Matthew Yglesias

Dalton Gets Down

A friend emails a link to some crucial Times coverage of the Dalton prom:

Michael Mitjans, a D.J. who has spun records at about 10 proms a year since 1989, said that this year at the Dalton School, a private school on the Upper East Side, "I threw on Madonna, and I lost the dance floor. As soon as I switched back to hip-hop, it was like nothing had happened."

Joseph LaBoy, 16, who assists Mr. Mitjans, said he was surprised by some of the grinding he saw at Dalton's prom. "I'm from the Bronx," he said. "I know how to do that stuff. I'm shocked to see them do it."

Officials at Dalton did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Shocking stuff, didn't anyone tell those school officials that it's the coverup, not the crime, that winds up doing you in. Fortunately, MY.com Little Brother Nick Yglesias was present at the prom in question, and may be available for comment later. Right now he's having his first day of work as an intern for Elliot Spitzer and cannot be reached.

Ah, Yes

In discussing Saturday's David Brooks column, I realize I relied on a bit of a cheap debater's ploy. He made what I regard as a real error in summarizing Josh Marshall's Atlantic article, so I focused on that. The main bit of the column, though, was about how Kerry's wrong about the Varela Project, which I totally ignored. As Tacitus says Kerry has this quite wrong.

Holy Shit

I'm enough of a knee-jerk partisan that when I heard an anonymous important government official guy was about to publish a book arguing that George W. Bush was screwing everything up, I just assumed I would love it. I'm not enough of a knee-jerk partisan for that view to have survived this interview with Spencer Ackerman. Normally I welcome any intelligent and articulate contributions to the public discourse, but I'm not sure that putting a scorched earth strategy on the floor for debate is really the sort of thing the country needs. I also note, once again, that technically a scorched earth strategy entails destroying your own country, not that of the people you're fighting against, but we know what he means.

Does The Election Matter?

I was going to come up with a long response to this but perhaps better to just go for a few bullet points where I think it's inarguable that the election matters:

• Will the 2001 tax cuts be made permanent?
• Things that aren't tax and budget policy

One also notes that if we've learned anything over these past few years it's that weird things happen in the world, and it kind of matters who presides over the response. I agree, though, that the 2000 election was probably more momentous, since the third term of Clinton-Goreism was going to be the one where we found out if there was a pot of gold at the end of the balanced budget rainbow. Instead we're back to square one.

VP Ads

The advent of an advertisement in this space urging a Kerry-Dean ticket is a good opportunity to re-iterate that the placement on an ad on this site should not be construed as an endorsement by me of the point-of-view contained therein. I might reject an ad whose point-of-view I found truly repugnant, but anything within the bounds of acceptable discourse will go up, whether or not I agree with it.

On the topic of Kerry-Dean, it would seem that the main sticking point is that the two guys don't like each other. As such, it's not a possibility I've given serious consideration to, but it's possible that one could make the case for it in some hypothetical universe. Insofar as the range of acceptable possibilities seems to have narrowed to Vilsack, Gephardt, and Edwards, I don't like , I sort of like Edwards, and I know nothing about Vilsack. The factors that seem to have gotten Bill Richardson eliminated from consideration are not, I think, especially valid concerns, but these decisions aren't up to me. So, when I think about it, I guess I do like Dean better than the short-list three, but the personality clash and regional overload factors are not to be dismissed lightly.

More On Clinton/Reagan

Tacitus defends the current coverage of the Clinton administration. Or he thinks he does:

Yglesias is upset that retrospectives on Clinton are focusing on the single most significant event of Clinton's presidency. Funny how that goes. If you think I don't like the implicit contrast with the premier Republican president of the last quarter-century, think again. Bill Clinton was a charismatic man, a competent administrator, a moral void, and in league with the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln as a great deferrer of inevitable questions of American identity and mission. He gets due credit for fortuitous timing -- amazing what the business cycle and emerging transformative technologies can do -- and, paradoxically, for having so little core principle as to easily tack with the political winds after November '94. Some good conservative governance happened on Clinton's watch (free trade, welfare reform, and balanced budgets among them), and that ought not go unacknowledged. On the other hand, we can't forget feckless feel-good foreign policy, health care "reform," and yes, impeachment; the latter of which, whatever roots it had in an obsessive witch-hunt, would never have occurred absent Clinton's own gross iniquity.

But see -- he's not really defending it. Tacitus has a take on Bill Clinton -- that he was a kind of cypher, a talented politician who used his skills to defer the great questions facing the nation. Not a true villain, per se, not a man who did grand things that Tacitus dislikes, but rather a figure who occupied a great office and put that office to no good use. I would disagree with that assessment (though I think that, in their own way, many liberals would agree with Tacitus), and would be interested in participating in substantive discussions on this topic with intelligent persons. This, however, is not what they were doing on Meet The Press. They were sitting around talking about his sex life. Two term presidents of the United States are rarely trivial historical figures and if one wishes to treat them as if there are, one should really make some kind of case about it, as Tacitus tries to.

Bubble, Bubble

Talk about the existence of housing bubbles in the contemporary USA suffers from a surefeit of anecdotal evidence. Via Virginia Postrel, however, comes solid data regarding to Bay Area: The ratio of purchase price to rental price keeps going up, and is now higher than it was before the previous regional bubble burst. This means that people are purchasing homes at least in part as a speculative commodity, purely on the theory that there will be some bigger sucker down the line. This sort of thinking is often true, but eventually the world runs out of suckers, and you really don't want to be the guy left holding the bag.

Haven't seen any similar data for the Washington area. Anecdotally, however, I'll be moving into a new place later this summer and when I was looking around at rents everything seemed the same as it was twelve months ago while I believe sale prices have continued to increase. It's a bit hard to say, though, because there's been a lot of construction of new luxury rental places, which tend to be more expensive than the older structures in the same location since they're nicer, but are possibly depressing the rental value of the older places.

Clinton And Reagan

Ezra Klein has hoped that Bill Clinton's book tour re-emergence would be a good Democratic riposte to the recent spate of Reaganania we saw when the Gipper died. Judging by this morning's Meet The Press he was 100% wrong. Forget the panel's slanted composition and even forget what they said, the key thing to note was the look in the eyes of Russert, Klein, Kay, and Novak. "Oh goodie! A chance to talk about sex!" And it really was sex. Maybe someone, somewhere out there was really concerned with the penny-ante legal charges against Clinton, but these people -- quite obviously -- were interested in sex. So fun! So easy to speculate about Clinton's dick! So much more fun than looking into the intricacies of Bush's foreign policy deceptions or budget trickery. Look -- sex scandal!

And I say this as a liberal who wasn't particular upset with the media's Reagan coverage. I know a lot of folks on the left who kept wanting to yell -- Iran-Contra! Iran-Contra! -- every ten minutes throughout that whole two week escapade. My take, though, was that the man's not on the ballot anymore, and it made more sense to look at the big picture. Iran-Contra was an important story, but Reagan's ultimate significance -- like that of any influential president -- lies in the way he changed the country, changed the world, changed the GOP, and changed the Democratic Party, etc. You don't need to like all those changes to recognized that they happened and that they were important.

But so here we have it. Where was the Clinton legacy? Nowhere. It was just sex, sex, sex. Do we care that Clinton neutralized the racial "wedge issues" that the GOP had used to stymie liberal economic plans since the 1970s? Do we care that Clinton incorporated Central Europe firmly into the Western Alliance? Do we care that Clinton reconfigured the politics of trade and the balanced budget? Do we care that Clinton presided over the collapse of the Democratic Party at the sub-presidential level? Do we care about Kosovo and the fate of liberal internationalism? Do we care about any of the things -- the good things and the bad -- that happened under Clinton's watch? No. Sex. Scandal!

It's really and utterly moronic.

Saved By The Chinese Small Investor?

Daniel Drezner locates an antidote to Daniel Gross's skepticism about the continued viability of the market for US Treasury Bills. To make a long story short, the market keeps buying these things for more than they seem to be worth. In particular, the central banks of China and Japan keep buying them, for what seem to be political purposes (currency stability, etc.) rather than investment ones. Gary Shilling says this will work out okay:

The day may come when the Chinese government stops being the lender of last resort to America, but if it does stop, there are a billion or so Chinese citizens ready to take up the cause. Given the legal right to do so, they would yank deposits out of the Chinese banking system and invest in U.S. securities.

Yeah, but the reason Chinese citizens would be so eager to "yank deposits out of the Chinese banking system" is that the Chinese banking system is no good. There's no money in those accounts, meaning that (a) they won't be liberalized, and (b) even if they are, they're not going to finance anything.

Putin

Bush finally gets what's been coming to him for his support of Vladimir Putin, as the would-be dictator turns the Russian security forces into tools of the RNC. Simply delightful.

Goals

Fred Hiatt buys a little spin:

This is the irony of Bremer's legacy. A ruthlessly methodical executive, he set numerical goals for himself more than a year ago and mostly met them: electricity restored, schools rebuilt, provincial councils formed. Yet he can barely travel in Baghdad. Polls show that he and his occupation are reviled, and Iraqis who cooperate with Americans are less safe than ever. It's far from clear that Bremer's "building blocks" will survive.

They haven't met the electricity generation goals set 12 months ago -- they're not even close. Nor have they met the oil production goals, the telephone landline goals, the security training goals or, as far as I can tell, any of Bremer's numerical goals. But whatever.

Sudan

For the record, those folks out there who were so eager for America to involve itself in a little humanitarian do-goodery ought to take a look at a genuine humanitarian emergency. Once upon a time I would have counted myself a strong proponent of the view that we ought to be willing to deploy the American military to try and halt a genocide, but the reality is that the whole Army's in Iraq. That we can't solve all the world's problems was a cliché of the 90s-era debates over humanitarian intervention, but right now we're stretched so thin that we can't solve any of them.

Meanwhile, the government of Sudan somehow got itself on the UN's Human Rights Commission and the European opponents of American hegemony have managed to allow an extremely wealth continent with over 300 million inhabitants to have no real capacity for military action independent of the United States, so even those countries who wisely stayed out of the fray in Iraq can do almost nothing. A lovely world.

America: School Painter to the World

How do you say "F.U.B.A.R." in Arabic:

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Viewed from Baghdad since April 2003, the occupation has evolved from an optimistic partnership between Americans and Iraqis into a relationship riven by frustration and resentment. U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis. Residents of a tough Baghdad neighborhood that welcomed U.S. forces with cold cans of orange soda last spring now jeer as military vehicles roll past. A few weeks ago, young men from the area danced atop a Humvee disabled by a roadside bomb, eventually torching it.

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who want to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

But guess what? Yes, that's right -- you guessed it: We've fixed some schools!

The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans have been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA.

Awesome dudes. Mad props to Rajiv Chandrasekaran by following that up with a discussion of the data from the Iraq Weekly Status reports that I've written about several times and that seem to have been unaccountably ignored. Long story short -- we're way behind schedule on training security forces, getting power working, and other minor things like that. But the schools are repaired, man, and don't you forget it. Plus the torture chambers are closed!

The Difference

There's been a lot of unfortunate hot air spilled by both sides concerning what, exactly, is the difference in outlook between the Democratic and Republican foreign policy establishments. This somewhat dated paper by James Phllips of the Heritage Foundation, however, brings out the contrast perfectly:

Finally, Iraq has switched sides in the war on terrorism. This is important because the United States cannot win the war on terrorism unless it eliminates or at least greatly reduces state support for terrorism. When it comes to terrorism, "It's the regimes, stupid"--to paraphrase the mantra of the 1992 Clinton election campaign. Al-Qaeda, which often is held up as the premier example of "stateless terrorism," actually was helped tremendously by the support of rogue states. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the radical Islamic regime in Sudan provided crucial help that allowed al-Qaeda to develop into the global threat that it is today.

You would never, ever, here a Democratic foreign policy person say that. They would say that this is a misunderstanding of the Qaeda-Taliban relationship, and total confusion about the nature of the threat we currently face. Now, when you have a situation where the first-order facts are pretty uncontroversial (what people dispute is how to characterize what we all agree happened there) then there's no clear policy divergence -- everyone wanted to take down the Taliban. In more ambiguous situations, things get hairy.

When the GOP sees a regime that's hostile to the United States and that it is within America's capacity to topple militarily, they say: "Go for it." A hostile state always might become an al-Qaeda sponsor, and Republicans think the possibility of state sponsorship of al-Qaeda is very, very, very bad, so it's worth going way out of our way to make sure it doesn't happen. Fundamentally, Republicans are eager to overthrow regimes not because they're democracy-promoting idealists (though some are democracy-promoting idealists, that's just not the dominant strain of thought) but because they're very worried about state sponsorship.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment sees this very differently. Democrats worry about failed states. Democrats think al-Qaeda grows -- and grows powerful -- where institutions of governance break down. Iraq wasn't governed pleasantly, but it was governed. Hence, Democrats are loathe to destroy a regime unless they're prepared to put it back together. This makes Democrats more hesitant to overthrow regimes, not because they're stability-worshipping realists (though, again, some probably are) but because their collective nightmare is more failed states. Democrats take nation-building seriously -- too seriously to want to do it more often than is really necessary.

Kerry's Realism

David Brooks writes, among other things:

Over the past several months, Kerry and his advisers have signaled that they would like to take American foreign policy in a more "realist" direction. That means, as Kerry told the editors of The Washington Post, playing down the idea of promoting democracy and focusing narrowly instead on national security. That means, as Kerry advisers told Joshua Micah Marshall in The Atlantic, pursuing a foreign policy that looks more like the one Brent Scowcroft designed for the first Bush administration.

That's a pretty poor representation of Josh's article:

Because Afghanistan was the Bush Administration's first order of business following the 9/11 attacks, the results of this policy have advanced the furthest there. And because Kerry is on record as saying he would increase the number of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, it's probably the clearest measure of how a Kerry Administration would differ from Bush's. Afghanistan is a subject that Kerry's advisers and other senior Democrats turn to again and again. When I interviewed Joseph Biden in late March, he recounted a conversation he'd had with Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2002 about the growing instability that had taken hold after the Taliban was defeated, in late 2001. Biden told Rice he believed that the United States was on the verge of squandering its military victory by allowing the country to slip back into the corruption, tyranny, and chaos that had originally paved the way for Taliban rule. Rice was uncomprehending. "What do you mean?" he remembers her asking. Biden pointed to the re-emergence in western Afghanistan of Ismail Khan, the pre-Taliban warlord in Herat who quickly reclaimed power after the American victory. He told me: "She said, 'Look, al-Qaeda's not there. The Taliban's not there. There's security there.' I said, 'You mean turning it over to the warlords?' She said, 'Yeah, it's always been that way.'"

Biden was seeking to illustrate the blind spot that Democratic foreign-policy types see in Bush officials like Rice, who believe that if a rogue state has been rid of its hostile government (in this case the Taliban), its threat has therefore been neutralized. Democrats see Afghanistan as an affirmation of their own view of modern terrorism. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently in Newsweek, the Taliban regime was not so much a state sponsoring and directing a terrorist organization (the Republican view) as a terrorist organization sponsoring, guiding, and even hijacking a state (the Democratic view). Overthrowing regimes like that is at best only the first step in denying safe haven to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Equally important is creating the institutional bases of stability and liberalization that will prevent another descent into lawlessness and terror--in a word, nation-building.

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 advisers still tend to seek the safety of a Scowcroftian middle ground, but the foreign-policy advisers who would serve President Kerry have quite a different vision--much more ambitious and expansive than anything pursued by the first Bush Administration.

So, you know, it's important to read magazine articles through 'till the end if you're going to refer to them in your newspaper columns. Whatever.

Polarization

Just a word. I've seen several articles lately pondering such questions as "how can the country be so polarized when the two sides aren't really all that far apart?" The answer, I think, might have something to do with the fact that "polarized" doesn't mean "far apart." Consider Andrew Sullivan. He's a man of extreme views -- very much for the war, very much for cutting spending, very much for gay marriage. None of these opinions is very popular, all are extreme. Nevertheless, these views tend to cut different ways. Gay marriage is an unpopular left-wing view and super-hawkery is an unpopular rightwing view. Budget cutting is also an unpopular rightwing view, but it's not one espoused by America's current rightwing president.

The more folks like this there are in the population -- people who want to nationalize the means of production and ban abortions -- the less polarized you'll get. Polarization comes when everyone's opinions start to cohere. When most people are either down-the-line liberals or down-the-line conservatives. One should note that it's actually more likely that we'll see polarization in this sense as the range across which public opinion is spread narrows, since it's outlier views that lead you to "depolarize" from one of the two big party-ideologies.

Fish; Heads; Rotting

One thing that will always bring Glenn and I together is our shared love for Pope-bashing. Personally, I think this whole massive international coverup of widespread sexual abuse is a slightly picayune complaint to level against a church that's been up to more devious schemes (international Nazi smuggling rings, for example) throughout history, but I'll take what I can get.

Bye, Bye Lakers

They won't be missed. Kevin Drum suggests it's a bit inappropriate for the LA Times to play this above the Johnson beheading, but we already knew there was a lot of nasty shit going down in the Middle East (beheadings, even) and the Lakers don't break up every day. If you start requiring news organizations to cover stories in accord with their actual significance, then the slippery slope may never stop. "Buttery Flaps Wings; Hurricane Feared," etc.

¡Gephardt No!

Garance continues the Prospect's anti-Gephardt jihad, making a number of valuable points. This graf really sums things up well:

Further, Gephardt uniquely has the potential to alienate both centrists and those on the leftmost edges of the party. Some prominent New Democrats tell me they're backing Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack out of fear for how Edwards' warm populism will mesh with Kerry's more cerebral grab for the political center. Double that worry with Gephardt, who they definitely oppose. To many of them, Gephardt is the last of the big-spending liberals. His primary campaign rhetoric was more protectionist and fiery than was Edwards'; his gargantuan healthcare plan was completely politically unrealistic in today's deficit-burned economy, even were a future president to have a Democratic Congress to work with.

Most importantly, Gephardt is the single Democrat most associated with enabling President Bush's intervention in Iraq. With the Democratic base and independent voters increasingly turning against that war and seeing the intervention's costs as having outweighed its benefits, and with the entire national-security justification for the war having collapsed, choosing the Democrat who did the most to get us into this mess seems like a bad move. If Nader were not in the race, it might be a different story. But so far, it seems that Nader is already drawing more support than he did in 2000.

Indeed, this is the crux of the Gephardt madness. While Kerry has helpfully ambiguated between the centrist and liberal wings of the party, Gephardt has clumsily managed to alienate both. Gephardt is way right on the war, where the country agrees with the left, but way left on spending, where the country agrees with the center. It's a kind of awful mishmash.

Now as readers will know, I've grown a great deal more sympathetic to the cause of trade unionism over the past year, and I think it might be an excellent thing to have Gephardt -- who clearly has a real passion on this issue -- running the Labor Department and turning it into something other than senseless window-dressing. Vigorous enforcement of even the existing labor laws combined with bully-pulpit advocacy could do a great deal to transform the economic and political landscape in this country, and Gephardt would be an excellent choice for the job.

Old School

Walking home from drinks with a friend a saw a guy giving another guy a blowjob in Washington Square Park. This is the sort of thing one used to see in the NYC of my youth, but the Giulianified New York -- featuring really bright lights in WSP -- just doesn't manifest this kind of wackiness so often anymore. A small price to pay, perhaps, for not needing to live in fear of serious crime (something I now know all about in Columbia Heights) but nice to see the spirit of the old still somewhat alive.

Armitage Strikes Back

Colin Powell would be willing to stick around for the first year or so of a second Bush term if he gets to be put in control of actual policy.

The President on Johnson

Kathryn Lopez posts a little message from George W. Bush:

I want to express my deepest condolences to the family of Paul Johnson. We send our prayers and sympathies to them during this very troubling time.

The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face. These are barbaric people. There's no justification whatsoever for his murder, and yet they killed him in cold blood. And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans.See, they're trying to intimidate America. They're trying to shake our will; they're trying to get us to retreat from the world. America will not retreat. America will not be intimidated by these kinds of extremist thugs.

May God bless Paul Johnson. Thank you.

If you ask me, the section I've bolden outlines a much wiser theory of the crime than the section I've italicized. It's really hard for anyone participating in decent society to ascribe anything that's recognizably like a motive to the people who do these things. It's not just that there's no justification -- in some deep sense there's no real reason. There's a cause, to be sure, but no reason. Which is what makes the part I've italicized so silly.

Present these people with any given course of American action and they're not going to be happy. So if I want the voters to do X, it's easy enough to say, "the terrorists would hate X! Let's go out and do it!" It doesn't prove anything. The terrorists would hate universal health care, they would despise us if we left Iraq, they'll be furious if we stay, it really just. Doesn't. Matter.

It's all a question of what you do about it. As Don Rumsfeld said, the problem is that these guys get churned out faster than we can kill them off. Something has to be done to cut off the source -- the Rangers can run around in the desert for decades and they're not going to really solve anything out there.

Going, Going, Gone...

. . . back to NYC for another round with the family, so no posts this afternoon while I'm on the train. . . .

Experiment?

Belle Waring writes:

Now, I'm totally straight, so it's not like I'm scoping all these chicks out in a sexual way (like most girls, I've made out with other girls, but I've never had any interest in having a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend).

[emphasis added]

That rang true to me, but a female colleague insists that this is wrong. Readers, what say you? Have most girls made out with other girls?

Then and Now

David Adesnik remarks in re: my theory that the administration's weirdly nonsensical discourse on the Iraq/Qaeda connection is designed to mislead people while protecting them from elite media criticism that it has not, in fact, protected them from such criticism. Rather, his "best guess is that Bush himself (along with Cheney) is deeply in denial. It's the same phenomenon we saw with Reagan. When you believe in something with all your heart and then stake your reputation on it, letting go is the hardest thing to do."

I think that's right. The mislead-and-avoid-elite-criticism strategy is one that used to work quite well during the second half of 2002, and I think it was adopted at the time for the reasons I outlined. Since then, it's ceased to be an effective strategy, since the WMD failures have brought on a more general skepticism about things that people should have been skeptical about in the first place. But they can't really let it go. Sullivan catches Dick Cheney denying that any of the pre-war intelligence was bad, which is laughable, and actually contrary to administration policy (they did, after all, appoint a commission to look into why the intel was so bad) and simply reflects a kind of on the moon attitude toward all this stuff.

Conservatives and Marriage

Michelle Cottle on Rush Limbaugh:

Whatever you think of Rush, this is a fair question. While he clearly knows how to talk the talk in support of the traditional, God-fearing, family-values-oriented America of movement conservatives' dreams, Rush has repeatedly displayed trouble walking the walk. It's not just that he obviously doesn't buy that what-God-has-joined-together-let-no-man-put-asunder marital nonsense.

Fair enough, but in reality breaking up your marriage is in the best Red America traditions. Take a look at this divorce rate list and you'll see that the ten least-divorcing states are Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Maryland, and Minnesota. Nine blues and a red. And keep in mind that most states are red, owing to their smaller populations. The bottom ten have nine reds and one blue. Louisiana is the only southern state to have a lower divorce rate than California. Etc.

Off the top of my head, I would think that rightwing moralism seems to encourage people to get married too young leading to more split-ups down the road. Alternatively, it's well known that conservative economic policies (said to promote growth at the expense of equality) have impoverished America's Reddest states and perhaps this just puts too much strain on family life.

VP Stuff

This all goes on for quite a long time without really telling us much. Apparently congressfolks think, sensibly, that Edwards would help congressional candidates more than Gephardt would. I tend to agree. My great fear in all this would be that Kerry avoids Edwards out of a desire not to be out-charismaed by his number two guy.

The legitimate concern with Edwards -- as in the primaries -- is that he's simply too young and inexperienced to be president. This, though, is obviously less of a concern for the number two spot. What's more, by all accounts he's a smart guy interested in substantive issues, which ought to count for a lot. I would also say -- looking at things from a team perspective -- that Kerry has positively tons of public-sector experience and so one could make the case that bringing someone in who's spent most of his adult life in other pursuits has certain merits. Now I love Joe Biden, but it's hard to make the argument that he'd be a huge political asset. I don't really see a political downside, either, and merit should count for something. I've said my piece on Gephardt at this point.

Stab In The Back Watch

The fun spreads to the Secretary of Defense, courtesy of Spencer Ackerman pretending to be Josh Marshall. Meanwhile, if this and this aren't related to the tectonic plates mentioned here then I must be the Iranian spy in the house.