Exploded Clown

Obama is struggling to condense his economic policy into a sound bite. The long version:

So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s simple call for less government and lower taxes.

He paused for a few seconds and then said this:

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.

“Now, that’s the story. Now, telling it elegantly — ‘low taxes, smaller government’ — the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.”

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

A suggestion:

The era of incompetent government is over.

There are already approximately seventeen million reviews of Matthew Yglesias’ new book, Heads in the Sand, so I figured one more wouldn’t hurt.

Yglesias is one of my must-read bloggers; when I’m behind a few days, I’ll plow through his feed first because he makes great points, ties it into the larger picture, and doesn’t belabor the issue. All of these things are true in his book, as well.

It has been said elsewhere, but the transition from blog posts to book chapters went very well for Yglesias’ style. In large part this is attributable to the decision to tie the book into a narrative following the last decade of American foreign policy, and make the points along the way. This allows Yglesias to follow his normal method of commenting on events “as they happen,” which is why reading the book feels a lot like reading the blog or his articles.

But it’s a two-edged sword. Too often the points Yglesias is making are directly related to the background they are surrounded by, but the background tends to bury the commentary by dint of leading rather than following. This makes the principals Yglesias puts forward somewhat harder to find in the text.

The exception to this pattern is the final chapter “In With the Old,” which dispenses with the narrative and instead takes a more forward-looking view to the next administration and how they should go about foreign policy. This chapter benefits greatly from this freedom, and makes some of the best points in the book.

But enough about the structure of the book; the content is the important bit. The book as a whole advocates not new ideas, but a return to the “liberal internationalism” that Yglesias says the US followed from World War II until the current administration. Early on, the yardstick we are given to measure foreign policy decisions is:

The question, then, that must be asked of any proposed policy is… whether it brings us closer to or further from the dream of a peaceful, rule-governed liberal world order. p8

Those four attributes: peaceful, rule-governed, liberal, and world order are the keys. The first is the goal, and the rest are how to achieve it in a sustainable way. If you abandon the latter three, you will inevitably lose the first.

Yglesias establishes the heredity of the idea: Wilson as grandfather, FDR as father, Truman as mentor. The first Iraq War proves that it works; bringing an international coalition together to enforce the rules and keep the peace is a success. But then we immediately trip over Kosovo.

Western leaders of the period were, and are, often accused of a selective approach to humanitarianism, acting forcefully in Kosovo, while being less concerned with more serious humanitarian problems in Africa and elsewhere. The charge is essentially accurate but largely misses the point: that Kosovo presented a mixture of humanitarian and interest-based reasons for intervention was precisely what strengthened the case for playing fast and loose with the UN rules, making intervention a reasonable option. p17

As Yglesias has conceded, Kosovo is somewhat of an edge case, but how much of one is debatable. The problem is that Kosovo is rather obviously a use of force outside of the approval of the UN Security Counsel, but it seems right anyway. Seeming right isn’t rules governed, though.

This highlights one of the shortcomings I found with the book; in its desire to hew closely to the chronology, it spends its time on what happened and why it worked or didn’t, and misses opportunities to talk about what should have happened. In the case of Kosovo, what is the US to do if the UN won’t act? (We chose asking NATO instead, and Kevin Drum makes the point that that was good enough). But in other cases this just left me wanting a few more pages.

One such case was the (excellent) discussion of the 2004 Presidential Race. Yglesias makes a good argument that Dean fell in the primary because he “was, in various respects, a less-than-ideal candidate” (p88), and that Kerry fell in the general because he couldn’t properly distance himself from his previous pro-war stances. But none of the other Democratic candidates could have done so, either. So what should have been done?

This oversight is especially sad because it ties in with Yglesias’ view that being the opposition party means being unafraid to oppose the other party. Bush was for the war, but for political necessity, so was most of the Democratic Party. As Yglesias puts it:

The 2004 primary offered the best possible opportunity for a Democratic course correction: a change to reject the errors of the congressional leadership in favor of the greater wisdom demonstrated by the bulk of the party’s rank and file, both in and out of Congress. But that opportunity was squandered, and the Democrats would up deeper in a political quagmire of their own making. p89

This comes close to getting to what should have been done, but misses the mark by being too abstract. Who was the candidate who could have done this? How would they have avoided being painted with the Dean smears of being “a throwback to post-Vietnam quasi-isolationism and left-wing radicalism” (p98)?

Another thing that seemed to be alluded to but missing is a real strategy of how to fight al-Qaeda. Specifically, is Beinart’s idea of “democrati[zing] the Muslim world” p121 a key to combating al-Qaeda, even if it isn’t the key, and Iraq wasn’t a useful means of obtaining that goal? Yglesias comes close to an answer:

The relevant sort of resentment, however, is not resentment at the absence of democracy, but resentment at the absence of democracy’s logical precursor–self determination. p135

And with this great quote from Michael Lind:

Woodrow Wilson said “we must make the world safe for democracy.” He did not say we must make the world democratic. p143

But going against Bush’s narrative that “Democracy is on the March” is too easily painted as being against democracy or– worse– being of the opinion that Muslims can’t handle democracy. Granted that we shouldn’t accept this framing, but how does one reject the argument without tripping into it?

The beginning of an answer is there, and I think it lies in the line that “Democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of empire” p144. This idea– more fully explored by Dave Meyer here– is interesting, but stands without any support in the book.

Another glimpse at the larger context for this question is elsewhere in the book:

It was fashionable for a long time for liberals… to argue that the Bush administration was right about the need to promote democracy in the Middle East but wrong in the way to go about it. What was needed, perhaps, was a new national commitment to a new method of promoting democracy. I myself wrote some articles along these lines, and there is some truth to that way of looking at things. p194

Yglesias outlines some of the ways to go about democracy promotion, and acknowledges that they’re not riveting, but still important. (And what does Yglesias think of Thomas Barnett’s rather riveting TED Talk? Too much like Max Boot’s proposal?)

One of the things that Yglesias does incredibly well, though, is present the current situation and show how untenable it is:

The Bush administration’s embrace of militaristic nationalism has not brought democracy to the Middle East and has not frightened Iran or North Korea out of conducting nuclear research, nor has it intimidated Iran or Syria out of supporting Hezbollah, spooked Pakistan into ending its support for Kashmiri radicals or into clamping down on al-Qaeda sympathizers in its border areas, owerawed China out of efforts to become a grat power, or frightened Russia out of reasserting itself. p187

Ultimately, I liked the book rather a lot. It was a quick run-down of most of the important foreign policy decisions in the last decade with good interpretations of the meanings and repercussions behind them. And I look forward to the next book, where Yglesias can answer his own challenge:

There is no panacea ere (just look at Singapore), but it is in many ways the best thing we can do. The subject lies largely outside the scope of this book, but one of the real challenges of liberal economic policy in the coming years will be rebuilding te domestic social contract in a way that once again makes further expansions of global trade acceptable– and, indeed, beneficial– to the American working class. p196

Non Volunteer Old Man: It’s been nice talkin’ to y’all. Say, who you voting for?

Old Man 1: Not Hillary.

Old Man 2 shakes his head and smiles.

Old Man 1: I’m voting for McCain. And let me tell you, I’m thinking about that. Thinking real hard.

Senator Clinton’s appearance felt a little strained, Senator Obama’s appearance was kind o funny, but EdWørds was hands-down the best of the cameos. Better introduction, better content, and much, much funnier. It reminds me of Al Gore on SNL warning about attacking glaciers; surreal enough that you know they’re in on the joke, but real enough that it’s not preachy when it turns back to the real issue. It’s Al Franken’s “kidding on the square.”

[Two men, each about 50, sit at a table over burritos. One of them is wearing a t-shirt that says "If you don't like abortions, don't get one." He is listening as the other man speaks]

Man #1: But the planes couldn’t have brought down the towers. The physics don’t work. And the Democrats are in on it. Howard Dean is not a dumb man; he’s inquisitive. He’d figure it out.

[Man #2 is not buying it. He's too smart for that.]

Man #2: But what about Castro? Who told him to be quiet? Bush and Castro have the same master.

I really, truly wish that I were making this up.

Robert Reich’s Blog: 2008 and 1968:

Yet the striking thing about Obama, and the enthusiasm he has stirred up, has little to do with the specifics of the policies he advances. It is rather his almost pitch-perfect echo of the John F. Kennedy we heard in 1960 and the Robert Kennedy last heard in 1968. It is a call for national unity and national sacrifice — not in the interest of military prowess but in the cause of social justice, both in the nation and around the world. His appeal is for more civic engagement, not necessarily more government. He has the voice and wields the techniques of a community organizer (which he was on the streets of Chicago), asking people to join together, calling the nation to form a more perfect union. Not since the sixties has America been so starkly summoned to its ideals. Not since then has America– including, especially, the nation’s youth –been so inspired.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Great article on the appeal of Obama, by one of the Clinton’s oldest political allies, Robert Reich (who I love hearing on Marketplace, I would like to say for the record).

¡Viva Obama!:

Personally, there are some things about silly season that I like.

How is it that this is so awesome and this and this are so terrible?

The lack of cheesy 90s graphics is a definite difference, but the music is the deciding factor. The Obama video is fast and happy and loud, the Clinton video is cloying and saccharine, the Huckabee video is like a bad 80s sitcom opening or a lounge act. But that describes the campaigns, too.

Josh and I were talking almost a year ago about how awesome it would be if the next President declared Bush an enemy combatant specifically to make the point that the President should not have such a power. Today, I was thinking of other such actions to take.

• Issue a signing statement that annexes Cuba. For the greater good.
• Claim that the text of the speech you are currently giving cannot be reproduced, due to executive privilege.
• Also claim that it’s a state secret.
• Announce that you will be holding a secret trial to determine the guilt of (let’s say) the Supreme Court Chief Justice.
• Pause dramatically.
• Announce that he has been found guilty, based on the ample secret evidence.
• Claim that tomorrow, you will be picking a name out of a hat, and that person will be put in jail for suspicious activity, with no trial and no habeus corpus rights. A new person will be chosen each day.

For best effect, announce these in your inauguration.

Listen to the crowds in these two speeches. You only have to get about 10 seconds in to each one.

Obama:

McCain:

(Both Via Talking Points Memo.)

Obama sounds like he is surrounded by hundreds of people who are attentive to his every word. He is. McCain sounds like he’s in a little room with a dozen people behind him and another dozen behind the camera. I don’t know if he is or not, but it sure struck me as a contrast.

In writing the previous post, I use “liberal” instead of the oh-so-trendy “progressive,” which I decided just today is about as informative as claiming that you are in favor of achieving things. Everybody is in favor of some kind of progress; the important part is what goal you are trying to achieve, and I want a more liberal world, where liberty is given to all who want it. Hence, I am a liberal.

I was watching “The Power of Nightmares” a while back. I’d previously heard about it, but never actually sat down and glued my eyes to the screen. If nothing else, it kicked off the following train of though in my mind.

Strauss, Father of Neoconservatism

One of the two groups the documentary charts the history of is the neoconservatives, and it traces them back to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss’ basic argument is that in a liberal system, the individual freedom is more important than the community freedom, which leads to a breakdown of community as individuals choose the selfish route over the greater good. The neoconservatives point to the riots in the 60s and 70s as evidence of this breakdown (Irving Kristol is the one who says it in the film).

This Straussian view got me thinking. It sounds right, but it feels wrong. I paused the show and spent a bit of time examining the disconnect.

What the matter with Liberalism?

Okay, there’s a breakdown of the community in the 60s, I can grant that. Sure, it’s a countercultural breakdown, and it’s largely a liberal movement. But is it because those people were given too much freedom?

“Wait,” says I, “why is freedom suddenly a bad thing? Freedom in markets is good, right? Freedom of religion is pretty nice. Freedom of speech is a perk, too. Freedom to vote seems to be popular.”

So let’s step back. Strauss is characterizing liberalism as a choice between individual freedoms and community freedoms. It’s the social contract; you give up your rights for the greater rights. But is liberalism really about putting the individual above the community? If it’s not, what is it? What is the greater good of liberalism?

The odd part is that as soon as I asked myself this question, the first thing that popped into my mind was that Conservatives want to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” They want a limited state, the better to secure the individual’s freedoms. That’s a nice concise philosophy, and it dovetails into the long tradition of government-as-necessary-evil. Madison tells us in Federalist #51 that “if all men were angels, then there would be no need for government.” I had never put those two together before, but now it seems quite obvious.

Calling out the Founding Fathers

But what also seems obvious is that Madison is wrong. Katrina was a problem because it was a hurricane, not because the people weren’t angels, and the government was needed in that case. When someone gets cancer and needs to pay a huge medical bill, it’s not angel deficiency that’s the problem, and a governmental health care program would certainly help. Sometimes life throws you lemons, and it’s not a lack of heavenly hosts that’s keeping you down.

If the purpose of a government is not merely to protect us from the insufficiently angelic, what other duties is it to have? Mr. Madison, meet… er… Mr. Madison, who says that government is to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” There seems to be more than one item on this list.

A Governing Philosophy

But these are all reasons to have a government; they are the goals that the government reaches for. What they are not is a governing philosophy, which constrains how the government goes about its work. Conservatism has such a criteria: be as small as possible. This includes defining the problem as small as possible so as to make the government equally small. Again, that concise “small” philosophy is useful. But why didn’t a similarly concise liberal philosophy jump into my head at any point?

What is the liberal philosophy? What do liberals want in a government? It’s not just government for government’s sake; there’s a reason in there somewhere, but it took me the better part of a day to figure it out.

From a liberal standpoint, government is like any other organization: it’s a group of people getting together to achieve common goals. A company is a group of people who want to make money. Many non-profits are groups of people trying to fix something. Masonic lodges are groups of people supporting each other. A government is a group of people trying to make the lives of those people within it better, by ensuring their freedoms, protecting them from enemies foreign and domestic, and otherwise aiding the club’s membership.

The social contract is that every individual wants those things, and so gives up some freedom so that those goals can be achieved. Instead of a necessary evil, the government is the populous acting on the better angels of their nature, and helping each member because it’s the right thing to do, not because you have to.

Liberalism’s guiding philosophy, then, is helping each other out, because doing so will help you out in the end, too. A rising tide raises all boats.

A Politics for Generation X:

As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.

Like conservatives, they favor fiscal restraint—but unlike the conservative leadership in Congress, only 15 percent believe that America should use any budget surplus to cut taxes. Like Democrats, they want to help the little guy—but unlike traditional Democrats, they are unwilling to do it by running deficits…

[A] recent poll suggests that the highest priority for the majority of young adults is building a strong and close-knit family…

Improving public education is one of the highest policy priorities for Xers…

Xers are eager to do away with the two-party system. They register particularly strong support for third parties, for campaign-finance reform, and for various forms of direct democracy…

[A] commitment to environmental conservation.

If Xers had their way, the collection of taxes would become more progressive and the distribution of benefits more widespread.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

It’s odd reading an article that was written eight years ago and finding almost every paragraph describing my views very closely, despite the fact that I’m not even technically a Gen-Xer, having been born in ‘81 (the article puts the cutoff date at ‘78, which is later than most would have it).

Still, a lot of this resonated with me quite clearly, but reading it with the Obama mindset that Andrew Sullivan had put me into with the link, I’m failing to see a lot of crossover here. These policies are all pretty well accepted by the majority of the candidates, at least on a high level. But then there’s this:

Xers may be poorly informed when it comes to public affairs, but they know enough to believe that our political system is badly in need of reform. At a very basic level they recognize that the political system is rigged against their interests. For one thing, Xers continually see a large gap between the issues they care most about and the ones that politicians choose to address.

That sounds distinctly Obama-esque. But it sounds even more like Edwards, who was my first choice. And that paragraph goes on to say:

Xers long for leaders who will talk straight and advocate the shared sacrifices necessary to correct the long-term problems that preoccupy them most.

And this article was published a month before McCain announced his presidential bid in 2000, which heavily emphasized straight talk and shared sacrifices, topics he still runs on today.

But then, the article also says:

A glimpse of the future may come, strangely enough, in the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota.

If that’s the yardstick we’re using, the outlook doesn’t look so great.

YouTube - Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video:

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Yes We Can.

The Choice:

In this respect the Obama campaign is uniquely circular: his political appeal is rooted in the fact that he’s so politically appealing. This means that when he loses, the loss affects him worse than it would other candidates, since it also cuts against his message. But when he wins, particularly when he wins big, as he did in Iowa and South Carolina, the win means more because it reinforces the basic argument of his campaign.

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

Until recently, I was torn between voting for Edwards (the get-the-lobbyists-out agenda speaks to me) and Obama. That choice was made for me when Edwards “suspended” his campaign, but if it hadn’t already been decided, this article might have pushed me over.

I especially like the circular reasoning in this quote, because it’s absolutely true; the reason Obama is a good primary candidate is that he has the potential to be a great general election candidate. It’s not just “electability” (truly, I’d be happy with any of the Democrats and maybe even McCain), but one of (dare I say it) change. Obama has the potential to plow into office with such force as to change the system, just like the Reagan Revolution did twenty-odd years ago: by bringing the country with him.

Now all they need is a catchy alliterative term for it. The Obama Overrun? The Barack Barrage?

(Via The Daily Dish.)

This makes the entire war seem like an endless loss by the south, where they were continually giving up territory. The Ken Burns documentary (which they borrowed the music from, smartly) shows the war as much more of a struggle, with the north continually losing battles and searching for a general to lead them to victory, while not speaking much of territory.

The focus here is on the map, so it’s natural that the loss of territory is obvious. The focus in the documentary is on the people, so it’s natural that the political situation is at the fore. But it’s interesting how, in two video presentations, the same war seems like such a different thing.