Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
--The Editors
I see via the blog Ragout that the New York Times obituary for Reagan incorrectly credits his tenure with the "longest economic expansion in history." According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it was the third-longest since they began measuring, with the Clinton expansion first and the 1960s boom second. I really doubt this was intentional deception. More likely it was sloppy reporting. But the Times is the paper of record. They should issue a correction.
Here's Atrios on Reagan's approval record, which, averaged out through his presidency, is lower than you might imagine. (Though he did leave office with the highest approval rating of any president leaving office.)
Jonathan Chait has an article here on Reagan's record, which, as I pointed out on Monday, is not quite what his acolytes and deifiers will tell you (to Reagan's detriment, in my opinion -- much of what they edit out are examples of true statesmanship and responsibility taking).
More examples as I come across them.
UPDATE: Here's a piece by David Greenberg in Slate which takes on all the Reagan myths, conservative and liberal alike (mostly conservatives', though).
--Nick Confessore
Kos is a bit wrong, though, to write "That the fiercely anti-abortion Hatch signed that letter [calling for a relaxation of restrictions] is telling." The key thing about Hatch isn't that he's pro-life, it's that he's a pro-life Mormon. All five Senate Mormons share Hatch's views -- against abortion rights, in favor of stem-cell research -- for reasons that are related to the intricacies of Mormon theology. Drew Clark explained the nuances here during the first stem-cell debate three years ago.
--Matthew Yglesias
The trouble with this, as with all of the president's other reversals on Iraq policy, is that by waiting so long he's eliminated most of the advantages that could have been gained. By going to the UN for a pre-war resolution only after the administration had made it clear that they wanted to invade come what may, they only ensured that their diplomatic task would be essentially impossible. By only crawling back for the postwar resolution after unilateralism had definitively failed, they've squandered the opportunity to obtain significant support from a wider coalition. Dumping Ahmad Chalabi months (if not years) too late, doesn't get us back the legitimacy we lost during the effort to install him as the leader of Iraq. Bringing more troops into the country after months of anarchy and insecurity, again, has done us far less good than getting it right in the first place would have. Etc., etc., etc.
This is all by way of saying that while there's much truth to the conventional wisdom that Bush's and Kerry's Iraq policies aren't all that different, the missing piece of the equation is the question of judgment. Time and again liberals have pointed to problems on the horizon in Iraq and suggested solutions. Time and again Bush has ignored us, only to see the problems arise and then, eventually, adopt the solution after it's too late. It's not, to put it mildly, a record that inspires confidence in this group's ability to handle the national security contingencies of the future.
--Matthew Yglesias
Meanwhile, it looks like I was not wrong to worry that the GOP's apparent belief that Native American voters don't count would have an effect on the election. South Dakota's Rapid City Journal reports that some people living on reservations may have been turned away from the polls in last week's House special election. More on this as it develops.
--Nick Confessore
Critics familiar with the August 2002 memo and another, similar legal opinion given by the Defense Department's office of general counsel in March 2003 assert that government lawyers were trying to find a legal justification for actions -- torture or cruel and inhumane acts -- that are clearly illegal under U.S. and international law.This argument is absurd on its face. Not only is there no general principle that the laws don't apply during wartime, but obviously if any laws are to apply whatsoever it's going to be the laws -- like the Geneva Convention -- whose sole purpose is to govern conduct during war. Nor, might I add, does the president have the authority to unilaterally alter the laws of the United States by having his underlings write memos. If Bush doesn't like the fact that torture is illegal, he needs to submit something to Congress for debate."This is painful, incorrect analysis," said Scott Norton, chairman of the international law committee of the New York City Bar Association, which has produced an extensive report on Pentagon detentions and interrogations. "A lawyer is permitted to craft all sorts of wily arguments about why a statute doesn't apply" to a defendant, he said. "But a lawyer cannot advocate committing a criminal act prospectively."
The August 2002 memo from the Justice Department concluded that laws outlawing torture do not bind Bush because of his constitutional authority to conduct a military campaign. "As Commander in Chief, the President has the constitutional authority to order interrogations of enemy combatants to gain intelligence information concerning the military plans of the enemy," said the memo, obtained by The Washington Post.
But is that really what the memos said? John Aschroft says no, "This administration rejects torture." But Ashcroft won't prove it by taking a simple step like releasing the memo to Congress so they can decide for themselves. Releasing secret information, apparently, is only supposed to be done when it can wound political opponents (Jamie Gorelick, Joe Wilson, Dick Clarke, etc.) not in order to allow Congress to perform its constitutional responsibilities:
"You are not allowed under the Constitution to not answer our questions," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. "You all better come up with a good rationale because otherwise it's contempt of Congress."So we see illegal behavior piled on illegal behavior in a manner consistent with the administration's general principle that there should be no oversight whatsoever of anything the president and his appointees want to do. Fortunately, The Wall Street Journal has placed online most of the Defense Department's memo where you can learn about how much physical harm (i.e., no permament organ damage) you can get away with inflicting in the course of your torturing.Asked by Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. R-Utah, whether the memos were classified, Ashcroft conferred for a long moment with an aide sitting behind him.
"Some of these memos may be classified in some ways for some purposes," he began.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., interrupted him.
"Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect that is a complete evasion," Durbin said. Durbin said the president either had to invoke executive privilege or Ashcroft had to cite a statutory provision allowing him to withhold the memos.
Ashcroft steadfastly refused to do either Tuesday.
"I am refusing to disclose these memos because I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from his attorney general that is confidential," he said.
--Matthew Yglesias
Also on The Daily Prospect:
- The Permanent Raw Deal: We know liberals face trouble if Kerry loses. But here's the tough choice they face if Kerry wins. By Mark Schmitt.
- Disconnected: Think Judy Miller went batty on the WMD? Well, check out author Stephen Hayes and his neocon pals on the fabled Saddam-al Qaeda connection. By Matthew Yglesias.
Clinton did do a few bold or semi-bold things. He signed Welfare reform in defiance of his base (and, hence, solidifying Reagan's legacy further). He championed NAFTA (again: solidifying Reagan's legacy further). He fought an air war in Yugoslavia (I'm not sure what that says of Reagan's legacy). But with these and one or two pther possible exceptions, Bill Clinton was concerned with maintaining the affection of the public more than he was concerned with doing anything particularly special. I'd be delighted to argue that further, but my sense is this is one of these controversial things you can say about Bill Clinton and his "philosophy" of triangulation which kept his poll numbers high while losing the House, Senate and scads of state governorships and legislatures.I'm skeptical. I think Clinton and Reagan actually had pretty similar records with regard to combining a clear sense of where they wanted to take the country along with a pragmatic desire to stay popular. Both pushed some dramatic changes to the tax code through the Congress early in their terms. Both followed that up with efforts to seriously alter the nature of the American welfare state -- Social Security cuts for Reagan, universal health care for Clinton. Both had their proposals die in the Congress, both saw their parties lose ground in the midterms as a result, and both spent the ends of their administrations wrangling with a hostile Congress.Nothing could be more different than the example of Ronald Reagan, who left the GOP much stronger than when he found it. Reagan was popular precisely because he had the brass to buck the conventional wisdom, endure the scorn of the intellectual class and the media.
I think the real reason Reagan's gone down in history as a popular leader, despite his middling approval ratings, is that he followed a very long string -- Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson -- of presidents who were distinctly unloved by the time they left office. Clinton came on the heels of Reagan's two terms, and immediately followed George H.W. Bush who, for a little while after the Gulf War was the most popular president ever. Reagan's popularity, in other words, stood out as unusual, whereas by Clinton's time it seemed fairly normal.
The other difference is that liberals are a bit more realistic in their assessment of what Clinton did. People who didn't like NAFTA or welfare reform don't go around denying that those things happened. Reagan's many tax hikes and other compromises seem to have been airbrushed out of the right's accounts of what happened. And pretty recently, too. Coincidentally, soon before Reagan died I'd finished reading David Frum's jaundiced look at Reaganism in Dead Right so I was interested to see if he would have anything unconventional to say today. The answer seems to be no.
--Matthew Yglesias
Visit Moving Ideas to find out more about the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. Bonus: Taking online action will earn you a free ice cream cone.
--Editors of MovingIdeas.Org
This marriage of power and values is the essence of the foreign-policy vision espoused by leading Democratic thinkers. Out of political caution Kerry's campaign advisors still tend to seek the safety of a Scowcroftian middle ground, but the foreign-policy advisers who would serve President Kerry have a quite different vision -- much more ambitious and expansive than anything pursued by the first Bush Administration.This disjoint between the candidate and his advisors is a bit puzzling, especially because it's not obvious to me that either approach brings any significant political benefits. As Marshall says, however, one place where Kerry and his advisors are certainly on the same page is Afghanistan, where the Bush administration has shamefully failed to follow through on the military victory by building anything that resembles either stability or democracy.
There's a fairly new report out from the GAO on the subject that, while long, is quite informative. The headline tells us that "Deteriorating Security and Limited Resources Have Impeded Progress; Improvements in U.S. Strategy Needed." I've long since given up on the notion that the Bush administration has any interest in whether or not their current strategy is working, but it's still worth keeping one's eyes on the situation, since we might get a new president one of these months. At any rate, the way you can tell the president isn't really serious about democracy in Iraq is to listen to how often he describes Afghanistan as a nation-building success story.
--Matthew Yglesias
But the Kurdish region's two military organizations, whose fighters traditionally are called pesh merga, have a different arrangement, reflecting the semi-independence that Kurdish-populated northern Iraq has enjoyed for more than a decade. About half are expected to join the national army or police forces, U.S. officials said. Thousands of others, they explained, will be incorporated into three specialized military units -- mountain troops, counterterrorist forces and quick-reaction battalions -- under the command of the Kurdish regional government that controls northern Iraq.This isn't really a militia demobilization at all. It's more like an official acknowledgment that the pesh merga won't be demobilized, and the central government had better simply accommodate itself to that fact. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army simply remains outside the agreement. Unfortunately, the article doesn't discuss a couple of other important detail. For example, will the Badr Brigades need to break up their command structure before its personnel is incorporated into the security services, or will militia units simply be deputized wholesale? And what's going to happen to the Sunni forces to whom we've essentially surrendered control of Falluja?
Until we know the answers to those questions, we can't really tell what's going on here. The situation they're setting up in Kurdistan could be the first step toward a stable "assymetrical federalism" or it could be the first step toward national dissolution. Until we know more, there's just no way to say which it is.
--Matthew Yglesias
[T]here is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career. Energetic conservatives have organized a drive to glorify the former president by trying to do everything from affixing his name to public buildings in each of the nation's 3,066 counties to substituting his face for Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill. A similar dynamic applies here. Many of these hagiographies are written by noted conservative authors (Buckley, Noonan, D'Souza) or former Reagan staffers (Wallison, Martin Anderson, Michael Deaver), under the auspices of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (Wallison), the Hoover Institution (Anderson and Schweizer), and the Heritage Foundation (Stephen F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the first of two volumes).It's possible to take this line of thinking way too far, and there will be a tendency, in the years ahead, to remember Reagan's conservatism more fondly merely because the conservatism of the George W. Bush era seems so much more extreme by comparison. But I think Green gets it just about right (so to speak).One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages. But they also do something else. Most of his conservative biographers espouse a Manichaean worldview in which Reagan's constancy in the face of liberal evils is the key to his greatness. But to sustain such an argument requires more than simply touting (and often exaggerating) his achievements, considerable though some of them were. The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been.
Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")
A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.
Though there are many reasons for the hagiography of Reagan, I think Jonathan Chait explained some of the most significant ones in this article from a few years ago, which appraises Reagan's place in conservative political culture. Subtitled, "Why the GOP still can't get over Reagan," Chait's piece seems eerily prescient now:
The Reagan presidency lives on in conservative mythology as a bygone utopia peopled by titans against whom the mortals of today must be measured. As conservative writer David Frum observed in his 1994 lament, Dead Right, "Post-Bush conservatives look back on the accomplishments of the early Reagan years the way seventh-century Romans must have looked at their aqueducts: to think that we once built all this!" When conservatives debate the Reagan legacy, it is not to dispute its merits but to lay competing claims to its mantle. Witness this year's intraconservative debate over expanding trade with China. Proponents of permanent normal trading relations pointed to Reagan's support for free trade; opponents invoked his anti-communism. Had someone dug up a forgotten diary entry laying out Reagan's position for such a future contingency, it might have settled the argument then and there. The premise underlying such debates was explicated by Reagan hagiographer Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote that "the right simply needs to approach public policy questions by asking: What would Reagan have done?"The ossification in question has been evidence throughout Bush's presidency, especially on such core ideological issues as tax cuts, which Bush pursued independently of -- indeed, in spite of -- any need for them. But as Chait cautioned:And therein lies the problem. Once it is agreed that all wisdom resides in the canon of Reagan, then the hard work of debate and self-examination and incorporating new facts is no longer necessary. On economics, defense, and morality, the Republican Party has refused to adapt itself to a patently changed political landscape for fear of acknowledging that the old ideas--the Reagan ideas--no longer work. And those who have tried to adapt have been cast out as heretics--anti-Reagan and therefore anti-conservative or even anti-Republican. When Ronald Reagan was actually president, Republicans prided themselves on being "the party of ideas." Now, as their hero fades into the twilight, his memory sits at the heart of a deep intellectual ossification.
The mortals of the present can never live up to the icons of the past. In George W., the Reaganites appear to have everything they have always wanted: a popular conservative poised to end the political exile into which his father thrust them. But at some point W.'s ideology will smack up against the hard reality of today's very different world, and either his popularity or his conservatism will give way. At that point the true believers will discover ideological deviations and conclude bitterly that the younger Bush is his father's son after all. And then, the verity of their doctrine reaffirmed, they will begin once more their search for the true heir to Ronald Reagan.I think Chait is right. Indeed, if you look at Bush's poll numbers over time, they tell the story of a president whose support was always trending downward steadily, except on three occasions when they shot up dramatically (and then began to decline steadily again): September 11, the start of the Iraq war, and the capture of Saddam Hussein. Kevin Drum posted the data on his blog here. These crises have obscured the inevitable clash between Bush's ideology and his popularity, and of course Bush has also tried hard to camoflage many of his most purely conservative proposals in a way Reagan never bothered to. If Bush loses this fall, the keepers of the conservative flame will look to his protectionism, his bloated Medicare pander, and his flim-flamming on many of the cultural war issues, and conclude that these attempts to ensure his re-election actually causes his demise.
As for Reagan's legacy, it should have been clear then, and is increasingly clear now, that for the most part Reagan the president was more popular than Reaganism the politics. One indication? The anemic response to the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project's efforts to name something after Reagan in every county on the U.S. I wrote about this a couple of years ago in The New Republic, and in the interests of efficiency (and at the risk of sounding self-important), I'm going to quote my own piece:
As the Gipper turned 90, his acolytes spoke of a veritable epidemic of Reaganmania sweeping across the land. "Ronald Reagan is loved and admired by millions of Americans, and by countless others around the world," read a House joint resolution that President Bush signed in January. "On his 90th birthday, the Gipper's influence on America today is greater than it was twenty years ago," wrote The National Review's Larry Kudlow. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist even testified in favor of a bill, sponsored by GOP Representative James Hansen, to memorialize the still-living Reagan on the National Mall--right there with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. "Clearly," Norquist told a House committee, "America loved Ronald Reagan, and the Congress should recognize the will of the people by passing this bill."As I wrote at the time, I don't think all this takes anything away from Reagan -- although I think it does reflect rather poorly on the judgment of some of his acolytes.There's just one problem with this nostalgic groundswell for the Gipper: It doesn't exist. Since Norquist launched the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997--aiming to have Reagan honored in every one of the nation's 3,067 counties--the number of Reagan dedications has crept upward from eleven to about 45. And the going has been tough. In 1998 Republican Speaker Jim King (with Norquist's help) pushed legislation through the Florida assembly to rename the 312-mile Florida Turnpike after Reagan--generating so many angry phone calls that, as King later told the press, "[y]ou'd have thought I'd nominated Hitler." The Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, California, almost lost its congressional funding in 1994; when the building prepared to open four years later, it was discovered that planners had neglected to buy a likeness of the former president to adorn the new structure. To date, 38 U.S. states don't have a single Reagan dedication.
This is no particular knock for Reagan, who was, after all, among the most popular presidents of the twentieth century. But with the exception of John F. Kennedy--whose tragic death triggered an immediate outpouring of national admiration--presidential greats are memorialized well after their time, when the public feels it must reach back to the past to celebrate a cherished American value. "The Washington [Monument]," observes historian Robert Dallek, "was completed after the Civil War, when the national impulse was to reestablish unity, to recreate a national spirit.... The Lincoln Memorial didn't come along until the 1920s, after the passions of the Civil War had subsided. The Jefferson Memorial was not dedicated until 1943"--in the midst of World War II, when Jefferson served as a kind of avatar of democracy.
The Reagan memorialists have a similar purpose: the elevation of Reaganite political values as an explicit rebuttal to the Clinton presidency. It's no coincidence that the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project got started in 1997 and 1998, just as Bimbroglio played out; that the overweening nostalgia surrounding Reagan's birthday peaked just as Pardongate did; or that Norquist's allies include some of the sweatiest Clinton-haters in Washington. In a sense, Reagan-worship is Clinton-hating by other means--a way of relegating the Bubba years to a brief hallucination between Reagan II (Bush père) and Reagan III (Bush fils).
The difference, as the Reaganites have discovered, is that most Americans have far more nostalgia for Reagan than for Reaganism (as opposed to Clintonism, which they liked considerably more than Clinton). And, as a result, the impulse behind Reagan-worship has come almost entirely from inside the Beltway. Ironically, the very people who came to Washington to join Reagan in smiting the arrogant, out-of-touch, top-down liberal elite--Norquist, Hansen, Bob Barr, Dennis Hastert--have established an arrogant, out-of-touch, top-down conservative elite bent on ramming their patron saint down the country's throat. "The impulse to build [previous] memorials," Dallek says, "was the product of a long-term development of public sentiment.... What's interesting about the Reagan memorials is the extraordinary speed with which they're going about it. I mean, he's not even dead."
More in this vein later.
--Nick Confessore
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.Rumsfeld and friends have gotten no small amount of grief from Tapped over the years, so it's worth pointing out that the Secretary of Defense has, quite admirably, been much better than his colleagues on the right at recognizing how ineffective the administration's counterterrorism policies really are. Everyone ought to go back and read the "long, hard slog" memo from last October and, unlike the media at the time, look beyond the bit about the slog in Iraq. It's a quite perceptive debunking of the "lump of terrorism" fallacy that's dominated a lot of conservative thought on this issue. As Rumsfeld said:The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?The question of whether we need a "broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists" only needs to be asked to make it clear that the answer is yes. The more interesting question is why it is that Bush doesn't seem interested in devising one. In all honesty, most Democrats haven't been much better, but there are exceptions, like Rep. Jim Turner, who's done some great work on this issue that I wrote about here.Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
--Matthew Yglesias
Osama bin Laden could have made a good living as a political consultant if he did not choose to kill babies in stead. The al Qaeda/Ba'ath Party strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is, at core, a political one. They seek not just to pull Iraq into chaos, but to defeat President Bush as well.Whence does Morris gain this keen insight into the mind of al-Qaeda? Evidence is lacking, but he elaborates on motives, "Al Qaeda and the Ba'ath Party want to defeat Bush to avenge his tough stance against them after the 9/11 attacks." This is sort of hard to accept; it seems to me that al-Qaeda was planning attacks before Bush's "tough stance" after the 9/11 attacks. That's how the attacks, you know, happened. Nevertheless, it's simply "obvious that Osama and his allies all want Bush out." Obvious how? Was the attack on the U.S.S. Cole an effort to get Bush in office? Nevermind.
Morris should consider contemplating the possibility that Osama's beef with the United States goes a bit beyond the content of the contemporary political debate. Nevertheless, I expect we'll hear more of this sort of thing between now and November. Note, however, that the strategy tends to lapse into incoherence:
But to fathom the al Qaeda/Ba'ath strategy, we need to remember how the Iranian militants manipulated the hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980 to defeat their bete noire, President Jimmy Carter. By dangling and then retracting the hope of releasing their hostages, they made Carter look weak and overmatched. Once Reagan won, they quietly let the hostages go.So vote for Kerry and the terrorists will leave us alone? That doesn't sound like a really effective slogan for the Bush campaign. Appeasement, after all, becomes a pretty attractive strategy if you have reason to believe that it will work. On one level, this is all very silly. On another level, however, it highlights a major challenge for the Kerry campaign. If another attack occurs between now and November, will voters rally around the president or will they hold him accountable for his failure to adequately focus on counterterrorism? Since it will be very difficult to engage in any sort of conventional campaigning in the aftermath of an attack, the time for Kerry to start reframing this issue is now.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Columnists
- David Brooks. Can't we all just get along?
- Nicholas Kristof. Bad apples everywhere.
- Jim Hoagland. If you just kind of juxtapose them, you can imply that the Iraq War is just like the liberation of France without really saying why. Try it -- it's fun!
- George Will I. I wrote this colum fifteen years ago.
- George Will II. The White House is worth a flip-flop.
- James Jordan and James Powell on the looming energy crisis.
During the 1984 campaign, Reagan stood in front of a senior citizens' project built under a program he tried to kill -- but his aides didn't care, concluding that the pictures were more important than the reporters' contrary words.If memory serves, the Bush campaign has elevated this to a standard campaign practice. I can't seem to find the link at the moment, but one of the major dailies had an extensive article about Bush administration aides were running around the country touting all sorts of government programs that Bush's own budget had tried to reduce funding for or kill altogether. And wasn't there some school or day care center Bush made a campaign stop at in 2000 which he later cut funding for?
If any helpful readers can send me the links, I will post an update.
--Nick Confessore
In the case at hand, Times to Post, the difference is not only the stronger conclusion in the Post (Bush misleads more) but a willingness to openly draw conclusions when participants in a conflict hotly contest each other's claims. Reporters in the maintream press generally don't do that. They do not openly conclude in a news account that one side is being more truthful than the other, especially in the heat of an election year struggle.I think this is a nice compromise between the standards of the patently opinionated European-style press and the increasingly ineffectual forms of American "objective" journalism. (I put that word in quotes because American journalists often mistake objectivity for neutrality, which, as Rosen rightly points out, makes them unwitting shills for other agendas.) Rosen and Stranahan say -- and I agree -- that journalism should drop value-neutral "he said, she said" journalism, and actually explain to the reader what is true and not true. (Stranahan calls it he said/she said/we said.) The results will look biased only to those who lie, spin, and deceive the most, and the public will be better served by a press that informs as much as it reports.Part of the reason to avoid conclusions like that is to avoid appearing biased, of course. The ritual called "he said, she said" is like an advertisement with that theme: both sides had their say, no bias here, trust the news you get from us. But it's slowly dawning on some in the press that it almost works the opposite way today.
When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report "what happened." From this angle, avoiding summary judgment doesn't necessarily build confidence in your reporting; it may encourage them to attack you for tilting the boards, for denying you have a perpsective on things, for bias.
By the way, check out here the Bush campaign's risible attempt to rebut the Post's analysis. They simply repeat the original bogus charge; to wit, if Kerry has plans for new programs that according to outside analysts would cost $900 million, we can say Kerry will raise taxes $900 million to cover it. That's not a "fact," as the Bushies claim. That's the definition of a supposition -- that is, it's purely a guess.
--Nick Confessore
What I have to add here is that I think any serious effort to reduce oil use is going to need to have a nuclear component. The basic fact is that any strategy to burn less gasoline -- electric cars, the "hydrogen economy," more mass transit, some combination of the three -- is going to require the production of more electricity, either in order to directly power vehicles or else to manufacture the alternative fuel. At the same time, using less oil to make gasoline and more oil to make electricity clearly isn't going to achieve anything.
Much as liberals may think we should increase our use of clean fuels like wind, solar, and hydro power -- and we should! -- it's simply not feasible to meet current electricity demand through these routes, much less meet current demand plus the additional demand imposed by economic growth plus the additional demand imposed by the need to move away from gasoline. That means looking at nuclear power -- which has fallen into disfavor out of a mix of irrational fear and the fact that Nevada is a swing state -- to do some of the work for us.
As an added nuclear-power bonus, let's note that insofar as there's a legitimate market for radioactive material that reduces the incentive for developing countries to sell their uranium to, say, al-Qaeda or Iran who might have more nefarious purposes in mind for it.
--Matthew Yglesias
Also on The Daily Prospect:
- Tear Down This Wal? $250 billion in sales, $9 an hour in wages: Is Wal-Mart propping up the American economy or dragging it down? A TAP debate by James Hoopes and Harold Meyerson.
- Monsters Inc. Agent Orange, Kathie Lee sweatshops, and an eco-friendly CEO -- you'll find it all in The Corporation. By Noy Thrupkaew.
The Pentagon has proposed a plan to withdraw its two Army divisions from Germany and undertake an array of other changes in its European-based forces, in the most significant rearrangement of the American military around the world since the beginning of the cold war, according to American and allied officials.This is something that really has been considered for some time, although I have no doubt that the overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan was the straw that broke the camel's back. The article gives you a good overview of some places where our forces are now deployed but, given the end of the Cold War, probably don't need to be any more. (I.e., the F-15s we have sitting in Iceland, presumably -- I've just guessing here -- as a defense against Soviet long-range bombers or anti-submarine aircraft.) This may prove to be the first step in a broader and a long-overdue reorganization of our armed forces away from the Cold War force structure.Pentagon policy makers said the aim is to afford maximum flexibility in sending forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential battlegrounds. But some experts and allied officials are concerned that the shift will reduce Washington's influence in NATO and weaken its diplomatic links with its allies, all at a time of rising anti-American sentiment around the world.
The proposal to withdraw the divisions comes at a time when the Army is stretched thin by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Pentagon officials said the move, which has been under consideration for some time and involves forces in Asia as well as in Europe, is unrelated to the current fighting.
Under the Pentagon plan, the Germany-based First Armored Division and First Infantry Division would be returned to the United States. A brigade equipped with Stryker light armored vehicles would be deployed in Germany. A typical division consists of three brigades and can number 20,000 troops if logistical units are included, though these two divisions have only two brigades each in Germany, with the other brigade in the United States.
Historically, it's usually taken a war to force changes on the encrusted military bureaucracy, even when those changes were obviously needed long ago. That appears to be the case here.
--Nick Confessore
The number of highly observant people has been shrinking, while the numbeer of un-observant people has been growing. Likewise, the white rural demographic slice of the population is shrinking, while the highly educated or single and working slices of the white female population (groups that don't like the GOP's faith-based politics) are both growing. Now, obviously, a political party wants all the votes it can get, and insofar as Democrats can do more to avoid alienating highly observant people without making major compromises on issues, then they ought to do so, but there's no real crisis for the party here.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that you can't reduce all these debates over political strategy to just political strategy. Campaigns based on appeals to gay rights, women's rights, and "postmaterial" issues like the environment are going to produce very different policy outcomes than would campaigns based on pocketbook appeals and moving right on "values" issues. A lot of the time when you see people advocating one strategy or another, they're really engaging in a policy dispute that's only pretending to be a dispute about policy. I would also note that church attendance is correlated with gun ownership, and that if the polling data in Stanley Greenberg's The Two Americas is to be believed, rural whites are much more friendly to the NRA than to pro-life groups, while highly-educated white women are much more hostile to pro-life groups than to the NRA, so if you're looking to square the circle, guns might be a more fruitful source of compromise than the more obvious sexual ethics issues.
--Matthew Yglesias
One mainstay of the group, the investment manager Tucker Andersen, told other members that he planned to withhold his vote and his money from the president. "I would be surprised if more than half the people in the room actually wrote checks for him," Mr. Andersen said in an interview yesterday. The Bush campaign has raised a record sum of more than $200 million already, and the club's president, Stephen Moore, said he still hoped to raise $10 million from members to buy advertisements related to the presidential race. But the discord within the club may represent a larger slip in the support for the president in his conservative base. . . .While the Medicare bill has done a lot to make conservatives angry, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that senior citizens don't much like it either. "Seniors express considerable concerns about the new law, with initial reactions to the law netting a mean score of 31 on a zero-to-100 scale, on which a zero means that they feel very unfavorable toward the new law and a 100 means that they feel very favorable toward the new law." All-in-all, this isn't looking like a very good result from the president, especially considering all the early reporting suggesting that Bush's Medicare bill was going to drive a stake through the heart of the Democrats' political fortunes.Mr. Moore himself helped initiate the debate Tuesday evening, people present said. After the club's board members, founders and some donors had finished interviewing four candidates vying for its support, the participants retired for dinner around the corner at an Italian restaurant, Patsy's, where Mr. Moore asked Mr. Andersen about his skeptical take on the administration.
Mr. Andersen, who is also on the boards of Gopac, an organization that seeks to groom Republican candidates at the state level, and the libertarian Cato Institute, said he soured on Mr. Bush over the Medicare overhaul.
In an interview, he said he had argued that proponents of limited government might be better off with a Democrat in the White House and the Republicans in control of one house of Congress because the divided government would block any new program from either side.
--Matthew Yglesias
Something similarly offensive is going on when Rep. Tom Davis, (R-Va.), the former National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman, says of Stephanie Herseth's narrow win in South Dakota, "If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won."
One can't help but wonder if this is exactly what the GOP intends to do for November's rematch. After all, it was just two years ago that Republican operatives --- abetted by their media shills -- tried to suppress the reservation vote with scurrilous and malicious charges of widespread voter fraud. (For background, see here, here, here, and here.) Somehow, I think we'll be seeing more of that this fall.
--Nick Confessore
Canada's governing (but maybe not for long!) Liberals have just released their election platform. Among the promises: funds to recruit 8,500 additional service personnel for Canada's ailing military. But wait! How does this promise jibe with the Liberals' attacks on Conservative leader Stephen Harper as "un-Canadian" for his earlier commitment to strengthen the Forces? Answer - the Liberals promise that the additional 8,500 will be formed into a special brigade dedicated to "peace support." What on earth does that mean? Given the Liberals' past record on national defense, I can only guess that it means that while they intend to hire more troops, they don't intend to buy them any weapons.Now I'll admit that the platform statement (warning: PDF) isn't incredibly clear, but this sounds to me like a very good idea:
A Liberal government will launch a Peace and Nation-Building Initiative with three principal elements:This is exactly the sort of thing the United States should be doing and that we should be encouraging our allies to do as well. The recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo have taught us that the American military is almost inconceivably good at fighting and winning wars. In all three cases, the troubles have come after the "end of major combat operations" during what the specialists call "post-conflict stabilization," known to the masses by the somewhat inaccurate term "peacekeeping." And our troops aren't bad at this because there's something wrong with them, they don't do it well because it's not what they're trained and equipped to be doing.
- Increase the Canadian Forces by 5,000 personnel, creating a new brigade and greatly enhancing Canada’s capacity for peace support. This will boost significantly our ability to participate in multilateral operations that are consistent with our interests and values. It will enable our military to assume a bigger role in bringing peace, security and democracy to troubled nations.
- Deploy the Canada Corps, which will harness the expertise and idealism of Canadian civilians with a special emphasis on recruiting the energy of young people. A primary mission of the Canada Corps will be to provide help and advice to fragile and failed states to build the institutions of good government, rule of law and respect for human rights.
Post-conflict stabilization forces aren't soldiers without weapons, they're soldiers with light weapons trained in things like working with local civilians and conducting operations that involve hefty law enforcement components. Right now, the bulk of the Army's forces with such training are in Reserve or National Guard military police or civil affairs units where, naturally enough, they're not as well-prepared as active duty soldiers would be. Since it's all but inevitable that the United States will find itself involved in more such missions in the future, it stands to reason that we should build a better capacity to conduct them within the active duty military.
Now Prime Minister Paul Martin might somehow foul this up in the implementation, but it's a very sound basic concept, and there's no reason an uber-hawk like Frum should find it objectionable.
--Matthew Yglesias
One interesting question at this point is whether the newly out-of-office Tenet will be a bit more forthcoming regarding the two above-mentioned controversies as well as the related tales of interference into the intelligence process by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Vice President. Tenet's long had a strange place in the administration -- consistently defended by the president against some fairly vehement attacks from the right, while consistently at war with the political operatives in the OSD and OVP. His continued presence has, thus, been a bit mysterious and seemingly the result of a strong desire to keep his job combined with a strong feeling on the part of the White House that it was better to keep him inside the big tent.
If that changes, things could get pretty . . . interesting, seeing as how the administration has already taken an awful lot of heat from defectors from within its ranks.
--Matthew Yglesias
Also on The Daily Prospect:
- Why Oil Prices are Rising: Don't look for the usual suspects. By Robert B. Reich.
- Mole in Our Midst: Finally, a grand, unified theory that explains Bush's domestic and international policies. Little did we know. By Matthew Yglesias.
- Ending the "Working Poor": The fight over minimum wage. By Robert B. Reich.
Because my staunch support of the war in Iraq has generated such overwhelming reader enthusiasm, it's time to re-establish my contrarian credentials. (Besides, I need a break.) Here's a crusade sure to infuriate the vast majority of penny-pinching traditionalists:For one thing, Safire's completely correct on the merits. More important, the thing about "contrarian credentials" comes in the middle of a joke. Safire writes for The New York Times op-ed page, which is mostly read by liberals. Indeed, now that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks have both gone wobbly, he's the last war-backer left standing. Safire's position on the war can't possibly have "overwhelming reader enthusiasm" -- he's kidding. What's more, it's really hard to think of a good lead for a column about pennies (just check out Jonah's awkward lead to his latest column -- this stuff isn't easy), so he deserves to be cut some slack. The really objectionable thing about the column is that the penultimate paragraph reveals it to be little more than a stealthy plot to boot Franklin Delano Roosevelt from his well-deserved spot on the dime.The time has come to abolish the outdated, almost worthless, bothersome and wasteful penny. Even President Lincoln, who distrusted the notion of paper money because he thought he would have to sign each greenback, would be ashamed to have his face on this specious specie.
--Matthew Yglesias
For one thing, although Abbott and their shills are crying poverty to regulators -- Abbott discovered seven years after introduction of the drug in question that they needed to recoup R&D; costs -- the company reports record sales to its investors. Tellingly, while R&D; costs were less than 9 percent of sales, the company's gross profit margin was a whopping 51.9 percent. Oops! So why did they raise the price? Rivka gives a good technical explanation, but the executive summary is this: Abbott is merely maneuvering to increase the market share of one of their other AIDS drugs, Kaletra, which contains ritonavair. It's a play for market dominance. It has nothing to do with R&D; costs. This has doctors so ticked off that some of them are organizing a boycott of all Abbott's products.
Now, obviously, increasing market share is something that most companies generally try to do. In principle, I don't have a problem with that. Nor do I have a problem with pharmaceutical firms making a healthy profit. But drugs, like other health-care goods and services, are not like other products -- for both practical reasons (the front end of their research pipeline is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer) and moral ones (you don't die if the you can't afford a Rolex, but many people will die if they can't afford the AIDS cocktails). Moreover, drug companies have shamelessly manipulated the patent laws in ways that, far from spurring innovation, encourage them to focus on things like increasing market share for existing drugs rather than coming up with new therapies. That is why there's a good case to made not only for reforming the patent laws, but also for taking steps -- such as giving Medicare the power to bargain with drug firms, as the Veterans Administration and Pentagon do -- to bring down prices on expensive medications, steps even most die-hard liberals wouldn't apply to the market in general.
--Nick Confessore
The old adage that there are "no atheists in foxholes" does not appear to apply as much as it used to. It turns out that the active duty troops in the American armed forces are somewhat less religious than the population as a whole.Securing more respect for atheists in public life has sort of dropped off my radar screen as a priority, but I'm glad to see this result. It should be noted, though, that you often get rather different results from asking people what they believe (i.e., "are you a Christian?") and asking them how they behave (i.e., "do you pray regularly?") and you might get a different outcome taking the latter approach. The fact that troops are better-educated than the public at large also strikes me as something most people probably aren't aware of.Americans over all are 78 percent Christian, 1.3 percent Jewish, .5 percent Moslem, .4 percent Hindu, 13 percent unknown or none and the rest various other sects and faiths. But the troops are 55 percent Christian, .3 percent Moslem, .27 percent Jewish, .04 percent Hindu, .24 percent Buddhist and 34 percent unknown or no preference. Part of this may be a generational thing, as the troops are younger than the population as a whole. People become more religious as they get older. Another factor is probably education, as the high education standards for recruits means those in uniform have several years more formal education than their civilian peers. More literate too, as people in uniform read at a level a full year ahead of civilians. As people become more educated, they tend to be less religious.
On a somewhat related note, Thomas Schaller of the Gadflyer analyzes the casualty data from Iraq and finds that Red states are not, in fact, doing a disproportionate quantity of the dying. Indeed, hippie Vermont, home of the dread Howard Dean, has suffered the most.
--Matthew Yglesias
