Steve Benen is mulling John McCain's recent emphasis on his biography and family background, saying McCain "seems to be the first candidate in recent memory to make family history highly relevant to his campaign." Benen points to Ed Kilgore, who "can't recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker's ... Family Heritage." Mostly, it's just the sort of speculative psychoanalysis that derives from cynicism about opponents.
But....really?
Just a couple weeks ago, Barack Obama gave this speech...
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Barack Obama and his supporters have spent more than a little time talking about Obama's heritage. As well they should. It's an interesting and powerful story.
Webb is so white he wrote a book about it; Saunders quickly realized Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America could become the rare campaign book voters might actually read, one that doesn't pull punches. In its opening pages, Webb lists the slurs by which his people are known: "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder." ... [Webb] considers poor white Southerners victims of the "monstrous mousetrap" they themselves built for African-Americans. "The Southern redneck" he writes, has become the "veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust . . . the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country-club whites had always held the key to the Big House . . . at the expense of disadvantaged blacks and whites alike.
During Webb's 2006 Senate campaign (disclosure: I worked against him for a couple months), The Washingtonian pointed out that Jim Webb "traces his aggressiveness to heritage, a theory spun at length in his quasi-autobiographical 2004 book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. “Born Fighting” is also his campaign slogan ... Webb traces his own warrior bloodline to the Revolutionary War, and during a recent campaign visit to southwest Virginia took time out to show his wife and her daughter the grave of his great-great-grandfather, whose Confederate headstone Webb obtained from the Veterans Administration."
For gods sake, Jim Webb even gave a speech "to honor" the Confederate soldiers for their "courage and loyalty", adding that "there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery." Can you even begin to imagine what would be said if a prominent Republican politician had done all that?
So, John McCain talks about his own background and military service. Big deal. Settle down. There aren't deeper meanings and ulterior motives behind everything a Republican says. Sometimes a campaign speech is just a campaign speech.
Following up on Jon's post below: it's nice that the Matts have super-sensitive antennae to John McCain's coded racial appeals (so coded, only .00001% of the population gets the subliminal message!). To return the favor, however, didn't Hillary Clinton make the most obvious racial appeal of the past 48 hours when she compared herself to Rocky Balboa? A white underdog challenging a flashy, well-spoken, African-American member of the overclass?
It would be entertaining to play this metaphor out to its logical conclusion, however. I think the following sequence of events would have to happen:
I) Obama narrowly defeats Clinton for the 2008 nomination, despite Clinton being perceived as the more deserving candidate;
II) Clinton narrowly defeats Obama for the 2012 nomination, despite suspending her campaign for a few months due to Bill Clinton's brief food coma;
III) Obama, now retired from politics, comes back as Hillary's campaign manager, teaches her to passably say, "Yes we can!" Hillary ultimately rejects this strategy, but still wins the presidency through the brilliant strategy of getting the GOP candidate to exhaust himself through negative campaigning;
IV) Clinton vanquishes Russia on behalf of the good old U.S. of A after Vladimir Putin brutally kills Obama in what was supposed to be a press conference.
First, Matt Stoller claimed that McCain's speech in Meridian, MS was a "racist dogwhistle" because a civil rights worker who had been murdered in a completely different Mississippi city had been born in Meridian. Never mind that Meridian is "not far from the naval air station where McCain once served as a naval flight instructor and McCain Field is named for his grandfather, a Navy admiral and native Mississippian."
Now, Matt Yglesias argues that McCain's emphasis on his biography is "the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people's potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way. McCain's putting together an identity politics counter-narrative steeped in nostalgia..."
(Sigh)
So that's it, then? Democrats - whether due to paranoia or calculation - are going to see racism under every rock, and they're going to exploit the hell out of it. This, as long as political points can be scored for it, will be our "conversation about race." That won't exactly help heal, ease or erase racial problems, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of such accusations.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the paranoia is just too deep and the temptation just too much to avoid that sort of thing. There is, of course, real racism in America and it deserves our swift public scorn...but "racist" is not a term to be thrown about lightly and without substantial evidence. Its overuse can only exacerbate real racial problems.
UPDATE: I've just discovered that Matt Stoller has acknowledged that he "was probably wrong on this incident, it doesn't look like a dogwhistle." I'm very glad to see it.
It's getting down to desperation crunch time in the Democratic primary, so the oppo researchers are unloading the good stuff press is really beginning to scrutinize the candidates more carefully. While the "oops" moments they've uncovered probably are not campaign-ending disasters, they seem like the kind of narrative slips that could be problematic for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. A parade of the recent troubles...
Hillary Clinton is running on her competence and determination to insure everybody. But she hasn't paid her staff's medical bills in a couple months.
Barack Obama is running as a new kind of candidate with a new kind of campaign. But his campaignis spreading good old-fashioned, er, misinformation. Oddly, they seem to think that hey, he amended the document and signed it himself, but that doesn't mean he actually read the thing is a good defense. [NOTE: yes, staffers do fill out questionnaires, and it is entirely plausible that Obama didn't read it the first time. It's even plausible that he didn't really read it thoroughly the second time, though one wonders why he filed an amended version if he or his policy people hadn't checked it closely enough to detect errors. But it's pretty implausible that a questionnaire was filled out and sent without ever being checked by the policy people who knew his positions well.]
Barack Obama is running as the sort of Uniter-Not-Divider politician who can bring us all together in rapturous harmony. But he keeps finding himself having to explain his choice in spiritual advisors and campaign committee members. The most recent story points out Obama's "connection to another racially divisive public figure—the stridently homophobic Rev. James T. Meeks", who was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the "10 leading black religious voices in the anti-gay movement". Incidentally, James Meeks was also behind the Halloween "hell house" which "housed a few denizens of "hell," including a pedophile trolling the Internet for a young victim, a meditating Buddhist, and two mincing young men wearing body glitter who were supposed to be homosexuals." Considering howtheProgressivesreacted to Obama'sassociation with Donnie McClurkin, I would imagine this won't make people happy.
Barack Obama is running on his unwillingness to take money from oil companies. But he's also been factcheck.org'd, since it turns out that no candidate has taken money from oil companies, and Obama has "accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses."
Hillary Clinton is running on her competence. But she has had to back down from her claims about experiencing sniper fire in Bosnia, claiming she was merely "sleep-deprived" and had "misspoke". ("Tired" is the politician's equivalent of the "flu" excuse that movie stars use when they need to spend a bit of time in rehab; it's transparently false, but they seem to think people buy it) But she had been "repeating this whopper for nearly three months" and the "Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff."
She must have been very tired.
Imagine what she might do if - to pick a potential Presidential situation entirely at random - there is a phone in the White House and it's ringing because something is happening in the world. It's 3:00 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. What do you suppose she might say if she was sleepy?
It's been a difficult week for both of them, but they have only themselves to blame. Well, themselves, their opponents research departments and a few well-fed reporters.
Politico's Kenneth Vogel writes about the Clinton campaign's slow and steady accumulation of unpaid bills. There's quite a bit of facinating detail about who she's not paying:
It’s not just the size of Clinton’s debts that’s noteworthy. It’s also that her unpaid bills extend beyond the realm of high-priced consultants who typically let bills slide as part of the cost of doing business with powerful clientele whose success is linked to their own.
Some of Clinton’s biggest debts are to pollster and chief strategist Mark Penn, who’s owed $2.5 million; direct mail company MSHC Partners, which is owed $807,000; phone-banking firm Spoken Hub, which is waiting for $771,000; and ad maker Mandy Grunwald, who’s owed $467,000....
She owed Iowa’s Sioux City Art Center Board of Trustees $3,500 for catering and venue costs, New Hampshire’s Winnacunnet Cooperative School District $4,400 in event costs, Qwest $24,000 for phone service, various branches of the Iowa-based supermarket chain Hy-Vee $15,000 for food, beverages and catering, and $7,700 to Ohio and Massachusetts branches of the theatrical stage employees’ union, for equipment costs.
In fact, about a third of the nearly 700 individual debts Clinton reported at the end of February were for various types of “event expenses,” including $319,000 for catering and venue costs, $420,000 for equipment, $11,000 for photography and $9,000 for security.
I'm trying to figure out if Hillary Clinton can somehow turn this to her advantage in the remaining primaries. I think one of three slogans would work:
1) "This just shows that no matter what the situation, I won't discriminate against the little guy"
2) "In solidarity with beleaguered homeowners, I have decided not to pay my creditors."
3) "As I told the Washington Post, I will continue to rack up unpaid debts until the Michigan and Florida delegations are seated."
Suggest your own mottos in the comments!
UPDATE: Vogel has a follow-up story: "the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out."
Obama? Really? The Economist's Free Exchange sums up the discomfort that my commenters, and indeed I myself, have with Obama:
As Mr Crook observes, Mr Obama is far from a centrist. His voting record suggests that, if elected, Mr Obama would be the most economically left-wing American president since ... well, it's hard to say. Richard Nixon? In any case, that the junior senator from Illinois is such a skilled negotiator and conciliator bodes rather ill for those who wish to see less rather than more government involvement in the economy, I conjecture.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama will not inspire venomous, high-spirited obstruction from the Republican congressional minority. On the contrary, an Obama victory will be cast as such a triumphant watershed moment (and quite reasonably so) that we should expect an especially drawn out and sunny honeymoon. Republicans will be anxious to take off the kid gloves, but will be much constrained by the prevailing spirit of celebration and hope, which may leave the charasmatic young president seeming untouchable, at least for a time. Add to this Mr Obama's much-touted skill for diplomatically forging consensus, and it seems we could end up with an American economic policy rather further to the left than seemed politically possible even a few month's ago.
How, then, can I support him? Allow me to channel my former Economist colleague, and now co-worker at The Atlantic, Clive Crook:
My perspective as a pro-market egalitarian condemns me to be perpetually disappointed by politicians. Mr Obama may prove no exception. Last week, in a speech at a General Motors plant in Wisconsin, he unveiled an economic plan. It mainly gathered previously announced ideas, spun to appeal to the “working Americans” in Mrs Clinton’s base. Indeed, the Clinton campaign accused him of plagiarism. Costed (conservatively) at more than $140bn a year, it includes comprehensive reform of healthcare, subsidies for alternative energy, investment in infrastructure and tax cuts aimed at the low paid. Unwinding some of the Bush tax cuts, together with unspecified increases in other taxes on companies and the higher-paid, would pay for it all, he said.
The goals are worthy. The US healthcare system is long overdue for reform. The country’s infrastructure has suffered years of increasingly apparent neglect. The Bush administration’s tax cuts worsened inequality at a time when economic forces were already pushing strongly in that direction.
But American corporate taxes are already high. Post-Bush, top marginal rates of tax on personal income are not low, when you take state and local taxes into account. Mr Obama’s proposal to restore top rates to the levels of the 1990s, and then lift the cap on social security taxes as well, constitutes a swingeing rise in the highest rates. Very high rates applied to a narrow base is bad tax policy. A more broadly based and (above all) far simpler tax system with a moderately progressive structure of rates is the way to combine increased revenues, a more equal distribution of post-tax incomes, and tolerably efficient incentives. No sign of this in Mr Obama’s proposals. It is also a great shame that Mr Obama, like Mrs Clinton, has adopted a populist stance on trade. He attacks her for having once supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he blames for “exporting jobs”.
Perhaps, for a Democrat, this position is a political necessity. It is a badge of economic ignorance, nonetheless.
Elsewhere, though, one sees flashes of an independent intelligence in Mr Obama’s economic pronouncements. He is no knee-jerk anti-capitalist: he lauds the “free market that has been the engine of America’s great progress”. He is cautious about mandates and other forms of dirigisme – which is why some party liberals still view him with suspicion.
Mr Obama is a paradox, as yet unresolved. His plan and his votes in the Senate show that he is a liberal, not a centrist. And he is no wavering or accidental liberal. His ideas are of a piece. He sees – or convinces people that he sees – a bigger picture. And yet this leftist visionary is pragmatic, non-ideological and accommodating of dissent. More than that, in fact, he seems keen to listen to and learn from those who disagree with him. What a strange and beguiling combination this is.
So how can I support the man? Well, I wouldn't, if there were better alternatives. But my choices are Hillary Clinton and John McCain, whose goals may be slightly more moderate, but whose instincts are for regulating the hell out of any market outcome they don't like. McCain is not a classical liberal; he's the product of an intensely hierarchical honor culture that he seems to think would substantially improve the rest of us if we adopted more of its values. I have no shortage of respect for the military, and their willingness to place their own lives between the rest of us and war's desolation. But that doesn't mean I think America would be a better place if we had a more martial state. His record bespeaks little respect for spontaneous order and individual freedom. What free-market instincts he evinces seem to have come as part of the conservative ideas combo-pack he bought because it was cheaper than buying the parts individually--all he really wanted was the national greatness and the moderately conservative social structure.
As libertarians go, I'm not a tax nut; I think deadweight loss is relatively low, and taxation is among the least intrusive actions the state can take. I'm far more concerned about regulation. The economic cost tends to be higher; it lacks the natural limits imposed by citizen resistance; and it doesn't so extensively accustom the citizenry to taking orders from the state.
I have the terrible feeling that for both Hillary and McCain, that last is a feature of regulation, not a bug.
Faced with that, I'm betting on the advisors. Obama's economic advisors are some of the smartest economists working in the field today, and they're people I deeply respect. I rest on the hope that they say something about the man who would choose them.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she could still pull out a victory with victories in the biggest primaries still to come, including Ohio and Texas next month. But Mr. Obama’s clear lead in delegates allocated by the votes in nominating contests is one of a number of challenges facing her after a string of defeats in which Mr. Obama not only ran up big popular vote margins but also made inroads among the types of voters she had most been counting on, including women and lower-income people.
Should the cracks in her support among those groups show up in Ohio and Texas as well, it could undermine her hopes that those states will halt Mr. Obama’s momentum and allow her to claim dominance in many of the biggest primary battlegrounds.
With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules.
I find it hard to believe that Clinton really entertains the notion that she can win by seating those delegates. One might be able to offer an argument for Florida, even though it would cause some party unrest. But if she manages to get delegates counted from a state where Obama wasn't even on the ballot, Obama's supporters will believe, rightly, that she stole the nomination. Even as she energizes the Republican turnout machine, this move will, at the very least, suppress turnout on the Democratic side.
He is concerned with a deep problem. Those of us who are "minarchists," meaning that we favor government that is limited to adjudicating conflict, have no reliable mechanism for restraining government.
His point is that government can use its rule-making power to remake any rules that were used to create it. Certainly, we have seen this in the United States, where I would say that the original Constitution lies in shreds.
He concludes that only irrational standards or taboos can constrain the power of government. I tend to agree. If there is no taboo against government interference with activity X, then as long as it is in the interests of the governing coalition to interfere with activity X, that will happen.
This really seems like a special case of a larger problem that anyone who favors any restraint of government has to deal with. I've heard basically this argument advanced in favor of anarcho-capitalism, but of course one of the biggest problems with any anarchism is that unless you can secure unanimity (in which case you had better not imagine a polity where n>1), some form of coercion seems to be required in order to prevent people from forming governments. Even with strong taboos, has there ever been a society that actually succeeded in controlling the size and shape of its government in the way that libertarians imagine?
No he will not transform politics. He won't abolish our problems. He won't eliminate our enemies. He won't disappear partisanship. That's not the point. He's a decent, reasonable human being prepared to tackle these problems outside the depressing template of Morris-Rove politics. One way he can begin to do that is to bring a wave of support with him, to appeal beyond Washington to Americans who know this country is in a terrible mess and want to fix it. That's what Reagan did. He wasn't perfect. But we still remember the difference.
Look, I support the guy. He's the only major presidential candidate in the field that I'd even consider voting for, and that's been true since the inception of the race. That wasn't a criticism of Obama as much of a criticism of a political system that relies at least as much on completely empty promises as on actual likely policy prescriptions to choose its leaders--which is to say, all of them. The American system is not special in this regard. Nor is Obama. Everyone is going around promising that the transformative action of their posterior upon that big chair in the Oval Office will in some way bring about a New America. I wish they wouldn't. I pick on Obama precisely because as of now, he's my guy, so I'd like to hear something less fantastical.
Apparently, someone leaked an Obama political questionnaire from 1996 to the Politico:
The questionnaire, which was provided to Politico with assistance from political sources opposed to Obama’s presidential campaign, raises questions of whether Obama can be painted as too liberal and whether he is insufficiently consistent.
A week after Politico provided the questionnaire to the Obama campaign for comment, an aide called Monday night to say that Obama had said he did not fill out the form, and provided a contact for his campaign manager at the time, who said she filled it out. It includes first-person comments such as: “I have not previously been a candidate.”
The campaign said his views have been consistent, and points out that his positions have always been more nuanced than can be conveyed in yes-or-no answers.
According to The Politico, these "liberal views could haunt Obama." Yes, particularly if major media outlets bring them up as documents worth taking seriously, rather than dismissing them as a pandering document published in the year of the Macarena. Say what you will about Obama, but with two books to his name and a speaking style that trends towards the endless, the guy hasn't given us an insufficient quantity of contemporary guidance as to his opinions, judgments, and qualms about public policy issues. It's true that, if the media wants to haunt him with old documents simplifying policy positions from a decade ago, they can. But don't use the passive voice. Let's not pretend someone wearing a sheet is a real live ghost.
The "too liberal" views in the questionnaire are support for a gun ban, support for a universal health care system, and opposition to the death penalty. For my part, I'd always assumed that these were Obama's views on the subject. Now I am pondering: are there really people out there who believe that a candidate's policy papers are what they would actually hammer out if they weren't running for office, and had simply been given the task of designing the system they thought would be best for the country?
I'm not even sure how much it matters what a candidate's real views are. Barak Obama probably believes, in his heart of hearts, that the death penalty should be abolished, and I agree with him. But the president doesn't really have any authority over the death penalty, and even if he did, strong public support for executions would almost certainly keep him from doing anything about it. Likewise, while I'm sure he wants to ban guns, Democrats have learned their lesson from Al Gore too well to consider doing much about it.
Health care is a different story, and there his views worry me--but they worried me before I knew he'd advocated a single-payer system back in 1996. His current healthcare plan is a pretty clear signal of the direction he wants to take the country's medical system in. Because whatever his true beliefs, if he campaigns on his current health care plan, and wins on his current health care plan, he's probably going to try to stick pretty close to his current health care plan. In politics, above all else, you go with what brung you to the dance.
Mostly, the reaction to this seems pretty tribal: we're not judging what he'll do, but "is he like me?" To be sure, that might be useful in assessing what he's like to do about all the policy problems we don't even know about yet--but not that useful, because who would have predicted Clintonian welfare reform or Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit? Anyway, I really can't spend a lot of time wondering whether politicians share, deep down, my core values. The number of politicians who agree with me on any major policy question can be counted on the toes of one hand.
A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from mega-millionaire hedge fund managers.
The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: “The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed.”
Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new “party of the rich”. More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers – single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 – and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.
Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.
Says Mr Farrell:
If it is true that Democrats tend to represent richer districts, both basic logic and an elementary grasp of statistics should tell you that this does not imply that they represent richer voters. Indeed, not only does it not imply this, we know that it isn’t true.
I think this might be a tad out of date; as pointed out in his comments, Pew research seems to show Democrats slightly outpolling Republicans at the very top of the income scale. But the bigger problem is that this confuses the voting base with the constituency. Democrats indisputably represent more rich voters than Republicans; their constituency is the people in their district, not the people in their district who voted for them.
Moreover, politically, this matters a great deal. The guy from Heritage is actually making a good point: the constituency of the Democrats will force many of them to support the interests of the rich, even where they might ideologically prefer to oppose, because doing so is good for their district. Voters, especially poor voters, are highly influenced by local economic conditions. It is thus in Chuck Schumer's strong political interest to keep the financial services industry happy, whether or not they vote for him. Ditto Nancy Pelosi and Silicon Valley. Thus the current quandary on carried hedge fund interest.
The Democratic leadership seems to be increasingly drawn from its most affluent districts, because those districts are where the money is. This means that the Democratic Party as a whole will increasingly serve the interests of the affluent, even if the rich people in those particular districts don't vote for those politicians. Personally, as I said on Bloggingheads, I don't think this is that big a problem; rich voters are few enough that the service is likely to take the form of small but annoying items like the carried interest tax. But I can see why it worries Paul Krugman.
I'm really not sure I can stand a full year of squealing paeans to the fact that she's a woman. I'm kind of repulsed by the notion that I should support her policies just because their author comes with a set of ovaries attached. I will be glad, naturally, if she wins, to see that America has come far enough in the battle against sexism to elect a woman. But that's not a reason that I should vote for her. I will be even gladder, after all, when the fact that Hilary Clinton has two X chromosomes is seen as unremarkable enough to pass without comment.
This is a really interesting post on the ways that population shift has made our government structures obsolete:
The ratio of small-state to large-state populations has increased. In 1790, Virginia had 12.5 times the population of Delaware. Today, California has 70 times the population of Wyoming. In 1790, Senators representing 14.7% of the population could sustain a filibuster under today's rules; today, that figure is 9.9%. I'm fine with the somewhat countermajoritarian nature of the Senate, but it's clear that things have gotten a little bit out of hand.
. . .
Travel is much faster, but the country is much larger. As recently as the 1960s, DC airports didn't have direct flights to much of the country. The common practice of Congress was to stay in the District for seven months, then stay in their home state or district and meet with constituents for five months. Today, most members fly home every weekend, even during session. This puts tremendous strain on Western members, who must endure six hour flights while their colleagues in New York can catch an hourly shuttle that gets them home in 45 minutes. At this point, it seems fair to consider moving the capitol, or at least having an auxiliary capitol that might be used every other year. The population center of the US is currently in central Missouri and continues to march West, so either moving the capitol to Kansas City, or putting a secondary capitol in Denver should do the trick.
Somewhat separately, there is now tremendous pressure to be in one's home district all the time. When combined with the crush of fundraising, this limits the time that members have to collaborate with one another. We ought to make Constitutional provisions to ensure that members have the time and space to meet, rather than rely on staff at all times.
The population has grown-a lot. The House has not kept up. The constitution mandates a state can have no more than one member of the House for each 30,000 residents. In the initial apportionment of the House, Pennsylvania received one for each 55,000 residents. Today each member represents about 700,000 residents. With a district sized to 1790 standards, a candidate could canvass the entire population in one Friedman Unit, meaning that every member would theoretically be vulnerable to a low-cost challenger. In addition, the effectiveness of TV advertising would drop to zero in most urban areas. Though, a figure that low would have other problems. California alone would have 650 members; Wyoming would have 9; the House as a whole would have 5454 members, which is clearly unworkable. In general, European countries have around one member per 100,000 residents; Japan, one per 265,000 residents; Russia, one per 320,000 residents. We ought to think about whether it's possible to have a much larger House with smaller congressional districts, with the hope that members will be more responsive to a smaller population and unable to win elections merely by blanketing the airwaves.
The problem is, of course, that the forces mitigating against any of these sorts of changes seem fairly well entrenched. So I'm not sure what good it does to talk about.
It is, however, a very good argument for federalism--devolving power down to the level of the states wherever possible. That makes legislators much more directly responsive to their constituents. Unfortunately, few people seem to really like that idea, since it means that a lot of the time, legislators in places other than the one in which you live will respond to the demands of their constituents in ways of which you disapprove.
How conservative is the Supreme Court? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?
Cass Sunstein is complaining that liberalism isn't what it used to be:
The Myth of Balance Between Left and Right holds that the Court has a "liberal wing," consisting of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, and a "conservative wing," consisting of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Justice Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote, the "moderate."
It should be clear, right off the bat, that something is fishy about this picture. Cautious on the lower courts, Ginsburg and Breyer were prescreened by and fully acceptable to Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both their votes and their opinions have been far more moderate than those of the great liberal visionaries of the Court's past, such as William O. Douglas and William Brennan. Souter is a Republican appointee. His approach to constitutional law is in the general mold of Justice John Harlan, the great conservative dissenter on the Warren Court. Stevens, also a Republican appointee, was a maverick on the Burger Court, far to the right of three of its members. Contrary to what you hear, Stevens hasn't much changed in the last decades.
Here's a simple way to expose the Myth of Balance. In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.
First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.
Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.
Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart. (The parallel between White-Stevens-Powell and Breyer-Stevens-Souter is very close; true, Ginsburg is somewhat to the left of Stewart in many domains, but their voting patterns and general approaches are pretty close.)
Finally we would have to assume that Roberts would vote more or less like Rehnquist (which is to say, definitely to the left of Scalia and Thomas) and that Alito would vote more or less like Burger (definitely to the left of Rehnquist).
To say the least, all this would represent a radical change in the Court's composition -- so radical that liberals cannot even fantasize about it. But this radically changed Court would be essentially identical to the supposedly conservative Court of 1980!
I remember 1980. You young people may not realize it, but back then, we didn't have these crazy touch-tone telephones you like to use to fax all your friends. We had rotary dials, with little holes for each number that you had to stick your fingers into and drag them all the way over to the right, where a touch bar known as the finger stop would register each digit. And if you wanted to call all of your friends, perhaps to invite them over for some fondue, by the end of making all those phone calls, your index finger stung from hitting the finger stop so many times, let me tell you.
Seriously: why on earth would the definition of a "conservative" court in 1980 be some sort of lodestar by which all future courts should be judged. By the standards of 1880, the current court would be a bunch of wild-eyed socialist libertine radicals bent on undermining everything that made America great. Does that entitle me to re-nominate Oliver Wendell Holmes, or his modern day equivalent?
Cass Sunstein (who graduated from law school in 1978) seems to be under the delusion that the conditions of his youth are the golden mean by which all future events are to be judged and found wanting. I mean, we all feel the same way, but most of us don't expect anyone younger to take us seriously when we drone on about how much better The Pogues were than any of this modern noise.
It seems stupid to have to point this out, but on a number of issues the public has moved rather rightward over the past generation. Naturally, the court has moved rightward too. It is not demonstrably out of step with the public on "liberal" questions like homosexuality, abortion, affirmative action, various sorts of environmental and business regulation, civil rights, campaign finance, separation of church and state, and so forth. If anything, the court is still to the left of the public on these matters.
The court is to the right of the average law professor, not to mention the average Cass Sunstein. But that's because the average law professor is to the left of the average American, and any reasonably democratic system is going to produce a Supreme Court whose mean opinion hews more closely to that of the voters than to that of any larger group from which the appointees are drawn.
James Joyner warns of the dangers of particularism:
Schaller's mindset -- and the Republican counterpart that seeks to build 50 percent plus one through a divide and conquer strategy -- is incredibly dangerous however. In its extreme, it's a recipe for another civil war.
To be sure, the nation was founded on the realization that a large country would have diverging interests, whether regional or economic or class based. We've generally managed to work as a polity, however, by having numerous overlapping interests that caused the coalitions necessary to get anything done in the legislature to constantly shift. We have, in other words, what political scientists term "cross-cutting cleavages," which are contrasted with the very dangerous "reinforcing cleavages."
One of the clichés of developing world politics is that "the election is a census, and the census is an election." We don't want that to happen here. When it does, those who lose elections see it not, as a temporary ideological setback but as a threat to their culture (or, in extreme, their life). Those who lose elections are given powerful incentives to cry "foul," calling the legitimacy of the system into question. Absent that, they're willing to take up arms to protect their interests.
We've got a lot of institutional safeguards in place to make extreme outcomes unlikely here. Many of those, however, were in existence in 1860, too.
It strikes to me that this vice is on the rise right now for several reasons:
Increasing geographic assortation--liberals are moving to be with liberals, while conservatives move to be closer to conservatives.
Increasing communication--we know more about what is going on in different geographical areas. As the divides get sharper, the magnitude of the differences comes to seem unbearable.
Increasing federalisation of law--Those weirdos elsewhere are making more decisions for you--or you feel compelled to make decisions for them. The hard-core pro-choicers concentrated on the coasts give relatively little thought to the state of abortion law in Ireland, but are outraged by the thought that women in Alabama might live under different abortion regulations than they do.
Judging what history will think of a president is, in the popular vernacular of yesteryear, a mug's game. Harry Truman declined to run again with a pre-election approval rating of just 23%, but we regard him pretty well, thanks mostly to desegregating the military. On the other hand, Warren Harding was well thought of throughout his administration; the scandals only came to light after his death in the third year of his term.
That said, this strikes me as pretty unlikely. I'd be a prepared to take a little action at Longbets if Karl Rove is ready to put his money where his mouth is.
Most of my libertarian friends seem to love Ron Paul. Their descriptions of his presidential campaign have a wistful "If only . . . " quality to them that I haven't seen in a political discussion since the write-in campaign by the girl's field-hockey team to elect Christian Slater president of the student council.
After my much-regretted decision to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, I've kind of been sitting on the political sidelines. I'm pretty sure I'll hate whoever gets elected. Rudy might be funny just to see the ACLU get all misty and nostalgic about the current administration, but that probably won't make up for having to wear uniforms and go to bed at 10 o'clock every night. John McCain lost me at the execrable McCain-Feingold finance reform, and has not exactly covered himself in glory since. I'm not even sure what one calls his peculiar politics: popuwafflism? Mitt Romney's specialty seems to be a blandness so total that I have difficulty recalling what he looks like, broken by inexplicably revealing stories about, for example, his penchant for strapping dogs to the roofs of cars.
Vote Democrat, you say, then. John Edwards teeth sure are pretty, but his economic polices sure aren't. Hilary Clinton . . . even if I were disposed to vote for her vintage 1967 earnest technocratic policies, I'd be more than a mite uncomfortable with a political lineup that went Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. Which means I'm probably going to end up voting for Obama just because I like his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee . . . and then regretting it as soon as he actually starts doing things.
But I digress. The point being that, having pretty much opted out of paying attention to politics, I've just kind of assumed that I would like Ron Paul to be president, if only the thing weren't totally impossible.
But then every time I hear about his actual policies, I'm pretty thoroughly appalled. He voted against CAFTA and wants us to withdraw from the WTO. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he's also hardline on immigration. He favors the stupid Cuba travel ban even though the Communist Menace evaporated almost two decades ago. And last week, sitting with one of his supporters at a wedding, I found out that he wants to move America back onto the gold standard. I cannot, in good conscience, even entertain the hope of electing a man who wants to outsource our monetary policy to Anglo-American.
Megan at From the Archives makes an interesting point about the warring incentives of legislators and bureaucrats:
This doesn’t surprise me either, that the work was done in a state agency, then lingered for years. The work of the state is huge and sprawling and only barely managed. People at the top, the political appointees and the legislators, give instructions and change them with the new exciting trend. Mid-level civil servants finish their reports (perhaps even a nice thorough job) and the person who commissioned the work is long gone for another job. Or the legislator is swamped with exciting new problems. Flood! Climate change! Relentless plodding is the mark of low and mid level bureaucracies, but long-term follow through fails at the top. That is because of news driven governance in some part, and you fickle voters in other part. Really though, it always goes back to a constituency. If you cared about prison health care, those reports and audits would get implemented.
The politicians, like the public they serve, have the attention span of a gnat. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, are built to work in geologic time. Neither has any control over the other to force them onto their time frame. From my limited experience as a government contractor, this seems to result in less getting done than would if one party managed to force the other into its time frame; we spent a fair amount of time trying to sort through the competing demands of the "This is how it's done" bureaucracy and the "Everything's changing! News at 11!" fly-by reformers. Result: paralysis.
Matt offers a slightly new view of the Republican "southern strategy":
It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.
And for a long time the strategy worked. Democratic politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt loyally upheld white supremacy. The dam began to crack with Harry Truman, and then under Lyndon Johnson the national party decisively broke with this corrupt bargain. With that done, white southerners just took their conservative views on taxes and national security into the Republican Party where such views belonged. Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.
I think Matt is obviously right that the South is not just conservative because they hate blacks . . . although it would be interesting to see how much the experience of Reconstruction altered Southern views of government.
The "Southern strategy" should imply not merely that Republicans started campaigning in the south (that would be logical if they thought they should win there . . . and would Paul Krugman really spurn white racist voters who supported, say, the Democrats on single payer?) It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?
Speaking of Crazy Uncle Rudy, I wanted to link to Jim Henley's take on his Foriegn Affairs essay. I know, I know, you've already read it. But it's so hilarious, I can't resist:
Rudy Giuliani hired a ghostwriter to produce the requisite manifesto, “Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned,” for Foreign Affairs magazine. It’s full of lies, oversimplifications and vagueness, but makes up for all that by being very, very tedious. Because the genre requires him to name-check every part of the world - perhaps to assure the alleged author that it exists, perhaps to reassure the FA reader that the alleged author has heard of the world - you get whole sections of “I see India out there tonight. Keep rocking, India! And lemme give a shoutout to my peeps in Germany!” Those passages read like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on “The State of the World Today.”
The rest of it reads like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on “The State of the World Today” after being maddened by bees.
Though it does take a certain amount of . . . shall we say, brio, to hitch your wagon to the neocon star just as it goes supernova.
Lets say Rudy did just make a bad choice, no ulterior motives. Isn't that bad enough? Don't we want a president that makes good choices when he has to make a decision on these types of things?
Who were the other guys that recommended to him that they put the command center away from the big terrorist target? Wouldn't they make a better president.
I am not defending Rudy, the presidential candidate. Almost no one who has lived in New York wants Rudy anywhere near the nuclear football, nor would we like to see his strongly authoritarian instincts (however much they arguably may have done for New York's policing) unleashed on the federal justice system. Rudy is craaaaaaaaazy, albeit not in a way that made him a particularly bad mayor. And the decision to locate the command center where he did was stupid. I'm just not sure it was as stupid as it now seems, and I am skeptical of the claim that he put it there to keep as a love nest. Rudy was perfectly capable of getting crazy, stupid ideas, and then forcing them on everyone else, when there was absolutely no sex involved.
I wonder how many massive press conferences are held to announce the arrest/conviction/sentencing in the average murder case in Anacostia. I wonder under what rationale it is more appropriate to dedicate wall to wall coverage of a prostitution ring (where at worst, the only "victims" are just a couple of very offended wives) than it is to dedicate any coverage whatsoever to a drive-by shooting that leaves someone dead.
Is it worth spending over $500 on a Tivo? I'm sorry to report that it is. The Series Three has all the functionality that made its older products the best DVRs around: an intuitive user interface, transparent menus, simple and fast recording. Now it's added HD capability and two cable cards so you can record and watch at the same time (or record two shows). With the cable cards, the most annoying feature about older Tivos--the latency switching channels--has disappeared. They've also added new features that prove surprisingly useful, such as the ability to download movies on a whim from Amazon's Unbox service. I'd give up my dishwasher before I'd part with this.
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