No Adult Supervision

This is a great review of books covering Wall Street and the financial collapse. It's long, but worth an entire read. Here's one killer passage towards the end:

What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable. But the truth—that an entire ideology had been unsustainable—is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. That ignorance begat infantilization, which bred cowardice and systemic moral decay. The only sustainable way out is to reacquaint ourselves and our fellow citizens with the wisdom of asking stupid questions.

This country is going to be completely dysfunctional so long as these people are not both publicly shamed and legally punished.

Markets Love Big Government

Yglesias makes a simple, but important observation that doesn't get made often enough. There's nothing particularly conservative about banks. They're like any constituency. They don't have any particular faith in the free market if they're the ones who are going down. They're perfectly well-disposed to Big Government, so long as that government's policies benefit them.

The Filibuster-Proof Majority: It ain't the same for them as for us

Taking Progressive's Punch's statistical survey of Senate voting habits, Chris Bowers over at OpenLeft finally puts into words what I've been saying for awhile now: the gridlock that we see now in the Senate is not merely the result of hyper-partisan atmosphere. It is the result of a hyper-partisan atmosphere combined with a Democratic majority.

I tend to have more respect for Ezra Klein than a lot of other progressives, but these kind of arguments are just ridiculous:

The Bush White House was very good at leveraging 9/11 to ensure congressional support for Middle East adventurism, but they didn't crack the code unlocking a compliant Congress for a hard-line conservative agend

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Maybe not a "hard-line" conservative agenda, ok. But a conservative agenda and not a soft one either. 1.3 trillion in tax cuts isn't 1.6 trillion, but it's still a hell of a lot of tax cuts. The 2003 tax cuts might have been reduced from $700 billion to $300 billion, but these were also top-margin tax cuts, affecting a very small number of rich Americans. No administration gets exactly what they want, including Ronald Reagan's back in 1980, but that didn't prevent the legislation Reagan did get through from fundamentally changing the nature of government for the next 30 years.

The fact of the matter is that Republicans never faced the kind of gridlock that Democrats are now facing and never will because--as Chris points out--Democrats are more likely to vote with Republicans than the other way around. Chris' calculations are depressing. For Democrats to have a "true" super-majority that could really get progressive legislation passed, they would need 72 (!!) Senators. But even more depressing is the number of their own kind that Republicans need for passing a Conservative agenda: just 54 Senators. You will always have 5 or 6 Democrats will to wheel and deal and--essentially--act as moderate Republicans. So remember: when people make the argument about the filibuster causing general "gridlock" they are oversimplifying the issue. Gridlock--as we are seeing it play out now--is exclusively a Democrat problem and a Republican creation. So getting rid of the filibuster, while making it easier for Republicans to pass conservative legislation, is the only way that large-scale progressive legislation seems to have a chance.

One thing that Chris doesn't mention, however, which I think is crucial: Republicans achieve party discipline by threatening their disobedient congressman with the removal of important powerful chairmanships. Democrats do no such thing. But there's no reason for them not to. Joe Lieberman was able to strip the Senate bill of any kind of public option or any kind of medicare buy-in simply because Democrats had no leverage over him they were willing to use. But leverage they had. Lieberman chairs the Department of Homeland Services committee and Reid didn't even mention the possibility of stripping him of it when Lieberman said he'd filibuster with the GOP on the Public Option....and then Medicare Buy-in, and really pretty much any idea that liberals liked that had a chance of making into the final vote. So when people talk about party discipline, there's this assumption--especially among liberals--that the particular ideology of conservatism somehow makes Republicans naturally more tribal than Democrats. But the practices that the GOP uses to maintain rigid party discipline are right there for the Democrats' taking. They just choose not use them. They should. I guarantee you that then support for filibuster reform would be lot more "bipartisan." As it is now, getting rid of the filibuster is far more beneficial to progressives than conservatives and liberals shouldn't pretend otherwise.

The Wannabe Centrist

I don't have much to say about Obama's SOTU. I thought it was a solid speech, a reminder of what a presence this guy still is. But rhetorically I think that Jon Stewart captured the underlying message of the entire speech pretty well.

It was a speech that basically admitted impotence, more or less. Obama chastised Republicans in a way that didn't sound whiny, but I'm not sure a whole lot more than that. That said, I was a lot more interested by what happened two days later at the house GOP retreat. When I first saw this, I got really excited. Obama just simply seemed masterful, taking Republican questions turning them back on the house GOP, and making them look silly and obstructionist. However, following that euphoria, I find myself considerably less hopeful. For one thing, the problem Obama faced never was in the House. (Come mid-term elections this year that might change). But for the last year and a half, Pelosi has consistently passed Obama's legislatively agenda, while the Senate has become the place where good legislation goes to die. But the other thing I noticed during the Q&A was how much faith Obama put in "experts" and establishmentarians like Howard Baker as a way of defining the political Center. He referred to his healthcare bill as a "pretty centrist" piece of legislation--which it is--and was promptly laughed at. He then defended this claim by stating that it was basically the same thing as what Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle put forward at the beginning of the year and what Republicans put on the table during Clinton's first term. The more I think about Obama, both from his SOTU speech, and from this recent Q&A with Republicans, the more I find myself thinking that the guy is a Wannabe Centrist.

Consider the following: Obama's political roots are liberal to the core. He began as a community organizer. His closest political associates--David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett--both have strong liberal tendencies. Yet coming into the White House, who does he hire as his closest advisor? Rahm Emanuel, a solidly Establishment centrist, a corporate "pragmatist" of the highest order. Or take the economic policies that have come out of his White House. The excise tax wasn't an idea that came out of Obama's administration--he originally proposed paying for healthcare by capping tax exemption limits on itemized deductions (which would mostly be paid by the wealthiest Americans). Furthermore, the president supported the public option and defended it publicly numerous times. The problem was as Rick Perlstein puts it, in this excellent exchange between him and Mark Schmitt, when the time came to draw lines in the sand Obama didn't do that. As Perlstein writes:

what I worry "being like Barack" truly means is that the knockout never comes. That the patience and the building of trust is, in fact, the end in itself. "Our Barack doesn't do mean," means, "Our Barack doesn't make the strategic choice to defeat a reactionary adversary even when that opportunity manifestly presents itself to him."

And that's really the point, watching the Q&A. Obama is most comfortable when he can orient himself in close proximity to the Establishment center. In this particular forum it was successful, it wouldn't have made sense for him to go into the house GOP retreat and tell them that they believed in failed ideas. But, in general, this is exactly what he needed to say, over and over and over, until the public came to see the current Republican platform and its rhetoric as fundamentally toxic. And he didn't. His instincts lead him in a pretty consistently liberal direction. But it's almost as though Obama envisions himself moving to the center before he actually does, that something would be wrong if that wasn't the end result of the legislative process. He's not triangulating, which I'm grateful for. He also, at least according to Richard Wolfe, sees himself as many progressives wish to see him: as a Reagan of the left. But for Obama to be Reagan he needs to draw new lines. And however successfully he might have invoked the Establishment center at the GOP House retreat as a way of painting the GOP as obstructionist, I ultimately see this as a failure of imagination rather than a success. He's not drawing new lines. He's taking the old lines and trying to use them against a reactionary party. The problem is that the old lines have been formed under the past 30 years of conservative political dominance in this country. The center is not the center. And Obama, trying to make that center hold, keeps stumbling out alone into the void where it used to be.

Everything Has to be on the Table....Except National Defense

A direct quote from Judd Gregg yesterday on the PBS News Hour yesterday (speaking about the debt commission) : "Everything has to be on the table: entitlements, taxes..."

Two things:

One, it's amazing how conventional this idea has become. Judy Woodruff just listens to what he says and moves on. Kent Conrad, who is also on the program, doesn't say anything either.

Letting Republicans frame the debt issue this way is--in no uncertain terms--fucking stupid. The public's desire for increased military spending is very low. True, there are very powerful constituencies in Washington who would scream over reducing our deficits with cuts in military spending. But they do not have broad popular support. This is another reason why the President's proposed spending freeze which specifically exempts national defense spending cannot really be taken seriously.

When in Doubt, Go to the Graphs

John Judis makes a convincing argument that the declines of Democratic candidates in recent months is intimately linked to Obama's approval rating in the state that candidate is running in. Except that he doesn't say much. He just lets polling graphs do the talking.

I don't know enough about the history of Senatorial candidates in these states to make an argument as to Obama's declining numbers have, in fact, dragged down democratic candidates in these states. What I think seems clear is that numbers really start getting bad for both Obama and Democrats around November. Missouri seems like a pretty conservative state. Obama is under 50% before August. But Robin Carnahan is very popular in the state and she is leading Blount until right around the middle of November. Colorado has a similar story: Obama's below 50% by September, but Senator Michael Bennett still has a lead until right around Thanksgiving (notice for Bennett how his numbers are flatlined, not declining, but the Republican's are rising). It should be extremely disturbing to Democrats that Obama's numbers are below 50% in Ohio and, particularly, in Philadelphia. Here is where you can really see the national trend emerge. Obama is still above 50% in both states at the beginning of November. The Dem Senate candidate, Fisher, and Ohio's (perhaps formerly) popular governer, Ted Strickland, both have leads all year that they lose right at the end of October. The one outlier to all of this is Arlen Specter, whose numbers have been a on a serious decline since he switched parties (remember how he was going to save his seat that way?).

One other point that should be made, however, is that none of these races--with the exception of Specter's seat (surprisingly)--seem even close to being lost. With the exception of Carnahan's race, which is still very close, all of these races have high numbers of undecided voters and the elections are 10 months off. That's a world of time away. However, what does seem clear is that over this past year Democrats let themselves be defined by Republicans, without Republicans offering any alternative for governing, and it worked. In every poll you can see Republican numbers rising, in some cases faster than Democrats' are falling. As of today, that trend is still going strong.

To Defend or not to Defend

Jonathan has long post arguing, in detail, for what is a fairly standard position among the Netroots:

Democrats can be assured that Republicans will attack them, regardless of what they do. Democrats could eliminate the estate tax permanently, slash the capital gains tax, repeal the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, invade Iran, and pass a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion, and Republicans would still attack them -- with exactly the same vehemence and vigor that Republicans have now. That's politics. It's how partisan politics is played. It is absolutely impossible to avoid attacks from one's opponents; nothing you do gives them license to attack, because they will attack whatever you do.

Bernstein's basic point can be summed up as follows: ignore the attacks because they will attack you no matter what.

Now, if we're referring to the current political situation in Washington today, I can't really find a simple example of Republican attacks that would refute Bernstein's argument. But that's more because Republican attacks have been largely fabricated media operas (death panels, Harry Reid's "negro dialect" comment, and bad-bad stimulus "pork" like creating jobs to clean up historical monuments). There is no excuse for Democrats failing to destroy these attacks right where they stand and I think makes a largely-correct-on-the-merits argument like Bernstein's very tempting.

But in absolute terms I think it's wrong. Republicans larger attack against Democrats--that they are both for Big Government and Big Business--is an argument that has resonance with the American public. And I would argue that it does because 1) it rings true given how the administration chose to handle the banking crisis, and 2) because, as Rauch himself argues, it is bad policy on the merits. If the Republicans had more of a coherent governing platform of their own I think this would be more clear. As it currently stands, Bernstein can simply dismiss every Republican attack as hypocritical because they don't have a real governing platform. But just because they aren't any better, doesn't mean that what they're saying doesn't have some truth. I wouldn't frame it the way Republicans frame it. But over this past year it's become very hard for me, as a Democrat, defend it against the charge that it is not just halfway beholden to corporate interests (which I always knew), but that it is ENTIRELY beholden to them when all is said and done. And, yes, it's bad policy. But it's also terrible politics and the Democrats have not paid nearly enough attention to their image as a party in bed with corporate interests. They assume that since the Republicans aren't any less beholden to corporations that voters will dismiss Republican attacks as hypocritical, or at the very least, view Democrats as the lesser of two evils. Both visions display a fundamental poverty of imagination.

Rick Perlstein put it well back in 2004:

For a party whose major competitive advantage over the opposition is its credibility in protecting ordinary people from economic insecurity, anything that compromises that credibility is disastrous.

If Democrats can't embrace being the party of the little man at the expense of their corporate support I don't really know what reason their party has for existing. All of this is to say that, in terms of Bernstein's argument, I think that some attacks really SHOULD be paid attention to. For example, if Democrats had listened more to criticism from their progressive members about their complicity with Wall Street, it's unlikely any of would ever know who Scott Brown was.

Pissing off Conservatives

So far, this is definitely the best argument I've seen for why Democrats should pass the healthcare bill.

Remarks of a Heretic

If I currently get happy whenever I see the Dow fall, does that make me a bad person? (I think if it dipped under 9,000 I'd probably stop feeling that way).

What David Plouffe Has to Say

Plouffe is out with an Op-Ed in the Post about how Democrats can still win in November. Seems like a pretty good plan to me. This passage in particular caught my eye:

Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy. Rarely does a congressional vote or issue lend itself to this kind of powerful localization. If GOP challengers want to run ads criticizing the recovery act as wasteful, Democratic candidates should lift up the police officers, teachers and construction workers in their state or district, those who are protecting our communities, teaching our children and repairing our roads thanks to the Democrats' leadership. Highlight the small-business owners who have kept their doors open through projects funded by the act.

While it's easy to paint ARRA as ineffective on the macro-level (the unemployment rate is still at 10%, right?) I think it's going to be a lot harder for Republicans to stigmatize individual democratic congressman on their vote for ARRA come November. If Democrats are smart they will only briefly focus on hard-to-picture abstractions ("the stimulus pulled our economy back from the brink") and instead localize the results of ARRA. Every time they mention it should be simultaneously linked in voter's minds with faces of people from their communities whose jobs were saved. I think this will be very effective.

One final thought: a lot of the things that Plouffe mentions aren't that hard to figure out. Doing them is really a question of putting in the time and energy. For example, the way to run a strong p.r. campaign behind ARRA is fairly obvious, but if you think about the logistics it's actually pretty complex. You'd need deep roots into local communities to find out specifically how they were helped, and you'd need to local communities to organize and get constituents who were helped to come forward and lend their voices to your campaign. All of this is simple as a solution. Putting it into practice, however, requires a great deal more patience and energy. If Democrats don't believe in what they are doing come November, it doesn't matter how obvious the solution is. There won't be the drive to get the necessary work done.

Why Obama Fears Telling a Story.

In a recent blog post for the New Yorker, Junot Diaz writes:

A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation—but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story. It is hard to feel invested in a terrible story or a confused story or, in the case of the current Administration, no story at all. Obama needs to craft a strong story, and fast, if he expects to be able to accomplish anything in the three years that remain. His opponents are hard at work smithing their stories, and Obama soon might find himself surrounded on all sides by crude powerful tales that no amount of ratiocination will be able to dispel. The President needs to remember his post’s true vocation: that of the Storyteller-in-Chief.

The whole post is worth reading in full. However, Junot seems baffled as to why Obama has not told a story. Indeed, I think many American writers were ecstatic at the possibility of an Obama presidency precisely because he was a real writer, a real storyteller. And in the case of the last eight years leading up to the financial collapse, the narrative for Obama to tell is so unbelievably obvious that for him to be unaware of it is simply impossible. So why hasn't he told one? Because any good story--by it's very nature, is ideological. Any good story uses its characters and their actions to tell us something about human nature, and by extension, about morality. It involves framing a character's actions so that the reader perceives the consequences as either good or bad, productive or destructive, right or wrong. By extension this involves casting particular characters as heroes and villains. Clearly, we of the so-called literary class value stories that blur these binaries, which reveal things that we like to refer to as "the grey area," "paradox," "ambiguity," and so on. But such stories have little value in a political context. Stories that move massive numbers of people to action have traditionally been rather black and white. Their brilliance comes not from burrowing into a small slice of the world and revealing its complexity, but by taking the sprawling series of events over a period of years and streamlining them into a simple, emotionally charged narrative. For Obama to tell convincing story would require him to cast various political actors as heroes and villains. And this is conflicts with something fundamental (and I believe, detrimental) to his presidency: his sincere desire for bipartisanship. He genuinely wants to work with Republicans even as he moves the country left. The problem is that in order to move the country left he needs to cast Republicans in the role of the villain. He needs to state unequivocally that Republican's vision for America has, for the last 25 years, caused median incomes to stagnate while the wealth at the top has exploded. Such rhetoric is, quite rightly, viewed as partisan. One could not blame Republicans--many of whom sincerely believe in their conservative vision for society--to view Obama as an existential threat, a man who enters their land to proclaim that conservatives believe in a false God. You don't negotiate with a man who publicly pronounces your ideology morally bankrupt and fundamentally dysfunctional. None of us would negotiate with a man like that, unless--perhaps--our very survival depended on it. Obama--being the gifted empathizer that he is--certainly knows this. And so what does he do? He presents policies which do move the country in a more progressive direction, but fails to defend them with a narrative that explains why such a direction is necessary. Because the other thing he definitely wants to do--however naive many of us think it--is to bring opposing sides together around a common cause. In other words, he wants to mediate the partisan divide. Well, any mediator will tell you that not villainizing either side is a pre-requisite to successful mediation. If you cast someone as a villain they will behave as a villain. But this is already happening. Republicans already perceive Obama as a threat to their existential survival. They already have no problem dissembling and obstructing. And this--I believe is where Obama may actually be naive: he doesn't want to believe that moving the country leftward will inescapably terrify the conservative movement, that they will perceive HIM as a villain no matter what and will tell a story to the public in which he and the democratic majority are taking the country down a radical path. Obama hasn't done the same thing because he knows the destructiveness of such a narrative, that once you cast your opposition in that light it cements the conflict and destroys any chance of compromise. But the problem is that Obama is also telling a story about his presidency bringing transformational change to the country, and the basic goals of this change are liberal ones: a more equal society, stronger labor laws, higher wages for lower income folks, and a larger role for government to enact these changes. This is an existential threat to conservatism and if Obama wants to make these changes he needs to tell a story with heroes and villains, with good and evil, a story that strikes the majority of Americans at their own existential core and gives them a story they can tell themselves about why Obama is doing what he is doing, why certain people hate it, and why those people who hate it are fundamentally wrong.

Some Thoughts Post-Election

I'm still on something of a high from Tuesday night. We elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Here are some thoughts that I take away from this, both as an American and a liberal.

We are the Cool Kid of the World Stage Again: I just got an email from a friend of mine in Italy. He told me that he listened to Obama's acceptance speech and cried. In Italy! "You have no idea how much the world loves this man," He wrote. We have all heard this before. Andrew Sullivan has not talked about much else in the last two years. Indeed, if Obama has a mandate with his electoral victory, it seems to me that it is a mandate for a more nuanced, diplomatic approach to foreign relations. This was a candidate emphasized early on was that he would talk to our enemies, and again, whose name was Barack Hussein Obama. Who was raised for part of his life in Indonesia. Whose father a Kenyan. Obama made his internationalism part of his platform in the democratic party, and while de-emphasizing it in the general election, Obama never backed away from his claim that he would talk to our enemies. I am very hopeful about all of this.

Is America a Center-Right Country, or Was Obama's Victory a Mandate for Progressivism?: As Dave Sirota, Bill Scher, Matt Yglesias and a number of others have shown, the Beltway insiders, cable news folks, and the like, are warning Democrats not to over-reach, NO! That is America is a center-right nation and will always, always, always, be a center right nation. It seems pretty clear that this claim is, frankly, retarded. Rick Perlstein titles his book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the Liberal Consensus, for a reason. From 1929 to 1964 there was a liberal consensus in America. It was caused by something called The Great Depression and series of policies known as The New Deal. Following WWII, this country experienced the greatest economic boom of its history until 1964, and indeed of any country's history, and the idea of an active government was so obviously right that when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964 he was called a kook. So we have a precedent in this century, of almost three decades, of America as a nation of the center or center-left.

A lot of the Netroots are chomping at the bit for major progresssive change now, now, now! They see the current election, the democratic congressional majority, and the economic collapse as a temporary window which must be taken advantage of for real progressive change. Otherwise it will close, people will "snap out of it" and just want to keep the Fed out of their lives. They also argue that Obama's win really did constitute a progressive mandate because McCain and Palin called him every epithet for a left-winger in the Republican playbook and lost by seven million votes. "Voters knew exactly what they were getting when they elected Obama," the netroots says, "They knew he was liberal, they knew his voting record, they believed that he would raise their taxes and they still supported him anyway." True. But they also knew that Obama was emphasizing a tax cut for the middle class. That policy advisors were largely members of the Clinton administration and the Washington establishment. His candidacy was, for these very reasons, met with approval from the MSM. And this too, was a reason why voters supported him. The logic of the Netroots is a bit desperate here. They want to push Obama to the left so they are saying that his victory represented a victory for progressive policies. And it did, in certain ways. Obama ran on a platform of Universal Healthcare (although his plan wasn't really universal, his rhetoric was pretty liberal in this area). He ran on a platform of transforming the nation's infrastructure with new, green technology. This too was a bold, liberal idea. But there was a reason why voters didn't think Obama was a "scary liberal." He didn't reach out to the Netroots, for starters. This, perhaps, would have been the best indication that Obama was committed to using his election as a mandate for progressive policies. Yet he did not.

So am I saying that Obama is not really committed to a progressive administration? Not exactly. I think he understands something about his election, and about the current moment in our history, that many of the Netroots would like to ignore. The truth is that for almost the last thirty years, since 1980, we have been a center-right nation. The constant refrain that one hears from the media on this point is not so much out of any ideological bent, as it is based on the effectiveness that conservatives have had controlling the political discourse in this country for the last thirty years. It is a kind of Ministry-of-information-logic: we are currently a center-right nation, therefore we have always been a center-right nation and will always be a center-right nation. But again, there is a reason for this, it is not just a media creation. For the last thirty years the Right has managed to trash the idea of government as a positive agent of social change. The logic was stunning in its tautology. By fucking up government and running huge deficits conservatives then claimed their own ineptitude as a governing party was proof that Government Was the Problem. Part of this was the Democrats fault too. By the late 1970's, they had become bad at governing too. And Bill Clinton, while governing effectively, managed to nevertheless trigger widespread disgust in government from his inability to keep his dick in his pants. And now we have the legacy of the Bush years, possibly the most inept and corrupt administration in American history. It has led to unnecessary war, botched crisis operations of Katrina, and now a global (!) financial collapse, bringing America to the brink of depression.

This has led to a curious paradox, I think, within the American public consciousness, and one that Obama is acutely aware of going forward. On the one hand, people are scared. Big things are happening that threaten to run over them, to leave them unemployed, uninsured and bankrupt. The housing market is tanking, public pensions are tanking, the stock market is tanking, and in the last two months 500,000 American jobs were lost (almost equal all of what we lost in the previous eight months of this year). People are scared, and they don't know who else to turn to at this moment of crisis except government. On the other hand, I think that it is naive of the Netroots to think that this is the equivalent of a vote of confidence in government to socialize healthcare, for example. If anything, I think the last thirty years have left American more distrustful of government than ever, but they are willing to suspend that belief because they have no place else to turn. And so, it is for this reason that I am distrustful of this first-100-day-is-everything meme. At this point it appears that democrats have been given an opportunity to regain public trust by rebuilding the economy. And it can go either way. Democrats have not shown much of an ability to pass legislation, not in the Bush administration or in the Clinton administration. If it turns out that this bailout comes back a year later, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been wasted, the tide could easily swing back to the Republicans. But lets assume that an Obama administration does rescue the economy from collapse ushers in a revitalized economy through a series of smart stimulus packages and infrastructure projects. The mid-terms come in 2010, and it seems to me that this is the real mandate for progressive change. Everyone in the media seems to assume that this is a repeat of 1992-94. A democrat comes into the presidency with large congressional majorities, only to completely lose Congress two years later. I think it is pretty clear that this moment is not a repeat of 1992. But continued dominance of Congress by the democrats in 2010 will prove it. And that, in my opinion will be the moment to push for universal healthcare. Its what would be the 'long view.' But I think that it is this long view that Obama is thinking about when he takes office.

Mainstream and not.

This is pretty interesting.

One of the things that is most interesting about these polls is that they illustrate how liberal the American public is on certain social issues. It's encouraging to read that 90% of Americans favor sex-education programs and that just 15% favor abstinence only. There's a pragmatism there that is refreshing. (Quick note: the Christian Right is usually about 15% of the electorate, so thats probably where it comes from). Nate makes the argument that democrats should use social issues against republicans where Republican philosophy is outside the mainstream. I think that sex-education is probably the most promising, of the issues that Nate brings up, for this approach.

Nate doesn't give much detail on abortion polls, but the divide in America over abortion is striking. More polls here and here. Most people believe Roe vs. Wade should be legal, but most people also believe that there should be more restrictions on abortions. This isn't surprising, considering the fact that American abortion laws are less restrictive than most countries in Europe.. As an otherwise conventional liberal, I can attest to the ambivalence I feel about certain abortion laws we have in this country; its not an issue where I feel myself to be on particularly firm moral ground, particularly once we start getting into the third trimester of a pregnancy and beyond. Anyway, the point is that the abortion issue also reflects a healthy pragmatism on the part of the American electorate; it is our abortion laws that are not particularly pragmatic--as opposed to those of western european countries, which are less dogmatically pro-choice.

I find the vast support for hate crime legislation rather fascinating, particularly given how unsympathetic mainstream America is to other features of discrimination and oppression (such as disproportionately large numbers of African-Americans in poverty and/or in jail). But I also don't think that most people will hold it against Sarah Palin for being against hate crime legislation. My guess is that if you asked most Americans how much they cared about hate crime legislation the response would be 'not very much'. Given that 70% of Americans will consider voting for someone who disagrees with their views on abortion (an extremely hot-button issue) its hard to believe that Obama could make much of an issue out of Palin's opposition to hate crime legislation.

Its not clear exactly what Palin's position on global warming is. I'm pretty sure the quote that Nate uses is in response to questions specifically about climate change in Alaska.. If it does turn out, however, that she is a straight-up denier of global warming--in the James Inhofe mold--that could be a huge problem. Nevertheless, I suspect that its not quite the case. As Nate's conclusion here illustrates, Palin's position on global warming is not really defined. That means she will almost certainly define it in a way that is passable on the national stage.

The rejection of evolution as an empirical, scientific theory, by the majority of Americans, is quite striking, except for the fact its not just Americans, half of the British population also share a similar disbelief. As cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom has points out repeatedly in his excellent book Descartes' Baby, the theory of evolution is, for whatever reason, profoundly counterrintuitive to the human brain. Children, are even when raised in secular households, are naturally predisposed towards a creationist view of the world. Another way of putting this is to say all of us are naturally predisposed towards creationism. This is not conditioning but, ironically, the way that evolution has wired our brains to think. In this sense, it makes sense that so many people reject evolution because they are predisposed to reject it unless they are conditioned to think counter-intuitively.

I'm going to try and post more about evolution and its conflict with human perception in the coming days. But for now, we can at least feel comforted to know that the majority of Americans reject evolution not because of some weird aspect of our culture that makes half the country ignorant. If its a cultural problem, as we sometimes think, then its a multi-cultural problem, one that across different countries and regions.

Obama's Speech: The Partisan Divide

I had been saying for weeks that Obama needed to pivot towards a more traditional democratic platform during the convention and away from the post-partisan stance that he often struck throughout the primaries because he was running against Hillary Clinton and--by definition--Bill Clinton's administration. Obama's speech did that. Here's how you know. After his speech, commentators did something that they don't usually do when commenting on an Obama speech: the split down partisan lines in their reviews. Progressive commentators loved the speech (as did I). Most of the 'nuetral' pundits such as John Dickerson, Mark Halperin, Marc Ambinder etc. also found it very effective. No surprises so far. Obama gives a good speech, we all know that. But the conservative reaction was mostly negative. This was particularly striking among more sophisticated conservatives like Ross Douthat, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, who have been demonstrated quite a bit of attraction to Obama throughout this election. Ross captures conservative frustration pretty well.

But from where I sit, to the right of the political center, Obama the generic Democrat is a big disappointment. He started this campaign with two promises: That he'd tell us what we needed to hear, rather than what we wanted to heart, and that he wouldn't be captive to the old left-right divide in American politics. But there were no tough choices presented in last night's speech, no hard truths told. There was just the promise that we can have it all: Energy independence (within ten years, no less!), universal health care, an army of new teachers, tax cuts for the middle class, the working class, and the upper-middle class, zero capital gains taxes on small business owners, a perpetually solvent safety net, plus a dose of protectionism - and all of it paid for by (unspecified) spending cuts, and tax hikes on just five percent of America. Meanwhile, the speech's concessions to conservatism were largely pro forma - an acknowledgment that fathers matter, that programs can't solve every problem, and that government "can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework" - and its proposals for common ground (reduce unwanted pregnancies, keep AK-47s out of the hands of gang members, etc.) were equally thin.

Again, if you're a liberal, none of this is going to sour you on Obama's speech, or on the candidate: Why should he concede anything to the Right, you might say, given the disasters of Bushism, and given that the political wind is finally blowing liberalism's way? Which is fair enough. But for those who aren't liberals, but who have been drawn, in varying ways, to Obama's transformational promise anyway, his claim to stand for "new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time" looks a lot more hollow today than it did a year ago.

It will be interesting to see how McCain responds at the Republican convention. Assuming that it happens in anything other than a procedural sense because of Gustav.

The Palin Pick

So, I am of the opinion that McCain just handed the election to Obama by picking Sarah Palin. Check that: I think the election will still be decided in the debates. But I think it just got a whole lot harder for Americans to take McCain seriously. I've been ranting all weekend how hypocritical and cynical the McCain campaign's choice was. But because I haven't written about it and because Andrew Sullivan's posts on McCain's choice have mirrored my own feelings on the pick, from surprised, to confused, to alarmed, to upset, to fully enraged, I will let his posts speak for my own feelings. Most movement conservatives are ecstatic about the pick like Kristol and almost all of the writers at National Review blog, The Corner, but some, like David Frum are pretty skeptical. The point I want to make is that there is a lot of skepticism, disbelief and contempt surrounding the Palin pick in the blogosphere, even on MSM blogs like Time and Politico. Sure, I am biased, but this seems to me to be the proper reaction. The Palin pick is transparently gimmicky, it fulfills every requirement that McCain needed to politically, except the actual requirement of the Vice-Presidential office itself--being able to step in and take over if the President is unable to fulfill the duties of his office. This is the big meme going around the blogosphere.

Not on the Sunday news shows, however. The disconnect between the blogosphere and television news is stunning. I just watched 'This Week', and it was like walking into an alternative universe. Not once they bring up the fact that McCain only met her once. Not once did they talk about how closely she was vetted. It was an "exciting pick" according to Cokie Roberts. George Will, who I have a weird sort of respect for because at least his opinions are usually coherent, makes the incredible statement that McCain's base is now more fired up than Obama's. The only one who seemed really skeptical was Stephanopolous himself, but he seemed like a kid in High School, who knows that what he's hearing is bullshit but doesn't want to appear too uncool by harshing on the vibe. Admittedly, when Stephanopolous interviewed Lindsey Graham he actually pressed him really hard on the hypocrisy and cynicism of McCain's choice. But once roundtable started, it just became ridiculous.

Meet the Press was a little better, principally as a result of Doris Kearns Goodwin, who specifically brought up the impulsiveness of McCain's decision-making process. But there was still a lot of the 'McCain's restoration as a Maverick' meme. But it really is like entering a parallel universe in comparison to the blogosphere. The same things have happened, in the same temporal order. None of the facts have been changed. But the interpretation of what they mean could not be more different.

The General Election

I'm an Obama supporter. I've watched so many of his speeches, its amazing that I could still be impressed with any new ones. At times he's amazed me, other times he's disappointed me. Over the last 17 months Obama has changed how we talk about politics. But I have also seen him get caught in the old paradigms of the 1960's; he cannot dismiss them completely and in some cases (William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright) he has simply tried to avoid conflict altogether by joining in the villainization of controversial, but nevertheless complicated, figures. But Thursday night, I was worried. The first night of the convention seemed stale, the second night better, but still nervous, uncertain, the atmosphere seemed to lack a certain confidence. It got better with each night. But Obama's speech brought the energy to a new level. It was, as Andrew Sullivan points out, a frank argument for liberal democracy. I felt like I was watching an episode of the West Wing or the American President or another of those political dramas of the 1990's in which the ideological power of liberalism was under siege by the far right, but still managed to reign supreme. Watching these shows today, one can see the anxiety that surrounds their mythology of liberal heroism, an anxiety reflected by the political climate of the Clinton years, but a heroism that somehow avoids the real world constraints that were placed upon the Clinton administration. All of these shows struggled with the basic problem of liberal self-esteem during the 1990's, the nagging fear among liberals that what they believed was somehow out of sync with the rest of America, the confused bewilderment that they were being rejected by the very constituencies (the working class) that they wished to help. These cinematic fantasies of liberal triumph acknowledge such feeling of isolation, particularly on wedge issues such as gun control and immigration, but somehow the Josiah Bartletts of the world remained unswayed by this storm of intolerance and in doing so ultimately move the country in their direction. Obviously, the Clinton administration turned out quite a bit differently.

But times have changed. Obama didn't use the word liberal, but he made the case for it, even briefly touching on wedge issues like gun control and abortion that Democrats have typically avoided. The reason is not because Obama is stronger than Clinton was. Its that the political climate is different. In his speech, Obama did something that he had never really done before. His rhetoric for change had always placed the blame for political stagnation in the context of "the last thirty years." He has claimed that it is not a question of Democrats or Republicans being right, but a question of moving past the culture wars. In the primaries he ran against Hillary Clinton, and to large extent the Clinton legacy. The puzzling thing about this rhetoric, perhaps the reason why it leaves people uneasy, is that throughout all his talk of post-partisanship, Obama's core principles remain firmly grounded in the liberal idea that government can be force of good for its citizens. In his speech Thursday night, for the first time, Obama explicitly acknowledged his own candidacy as an extension of Clinton's presidency, and in doing so introduced a new meme into the race. That his presidency will fulfill the promises that Clinton's began but left unfinished. That Obama embodies the liberal aspirations of the democratic party, which can now leave the world of cinematic fantasy to which they were relegated in the 1990's, step forward naked, exposed, but unashamed, onto the national stage.