Category Archives: Politics

The Stakes in 2008

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I have more or less figured that right-wing crossover-voting Democratic Congressmen would hamstring an Obama administration, guaranteeing that any of his significant initiatives go nowhere and forcing him into a Clintonian strategy of triangulation, centrism and micro-initiatives. But Kevin Drum intriguingly suggests that Republicans, chastened by the 2008 outcome, could have the opposite effect (“End of an Era?,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 19 May 2008):

They won’t be willing to say this during a presidential campaign, but there are at least half a dozen smart Republican senators who understand this and don’t really want to go down with the ship. So even if Democrats don’t win a filibuster-proof majority in November — as they almost certainly won’t — it’s likely that there will still be enough survival-inspired GOP senators around to give Barack Obama the votes he needs to make a difference. If that’s the case, and if Obama has the courage of his convictions, his first two years could be historic.

Unfortunately for Senator Obama it’s structural factors such as this that make Senator Clinton such a tenacious foe: this year could promise a shoo-in victory for the opposition party. And as if that wasn’t a sweet enough pot, whoever gets the nomination could potentially — again for structural reasons, not cause of personal vision thing — have a historical administration. Wouldn’t you too fight tooth and nail for such an opportunity were you in Hillary Clinton’s position?

Playing Into bin Laden’s Hands

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Last week President Bush (remember him?) took his message somewhere that people might listen without creating a media spectacle, the Israeli Knesset, where he made his now infamous, implicit criticism of Barack Obama (“President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset,” The Knesset, Jerusalem, Israel, 15 May 2008):

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Yes, yes, appeasement has been discredited, except in all those other instances where its opposite, belligerence or intransigence has been discredited too (“The Contradictory Lessons of the Twentieth Century, smarties, 28 August 2004). The fact is that there is no diplomatic panacea — firm resolve always works — and what is required is that ever so subtle virtue, judgment, exactly what this administration has been lacking.

This all reminds me of the passage from Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine in which he describes the assessment of the CIA as to the meaning of Osama bin Laden’s 29 October 2004 statement , made just days before the 2004 presidential election:

Inside of the CIA, of course, the analysis moved on a different track. They had spent years, as had a similar bin Laden unit at FBI, parsing each expressed word of the al Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons — and those reasons are debated with often startling depth inside the organization’s leadership. …

Today’s conclusion: bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

At the five o’clock meeting, once various reports on latest threats were delivered, John McLaughten opened the issue with the consensus view: “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.” (p. 335-336)

The fact is that the policies of President Bush and his administration have been an irreplaceable gift to al Qaeda. As Osama bin Laden himself said in the afore mentioned statement,

[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note …

Osama bin Laden essentially told the world that he loves George Bush for playing right into al Qaeda’s hands.

Barack Obama and the left more generally have responded to the President’s implicit criticism, but it’s been entirely meta. It’s beyond the bounds of fair politics, the President shouldn’t make such criticisms while abroad, etc. The left should deal squarely with this issue. Appeasement — were it even true — would be one thing, but George Bush is America’s gift to Osama bin Laden. Senator Obama is not bin Laden’s candidate: George W. Bush is. For seven years now the West has danced to bin Laden’s tune. On 20 January 2009 that ends.

Ouch! 2008 as 1972

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Among all the other things they’ve lost, at least The Economist hasn’t lost their edge. In review of Rick Perlstein’s new book, Nixonland, they have the following to say about the present election season (“The Fuel of Power,” vol. 387, no. 8579, 10 May 2008, pp. 93-94):

It is hard, in the current political season, to read this book without hearing the sound of history rhyming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. George McGovern’s promise of “post-partisanship” galvanised America’s youth. He trumpeted his opposition to the Vietnam war under the slogan of “right from the start”. He went on to suffer one of the biggest defeats in the general election in American history. “Dirty politics confused him,” Hunter S. Thompson sighed. Nixon chose “experience counts” as his campaign slogan in 1960 and boasted that he had spent “a lifetime getting ready”. He made up for his lack of personal charm by an almost deranged relentlessness. But this week’s result suggests that these are only half-rhymes at best: Barack Obama has already met his Richard Nixon and slain her.

The entire media establishment this week is touting the demise of the Clinton campaign, and the whole thing has been rather unseemly for Senator Clinton, but no one says it in quite such a wince-inducing fashion as The Economist.

A Concession Speech?

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Regarding the Clinton campaign continuance clear to convention: On the other hand, Senator Clinton’s speech last night sounded surprisingly like a concession speech — especially this part (“Hillary’s Election Day Remarks in Indianapolis, Indiana, 6 May 2008):

And I especially want to thank my family for their incredible love and support. Bill and Chelsea. People ask us all the time, how do you keep going? We love getting out and meeting people. We love having a chance to be with all of you, and didn’t Chelsea do a great job? I know a lot of people enjoyed seeing my husband again out on the campaign trail.

And I’m not the only one. A coworker commented to the same effect to me this morning. And Tim Russert couldn’t control himself over a rumor that the Clinton campaign had cancelled all morning press appearances. It seems to me like she was leaving the door open to an announcement later today. If nothing else, there’s got to be some somber strategy sessions this morning among the Clinton people.

And upon some reflection, the thing that I see that could be really convincing to the Clinton campaign could turn out to be the money game. The fundraising pattern looks even more bleak than the electoral one.

To the Bitter End

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Unless something completely unexpected happens it’s going to be a convention fight. With primaries like West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota remaining it’s just going to be more of the same. That list of states looks like more tit-for-tat wins and loses. There is nothing left that can serve as that defeat from which there is no coming back. Senator Clinton now has all the momentum, meager as it may be, to carry her through the last one on 3 June. Where things stand now is where they’ll be on August 25th, the opening day of the nominating convention.

The second factor here is that one may whish for some party elders to deliver to Senator Clinton her come to Jesus talking-to, but who has the sway over the Clintons? Howard Dean is an enemy that they fought to keep from his current position. Harry Reid has sworn neutrality because he is going to have to cope with at least one, at this rate perhaps both of them come the 111th Congress. The various other Senators are pledged all over the map. On MSNBC they were talking about Al Gore, but at this point there is too much bad blood between the Clintons and Mr. Gore.

There is nothing left now that can stop Senator Clinton from fighting on to the bitterest of bitter ends. Her strategy is clearly to wait it out and see if there are any more Reverend Jeremiah Wrights lurking in Senator Obama’s shadow. Or see if they can drum up some. Something, anything to cause an mass defection of delegate support come convention.

Consider what will happen if Hillary Clinton were to win the nomination in a convention fight? Could that be the end of the Democratic lock on the African American vote? Imagine how chilly the 111th Congress will be under a President McCain. Imagine the recrimination within the Democratic party should the Democrats lose after eight years of George W. Bush. Clearly the darkest days of the Democratic party are not yet safely in their past.

If it comes to a convention fight, I may have to put in for that week off from work.

Asian Triumphalism

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The blaring red 36-point font on the cover of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs insists, “Is America in Decline?” which immediately caught my attention, of Spenglarian tendencies as I am. Turns out it’s just an abridgement of Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Post-American World. Turns out it’s all hype and the article hims and haws around an answer of “no.” But the issue also contains and adaptation of Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East as well as a reviews of Amy Chua’s Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall, Parag Khanna’s The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order as well as top billing, Fareed Zakaria’s book.

And wow, there sure are a number of books out about the certainty of U.S. relative decline. But there is something distinct about this list of authors: they’re all Asians. Fareed Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India, Kishore Mahbubani is a citizen of Singapore, Amy Chua is a first generation American of Chinese descent and Parag Khanna was born in Kanpur, India. And I’m not cherry-picking. This is lifted from a single issue of Foreign Affairs. And I’m not suggesting that they’re part of some Asian propaganda front. They’re all correct in their analysis. The United States is experiencing decline relative to a rising Asia and other countries.

What puzzles me is that there isn’t a similarly prominent cohort of white guys writing books saying the same thing. I am reminded of John Mearsheimer’s “China’s Unpeaceful Rise,” (Current History, vol. 105, no. 690, April 2006, pp. 160-162), but the issue of the relative decline is for Mr. Mearsheimer a subordinate point to his “tragedy of great power politics” shtick and he is writing it in a down market publication. I’m sure white people making the same point are out there, but why so little known? Is there something about actually being Asian that makes one prone to see and accept this point and something about being white that puts one in a massive state of denial? Or do publisher think there’s something novel and amusing about publishing such voices? Is there something about our discourse on relative decline that we feel the need to give it Asian spokespeople? Will Thomas Friedman’s next book be on the relative decline of the United States and the rise of Asia? Did Paul Kennedy write it so long ago that is doesn’t bear revisit?

More Enthusiasm for Expensive Gas

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And hey, sales of compact and subcompact cars are at an all-time high, with one in five cars sold in April now from this category, up from one in eight at the height of the SUV craze. And four cylinder engines are now more popular than six cylinder. Sales of SUVs and trucks are down between 25 and 35 percent (Vlasic, Bill, “As Gas Costs Soar, Buyers Flock to Small Cars,” The New York Times, 2 May 2008).

In my own observation, I have noticed that the slug lines in D.C. — namely the one on 14th between F and G — have grown quite competitive as of late.

Regarding taxes, many critics of the holiday proposal have answered that it would simply benefit the oil companies, not consumers. But on consumers is where the burden of paying the taxes falls, right? Not exactly. Empirical studies show that consumers and oil companies roughly split the cost of gas tax increases. For example, this study excerpted by Matthew Yglesias suggests the following:

Using the estimated coefficients, we can determine the incidence of federal and state specific taxes. An increase in the federal tax by 1¢ raises the retail price by 0.47¢ and decreases the wholesale price by 0.56¢. Thus, consumers and wholesalers each pay roughly half of the federal specific tax.

(Chouinard, Hayley and Jeffrey M. Perloff, “Incidence of Federal and State Gasoline Taxes,” Economics Letters, vol. 83, no. 1, April 2004, pp 55-60; Yglesias, Matthew, “Gas Tax Incidence,” TheAtlantic.com, 2 May 2008)

These stories aren’t unrelated. Gas was hitherto imagined as one of those products for which demand was highly inelastic because it was largely a function of house purchasing and employment decisions — both factors not amenable to rapid readjustment. Consumers would only be able to adjust to increased fuel prices on the timescales in which they make house buying and employment decisions — that is, not very fast.

It turns out that consumer demand for gas isn’t as inelastic as it was previously thought. Many have pointed out that companies don’t pay taxes, they collect them. In other words, if the government taxes a corporation — they’re evil, they deserve it! — they will just pass the tax through to the consumer by building it into the price of their products. It turns out that the catch-phrase version of this story is too simple. The power of a company to pass a price along to consumers is dependent on elasticity of demand for their products. Where it’s highly inelastic, they can unproblematically pass it all on. Where consumers are more responsive, producers have less liberty and must to price with caution.

In the case of gas, it turns out that people can and do take steps to adjust their consumption — not enough that we’re going to achieve oil independence, but enough that oil companies have to think twice before passing along a price increase.

And this is all just the steps that are being taken now. I would expect urban density to begin to increase and the suburbs to start to depopulate over the next few years as those longer-term adjustments to fuel consumption come within the purview of people’s decision making.

Three Cheers for Expensive Gas

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Everyone’s all worked up about the price of a barrel of oil these days, with certain pandering candidates proposing a gas tax holiday for the duration of the summer. But look what’s happening with prices being as high as they are. Drivers in the Northwest have reduced fuel consumption eleven percent to 1966 levels and long-haul freight is moving off trucks to rail, a trend driven by the 3-to-1 fuel efficiency advantage of trains over trucks. I would say this is all good news brought to you in whole by astronomical prices at the pump (Barnett, Erica C., “Northwest Gas Consumption at Lowest Level Since 1966,” SLOG, 18 April 2008; Ahrens, Frank, “A Switch on the Tracks: Railroads Roar Ahead,” The Washington Post, 21 April 2008).

Expensive gas isn’t as good as a carbon tax or a cap and trade system, but it’s progress. So let’s not give up while we’re ahead. Instead of a summer gas tax holiday, why don’t we double down? Let’s add a few more cents of gas tax. Every penny in Uncle Sam’s coffer is one less in that of the House of Saud.

And as for those truckers in Pennsylvania, it’s called creative destruction. It’s part of the capitalist system. Time to take that tech school cert in diesel engine maintenance. The rail companies are hiring like gangbusters and those are better jobs anyway. Instead of pandering on fuel prices to an industry that should be paired down to everyone’s advantage anyway, the Democrats should be pushing a grand bargain between capitol and labor: an enhanced social safety net to cushion workers against the currents of globalization in exchange for greater liberalization.

The whole argument of freemarketeers is that prices are signals to consumers and by consumers acting on those signals, optimum or near-optimum resource utilization will be achieved. I’m actually in favor of enhanced signaling. Price leveling schemes by utility companies are a convenient service to their customers who have to plan household budgets, but it is signal-dampening. I think that price leveling should be done away with favor of hyper market in utilities. Power, water and gas prices should fluctuate on a per minute or per hour basis with a price readout in every house and some smart planning tools available to consumers to help them make consumption decisions. People might run certain appliances at night when power generation and distribution systems were underutilized and the electricity at its cheapest or refrain from watering their lawns so much in the summer.

The Dean Scream Gank of 2008

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I really don’t think I can handle the U.S. political scene and the 2008 election anymore. The right can still get away with their “liberal media” routine, despite it now being quite apparent that the media lies at the ready, waiting to gank any liberal with an even vaguely populist message at the first sign of any traction. Four years ago in what was one of the most amazing, mendacious, mean-spirited attacks on a politician that I have witnessed, Howard Dean was completely eliminated from the running in a single day and night of misfortune following the media pile-on over the Dean scream. This season it fully seems that Barack Obama has been served the same treatment.

The annoying thing is that this is working — at least on me. Maybe I’m too plugged in, whereas most voters are barely noticing, or maybe I’m not steady enough of nerve to weather what is a passing storm. I was in favor of Hillary Clinton throughout most of the primary, but after a few weeks of vague racism, typical Clintonian petty lying and unhinged desperation — doesn’t Bill Clinton really seem like a stroke victim at this point? — as well as a few positives from Barack Obama, I was convinced to switch to advocacy of the inevitable.

But after the whole Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the elitism gaff, Barack Obama seems like a pretty indefensible candidate to me. I mean, if someone took issue with Reverend Wright what would you say? Senator Obama was unfamiliar with these positions? That would be a convenient lie. That Reverend Wright’s opinions aren’t really that important? Do you plan to extend the same curtsey to John McCain regarding his religious wacko supporters? That Senator Obama is a closet atheist and just goes to church out of political necessity? Digging the hole deeper. That Reverend Wright’s points aren’t really that offensive? Let me know how that works out for you. That a politician shouldn’t have to apologize for the opinion of everyone they’ve ever come into contact with? There’s only so much mileage to be had here. Guilt by association is a lament because it has so much cred with common sense-type reasoning. And Senator Obama had been a member of Reverend Wright’s church for how long? Twenty years?

I think this is all stupid on a competitive basis. Despite the fact that John McCain has his own covenant of wacky preachers (Pat “we deserved September 11th” Robertson, John “the Catholic church is a whore” Hagee), has claimed spurious religious affiliation and in the form of national greatness conservatism has his own brand of condescension toward the decadent whims of the American citizenry, he’s getting a free pass from the media. If the media does decide to make an issue of anything about Senator McCain, it will undoubtedly skip over his war mongering and his avowed ignorance of economics to focus on the weakest case against him, that he is short and old., criticisms that will probably redound to further the liberal elitism case.

It pisses me off and I want to know when the DNC is going to dispatch Dean and Carville to the CNN Situation Room to empurple the face of Wolf Blitzer and to the Meet The Press studio to throw Tim Russert down an MSNBC fire escape stair well.

Maureen Dowd Marinated in Bitterness

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Since there is no one more hateable in U.S. media than Maureen Dowd, I pass on the following screed (Kathy G., “My Maureen Dowd Story,” The G Spot, 18 April 2008):

But there’s another problem with the opening sentence of the Dowd column. “I’m not bitter.” Oh Maureen — who the hell do you think you’re kidding? The woman positively soaks in bitterness. Marinates in it. It oozes out of her pen and pours into just about every damn word she writes. Her bitterness has utterly corroded her soul. It’s turned her into a twisted freak whose chief pleasure in life seems lie in vicious, barking-mad attacks on the only people capable of ending our long national nightmare — the Democrats. Seriously, if there is any other single person in the media who’s been a more powerful enabler of Republican high crimes and misdemeanors than Modo, I don’t know who it is.

It would be one thing to be relentlessly critical of the Democrats — I am and they deserve every bit of abuse they get — if it seemed as if it were in the service of some principle. But the amazing thing about Maureen Dowd is that she doesn’t seem to have anything approaching a positive agenda or even the most remote interest in issues of policy. Her column is just a wasteland of the rote application of the worst of yesterday’s discarded pop psychology to the politician de jour. Her entire oeuvre consists of little more than pulling the wings off of political flies.

When will a shakeup at the New York Times Op-Ed page deliver us from this twice weekly phantasm? Probably never. I wonder at the wisdom of associating myself with fellow leftists every time I see that Maureen Dowd’s column is the most e-mailed of the day — as it is twice a week. It just might provoke a Christopher Hitchens-like bolt for the door.

Courtesy of Kevin Drum (“Who’s Not Bitter,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 18 April 2008).