantanamo because a lot of people who work on this stuff think we should close Guantanamo. That's the thing about electing a smart technocrat as president: He's swayed by smart, technocratic arguments. The political people are being used to help sell and shepherd the policy, and to figure out how much of the policy can pass Congress, but they seem to be losing the major arguments over what that policy should be.
The obvious counterargument here is the stimulus debate, but as Michael Tomasky has noted, the limits on the size of the stimulus appears to have come from the House of Representatives (and then, later in the process, from the Senate). Maybe Rahm and the White House didn't do enough to break through those limits, but they also thought the recession would be a lot milder than it actually was, and so didn't act with quite the urgency that better information might have furnished.

The point about the stimulus is well-taken. And I'd add to the domestic policy part of this argument that Obama has very publicly staked a massive part of his presidency on the success of comprehensive healthcare reform. And he has not backed down from the goal of a comprehensive bill. The period immediately following the Brown election was disheartening, but people who thought the White House would give up or scale back their efforts were wrong. Obviously, a lot depends on what happens in the next few weeks - we'll see if we get the bill (and it's now appearing that we will). When healthcare is done, people will come back to their senses. The process has been wrenching, and liberals faced some agonizing moments when Obama's approach seemed excessively cautious and pragmatic. But I expected caution and pragmatism, and that's what Obama promised in the campaign. And after a long, grueling process, he still hasn't abandoned the healthcare effort. He kept that promise too.

The Tensions of Obama-ism, Pt. II

2010-02-28T19:11:00.003-05:00

Can he get worthwhile legislative victories and govern as a uniter? Edward Luce of the Financial Times says no (registration required, link via Brad DeLong):

Forget bipartisanship Obama: shoot for the moon: The problem started even before he was inaugurated. Mr Obama was faced with two conflicting objectives. First, try to revive a rapidly sinking economy by crafting a big fiscal stimulus – one that should be “timely, targeted and temporary” in the words of Lawrence Summers, Mr Obama’s chief economic adviser. Second, try to win over as many Republican votes as possible. In the event, Mr Obama got the worst of both worlds – a poorly designed stimulus that won only three (out of 41) Republican votes in the Senate. The price of those three was high. In order to appeal to the Republicans, a third of the “stimulus” was frittered away in minute tax cuts that most families either saved or used to help reduce their household debts. Designed to stimulate the economy and Republican support, the tax cut achieved neither. Second, its overall size was cut from $1,200bn to about $800bn – considerably lower than most economists believed was necessary to kick-start the economy. In order to win over Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, the Democrats removed $83bn of short-term spending from the bill at the cost of 400,000 jobs....
A year later, little has changed. This week pundits got excited about a $15bn jobs promotion bill that was enacted in the Senate. The excitement was confined to political observers, who noted that the bill passed with the support of 13 opposition votes, including that of Scott Brown, the Republican who took the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in last month’s Massachusetts election. It was celebrated as a victory for bipartisanship. What it did not herald was much of a victory for jobs. Economists confined their observations to the fact that the bill, which offers employers a one-year holiday on the 6.2 per cent payroll tax they pay if they hire someone who has been out of work for more than two months, was unlikely to make a notable dent in unemployment. Businesses are suffering from a lack of demand not supply....
Finally, Mr Obama’s bipartisan instincts arguably contributed to the parlous state of healthcare reform today. The most serious blow to the bill came last summer when Mr Obama allowed a small group of centrist Democratic and Republican senators to negotiate on a compromise. The exercise robbed Mr Obama of three valuable months and ceded the initiative to people who had no prior record of fighting for healthcare reform. It also created the space for the demagogic “townhall” meetings in which the bill was depicted as a Trojan horse for socialism, euthanasia and an all-seeing federal bureaucracy. The net result? No Republican votes....
American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement, notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr Obama...

One popular theory right now is that as long as the Republicans remain in la-la land, the president may have to choose between sound policy and political comity. But right now he's trying for the latter, and in so doing he's sacrificing the former and getting neither. (Actually, to be fair, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say he's not getting any sound policy changes - health care, if it passes, will be huge, and the stimulus, for all its flaws, was necessary and successful, even in its watered-down form).

My gripe: I think the choice between good politics and good policy is a false one. Matt Yglesias argued a while back that a larger stimulus would have boosted the economy much more than the one we got, which in turn would have done a lot more to reassure nervous Democrats than limiting its price tag (and, correspondingly, its effectiveness) did. I agree with this analysis. The public wants political reconciliation, but it also wants policies that work. If Obama can get the policy right, than he's solved more than half of his problem - the rest is just a messaging battle, trying to convince people that the Republicans a) have no serious policy ideas and b) have consistently refused to negotiate in good faith. I think that's a political fight Democrats can win, but if they can't marry their political argument with tangible policy victories, they'll be in hot water come November.

Finally, A Party I'd Go To

2010-02-26T09:55:00.006-05:00

The Post reports that there's a new movement afoot: coffee parties!

From a pretty funny story today:

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party -- the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending -- Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.
let's start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss 'em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let's get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.
Friends replied, and more friends replied. So last month, in her Silver Spring apartment, Park started a fan page called "Join the Coffee Party Movement." Within weeks, her inbox and page wall were swamped by thousands of comments from strangers in diverse locales, such as the oil fields of west Texas and the suburbs of Chicago.
I have been searching for a place of refuge like this for a long while. . . . It is not Us against the Govt. It is democracy vs corporatocracy . . . I just can't believe that the Tea Party speaks for all patriotic Americans.. . . Just sent suggestions to 50 friends . . . I think it's time we start a chapter right here in Tucson . . .
The snowballing response made her the de facto coordinator of Coffee Party USA, with goals far loftier than its oopsy-daisy origin: promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people, push leaders to enact the progressive change for which 52.9 percent of the country voted in 2008.

Finally, there's a national movement to unite two of my favorite things: civil, compassionate, and inclusive political discourse geared towards progressive change...and coffee! Now, all we need is someone to start a Beer Party Movement. That's not as pressing for me personally - after all, being a poli-sci nerd and a college student tends to turn many evenings into beer + political conversation, but for the rest of America, yearning for the hoppy, malty, and substantive experiences that Georgetown students enjoy so frequently...

(By the way, I should take this opportunity to throw in my lot with James Fallows, the Atlantic's national correspondent, who describes himself as an "inveterate coffee-and-beer drinker -- coffee until 3pm, beer thereafter." This is really more of an aspiration for me, since a college student's budget does not permit that much beer - unless you're drinking the cheap stuff, and I've already shown myself to be a beer snob. Someday!)

Stimulus Reality Check

2010-02-23T18:54:00.007-05:00

If you're ever wondering who to believe about the stimulus. Or about anything, really.

"The stimulus [...] has had no effect on jobs. None. Not anywhere." - Rush Limbaugh, six weeks ago

"Where are the jobs?" - John Boehner, six days ago

"The legacy of the stimulus isn’t jobs or economic growth – it’s more dangerous debt." - Sarah Palin, six days ago

"John Edwards and Tiger Woods have had a better year than the stimulus bill [...] If you spend nearly a trillion dollars, you should create at least a few jobs." - Mitch McConnell, five days ago

"We now know there was $860 some billion spent in the stimulus bill, and it didn't work. It was a failure. Jobs weren't created." - Eric Cantor, five days ago

"CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. [...] CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA." - The Congressional Budget Office, today

Just a Pragmatic, Jobs-and-Transportation Kind of Guy

2010-02-18T08:47:00.007-05:00

When Bob McDonnell was running for governor of Virginia, his campaign was pretty careful to play down his Christian Right bona fides and focus on pocketbook issues - namely, the state economy and Virginia's (very serious) transportation problems. Eventually, the opposition got around to exposing his ultra-conservative, borderline-reactionary views on women, homosexuality, and other matters, but it wasn't enough to sway the election. For one, Creigh Deeds, who seemed to think he could run for governor while comatose, couldn't have excited Virginia Democrats if his life depended on it, so he couldn't make much hay out of the outrageous arguments in McDonnell's 1989 master's thesis from Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network University (now called Regent University, because apparently naming a school after a TV station just wasn't resulting in the sort of gravitas universities strive for).

In the thesis, McDonnell (among other things) criticizes feminists for the breakdown of the family, argues that the government should "restrain, punish, and deter" behavior such as homosexuality or the purchase of pornography, and attacks Griswold v. Connecticut. These are the marks of someone who is unapologetically opposed to almost every major social development of the last 60 years - someone whose positions on social issues are well to the right of mainstream America. For example, the Catholic Church is very strongly opposed to birth control, but 96% of married Catholics use it. And a 2004 CBS-NYT poll showed that only 16% of Americans, and only 25% of self-identified Republicans and conservatives, believe that pharmacists should be able to refuse birth control to customers for religious reasons. 78% of Americans said they should not be able to do so -- and that's just the number who believe individual pharmacists shouldn't be able to refuse to sell birth control. Imagine the number of Americans who would oppose a blanket ban - so that instead of being refused contraception by one pharmacist and having to drive to another pharmacy, you weren't allowed to buy contraceptives at all. That was the law in Connecticut before the Supreme Court decision McDonnell criticized. And that, apparently, is what he wants for everyone.

But for the Deeds campaign, it was too late. It's tougher to get people to care about social issues in a recession, and the "Bob's For Jobs!" slogan stuck. Christian conservatives were OK with this; in fact, they were ecstatic about it. Students I interviewed at Patrick Henry College, a small college for home-schooled Christian conservatives, said that the McDonnell campaign was a model for conservative Christians nationwide. One student enthusiastically argued that, "if we follow his lead in 2010," conservative Christians would lead Republicans to victory. Critics of the Christian Right have long claimed that it misleadingly uses "stealth candidates" to win elections - people who masquerade as pragmatic, jobs-focused problem solvers, but are really culture warriors at heart. Christian conservatives argue that they're not hiding anything, and sometimes they even claim that social issues really aren't at the heart of their platform. McDonnell himself, resisting pressure by Deeds into a debate over abortion, said, "I've never made social policy a huge part of my campaigns or a huge part of my agenda."

That's, um, an interesting reading of his legislative record. He introduced bills banning late-term abortion and requiring informed consent for all women seeking abortions. He introduced a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Virginia. This is more than enough to cast doubt on his claim that social policy has "never" been a huge part of his agenda.

Still, McDonnell promised to be a governor focused on jobs, transportation, and public safety. When pressed on his thesis, he softened his tone. In September, the Washington Post reported that although McDonnell's position against gay marriage hadn't changed, he had come to believe "that discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation or marital status has no place in government or on the job."

Well, that settles that, then. Except for this:

Gay and lesbian state workers in Virginia are no longer specifically protected against discrimination, thanks to a little-noticed change made by new Gov. Bob McDonnell.

McDonnell (R) on Feb. 5 signed an executive order that prohibits discrimination "on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, political affiliation, or against otherwise qualified persons with disabilities," as well as veterans.

It rescinds the order that Gov. Tim Kaine signed Jan. 14, 2006 as one of his first actions. After promising a "fair and inclusive" administration in his inaugural address, Kaine (D) added veterans to the non-discrimination policy - and sexual orientation.

This reminds me of the old story about the turtle and the spider. The spider sees the turtle about to cross a stream, and he says, "Let me ride on your back." The turtle says, "Absolutely not! You'll sting me, and I'll drown!" The spider replies, "I promise, I won't."

Halfway across the stream, the spider stings the turtle, and the turtle begins to drown. As he sinks into the water, the turtle says, "Why did you do that?" The spider replies: "It's my nature."

People who are on a mission from God do not let settled law, public consensus, or campaign promises stand in their way. And anyone who voluntarily associates with Pat Robertson - a vile, hateful bigot who profits from corrupt cooperations with murderous dictator s - does not deserved to be considered for dog-catcher, much less governor of a state. McDonnell appeared on the 700 Club with his friend Pat back in 2006. This was seven years after the discovery by a Virginia Pilot reporter that Robertson had misled viewers of his show to donate money for what they thought was Rwandan genocide relief. Robertson diverted a portion of those donations to fund a diamond-mining operation he had initiated with the help of Mobutu Sese Seko, the totalitarian dictator of Zaire who was one of the most corrupt leaders of all time. Robertson also got into the mining business with Charles Taylor, the warlord of Liberia who is currently on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor is accused of funding a civil war in Sierra Leone so he could get access to its diamonds - and it was diamond-mining in Liberia that he and Robertson worked on in 1999. Taylor's brutality in Liberia and Sierra Leone included slavery, mutilation, rape, the use of child soldiers, and the horrific deaths of up to 250,000 people.

This was a guy Pat could do business with! After all, they shared the same religion: the worship of the almighty dollar.

So watch that YouTube clip. It shows the then-attorney general of Virginia, later-candidate and now-governor of Virginia, smiling happily with the founder of his alma mater. As if they were at an ice cream social.

So, call me paranoid, but I was a little suspicious when Bob claimed he was just campaigning on jobs and transportation. Is he a warlord or a conspirator with warlords? No. Has he done anything illegal? No.

I want to be very clear that I don't consider McDonnell to be in any way involved with the despicable acts of Pat Robertson. But I do consider his continued association with Robertson, in light of these revelations, to be a spectacular failure of moral and civic leadership, and a particularly sad example of just who he was willing to embrace in order to win.

Where was the principled stance from McDonnell on breaking with his mentor? Why didn't he refuse to go within 10 miles of the 700 Club?

Because he's a culture warrior at heart, and Pat Robertson is a culture warlord. And you need the base to win. You can get the moderates with your pragmatism, but you can't abandon the base. I'm sorry to hear that LGBTQ workers for the state of Virginia have lost protection against discrimination. But I'm not naive enough to be surprised.

What He Said

2010-02-18T08:34:00.006-05:00

I don't know how many times I can link to E.J. Dionne and say, "That's what I think, too!" But assuming I haven't reached my limit, read this. He demolishes the lie that Obama's agenda is in peril for being too left-wing:

Nobody wants to admit that on health care, the moderates won all the big fights. Single-payer was out at the start. The public option died. A Medicare buy-in died. The number of Americans who would be covered shrank. The insurance companies held on to their antitrust exemption. If a bill eventually becomes law--as it must if the Democrats are not to look like a feckless, useless lot--the final proposal will be much closer to the moderate Senate version than to the more progressive bill passed by the House.
And if the Republicans refuse to cooperate, this will not mean that the bill isn't moderate. It will mean only that Republicans refuse to vote for a moderate bill.
But if all the media talk about the "failure of moderation" is nonsense, this doesn't get liberals or Obama off the hook.
While liberals were arguing about public plans and this or that, and while Obama was deep into inside deal-making, the conservatives relentlessly made a straightforward public case based on a syllogism: The economy is a mess. Obama and the Democrats are for big government. Big government is responsible for the mess. Therefore the mess is the fault of Obama and the Big Government Democrats.
Simplistic and misleading? Absolutely. But if liberals and Obama are so smart, how did they--or, if you prefer, "we"--allow conservatives to make this argument so effectively? Why do the mainstream media give it so much credence?
Of course, I think the conservatives' argument is wrong. But at this point, I have to admire their daring and discipline.

And the key point of the entire piece:

Moderate and progressive Democrats alike have eight months between now and this fall's elections to change the terms of the debate and prove they can govern. Otherwise, they'll be washed out by a tidal wave.

It's the best concise summary and analysis of the fights over the stimulus and health care that I have yet read.

What's Wrong with the Media

2010-02-17T14:43:00.011-05:00

I captured this myself! From the Atlantic Wire:

Let's review. According to the article, there is a "strong consensus" among economists that the stimulus was necessary, and according to David Leonhardt, the most prominent economic research firms - IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody'sEconomy.com - "all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs."

But wait! It doesn't play well. So the headline asks, was it worth it? Let's see. Why don't you ask one of the 1.8 million people who are employed today because of the stimulus bill?

There was a similar story - and an even worse offender, it pains me to say - on my beloved, usually-above-this-sort-of-thing NPR this morning. (Yes, I embrace the NPR-liberal label. You should see my coffee mug!) Just read the highlights of this article and then brace yourself for its ridiculous, tacked-on conclusion.

It begins with Obama's qualified language about the intent and effect of the stimulus bill: "'I don't want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problem,' Obama said when he signed the $787 billion bill last February. 'But today does mark [...] the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs.'"

Then the article goes on to say that both the White House and the CBO estimate the stimulus kept about 2 million people employed, that the economy is growing again, that job losses have slowed down to "a trickle," and that private economists mostly agree the stimulus worked. It further notes that insofar as the stimulus was insufficient, it was because it probably wasn't big enough, and it was too focused on tax cuts.

Let's see: too much spending and not enough tax cuts. Who does that sound like to you?

But that's not all. The article quotes Obama rebuffing GOP criticism by noting his concession on the tax cuts, then darkly notes that most people don't think their taxes were cut. (The text reads more neutrally than the damning tone the correspondent took on Morning Edition today.) Why don't people think their taxes were cut? Because they were given the tax cut over several paychecks, not in a lump sum. The article notes that behavioral economists agree this is the best way to encourage spending, because people are more likely to save a lump-sum tax cut. But just like the Atlantic Wire, NPR can't help itself: well, that's all well and good, but what about the *politics*? He may have cut taxes in the most effective way, but if he can't campaign on it, what's the point?

Then: the conclusion. Are you ready?

The Obama administration is still paying a price for its marketing missteps. Rightly or wrongly, the president's first big initiative is widely seen as missing the mark.

Rightly or wrongly? How about just "wrongly"? And "widely seen" as missing the mark? Yeah - by people who a) didn't understand its intent and b) are playing politics (as well as lying). This sort of wishy-washy nonsense is exactly what happens when nervous reporters want to avoid the appearance of bias - so instead of saying what's true (namely, that a modest, probably-too-small stimulus bill fulfilled its main goals, but that it would have been more effective if centrists and Republicans hadn't insisted on trimming the price tag and replacing spending measures with relatively less-effective tax cuts -- a White House concession which earned the President zero GOP votes in the House), they have to present "both sides" - reality and the Republican talking points - and then shrug at the end, saying "well, we know what's true, but Republicans say different. It's a debate!"

All while decrying the politics of the bill, never stopping for once to imagine that, in this instance, good policy was the enemy of good politics, and the President - being serious about governing, something no one in Washington is apparently used to - opted for the former.

So, happy birthday, stimulus bill. Maybe by the time the media marks your second birthday, people will have begun to take serious problems seriously - and we can get some better analysis. I'm not going to hold my breath.

How to Build a Legacy (or, I Could Do This Punditry Thing, Part III)

2010-02-12T08:40:00.004-05:00

I don't have as much time to comment on this as I'd like, but take a look at David Brooks's column this morning. If you don't have a spare five minutes, I can sum it up for you: "I don't like parts of Obama's agenda, so I have decided that the voters don't either, and his presidency must be dead. How can Obama rescue his presidency? Only by embracing my politics!"

How convenient!

A Quick Note

2010-01-31T15:11:00.003-05:00

Today's NYT has a nice series of short pieces from former presidential aides about their experiences one year into a new administration. Karen Hughes takes a little jab at the sitting president by recalling her own boss's words at his first SOTU:

President Obama often seems to suggest that his administration is facing challenges more difficult than others did. He might look back on the first words of President Bush’s first State of the Union address: “As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.”

It's a nice sentiment, but we now know he was wrong, don't we?

The Tensions of Obama-ism

2010-01-21T09:45:00.004-05:00

E.J. Dionne's column today is a perfect explanation of how Obama's style and promises conflict with his agenda. The whole thing is a must-read, but this particular paragraph (which singles out the Senate's unconscionably slow deliberation on health care) strikes me as dead-on:

Brown's victory is also a rebuke to a United States Senate that acted as if it had unlimited time to pass health care legislation and ignored how foolish its listless ways appear to normal human beings. Like a bottle of milk kept out of the refrigerator too long, the health bill came to look curdled and sour to a public that felt it never heard an adequate explanation of what was in it.
In the short term, Democrats have to make a quick decision on health care. The obvious path is for the House to pass the Senate's bill and send it to Obama's desk, while reaching agreement on certain changes that, under existing practices, can get through the Senate with fewer than 60 votes. It would be the equivalent of a political crime for Democrats to have invested so much in health reform only to let it die because of one election in one state.

Read the whole thing here.

The Re-Set Button?

2010-01-20T14:04:00.002-05:00

That's what a lot of people are calling for in the wake of the Brown victory. Ross Douthat, for example, writes:

There’s a scenario, believe it or not, in which Scott Brown’s stunning win last night could actually end up forestalling a massive G.O.P. sweep next November. It involves Barack Obama swallowing his pride, behaving like a President who’s just been thumped, and making a very public show of internalizing the lessons of last night in Massachusetts. And it involves dismissing, immediately and with prejudice, the liberal fantasy that Rahm Emanuel should spend the next few weeks “knocking heads together” in the House, in the hopes of pushing the Senate bill through Congress.

Obama ought to closet himself with every potential swing-vote Senator and congressman, hat in hand, to figure out if there’s some kind of Plan B on health care that could get passed in the next six months. There are plenty of ideas that the White House could draw on in this quest (risk pools, Medicaid expansions, anything from this Tyler Cowen list, etc.), and the final result could be sold, accurately, as an incremental alternative to the bloat of the current legislation. Then Obama could spend next year saying “message received, America” on health care, even as he picks fights with the G.O.P. on financial reform and a few other issues and waits for the economy to start adding jobs again. The goal would be to reassure a public that still likes him and still distrusts Republicans, but that clearly wants the Democrats to slow down, spend less, and face a few more curbs on their authority.

No. No. No. No. No.

The voters elected Barack Obama to pass comprehensive health care reform. One freak upset GOP victory in Massachusetts doesn't change that. The point of this reform process was not to waste a year of the nation's time only to give up when things get tough. Congress spent a whole damn year on healthcare. The Senate has a bill. It's done. The House can swallow that bill - it's not as good as the House's own bill, but it's a good bill nonetheless and it can get passed.

This is not the time to start listening to hand-wringers - either the gutless ones on the left or the opportunistic ones on the right, who want to scare Democrats into abandoning real reform efforts. It's time to finish this job.

Does It Ever End?

2010-01-16T21:35:00.005-05:00

From Jonathan Chait (whose new TNR blog is excellent, by the way) comes this video of Scott Brown chortling while suggesting President Obama was born out of wedlock:

This is, Chait argues, a much more potent weapon against the Brown campaign than anything else the pathetic Coakley campaign has yet managed to produce:

By showing Brown endorsing a fringe right-wing pet theory (explanation here), it's more evidence of the fact that Brown is anything but the good government, uniter-not-a-divider moderate he pretends to be. That's the fundamental lie of his campaign that Coakley has been seeking (unsuccessfully, thus far) to expose. And on a visceral level, to watch him chortling as he calls Obama illegitimate is just gross and offensive.

I'm inclined to agree. There's nothing about Coakley I find particularly exciting (and there are certain aspects of her record that are concerning), but she's clearly the right choice to succeed the late Senator Kennedy - especially since health care reform could be hanging in the balance.

That's why her meandering, incoherent, almost unbelievably inept performance has been so infuriating. At this moment, the stakes are just too high for her to screw up. And the last thing the Senate needs is another classless idiotic right-winger. There's a bastard in that video, all right - but it's not the president. Hopefully the good people of the Bay State will keep him out of the U.S. Senate.

The Artifice of Natural Law

2009-12-23T12:35:00.020-05:00

I was going to comment on this NYT piece when I read it a few days ago, but I've been finishing up some work, and now Sully's beaten me to the punch. It's a profile of Robert George, the Princeton professor and natural law theorist. George's advocacy of natural law makes him something of an anachronism among philosophers (at least at secular institutions) and something of an icon among conservatives. I first became familiar with his work a couple of years ago when I began to delve more deeply into the intersections of political theory and theology, and he's doubtlessly one of this generation's most important scholars of religion and politics.

His approach to the subject also happens to be phenomenally misguided - and, it increasingly seems, openly ideological.

Let me explain a little bit, since this article gives (it seems to me) an unhelpfully shallow explanation of some of the major issues at play. Early on, the article begins to list some of George's biggest fans:

He has parlayed a 13th-century Catholic philosophy into real political influence. Glenn Beck, the Fox News talker and a big George fan, likes to introduce him as “one of the biggest brains in America,” or, on one broadcast, “Superman of the Earth.” Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research.

Ok, so what is this "13th-century Catholic philosophy" that has Major Intellectual Figures such as Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush so enthralled? It's natural law - so we might call George, as Sullivan does, a "natural lawyer." The proponents of natural law include a long list of major Catholic philosophers - including Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria. Let's assume that Glenn Beck has never read Francisco de Vitoria. What does he find so appealing about this philosophy?

At its core, natural law is basically the idea that the natural world, since it was created and ordered by God, exemplifies God’s wisdom and intent. The artificial order, then, should be modeled after the natural order, in order to reflect the plan and genius of God. I recently noted, in a paper on this subject, that "the considerable persuasive and explanatory power of this theory lies in its appeal to deeply-held convictions and its power to develop theories that seem intuitive." Sullivan's post echoes this point:

But my deeper point is actually an agreement of sorts: there does seem something intuitively right about seeing our "nature" as some sort of guide to the way we should live our lives. But this is the beginning of an argument, not an end to it. What do we mean by nature? How do emotion and reason interact? How precise and universal can we be in adducing morals from something as diverse and varied as the fruits of natural selection? How can we be sure we aren't smuggling in all sorts of pre-existing views of what nature is and what morality is when we declare something "unnatural"?

This does a neat job of summarizing the immediate problems that arise from removing natural law from abstract speculation and actually using it to guide politics. Sullivan's main beef with George and the natural lawyers is their approach to homosexuality, and indeed, it's a revealing look at the way a supposedly intuitive, rational approach to politics quickly becomes arbitrary, gnostic, and theocratic.

The official Catholic position on homosexual sex is that it's "unnatural" - referring, quite literally, to the notion that sex is by nature procreative and physically unitive of male and female, and since homosexual sex doesn't fit that definition, it's inherently incompatible with what is "natural" - and therefore ordered by God, since God created the natural order. This is, to put it lightly, a fraught position, as numerous writers have demonstrated. It's not necessary to revisit their points here (but if you're interested in more reading on the topic, see Jon Corvino, Jeffrey Siker, and others). Suffice it to say that, as is plainly evident from this line of argument, it's impossible to have natural law without a certain requisite amount of theology.

That's why this claim, recently made by Justin Rigali, a conservative cardinal closely associated with George (and in a speech that the article suggests George wrote) is so frustrating and misleading:

These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”

This is completely wrong and intellectually dishonest. Those principles do belong to divine revelation. Natural law is by definition impossible without divine reason, so either Rigali doesn't understand natural law or he's just being a liar. I'd actually be hard-pressed to say which. People tend to defer to scholars with George's pristine credentials (including degrees from Oxford and Harvard), and it's tempting to argue that one's own views are accessible to anyone employing right reason.

But think about the fundamental arguments behind natural law: we know what to do because of what we see in creation. Yet why should creation have any meaning? Why should nature hold any authority? I addressed this question a few months ago:

The Christian idea of a world created ex nihilo is not a world that precludes contingency, but it is a world where the contingent embodies (in some way) a divine idea or image, if not divine intent. It is a world in which, as Louis Dupré writes, "nature retains an intrinsically normative character," a "further stage in the process of revelation." For Christian thinkers of centuries past, nature was filled with meaning, if not intentional structure. Again, as Dupré puts it, "the epistemic apriori imposed no categorical structure upon the real, but a perspective for reading what was directly, but never simply or exhaustively, given."

Natural law is essentially one step beyond this position - there is a categorical structure given in nature, because nature reflects the intent of God. It is therefore impossible to conceive of natural law without believing that a) God exists and b) God created the universe. The idea that this is possible, as Rigali says, without religion, on a foundation of universal reason, "even apart from divine revelation," is ludicrous.

The political implications, of course, are too tempting for any social conservative to ignore, so they insist on this insulting farce. All while ignoring the fundamentally theological presuppositions and consequences of their argument. After all, can anyone convincingly explain how a system of government and laws based on clerical interpretations of God's intent can avoid being - at the very least - a soft theocracy? And a gnostic one at that? Someone has to interpret what is natural and what is not; what counts and what doesn't; what reveals God's intent and what is simply an anomaly. This will require people with some religious training. Right reason, separate from religion, indeed.

But nonetheless, the battle lines have been drawn, and the political consequences are clear. Christians of various stripes have come together to push this idea - hey, all it takes is a common enemy in the dreaded gays for conservative Christians to discover ecumenism. And they have every right to push these ideas in the political square.

Just don't try to argue that they're not fundamentally religious arguments. It's insulting.

I Could Do This Punditry Thing..., Ctd.

2009-12-19T19:24:00.006-05:00

Again, some better-known, more talented writer anticipates yours truly. Here's Jonathan Chait on the Republicans' healthcare blunder:

The United States is on the doorstep of comprehensive health care reform. It's a staggering achievement, about which I'll have more to say later. But the under-appreciated thing that strikes me at the moment is that it never would have happened if the Republican Party had played its cards right.
At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can't know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.
But Republicans wouldn't make that deal. The GOP leadership put immense pressure on all its members to withhold consent from any health care bill. The strategy had some logic to it: If all 40 Republicans voted no, then Democrats would need 60 votes to succeed, a monumentally difficult task. And if they did succeed, the bill would be seen as partisan and therefore too liberal, too big government. The spasm of anti-government activism over the summer helped lock the GOP into this strategy -- no Republican could afford to risk the wrath of Tea Partiers convinced that any reform signed by Obama equaled socialism and death panels.
[...]
The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama's presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they'll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they've been dealt will last for decades.

As I noted just over a week ago, I made this exact point back in October, two months before David Frum and Jonathan Chait got around to it. Just sayin'.

Brilliant Idea!

2009-12-15T09:52:00.005-05:00

So Kos and John Aravosis (of AMERICABlog) have apparently decided that Congressional Democrats (especially in the Senate) have compromised on too much and it's time to kill healthcare reform. Great plan. After a grueling, eighteen month-long primary campaign arguing about competing health care reform plans, a grueling general election campaign arguing about whether to enact meaningful health care reform at all, and nearly a year of legislative haggling over a massive (and massively-important) piece of legislation - with all the attendant promises, deals, spent political capital, hours of analysis and argument and hard work - let's just throw the whole damn thing out so a bunch of pissed-off lefties who have never had the responsibility of governing can enjoy a temper tantrum with an even bigger-than-usual dose of self-righteousness. All while thousands of Americans continue to die each year because they don't have health insurance, and millions more live in crippling financial insecurity because of skyrocketing costs. Both of which are problems that this bill would solve.

It's perfectly reasonable to be upset that some reforms have been watered down, but it's completely childish to argue that a good bill that will vastly improve the current system is worth scrapping simply because the left didn't get everything on its wish list. I've spent no small amount of time criticizing the Republican base for its stupid, immature, fantasy-land approach to governance, and the same message applies to the netroots in this case: Grow. Up.

(And, of course, Toby Ziegler has already said this better than I can, so I leave you with this! The best bit starts at 1:15.)

"And if you think demonizing people who are trying to govern responsibly is the way to protect our liberal base, then speaking as a liberal, go to bed, would you please?"

A Just War?

2009-12-12T15:46:00.003-05:00

Michael Walzer, who knows a thing or two about the topic, raises some questions about Afghanistan:

After all the mistakes, the cost of “winning”—significantly reducing the strength of the Taliban, stimulating local resistance, training a national army, working with Pakistan to shut down al Qaeda havens across the border—may now be too high. The number of troops that would be necessary to “win” may be far greater than the number the president has committed and far greater than the American people would be willing to commit. And if that is true, then the continuation of the war can’t be justified—for it is one of the key criteria of a just war that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a just peace.

This sums up my own attitudes about the strategic costs/benefits of Afghanistan pretty well. But Walzer points out that there may be another, more convincing argument for seeing things through:

Things have not gotten better for most Afghans in those years, and for many of them, who live in the battle zones or who endure the rapaciousness of government officials, things have probably gotten much worse. At the same time, however, there have been some gains, in parts of the countryside and in the more secure cities. American and European NGOs have been doing good work in areas like public health, health care, and education. Schools have opened, and teachers have been recruited, for some two million girls. Organizations of many different sorts, including trade unions and women’s groups, have sprung up in a new, largely secular, civil society. A version of democratic politics has emerged, radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk—at risk for their lives—if the United States simply withdrew. Given everything we did wrong in Afghanistan, the work of these people—democrats, feminists, union activists, and teachers—is a small miracle worth defending against the Taliban resurgence.
Indeed, I think we have an obligation to do that—and I also think that most of these people would agree (they should be asked). And it is here that there is a realistic possibility of success: the cities can be held, civil society fostered, and NGO projects in the countryside protected, even with fewer troops than the president has committed. But for this work there is no obvious end; a year and a half won’t be enough.

I Could Do This Punditry Thing...

2009-12-10T10:41:00.003-05:00

Or this think-tank thing. Or this presidential speechwriting thing. (Ok, maybe not.)

But I was still a few weeks ahead of David Frum when I wrote (regarding healthcare):

Salam is right to note that if you think an idea will be bad policy, it is responsible to oppose it. But think of the nature of Republican opposition and its likely consequences. Leading Democrats from President Obama down have all repeatedly stated that they want a bipartisan bill, but at the end of the day they'll pass healthcare reform with or without Republican input. There have been minor substantive ideas from Republicans (namely, tort reform), but overall, the Republican "contribution" to this debate has been scaremongering and demagoguery led by the likes of Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey - with their ridiculous lies about death panels, euthanasia, abortion, socialism, etc. Republicans had their chance to make real contributions to healthcare reform. They had the opportunity to ensure that the final bill, even if they found it objectionable, would at least be mitigated by some conservative provisions. But they never took that opportunity. For the most part, they've been content to sit on the sidelines and throw spitballs. Since the passage of healthcare is nearly guaranteed, they are being profoundly irresponsible, and yes, nihilistic, if they refuse to try and positively change something that they believe will be disastrous.

Yesterday, Frum, in a post about healthcare and global warming legislation, expressed similar sentiments about the results of what he called Congressional Republicans' "'no, no, no' policy":

Republicans could have been architects of improvement, instead we made ourselves impotent spectators as things get radically worse. [...]
The furious rejectionist frenzy of the past 12 months is exacting a terrible price upon Republicans. We’re getting worse and less conservative results out of Washington than we could have negotiated, if we had negotiated.
As is, we’re betting heavily that a bad economy will collapse Democratic support without us having to lift a finger. Maybe that will happen. But existing party strategy has to be reckoned a terrible failure. Most Republicans will shrug off that news. If polls are right, rank-and-file Republicans feel little regard for the Washington party, and don’t expect much from it. But it’s the rank-and-file who are the problem here! Republican leaders do not dare try deals for fear of being branded sell-outs by a party base that wants war to the knife. So we got war. And we’re losing. Even if we gain seats in 2010, the actions of this congressional session will not be reversed. Shrink Medicare after it has expanded? Hey- we said we’d never do that.
I hear a lot of talk about the importance of “principle.” But what’s the principle that obliges us to be stupid?

I confess that I don't know, but I'm sure Sarah Palin is somehow involved.

Obama's "Failure" in Asia

2009-11-27T18:16:00.003-05:00

James Fallows debunks another false narrative. Comprehensively.

Thanks, Sarah!

2009-11-21T13:10:00.004-05:00

For answering my question:

Is it possible that the Palin Right has diminished the office so much that they really think any warm body with the right views on abortion can do the job? What planet do they live on?

Apparently, that's exactly it:

O'REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values.

Well, there you have it! I was right.

Lessons from Ft. Hood?

2009-11-19T08:40:00.012-05:00

Allow me a respectful dissent from Jeff's take on some of the various reactions (specifically, those of Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg) to the shooting at Ft. Hood.

Jeff writes:

Both Goldberg and Sullivan effectively call for investigations into American Arabs/Muslims, particularly those in the military. Right, good idea: let’s alienate the few Arabs/Muslims who love their country – in spite of their country’s and fellow soldiers’ prejudices against them, drawn out by incidents like the Fort Hood massacre – enough to die for it.
Fort Hood was incredibly tragic, and incredibly sad. Did Major Hasan scream Allahu Akbar? It does not matter. He may have believed himself to be religiously motivated, he may have had ties to radicalizing Imams, but at the end of the day — he was clearly disturbed. Indeed, the military and society as a whole should watch out for people who gave warning signs of mental instability — but not warning signs based on their religious or ethnic identity, which is what Goldberg and Sullivan are demanding.

This characterization conflates the reactions of Goldberg and Sullivan, which were actually quite different. In fact, Sullivan wrote the following about the shooting on November 6:

It's a tragic massacre in the first place. It will doubtless increase suspicion of Muslim servicemembers, which in turn propels more religious polarization, which makes winning this war harder still. You can instantly see how the Malkins will spin this, and how a war on American Muslims can get jump-started in America.

And he posed the following questions about reactions to the shooting the same day:

[Should we] Screen all potential Muslim soldiers in [the] future? Have special surveillance of such soldiers? It's easy to see how this might make matters worse just as it might make them better. Michelle Malkin, remember, favored interning Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Is that what the anti-Jihadists now want for American Muslims? Or what, exactly?
Denial of these Islamist currents, even within the military, is dangerous and foolish. But equally, over-reacting to them is dangerous and foolish.

Sullivan's statements don't quite add up to "effectively call[ing] for investigations into American Arabs/Muslims, particularly those in the military." Granted, he did write that "if political correctness is preventing this vigilance, it needs to be pushed back, and hard," but that's a qualified statement, and in any case it seems pretty self-evident. If warning signs were ignored because no one wanted to cause offense, that's obviously unacceptable. (For the record, I think it's extremely unlikely that that will prove to be the case, and some of the people making this claim are just taking potshots at liberals.) But Sullivan made the suggestion in a qualified way, and explicitly rejected the "ROOT OUT THE MUSLIMS!" sentiment that undergirded a disturbing amount of conservative reaction.

Goldberg, for his part, wrote:

But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course.

I think he's wrong - aside from the usual suspects who jumped to conclusions within minutes of the news, there were quite a few people who considered that radical Islam could have something to do with this. But they recognized that a hotheaded reaction could provoke violence against a vulnerable minority group, so they withheld judgment. That's the obvious point that Goldberg misses: the situation with regard to American Muslims and radicals among them is much more tense than the situation with regard to American Christians and the radicals among them. No one is "ignoring" the meaning of this - we'd just like to know what that meaning is before putting American Muslims at risk for the sake of making political hay.

So obviously, I'm far less inclined to support Goldberg's writings on the matter - I just wanted to make the point that their reactions were not the same. And to the extent that either of them call for investigations, Goldberg is much closer to that position, but he never actually advocates for such a thing. In fact, he says (regarding the case of Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy) that the witch-hunts and profiling against Jews after Pollard's arrest were wrong - but that the FBI should not have subsequently ignored suspicious activity by American Jews for fear of causing offense by seeming to profile them. The point is reasonable: if there is one spy, or terrorist, or whatever, that has infiltrated an organization, it is reasonable to assume (from a security perspective) that there could be others. This does not excuse profiling and witch-hunts. But it does mean that worries about political correctness should not override real security concerns. (In any case, as I said, I doubt political correctness had anything to do with the inaction on Hasan's case, so this is probably a moot point.) And I do agree with the argument that Jeff cites from Marc Lynch - that we have to combat a "clash of civilizations" narrative from emerging.

The reason I'm hesitant to judge either way is simple: the investigation is still ongoing. In the meantime, the wisest course is to withhold judgment about what this means until we know why Hasan did the things he allegedly did. Declaring that we understand what this means before we have all the facts in front of us is premature and potentially dangerous.

In Case You Hadn't Heard

2009-11-14T12:09:00.003-05:00

Sarah Palin, who was once (and to many, still is) the Future Of The Republican Party, has a book coming out in a few days. Apparently, its content is heavy on perpetuating campaign infighting. The book, of course, is called "Going Rogue," and so its main purpose is probably to salvage the narrative that Palin was mistreated by slick political operatives and rendered unable to get her message out to Real America. The real Sarah, I'm sure the book will tell us, is a hardworking, straight-talking, no-nonsense hockey mom who has no patience for cocktail-party Washington politics and campaign shenanigans.

OK. Now try to reconcile that with the fact that, after torpedoing a presidential campaign with her outrageous and offensive antics, she returned to Alaska and quit her job as governor before finishing a single term. Since then, she's been spending her time fighting (and losing) a media battle with a high-school dropout and soon-to-be Playgirl model. Who happens to be the father of her unwed teenage daughter's child. What a circus. Of course, to some this sounds like the exploits of a major political leader, and someday the President of the United States. Like Abraham Lincoln.

Is it possible that the Palin Right has diminished the office so much that they really think any warm body with the right views on abortion can do the job? What planet do they live on?

Today's Conservatism, In a Nutshell

2009-11-04T16:49:00.004-05:00

If you want a near-perfect encapsulation of what passes for conservative "thought" these days, I highly recommend this celebratory post at the Corner. It hits all the main points: caring more about winning than being right; rejoicing in the real pain of gay people; a massive and unfounded persecution complex; a creepy and condescending practice of pitting all arguments as "real people" versus "elites" (who are gay! GAY!); masking nasty prejudices in smarmy, Leave-It-To-Beaver B.S. about "tradition"; and making lame allusions to people like T.R. in an effort to associate legendary Americans (and old-school Republicans) with the modern Republican party, even if those Americans would find today's Republicans repugnant. If there were some sort of ridiculous Reagan hagiography thrown in for no apparent reason, it would be the Corner Post To End All Corner Posts.

One Year Later

2009-11-03T18:55:00.003-05:00

The news organizations are doing their "One Year Later" pieces on President Obama's election, so I thought I'd join in on the fun. If you've been reading the blog since January 20th, you already know my thoughts on his presidency so far (or at least those thoughts I've written posts about), so I thought I'd link to some old pieces about the election that turns one year old tomorrow.

October 28, 2008: "I Voted Today"

November 3, 2008: "What's at Stake Tomorrow"

November 3, 2008: "Really, Though..."

November 4, 2008: "Once More"

November 5, 2008: "A New Day"

November 5, 2008: "What This Means"

Obama at Dover

2009-11-01T15:40:00.005-05:00

"As Obama comforted families at a tragic moment, he also had to contemplate a tragic dimension of his own presidency: It's nice to talk about change, but you can't wipe away yesterday." - Maureen Dowd.

This is a sad but important and insightful observation. I share her worries.

Obama was left a mess of incredible proportions by people who take no responsibility for their deadly mistakes. But I think the President has his eye on the ball, and I continue to hope this dark past won't swallow up our chance for a better future.

"I Noticed Something: You May Notice Something Quite Wonderful in Most Everybody You Meet"

2009-11-01T14:56:00.003-05:00

From the original 1950s radio series "This I Believe," an essay from Robbins Milbank, who died in 1985. Listen to the recording if you can. This is a profound and beautiful piece.

Seconded

2009-10-19T09:27:00.005-04:00

Jacob Weisberg is tired of the "phony debate" over Fox News's bias:

There is no longer any need to get bogged down in this phony debate, which itself constitutes an abuse of the fair-mindedness of the rest of the media. One glance at Fox's Web site or five minutes randomly viewing the channel at any hour of the day demonstrates its all-pervasive political slant. [...] What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20^th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in Europe or many other countries that do have free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has implemented at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes journalistic fair play. But it's a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

I don't have much to add to this except to say that it's dead-on, and the whole piece is worth reading. The "Murdoch Model" of openly-biased newspapers was one of the things that bothered me most about English media and political culture. Of course, it's fashionable to claim that such a system is simply more straightforward; that American newspapers are biased, but they're just not open about it.

I think that's an oversimplification. I'm not naive enough to suggest that the major newspapers are completely unbiased, but it is true that most of the time, the professional journalists who work at those newspapers are trying to present a story as accurately as possible. Whatever political slant ends up in the story is usually in spite of, not because of, the journalist's intent. With Fox, it's just the opposite. (Of course, Jon Stewart is all over this.)

Nihilism and the HSA Problem

2009-10-15T09:16:00.005-04:00

Reihan Salam has a smart, but ultimately misguided, take on the Finance Committee's healthcare bill:

Among Democrats and liberals, there is a belief that Republican opposition to the various Democratic proposals represents a kind of "nihilism," and that because Baucuscare resembles proposals offered by liberal and moderate Republicans in the 1990s, today's opposition is obviously unprincipled if not insane. My sense is that we've learned a great deal about health reform over the intervening period, and that, as Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang have argued, it is disruptive competition that promises substantial improvement in the cost and quality of medical services over time. I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to move in this direction is to create a system of universal catastrophic coverage and universal health savings accounts, as proposed by Martin Feldstein and a number of others. The emerging consensus among congressional Democrats moves us in a very different direction, towards a highly centralized, highly regulated system that will give entrepreneurs very little room to dramatically improve care. With that in mind, I don't think opposition is "nihlistic"; rather, I think it's responsible.

Health Savings Accounts are an interesting approach to the healthcare problem - certainly they would eliminate many of the distortions that currently plague the healthcare market, and removing insurance companies from the process of paying for regular healthcare expenses would drive consumers to make more careful decisions while encouraging competition among doctors and hospitals. Having a third party foot the bill dramatically increases costs. As David Goldhill wrote a few months ago: "Want further evidence of moral hazard? The average insured American and the average uninsured American spend very similar amounts of their own money on health care each year - $654 and $583, respectively. But they spend wildly different amounts of other people's money - $3,809 and $1,103, respectively [...] If it's true that the insurance system leads us to focus on only our direct share of costs - rather than the total cost to society - it's not surprising that insured families and uninsured ones would make similar decisions as to how much of their own money to spend on care, but very different decisions on the total amount to consume."

It's an intriguing idea - but I think it inadequately addresses the problems faced by Americans who are uninsured because of poverty, and who, in an HSA system, wouldn't have enough income to put aside in their accounts to cover expenses short of the universal "catastrophic" coverage proposed by HSA advocates. For them, insurance is key - it lowers costs by pooling risk, so a subsidy to buy insurance would be more useful than a subsidy to directly purchase care. And subsidies - of one kind or another - do seem to be the only answer to the problem: HSA advocates like Goldhill admit that the government would have to provide subsidies to poor Americans so they could meet the minimum contribution requirements for their HSA. But is it realistic to think that the government could provide satisfactory subsidies to a more medically-vulnerable demographic without spending massive amounts of money? Keep in mind, all this would be taking place in a marketplace without the cost-reducing pooling benefits of insurance - and that, in turn, is based on the assumption that it's even possible to remove the insurance middleman from short-of-catastrophic transactions. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2005:

If you are preoccupied with moral hazard, then you want people to pay for care with their own money, and, when you do that, the sick inevitably end up paying more than the healthy [...] "The main effect of putting more of it on the consumer is to reduce the social redistributive element of insurance," the Stanford economist Victor Fuchs says. Health Savings Accounts are not a variant of universal health care. In their governing assumptions, they are the antithesis of universal health care.

If you're like me, and you think universal coverage is the most important component of healthcare reform, this is a big problem. And I don't think that, as far as public policy goes, we are forced to make a choice between universal coverage and a sensible healthcare market that encourages competition and consumer choice (in fact, that's one major reason why I support a public option). That's why Salam is ultimately wrong not only about how "centralized" a post-reform system will be, but about whether or not Republican opposition to this bill is nihilistic.

Salam is right to note that if you think an idea will be bad policy, it is responsible to oppose it. But think of the nature of Republican opposition and its likely consequences. Leading Democrats from President Obama down have all repeatedly stated that they want a bipartisan bill, but at the end of the day they'll pass healthcare reform with or without Republican input. There have been minor substantive ideas from Republicans (namely, tort reform), but overall, the Republican "contribution" to this debate has been scaremongering and demagoguery led by the likes of Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey - with their ridiculous lies about death panels, euthanasia, abortion, socialism, etc. Republicans had their chance to make real contributions to healthcare reform. They had the opportunity to ensure that the final bill, even if they found it objectionable, would at least be mitigated by some conservative provisions. But they never took that opportunity. For the most part, they've been content to sit on the sidelines and throw spitballs. Since the passage of healthcare is nearly guaranteed, they are being profoundly irresponsible, and yes, nihilistic, if they refuse to try and positively change something that they believe will be disastrous.

Other Reactions

2009-10-10T09:37:00.008-04:00

The reasonable, moderate, sober punditry meme developed in record time yesterday morning: by 9 AM EST, there seemed to be a "consensus" among people who determine what the consensus is that well, the only respectable thing to do now is turn it down. When that didn't happen, the respectable reaction became well, certainly this is nice and all, but it's a mixed blessing; let's see how we can turn this into a negative story. Hence the absurd NYT headline "For Presidency in Search of Success, Nobel Adds a Twist" and TNR's takeaway, "Obama's Nobel: Mixed Blessing At Best."

Since you can read those pieces anywhere today (or just turn on your TV), I thought I'd highlight the assessments of people whose opinions aren't affected by their need to have a respectable reputation among the commentariat.

From the comments of readers of that TNR piece:

"Mr. Crowley et al.: You are all completely nuts. You can refuse a Nobel Prize if you want to express contempt for those who award it, or those who have received it, but to do so for the kind of cockeyed political reasons mentioned above is just totally self-defeating. And I think he has accomplished more internationally, Afghanistan aside, than a lot of people want to realize. The speech to the Arab world, his work with G20 and at the U.N., the decision on the nuclear shield, and maybe even the Iran negotiations have all made an impression on the world if not on TNR bloggers."

"All of these hideous attacks on this great honor to our President are the pinnacle of self indulgent, preening, arm chair nobody-ism. To a person, the attacks have made me sick, there's not a single decent point in any of them. If anyone deserves a Nobel, it is our brave President."

Ben Cohen at the Daily Banter:

America became a feared and despised state under the rule of the Bush Administration. The brazen disregard for global opinion, the trampling of international law, and the overt environmental destruction were hallmarks of a Presidency determined to project American power at all costs. With one election, the world forgave, and almost forgot the tragic Bush years as a young black President who spoke of hope rather than hatred, and cooperation rather than force swept into power.
This monumental shift cannot and must not be underestimated.

Steve Clemons:

...the Nobel Committee's decision to make Obama the only sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize shows the committee's clear-headed assessment that Obama's "unclenched fist" approach to dealing with the world's most thuggish leaders has had a constructive, systemic impact on the world's expectations of itself. [...] What is brilliant about Obama and why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that he is a global leader who clearly saw the gains that could be made in changing "the optics" of the global order, upgrading the level of respect between the United States and other nations, making a point of listening to other leaders.
Obama saw that before the world could move to a more stable and better global equilibrium, it had to believe it could -- and this is what Obama has done in ways that no other leader has in memory.

Josh Marshall calls it an "odd award," an assessment with which I'm inclined to agree, but makes a crucial point:

But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Obsidian Wings:

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel dimension where everything is inverted. Accepting the Nobel Prize makes you look bad? It's narcissistic to accept prizes from other people?
I am gobsmacked that some Democrats want the president to turn down the prize for his own good. What message would that send to the rest of the world? Something along the lines of 'Thanks, guys, but I'm really all about war'?
Of course the Republicans are going to freak out. Our guy wins a Nobel Peace Prize after 9 months in office, primarily for tinkering with the worst excesses of the wars their guy started. That's humiliating. Humiliated Republicans lash out, news at eleven.

Spencer Ackerman:

But turning it down would be a slap in the face to an international community that is showing, in the most generous way possible, that it wants the U.S. back as a leading component of the global order. The issue is not Barack Obama. It’s what the president represents internationally: a symbol of an America that is willing, once again, to drive the international system forward, together, toward the humane positive-sum goals of peace and disarmament. The fact that Obama hasn’t gotten the planet there misses the point entirely. It’s that he’s beginning, slowly, to take the world again down the path.

The first commenter on the story at Wonkette:

I thought he won because he blew up the moon and ended the wicked tides that plague the planet, but I notice this morning the moon is still there, so one more massive failure.

I smell a new meme!

President, Nobel Laureate, and All-Around Cool Dude

2009-10-09T07:45:00.011-04:00

So, first off, I suppose a congratulations is in order to President Obama.

Of course there will be critics - there always are - but I particularly love a day when a person lambasting the award as proof that "these prizes are political, not governed by the principles of credibility, values and morals" could either be a blogger at The Corner or Khaled Al-Batsh, the leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. (It's the latter, in case you were wondering.)

There is a case to be made that this is "premature" - after all, the president has been in office less than nine months, and to put it gently, the world's various problems aren't exactly solved. But I think the point the Nobel Committee was trying to make was that, in a short amount of time, Obama has fundamentally and radically reoriented the American stance toward the world, restoring it to its traditional stance of cooperative leadership. He has devoted significant time, resources, and political capital early on in his presidency to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; he has ended torture and other stains on America's human rights record; he has articulated a vision of nuclear disarmament and worked to set the world on that course; he has reached out to the Islamic world in a spirit of respect and peace; and he has subtly but effectively undermined an aggressive Iranian regime without firing a single shot. And he did much of this with the blessing and assistance of the international community, working within traditional international institutions and respecting international norms. Certainly some of the world's embrace of Obama is based on relief at the end of the Bush era - to outsiders, what we call "unilateralism" looks more like a middle finger - but to suggest that this man is not uniquely responsible for major advances in the cause of world peace is unfair and shortsighted.

Lots of people will charge - in fact, I've seen it already - that all he has done is "give a speech or two." "Give a speech, win the Nobel Peace Prize! If I had only known it was that easy!"

This criticism, of course, reflects a staggering amount of ignorance about the significant day-to-day work that presidents and governments do. There is no doubt that Obama and his team have put long hours and no small amount of elbow grease into the nuts and bolts of these issues. Governing is a slow and difficult process.

But more to the point, this criticism misses the obvious reality that public gestures are important. That's how you motivate regular people and pressure governments, and it's how world leaders set the course of international affairs. Barack Obama could have set the course, as his predecessor did, towards unilateralism and unnecessary wars. He could have ignored the issue of nuclear disarmament, waited until the last minute to get serious about Israel/Palestine, denied the reality of global warming and the catastrophic effects it could have on the world, refused to engage in diplomacy with America's enemies, defied international law and human rights by torturing prisoners, and regarded other world leaders as obstacles rather than partners in the pursuit of global peace. That kind of behavior certainly wouldn't have been without precedent.

But he took a different course. He dove right into some of the thorniest problems in the world, all of which demand attention and priority - and none of which can wait. And if we have inched closer to a solution to any of those outrages against peace, it is because of the aspirations and work of this specific person. The world is a very different place today because Barack Obama is President of the United States. I think that's worth recognizing.

How Charming!

2009-10-06T11:55:00.009-04:00

Andrew Sullivan highlights Jerry Coyne's dispatch from a major meeting of atheists last weekend:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

The first time I read this, I thought there was no way that's what Coyne meant to say - his words must have been, for lack a better phrase, "ripped from the text." Then I went and read the whole thing in context, which is what you do when you have even a modicum of respect for people with whom you disagree - or for the pursuit of knowledge generally.

But that didn't change anything. Coyne is actually suggesting that "ripping" the words of major writers "from their texts" - something the rest of us call "taking things out of context" - is the best way to engage in debate, rather than a tactic which would get you dismissed from any serious conversation. After all, most people respond positively to sneering contempt and lazy intellectual posturing. I think it's clear that whatever small interest people like this have in changing minds is totally overwhelmed by the pleasure they get from patting each other on the back. (By the way, for those who are interested, I took a more comprehensive look at this issue here.)

About That

2009-09-30T14:04:00.002-04:00

Conor Friedersdorf, speculating on which Republicans could win the 2012 race, offers this headscratcher:

My somewhat uninformed guesses: David Petraeus and Colin Powell (who’d have all kinds of difficulty winning the primary). These accomplished generals share one related trait: deep credibility as men who are serious about national security, enabling them to run as sane, experienced stewards, rather than bellicose idiots so desperate to seem toughest on terrorism that they spend the primaries calling for “doubling Gitmo” and competing to see who would torture in more contrived ticking time bomb situations.
They’re also both post-partisan figures of the kind that Americans seem to like, haven’t got long voting records to be picked apart, and can nevertheless credibly claim more executive experience than President Obama.

I have to say, I can't imagine executive experience being a real clincher when you're running against an incumbent President.

Tea Party-ese

2009-09-21T12:15:00.003-04:00

Buzzfeed translates.

(Sorry for the scant updates over the last several days. I've been too busy to write much lately, but things around here will pick up again next week.)

Obama's Healthcare Speech

2009-09-13T19:10:00.006-04:00

I think Frank Rich put it pretty well this morning: short of a "suicide pact," Congressional Democrats weren't going to let healthcare reform fail, so the idea that this was a "make or break" speech for the President is little more than an example of the breathless, hysterical "win the morning" mentality embodied in the 24-hour news cycle.

I think the speech, though, accomplished some important goals: it almost certainly united Congressional Democrats and asserted Presidential leadership at a time when Barack Obama's practice of deferring to Congress seemed to be harming his agenda. It made an effective case for reforming the healthcare system, it candidly addressed some of the B.S. being spread around by shameless liars like Sarah Palin (I'm glad he used the word "lies"), and it successfully positioned the President where he should be: above the fray, guiding the discourse but not mired in it.

It was not, as Sen. Lindsey Graham bafflingly claimed (or maybe not so bafflingly, since he was just giving red meat to the FOX News crowd), a combative and uncompromising speech: the President provided a defense of the public option but explicitly said he wouldn't insist on it; he expressed willingness and even eagerness to hear other ideas; he pointed to John McCain and praised him for a policy idea; he spoke convincingly of self-reliance, freedom, and the healthy American skepticism towards government - while emphasizing that determing how much government is appropriate is something that good, patriotic Americans can disagree on. Consider this passage near the end:

That large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others -- is not a partisan feeling. It's not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character -- our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise. [...]

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

If anything, he was too polite to Republicans, since he has been met with almost nothing but dishonesty, demagoguery, and bad faith throughout this entire debate. (The passing reference in the above passage to "facts and reason" being "thrown overboard" was far more charitable than I would have been, but that's why I blog and he governs.) Most House and Senate Republicans have behaved disgustingly; they deserve derision and to be shut out of the process. Yes, yes - I know that's not how politics works. I don't need a lecture on the mechanics of the Senate, or on the intricacies of major legislative efforts. But at some point, people have to be held responsible for their actions. Lucky for them that the President is remarkably civil towards his antagonists - but unlucky for them that his mind is on the long haul, and he's undermining them every day.

A great example of this was the way he movingly spoke of Ted Kennedy, using the moment as an opportunity to speak about Kennedy's life goal of healthcare reform and his bipartisan bona fides. Obama didn't name a single Democrat when he talked about Kennedy's friends, but he named three Republicans in the room - Sens. Hatch, McCain, and Grassley. That's classy as well as effective.

Ultimately, the speech probably changed very little about the final form of the bills pending in Congress - although it now appears that the public option is dead, which is a depressing development due in no small part to inconsistent messaging and weak support from the White House. Obama should not have raised expectations and made such a strong case for the public option if he was willing to let it die less than a week later.

But on a more positive note, the speech took the focus away from Congress and gave the impression of "ownership" of whatever happens back to the President. That's good, since he's considerably more popular than Congressional leaders, and this process should be an evaluation of his leadership skills. I think the President gave a great speech, and I think he'll end up with a good bill. When it comes to a problem as huge as healthcare, a process as maddeningly difficult as legislation, and the incredible dishonesty and acrimony dominating American politics, that's nothing less than brilliant.

The Congressional Heckler

2009-09-10T07:26:00.005-04:00

By now everyone has heard (or heard about) Rep. Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" during the President's speech, so I don't need to tell the story - but read between the lines of this sentence from the NYT's account. This is cold:

"Mr. Wilson also phoned the White House and reached Mr. Emanuel, who accepted an apology on behalf of the president."

He "reached" Rahm Emanuel - which means he's not important enough to have a direct line. And President Obama was not going to hear his apology, so Rahm accepted it instead.

My schedule is pretty hectic over the next day or so, but as soon as I can put together some refined thoughts on the speech, I'll post them.

Fear and Knowledge

2009-09-08T07:00:00.011-04:00

Over at Empirical International, Matt has a couple of excellent posts answering ten "challenges" to evolutionary biology posed by Jonathan Wells, a prominent intelligent-design advocate. The challenges are part of an old chain email that tries to convince high-school students to confront their unsuspecting biology teachers with ammunition against the supposed fraud of evolution. Ever the gentleman, Matt writes, "Wells holds PhDs in Molecular and Cell Biology from Berkeley and Religious Studies from Yale, so he's obviously no slouch and I do not believe he is deliberately trying to deceive people." Well, speak for yourself, Matt. I've been blogging for over a year now, so my ability to assume good faith was lost long ago.

Kidding aside, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Dr. Wells is honestly questioning widely-accepted science (instead of cynically selling out to hacks and pseudoscientific organizations like the Discovery Institute, where he is a fellow). Matt already addressed the numerous scientific errors Wells makes in his criticisms, a task for which he is manifestly more qualified than I am, so we'll put aside those concerns for the time being. For my part, I'd like to explore why seemingly-intelligent people cling so desperately to junk science like intelligent design in defiance of all logic and scientific consensus. I think the phenomenon raises some interesting issues.

There's no small amount of fuss about a supposed showdown between science and religion in our age, and among highly-educated people, I imagine the consensus is that science is "winning." Until 9/11, there was a rough agreement that religious faith was waning, at least in the developed world, and it's not hard to imagine why some people - and I'd place Wells and his ilk among them - feel threatened. There's something very scary about the prospect of one's world seemingly fading away, an unsettling feeling that your cherished, familiar traditions are being replaced by an indifferent empiricism whose evangelists are openly hostile to your heritage. Or at least that's how they see it. For others of us, the picture is considerably less bleak: the advancement of human knowledge is exciting and potentially world-changing, and regardless of our religious beliefs, it should be considered a good thing.

Fundamentally, that's why ID advocates are off-base. Religion - or at least Christianity - is not about making empirical claims. It's not about explaining, in any scientifically meaningful sense, how the universe came to be, and when it addresses its subject matter appropriately, its claims are beyond the realm of scientific testing. The temptation to scientifically explain the world using God is misguided and counterproductive.

It didn't start with intelligent design, though. We can look back at least as far as 1613, when the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius published De Providentia Numinis, an argument about God and Christianity which proceeded by venturing into explanations of the physical universe. It was, to say the least, a troubling sign of things to come. As the philosopher Michael Buckley writes:

De providentia numinis occupies a position from which the Church will seldom depart in its apologetic response to the gradual rise of atheism in the Western world. Lessius’ problematic methodology separates the question of god from the cognitive claims of Christology in the classic distinction between revelation and reason. The centrality of Christ is relegated to revelation – Christ does not evoke faith in the Father; his intelligibility is consequent upon faith. What Lessius presents is not the person and message of Jesus, but those cosmological and historical experiences which are open to any human being.

When you think about it, this is a pretty remarkable shift, one which basically amounts to a tacit admission that personal experience of the sublime is intellectually insufficient as grounds for belief. Born of this sentiment is the fundamentalist tendency to look for "answers in Genesis," which will always be a fool's errand. Religion should not appeal to science for coherence, not only because it doesn't need to, but also because science doesn't need religion. Science is perfectly coherent without religion.

But that's not the only reason why the ID-style approach is misguided - or why ID advocates are scared. There is another significant concern behind their way of thinking, one that has to do with the way people imagine nature. The Christian idea of a world created ex nihilo is not a world that precludes contingency, but it is a world where the contingent embodies (in some way) a divine idea or image, if not divine intent. It is a world in which, as Louis Dupré writes, "nature retains an intrinsically normative character," a "further stage in the process of revelation." For Christian thinkers of centuries past, nature was filled with meaning, if not intentional structure. Again, as Dupré puts it, "the epistemic apriori imposed no categorical structure upon the real, but a perspective for reading what was directly, but never simply or exhaustively, given." Most Christians, I imagine, are intent to continue viewing nature in this way, but the rise of evolutionary theory exploded forever the idea of a manifestly-ordered creation. Right?

People like Dr. Wells are afraid of the question - so they continue to insist, against all evidence, that evolution cannot possibly account for the world we see. They are, of course, wrong. Their work perniciously undermines real science to support pseudoscience. And on theological grounds, their efforts are completely unnecessary: contingency, however we imagine it to work in the universe, does not make the world devoid of meaning or beauty. God does not exist as some sort of heavenly puppetmaster, and it was always theologically childish to imagine God that way. However we may conceive of creation and of the nature that developed after the origins of the universe, we can at least admit the possibility of a pervasive divine grace, free from the temporal limitations of humanity, able to see what was, is, and will be; imbuing the world with meaning even as it unfolds in ways that are unpredictable to us. Vain attempts to fit science and the world into our preconceived notions of providence are doomed to fail. But the honest and unbiased pursuit of knowledge - whether scientific or spiritual - has the potential to unlock not just information, but understanding.

Breaking News!

2009-09-07T11:10:00.004-04:00

Can anyone explain the purpose of the vague, uninformative, self-contradictory, and bizarre non-story the NYT is featuring this morning? The article, "Obama Faces a Critical Moment for His Presidency," contains the breaking story that...um...healthcare reform is important? Being president is tough? Add in the reporter's (philosopher's?) string of rhetorical questions, and you've got a real head-scractcher:

He faces a crisis of expectations tough to manage. Can he form a health care compromise that satisfies both his liberal base and fiscal conservatives in his own party, much less the other one? Can he stanch the slide in support for the war in Afghanistan even as he considers sending more troops? Can he soothe discontent with an economy that appears to have bottomed out but remains moribund? Can he change the tenor of debate in a capital that seems as polarized as ever?

Um, I don't know. That's why I read the newspaper. But that's far from the worst part of this piece. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the hallmark of poor journalism: a simplistic narrative!

Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to run into trouble after the bunting and balloons have vanished, but his slipping support has fueled a narrative about a young and relatively inexperienced president who overinterpreted his mandate and overreached in his policies. His job approval rating has fallen to 56 percent from 62 percent since February in polls taken by The New York Times and CBS News. Other surveys register an even sharper drop.

Wait: having a 56% approval rating = unpopularity? And who thought that having a 62% approval rating after a month in office was sustainable? It's like the pundits who pretend to be shocked that healthcare reform used to have astronomically high public support, and now its support has fallen. Well, duh: when there's no plan to oppose, the abstract idea of "reforming" something sounds pretty good!

The second issue here is the narrative being "fueled" by "slipping support" (again, 56%?) If anything, the narrative is being fueled by lazy and opportunistic reporters who aren't interested in writing a nuanced story about why governing, even for someone as powerful as the President, is so difficult - and who know that "WUNDERKIND OBAMA SLIPPING FAST" is a much more exciting headline. Ooo, look! A hero is stumbling! One could write a story about the intricacies of Congressional politics, the slowness of bureaucracy, or the naturally incremental nature of the American political process - the kinds of helpful, informative pieces that normally appear in the NYT - but for today: narrative! Even weirder, then, that this sentence should immediately follow:

But his overall standing with the public is still healthy [...] If he ultimately gets some form of health care program passed that he can call a victory, this turbulence may ultimately be forgotten.

Translation: everything I just said is crap, and even I know it. If any kind of healthcare bill gets passed (which is basically set in stone at this point), we'll all forget that I wrote this terrible article.

Gitmo Prison Blues

2009-09-04T21:53:00.002-04:00

While filling in at the Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner does us all a favor by tearing apart Elise Cooper's weak arguments against moving Guantanamo prisoners to facilities in the United States. Cooper's piece, titled (apparently without irony) "No Terrorists in My Backyard", brags that there was a consensus against housing Gitmo prisoners here among those interviewed: namely, security experts and members of Congress. The problem: they're nearly all Republican politicians. And one of the two security experts is Michael Chertoff, who hardly counts as impartial - when he was head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division in 2003, he sided with John Yoo's memo that exempted the military from federal law during wartime and authorized torture at the prison. He had a hand in making Gitmo the nightmare it was, and unfortunately remains, for the US.

Bodenner does a fine job demonstrating why none of Cooper's arguments make sense, and he notes that the piece "reads like a cobbled-together press release." It does have a bit of a thrown-together feel to it, especially this humdinger from Rep. Tom Rooney:

Congressman Rooney points out that since a lot of money was spent in making Guantanamo Bay a state of the art prison America should keep the detainees there. He does not support the Obama administration’s view that Guantanamo must be closed because of the stigma associated with it.

Where to start with this (besides the obvious question of why we elect such people to Congress)? How much Guantanamo cost to build has nothing to do with whether or not we should keep it open; that question is decided by its helping or hindrance of our national security objectives. So the "stigma" of Guantamano is a very good reason for closing it - but, just for clarity's sake, let's not call it a stigma. That understates its danger. Guantanamo is an incredibly powerful recruiting tool for our enemies, and since we can safely imprison terrorists without handing them a recruiting tool, the security cost of keeping it open far outweighs the benefits. With no coherent argument opposing this move, it's hard to characterize Republican behavior as anything besides posturing.

Nodding Towards Nullification

2009-08-22T09:29:00.009-04:00

On a conference call organized by Americans for Prosperity, Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Michele Bachmann, two of the more reliably nutty members of Congress, made some oblique references to nullification when discussing the states' response to healthcare reform. From TPMDC:

A caller asked DeMint what the states could do in order to stop unconstitutional action by the federal government on health care. DeMint replied, "I think the key to pushing back against the federal government is some governors and state legislators who champion individual freedom."

DeMint said he would love to see states go to court to invoke the Tenth Amendment: "If we had some states come together and say the only way to save this country is to push back." He also added: "I think you'll see some states say no more, we're not going down with the federal government."A few minutes later, Bachmann commented on this possibility as well, noting that the efforts of some Republican governors to reject stimulus money failed in large part because they were too isolated from one another. A collective action, on the other hand, would stand a much greater chance of success.

The idea that states can selectively ignore or deny the validity of federal laws is nullification. Responding to the statements of DeMint and Bachmann, Josh Marshall - who, by the way, holds a PhD in American History from Brown, where he must have studied with Gordon Wood (jealous!) - calls nullification "a crackpot idea from the start" that "hasn't been seriously entertained anywhere in the county since the Civil War (with the exception of feigned attempts in the South during the Civil Right Era)." This is basically true, but allow me one small quibble: the assertion that nullification was a "crackpot idea from the start" doesn't ring perfectly true to me.

Nullification can be traced back before the Civil War to Thomas Jefferson, who most clearly articulated the idea in response to the almost-certainly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which, among other things, criminalized "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government. Jefferson was enraged by the Acts, and not just because they were a transparent power grab by his political rival, President John Adams.

In 1798, the consensus on the relationship between federal and state power was fragile at best, and Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution asserted boldly that "the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself." To that end, Jefferson (and James Madison, who drafted a similar resolution in Virginia) articulated a more compartmentalized vision of constitutional interpretation, arguing that each branch and level of government had the authority to interpret the Constitution for itself. Madison, it should be noted, was not willing to go as far as Jefferson on this notion: he proposed using the federal judiciary to settle disputes, and though he admitted it would not be a perfect system, he still insisted that "as some such Tribunal is a vital element, a sine qua non, in an efficient & permanent Govt. the Tribunal existing must be acquiesced in, until a better or more satisfactory one can be substituted." Basically, governments need an ultimate arbiter. Jefferson, for his part, preferred to settle disputes by democratic referendum (a view he defended in an 1823 letter). The problems with this approach are obvious, but it's still a bit of a stretch to assert that this theory was "crackpot from the start." It was certainly wrong, but Jefferson and Madison weren't just any random folks writing about government (cough) - and hey, they were wrong for pretty interesting reasons.

How Democracy Is Supposed To Work

2009-08-20T13:24:00.007-04:00

Sen. Grassley recently remarked that the "the outpouring of anger" at healthcare townhalls has convinced him that reform efforts should be changed. Conor Clarke lays out what the Senator doesn't seem to understand:

I think it's worth mentioning that the Grassley theory of "the public" is pretty much the exact opposite of how American democracy is supposed to function. Famously, public representatives are supposed to distinguish between the "vicious arts" of faction (Madison's words) and the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community" (Hamilton's). Of course, it might be the case that protestors laying seige to Fort Grassley actually represent the aggregate interests of the public. But you won't find evidence for that conclusion at a townhall meeting.

Washington, D.C.! It's Paradise to Me

2009-08-14T08:41:00.004-04:00

I'll be heading back to D.C. this weekend, and beginning the day I arrive, my schedule will permit very little free time - so don't expect regular updates for at least the next several days. If I run across something interesting, I'll try to post a quick reaction or a question about it, but that might be all I have time to do until my schedule loosens up a little bit.

If you'd like some bloggy reading material while I'm away, allow me to plug the work of a couple of friends. First, JDR's superb blog Deep Focus, which offers incisive, thoughtful, and well-informed (the latter is a particular rarity when it comes to his favorite topics) commentary about ~~whatever the author read in the NYT that day~~ politics and the media, particularly with regard to the Middle East. I also eagerly anticipate bloghaddad's newest offering, In the Woods. It's just getting up and running, but I have high expectations, since it's coming from an exceptionally talented and refreshingly provocative writer. If you want a sample of his stuff, check out the comments on a few of my posts. (And he's someone whose first forays into blogging precede my own - making him something of an elder figure around here.)

If this blog doesn't reference the writings of Messrs. Reger and Haddad very frequently, it's not because they're not producing good material, but because I don't want to invite the reader to make comparisons between their work and my own. I have to hang on to my audience somehow...

Here Are A Few Suggestions

2009-08-11T16:50:00.006-04:00

Contra Paul Krugman's column today, Megan McArdle doubts that the federal government's response to the financial crisis validates "big government":

...We did three things differently than we did in 1932:

We didn't follow a contractionary monetary policy
We shoveled gigantic wads of cash into the banking system without much regard for who it was going to, or what they might spend it on
We maintained a high level of spending that kept aggregate demand from contracting as powerfully as it did in 1932.
Only the last, I think, can be seen as a vindication of "Big Government" in the sense that Krugman means. It's also totally unsustainable, and it will be interesting to see what happens to the economy as the government is forced to pull back on the stimulus over the next year or so by either raising taxes, or cutting back on spending. [...]

I'm not sure what we just went through validates any reasonable philosophy of government, except "give officials room to make ad-hoc decisions, and hope they don't do too badly."

The set-up of that response is awfully misleading. Right-wing critics of "big government" generally have rather harsh critiques of the American welfare state, which is comparatively modest (as a percentage of GDP, we spend about half as much on welfare services as the highest spenders - Denmark and Sweden - and spend substantially less than nearly every European nation). As Krugman points out, when the Great Depression hit, most of the "big-government" safety nets that have helped people avert the worst today - Medicare and Social Security being two of the most prominent - didn't exist. So the existing structures of what conservatives derisively call "big government" are as important in evaluating the weathering of this crisis - and the effectiveness of "big government" generally - as the spending decisions made by Congress, the Fed, and the President.

And as for McArdle's shrug that the only lesson from this crisis is "give officials room to make ad-hoc decisions, and hope they don't do too badly": how about admitting that there is a proper time and place for Keynesian macroeconomic policy? How about abandoning visceral opposition to any kinds of government intervention in the economy? How about recognizing that government sometimes has to behave differently from individuals - so when individuals are cutting back, governments can and should spend more? When John Boehner advocated that the government "tighten its belt," it wasn't just some guy talking - it was arguably the nation's most powerful Republican actually suggesting that the government cut off spending in the middle of an economic crisis - possibly pushing the country into a depression - either to show solidarity with American citizens, or attempt to balance its budget during a recession, or some other wacky idea that he apparently saw as the solution to our economic woes (I won't pretend to understand what goes on in that guy's head).

The government's ability to mitigate the worst of this crisis was due in part to actions that, granted, cannot be continued indefinitely, but to suggest that weathering this storm says nothing about the virtues of big government takes some pretty remarkable libertarian tunnelvision.

The Other War

2009-08-11T12:37:00.007-04:00

Over at Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin is highlighting a piece criticizing the Feminist Majority Foundation's support of troop escalation in Afghanistan. The argument is twofold: it notes that further warfare will only add to the suffering of civilians, especially Afghan women, and it criticizes the new Afghan political elite for being every bit as backwards and misogynistic as the Taliban was. The authors write:

Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.
Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan [...] The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban. Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai.

This brings up the important question of what, exactly, we're trying to achieve in Afghanistan. Policymakers have surely factored human suffering into the grim arithmetic of determining the costs and benefits of war, but what if the authors are right - what if it's the same villainy, only with new villains?

The possibility or impossibility of creating an effective, liberal Afghan government is a question that the Obama administration will have to face head-on. The sad answer is probably that Afghanistan's geography alone - to say nothing of its history, culture, or politics - makes it almost impossible for NATO or any other outside force to establish effective political rule, much less political rule that would be acceptable to Westerners. (I think the authors' assessment of the war as imperialist aggression is myopic, but that's a different argument.) But still, after reading their argument, my main reaction was to ask for patience - the war is not yet over. Perhaps there's still a chance.

But ultimately, the exact nature of the political leadership and the state of women's rights in Afghanistan are secondary concerns: the main mission of the war is to fight terrorism. Security from al Qaeda is the goal that will determine NATO's course of action and the metric by which its success will be judged. The question is this: does the Obama administration think that nation-building in Afghanistan is the best way to fight terrorism? Lots of people are discussing Marc Lynch's recent contention in Foreign Policy: "I just don't really see why trying to build an Afghan state is a significant American national interest, or that it can be done at a price commensurate to its significance." If Afghanistan becomes a (relatively) safe and stable place, can't al Qaeda simply regroup somewhere else? And if that's the case, is there any point to nation-building in Afghanistan? Eric Martin notes that, in addition to achieving very little in national-security terms, it would simply strengthen the hellish conditions Afghan women and children live in:

The authors do highlight one (of) the primary obstacles to creating a liberal-ish government in Afghanistan that will safeguard women's rights: there are no major political factions, or constituencies, that would push for - or even support - such a government. [...] And in pursuit of propping up this corrupt, warlord dominated, misogynistic government, we are killing thousands of Afghans - including and especially women and children. In addition to creating conditions that lead to more and unspeakable hardships for those same women.

I don't know for certain if that's true, but I worry it probably is. If the current leadership retains power, women will continue to suffer. If the Taliban regained power, women would suffer. The only chance for women in Afghanistan is the hope that credible Afghan political leadership (however backwards) could be engaged and pressured by the international community into reforming and modernizing its treatment of women. If Afghanistan is isolated from the world, that hope is gone. But maybe it's naïve to believe it could exist in the first place.

Perhaps chief among the neoconservatives' fantasies was the conviction that democracy could be created at gunpoint. Maybe human rights activists are just as deluded to think war and nation-building can change anything for women in Afghanistan. Are there really just two options - abandonment or nation-building - both of which are hopeless?

Talking About It

2009-08-08T21:20:00.018-04:00

After running a 5K this morning, my dad and I visited a local running store. There was a collection of running medals hanging near the entrance - medals won by customers and donated to the store to be used in Special Olympics competitions. A little coincidence tonight, then, when I read that Congressman Frank Kratovil of the Maryland 1st serves on the Board of Special Olympics Maryland. I'm sure they do great work in Maryland, just as they do here. I also read that Rep. Kratovil attends Episcopal Church in his hometown, that he plays guitar, that he has a wife and four sons. Normally I don't spend so much time reading up on the biographical details of freshman members of the House, but I wanted to get a better sense of why someone thinks he'd be better off dead. This is Representative Kratovil, hanging in effigy at a healthcare protest in Maryland:

Politico notes that whoever tied the noose seems to know what they're doing.

The point of this post isn't to associate all opponents of healthcare reform with the smirking jackass pictured above; it's not to suggest that all conservatives are contemplating violence against elected officials - or anyone, for that matter. If the events of the last few months have shown us anything, it's the importance of precision in language. This photo is the most notorious icon of a debate that has turned unbearably sour. But in showing it and explaining my thoughts on this issue, I still want to be very clear that while Republicans might not all be polishing their effigy-making skills, the dishonesty shown by the party's leaders on healthcare is staggering. Even by their standards.

Not everyone has a massive forum like a television channel, a newspaper editorial page, or a blog with a million readers (though if wishing made it so!) - but anyone who has a forum at all, even a small one, needs to speak up. Even if it's just your co-workers in the break room, your friends on the email chain, or your relatives at the family get-together, healthcare reform is too important to lose for lack of conviction. On this issue, the worst are full of passionate intensity.

When Barack Obama was running for president, my family hosted a house party for neighbors who were supporters and others who were on the fence. We met a lot of people that night from the surrounding blocks, and at one point we discussed why the election mattered to us - and why we were supporting then-Senator Obama. One neighbor, a hospital nurse, explained to a room of about 25 of us why healthcare reform meant so much to her. Every day, she said, she sees sick and injured people brought into the emergency room. Many of those are children, and accompanying them are nervous mothers and fathers. As she choked up a little bit, she described to a silent audience the look she so often sees on the faces of fathers who quietly take her aside - out of earshot of their wives and children - to tell her that they can't afford to pay for their child's treatment. Grown men, trying their best to protect and provide the way their fathers and grandfathers did before them - reduced to humiliation and tears as they softly plead, "Please help me. I can't pay for you to treat my child."

In this wealthy nation, where we can provide for so much, where we cherish equality, where we rise and fall as one - this is unacceptable. Even beyond that, it is unacceptable on a basic human level that anyone should go without such a basic necessity when the means exist to guarantee it. We can fight over policy details, but we are compelled by our basic compassion to have a good-faith debate on how to solve this problem. A good-faith debate.

That is, a debate where facts and arguments are met with facts and counterarguments. Where ideas are listened to, considered, and responded to honestly. Not a debate where the GOP's last Vice Presidential candidate tells outrageous lies about "death boards" and killing off mentally-disabled children. Not a debate where FOX News, GOP members of the House, and the Washington Times spread completely made-up stories about the government euthanizing the elderly.

Oh, and by the way: a debate happens when two or more parties engaged in spirited argument about an issue. When people who lack any understanding of the proposed healthcare legislation show up at town-hall meetings to scream nonsense, it's not a debate, and it's not good for anyone. I don't know whether these events are being organized by shadowy GOP organizations, but I do know that they're being promoted constantly on FOX News - both its television and radio components - in the form of wall-to-wall "news coverage." When people who live in an information bubble are fed a constant diet of anger, hatred, and lies, it's no surprise that they become totally unable to engage in dialogue with their fellow-citizens over an important policy change. It's just sad.

So yeah, I have no problem that the White House is getting out in front of this mendacious bile. In fact, I think it's wonderful that they're soliciting material from disinformation campaigns so they can set the record straight. Are they collecting a list of names? No. Are they asking for the content of right-wing propaganda so they can combat it? Yes. The lies on the right are like insects crawling in the mud under a rock: when somebody exposes them to sunlight, they'll shrivel. I understand if they're unsettled by a fact-based campaign. They have a lot of lies to be ashamed of.

A great example of the disingenuous flap over this non-story is the increasingly-addled Peggy Noonan (she of the delicate sensibilities), who wandered into the fray in her recent column:

But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems “fishy,” you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight “intentionally misleading” information.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday wrote to the president saying he feared that citizens’ engagement could be “chilled” by the effort. He’s right, it could. He also accused the White House of compiling an “enemies list.” If so, they’re being awfully public about it, but as Byron York at the Washington Examiner pointed, the emails collected could become a “dissident database.”

I have a question for you, Peggy. Why is this harmful to political civility? Should lies go unanswered? And is there any evidence whatsoever that the White House is creating an enemies list? Have they asked for the email addresses of the people sending this stuff - and even if they collected those email addresses (a fantasy so paranoid as to be almost beneath consideration), what, pray tell, do you think they might do? It's not like they'd arrest people, throw them in some lawless prison with no charge and no lawyer, and then torture them to get evidence for a secret illegal trial with no jury while asserting the right to hold them indefinitely. It's not Bush we're talking about here.

So yeah, we need to have this debate. We need to talk about this issue. But I have no patience for dishonesty, hatred, demagoguery, or ignorance. Certainly not now, when the stakes are so high. Counter the lies with facts. Fight ignorance with knowledge. And if you hear people telling lies about euthanasia, enemies lists, death boards, or anything else, correct them - calmly and politely, but firmly. This is the time to win on healthcare. This is the time to score one for those fathers.

"You're Racist!"

2009-07-30T11:01:00.010-04:00

I was thinking about this last night while watching coverage of the brouhaha resulting from Glenn Beck's claim that the President "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" and is a "racist." Beck's comment is just the latest in what some see as an escalating series of racially-tinged attacks on President Obama, following Lou Dobbs's promotion of the racist birther conspiracy theory and Rush Limbaugh's attempt to foment racial hatred by declaring that Obama's comment on the Gates arrest is "a black president trying to destroy a white policeman." Limbaugh also recently claimed that "white firefighters" were "under assault by agents of Barack Obama" and "now white policemen are under assault."

You don't need to be an expert in American history to cringe at this sort of language. The attempts to paint Obama as "other," to cast a powerful black man as the alien enemy of white culture, and to paint community defenders (police officers and firefighers) as under "assault" from a subversive racial minority all fit comfortably within the legion of tactics historically used by American racists, and in particular, white supremacists. It's no accident that their preferred attack against Obama, a politician known for his admirable and sorely-needed efforts at racial bridge-building, is calling him a "racist." Projection is typical among these people, but in this case they're also conscious that Obama is undermining them. Without stoking cultural grievances and racial resentment, guys like Rush Limbaugh would have no career. In making their millions out of this sort of divisiveness, they've adopted (and taken to the extreme) a practice they used to criticize liberals for: using the charge of racism to silence political opposition.

In his excellent column today, E.J. Dionne, while discussing a slightly different issue, nonetheless nails the point I'm trying to make:

From the time I was in college in the late 1960s and early '70s, I have been incensed at the elitism so often shown by privileged liberals toward the white working class. And I felt this as someone on the left.
I wrote a doctoral dissertation inspired by that concern, and the current controversy led me down memory lane, through college newspaper archives, to see if my recollection of my earlier views matched reality. For what it's worth, here's what I wrote in 1973, the year I graduated from college:
"What is most disturbing about conservative attacks on the student left is that many of the charges were right on the mark. The student left often did come to be characterized by its own forms of elitism and intellectual arrogance. ...
"Even more pernicious and divisive were race issues. It is clear, of course, that black demands for political and economic equality are justified ... (but) the way these issues developed ... served to estrange the working class white from the movement for equality. White workers rebelled because they felt they were being forced to pay an inequitable share of the costs of equality. ... Sadly, whites who protested against being singled out were too often attacked as racists. ... In the end, the losers were those who had the greatest stake in social reform -- white workers, blacks and the student left."

There was (and remains) a frustration among conservatives in the post-Civil Rights era that certain policy discussions with racial elements - crime, welfare, drugs, and education, to name a few - could not be openly and candidly discussed without liberals crying "racism!" A conservative with legitimate concerns about welfare reform, for example, could be (rightly or wrongly) associated with Reagan's reckless blather about "welfare queens" and the racially-tinged associations that went along with it. Of course, actual racism should be condemned whenever it rears its ugly head, but there's no question that worries about being called a racist have had an eerie silencing effect on many conservatives, moderates, and more than a few liberals. In our legitimate effort to stigmatize bias and hatred, we've made it tougher to have frank discussions about important topics. Or so the critique goes. I think it has some merit.

Strange, then - or maybe not so strange - that the most prominent rash accusations of racism today are coming from the right. The simultaneous radicalization and dumbing-down of American conservatism has been almost unbearably ugly to watch. It's become an even bigger concern now that irresponsible charges of racism have been fused with broader attempts to sow racial hatred and divisiveness among Americans. Beck, Limbaugh, Dobbs, and their ilk are playing with fire.

The Most Important Decision

2009-07-29T16:45:00.008-04:00

After a few days of avoiding comment on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, I almost broke down today and offered my thoughts on how distorted, illogical, and ugly the debate has become (I guess we're still not ready for a "national conversation on race," whatever that means).

Then I came across something even more disappointing than the superficial, grandstanding arguments over the issue: the President's choice of Bud Light for his beer/photo-op with Officer Crowley and Professor Gates (talk about compounding your dumb decisions). Jason Zengerle reports on this troubling development:

The Boston Globe had an article today--before news of the Bud Light selection leaked--about how Massachusetts brewers were angling to have their beers served at the get-together, with the idea being that since Gates is a Red Stripe or Bass man and Crowley prefers Blue Moon, maybe Obama could find common ground between the two of them by pouring a beer from their neighborhood. That made sense to me. And, while the local beer I was pulling for was a real long shot (Pretty Things Jack D'Or if you're an inquiring beer snob), you'd think that Sam Adams, or even Harpoon, are big enough national, mainstream brands that Obama could have served them without looking like someone with elite tastes. But I guess Bud Light is a safer call. Still, if Obama is intent on using this whole episode as a "teachable moment," you'd think he could teach Americans to drink something better than Bud Light.

Look, if Obama is worried about repeating the dijon disaster by snobbishly picking a specialty beer (thank God the right is ever-vigilant about crucial issues like the President's choice of condiments and booze), and if he is so concerned about stoking fears about his American-ness that he can't choose a good import beer, can I suggest a staunchly patriotic (and delicious!) domestic brew?

Rogue American Amber Ale. I'm sure someplace in D.C. has it. It's not too late to change your mind, Mr. President!

SCOTUS, Politics, and Dred Scott (And Hello Again)

2009-07-23T14:01:00.009-04:00

Prof. Sandy Levinson takes Chief Justice Roberts to task over Dred Scott v. Sandford. Roberts attended a conference in West Virginia about a month ago where he was asked to discuss a Supreme Court case that seemed particularly important to him. Roberts remarked:

Well, I do think there's one that stands out, and it's a counterpoint. I mean, people talk about the monumental cases, and you assume they're talking about the good ones -- Marbury and Brown. I would say the third most significant case in the court's history was Dred Scott in the sense that while Marbury and Brown are good examples of what to do in very challenging situations and how to handle it, Dred Scott's an example where things went terribly wrong. And you need to look at that and try to figure out why.
And I think some of the reasons are pretty clear. You had, of course, the most divisive issue in our history, leading the country toward civil war, sectionalism overlayed on top of that, the political branches failing to address it in the case of the executive and failing and causing more harm than good in the case of the legislature.
And you had Roger Taney, whose reputation would be quite different if it weren't for this one case, looking at it and saying the other branches aren't working, this issue is threatening to destroy the country, and I'm going to solve it. I'm the only one who can. And he, more or less, took it upon himself to lead the court into a resolution of those issues that were dividing the country. And in a broad way, that really had no basis in a proper reading of the Constitution and in a decision that could have been resolved either way on much narrower grounds, which would have preserved the court above the fray. [...] You need to look at Dred Scott and think, well, this is a good example of how not to do it. And that can teach you just as much as the good examples.
I think what Taney did is he used a case that could have been resolved on quite narrow grounds -- and I'm not suggesting it would have resulted in a noble decision, you know, freeing the country from slavery. It might well have resulted in the same decision, but it wouldn't have had the dramatic political impact. Taney went quite beyond what was necessary. It could have been resolved on several different levels and either resulted in relief for Dred Scott or not. But instead, he resolved it on the broadest possible grounds. And as a result, I think, threw the court into the political realm quite self-consciously. [...] And as Taney did not, I think it's important to recognize there are going to be huge consequences if you do leap ahead and involve the court in politics.

Levinson pounced:

There are many things that can be said about Dred Scott; indeed, Jack Balkin and I published an article, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Dred Scott. And, of course, there is Mark Graber's magnificent book on Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. The Chief Justice would be well advised to spend some of his summer vacation reading Mark's book, so perhaps he would no so foolishly argue that Taney's opinion, egregious as it is in all sorts of moral dimensions, "really had no basis in a proper reading of the Constitution." What Roberts is doing is simply conveying the "judges on a rampage" view of Dred Scott, which allows us, among other things, to avoid coming to terms with the possibility that William Lloyd Garrison may have been right, that the Constitution really was a "Covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell" and that "honorable" judges had to live up to the deadly bargain (as Joseph Story, far more honored that Taney, did, with arguably lesser legal warrant, in the just-as-egregious case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842). [...] Nor were Taney and his colleagues on a rampage; they were accepting a gilt-edged invitation to try to resolve an issue that the legislature had been exposed as incapable of doing so.

If Prof. Levinson is correct (and I suspect he is), the implications are far-reaching and troubling. There is a tradition of what you might call American mythology that makes secular saints of the Founders and holy scripture of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Of course, people should always strive for a better and more nuanced understanding of history, but nonetheless, it seems to me that there is some utility to American mythology. It inspires us, it gives us an ideal to reach for, and it keeps us from growing complacent with the imperfections of the present. And it is a useful corrective to our society's pervasive cynicism: after all, some of these people were truly incredible, and their lives and accomplishments merit admiration.

But Levinson is certainly right to note that there are limits to this mythology, and when it obscures proper understanding of our history, a dose of reality becomes necessary. Our admiration for the Founders and for our founding documents must never blind us to the darker moments of our history. (In particular, I can remember one day in my high school civics class when the teacher happily informed us that the U.S. Constitution was conceived by such forward-thinking individuals that it was entirely free of racism! The teacher reacted with an annoyed sigh when I raised my hand to mention the three-fifths Compromise.)

It is very difficult for Americans to except that there may be something fundamentally evil about our Constitution, and so the "judges on a rampage" theory of the repulsive Dred Scott decision can be very comforting. Instead of casting the Constitution in such a negative light, it tries to portray the question of Dred Scott's freedom as a very narrow one - one that a more restrained Court could have answered without making such sickening and unnecessarily broad declarations about who can be a citizen of the United States. I am familiar with this narrative because I myself once unsuccessfully tried to advance it. The following excerpt comes from my analysis of the political climate that led to Dred Scott:

The broader political developments of the 1820s and 1830s, including the development of abolitionist political movements and major sectional tensions over the expansion of slavery, undermined the old notion that a single national interest existed and could be promoted by politicians. When the construction and intent of the Constitution with regard to slavery came into question, the Court’s ability to simply answer constitutional questions and avoid political judgments was deeply compromised. The country was beginning to drift into North and South, and a paralyzed Congress feared exacerbating the tensions that poisoned political debate.
It was a time that called for extreme judicial restraint and increased focus on allowing the proper political bodies discuss the controversial question of slavery. Yet the developments of previous decades had moved the Court away from Marshall’s deference to legislative action [...]

This, I suppose, is accurate enough, but what follows (and what the Chief Justice was arguing) is a very difficult case to prove. Nonetheless, I continued:

Keith Whittington describes the volatile circumstances: “In the final years before the Civil War, Congress extended an invitation to the Supreme Court. Congress invited the Court to decide a constitutional question that it was unwilling to decide itself: whether the federal government had the power to prohibit slavery in the territories.”¹⁰The issue had been disastrously destabilizing for national politics, and was even giving rise to a new Free-Soil party which threatened the established party system. In 1857, the Court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, saw just such an opportunity to address the question of slavery in the territories when it heard the case of Dred Scott, a slave who had been brought into free territory before returning to Missouri. Scott argued that by entering and temporarily living in free territory, he had secured his freedom.
The ruling was utterly calamitous. In his infamous opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Taney rejected Scott’s claims of citizenship on racial grounds, but more importantly for the question of slavery’s expansion, he denied the Congress’s right to ban slavery in the territories at all. This undermined the position of both the Free Soilers and advocates of popular sovereignty, since it took away the right of settlers in the territories to decide if they wanted to allow slavery. The Court, stepping far beyond the boundaries of the case, even overturned the Missouri Compromise, sending national politics into a tailspin. Alexander Bickel’s analysis of judicial review explains the Court’s need for prudence and illuminates why its broad declarations in Dred Scott only inflamed the very tensions it was meant to ease:
When it strikes down legislative policy, the Court must act rigorously on principle, else it undermines the justification for its power. It must enunciate a goal, it must demonstrate that what the legislature did will not measure up, and it must proclaim its readiness to defend the goal – absolutely, if it is an absolute one. But it is not obligated to foresee all foreseeable relevant cases and to foreclose all compromise.¹¹
[...] The Taney Court could not avoid the impression that it was entering a political debate, and in fact, it was only too eager to do just that.

My citation of Alexander Bickel is particularly problematic, for, as Levinson correctly notes, "To say that Taney should have exercised more Bickelian "prudence" is simply to say that he should have acted even more as a "politician," and it has nothing to do with the legal merits of Taney's arguments. After all, Bickel developed his theory of the "passive virtues" precisely in order to allow the Court, on patently political grounds, to avoid legal hot potatoes."

When I wrote this analysis, I was convinced of the convenient theory that Taney had simply gone beyond his proper role and created chaos where a more narrow ruling would have sufficed. But this misses the point: even if one charges that Taney was improperly attempting to settle a political question, it does not follow that his ruling was devoid of legal merit. The Constitution, prior to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, made it perfectly possible to do horrendous evil against African-Americans. That is a very uncomfortable thing for us to admit. And Taney's argument - based on a reading of fundamental property rights that protected citizens from giving up their slaves upon entering free territory - was, sadly, not a crazy opinion. Slaves were property. And property was protected.

I discovered, in a futile attempt to defend my own articulation of the "judges on rampage" theory, that it cannot withstand a more comprehensive look at the history of the period, and when the legal arguments of Taney are considered in the context of the era, the convenient, Constitution-exonerating approach of blaming the Court falls apart. It's good that we have respect and admiration for our founding documents. But our ultimate fidelity must be to the truth, or our ongoing struggle to form a more perfect Union is doomed.

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¹⁰Whittington, Keith E. “The Road Not Taken: Dred Scott, Judicial Authority, and Political Questions.” The Journal of Politics 63, no. 2 (May 2001): 365-391. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2691757>.

¹¹Bickel, Alexander M. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

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I guess this means the end of my hiatus from blogging. Weirdly enough, traffic remained about the same even when I wasn't updating, but now I'm starting again, so those of you still checking this page will have something to read. Enjoy, and don't be afraid to comment. This operation runs more smoothly when communication goes both ways.

Palin Resigns

2009-07-04T00:05:00.004-04:00

That might have been the weirdest speech I have ever seen. Why she's doing it is anyone's guess, but the strange timing, the weak reasons, and the obvious nervousness with which she was speeding through her idiotic platitudes suggest to me that there is a major scandal brewing, and the pressure of its impending disclosure is getting to be a bit much. But I've been wrong before.

Missing the Point on Iran

2009-06-25T17:08:00.011-04:00

Why a preening opportunist like John McCain has any credibility left on Iran after joking about bombing it is beyond me, but nonetheless, there he was yesterday, flanked by the usual suspects and just loving the spotlight:

"As Joe said, we don’t take the side of either candidate. There seems to be some confusion about that. We take the side of the Iranian people to have human rights, to have the freedom that we deem universal. And this argument about that somehow the government may be more repressive if we speak out on behalf of the people, we’ve seen that movie before.

The liberal left, during the Cold War so warned that if we spoke out for the people who are captive nations, members of captive nations, that that would lead to greater oppression. We found out after the Berlin Wall came down that we were, in their words, a beacon of hope and liberty and freedom for them.
So the liberal left will, again, continue to argue that we should be nice to the Iranian regime and we shouldn’t encourage dissidence. That is in direct contradiction to the fundamental principles of the United States of America."

Where do you start? With the baseless charge that anyone - much less the American left - is arguing that we should "be nice" to the regime? With the lie that the "liberal left" (and here, he must be referring to President Obama) is discouraging dissidence? The President - and, as far as I can tell, other Democrats - have done no such thing. (To say nothing of the sneering smile creeping over McCain's face - which, if you happen to see video of this, you're bound to notice - when he attacked the "liberal left." Trying to score partisan political points over this is disgusting.)

But addressing these arguments one by one would miss the larger point: Iran's brave protestors would be seriously harmed by overzealous American involvement in their efforts.

McCain, in the passage I quoted above, is conflating two distinct arguments:

1) That there are some people (of course, they are left unnamed) who are insisting we must not speak out against human rights violations in Iran because it would increase the regime's oppressiveness.
2) That the dread "liberal left" (again composed of these suspicious unnamed characters) is arguing that "we should be nice to the Iranian regime and we shouldn’t encourage dissidence."

For McCain, these are one and the same - that America, by not sufficiently backing the victims of the regime's brutality, is being "nice" and discouraging dissidence.

But this is an incredibly misleading way of presenting the dilemma faced by the international community. President Obama has been wise to focus his comments not on the protestors and their cause, but on the government and its actions. By condemning the violence against mostly-peaceful protestors, the United States can advance legitimate concerns about human rights without seeming to take sides on what are basically political questions: was there election fraud, and is Ahmadinejad a legitimate president? (The answers to those questions are unknown, of course, but they're probably "yes" and "almost certainly not," especially if one considers not just this election, but the Iranian electoral process overall.)

For what it's worth, the United States has spoken out about human rights violations in Iran: President Obama declared that he was "appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days." He added, "I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost." Yet even this relatively strong language is wisely cautious: it focuses merely on the regime's actions against the protestors, not on the legitimacy of the protestors' cause.

So McCain's first argument - that there is somehow silence over the atrocities taking place in Iran - is just wrong. And it does not follow, despite his confused declarations, that the United States is being "nice" to the regime or discouraging dissidents from protesting against the election results. In fact, the US has done little to discourage or encourage dissidence, and for good reason.

For the supporters of Mousavi to have any credibility, it is absolutely crucial that their efforts be understood as an internal rebellion of Iran's people against their government. It is therefore necessary for the United States to focus its limited influence on condemning and deploring the regime's actions against its own citizens, in order to underscore the fact that the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are not locked in a struggle against the United States, but against their own people. Openly encouraging continued actions against the regime - which McCain apparently wants the US to do - would be taking sides, and it would undermine Mousavi's supporters terribly. Iran is crushing its own people in the streets. It is beating them with clubs, hacking them with axes, and shooting unarmed peaceful protestors, including young women. In this struggle, the enemy of the Iranian government is the Iranian people. For those courageous people to have any chance of success, we must not make this about us.

Welcome, Visitors!

2009-06-18T02:43:00.004-04:00

Google Analytics is telling me that I'm receiving more than a few new visitors from the website of the Jeff Farias Show, which featured a link to my post "The Ethics of Outing Publius" when Mr. Farias interviewed Publius a few days ago. Thanks to everyone who's visited the site; I hope you'll return or add it to your RSS feed.