Matthew Yglesias

The Iran Factor

Knight-Ridder reports that the winner of the war on terrorism so far is . . . Iran. Some observers were pointing this out a while back, as you may recall.

A Good Idea?

Daniel Drezner uses rhetorical devices when writing his columns, just like the rest of us. "Unless the entire country--particularly the political class--is required to take an introductory economics course, the mercantilist mindset will be hard to shake." Which brings to mind a good question -- why not require the entire country to take an introductory economics course? If everyone had to learn a little basic, non-calculus economics it seems to me that that would be a very worthwhile investment.

If I think back to the things I learned in high school, learning a little economics was surely one of the most valuable.

National Greatness

Jim Henley doesn't mind the neocons, it's the national greatness conservatism that gets him down:

The Republican Party has been taken over by people who, like Barnes, consider war a tonic for the national soul. For them the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not just a calamity. They were an opportunity. They are not to be trusted with the nation's defense because they are not trying to defend it. They're trying to purge the place.

This is akin to Irving Kristol's complaint from the nineties that the defense of free markets was boring, and conservatism needed something more fun to do. Similarly, Jonah Goldberg has recently criticized Bill Clinton for presiding over a tragically tedious and dull period in American history. But this was a good thing! During the Clinton years, the economy was growing, the budget trend lines pointed in the right direction, and so the president focused on the incremental amelioration of domestic problems in the fields of health, education, and the environment. If we had kept up that policy tragectory for the past several years we would (a) have a lot fewer problems than we do today, and (b) have a much better chance of tackling further problems over the next five years.

Now of course this passion for action -- action -- over sound government is not the unique province of the right. One also sees it in a leftwing kind of sentiment holding that any candidate who does not promise to launch a grand crusade that will mobilize untold millions of non-voters and solve all national problems within 18 months is not a candidate worth supporting. People want a kind of millenarianism from their candidates and for every legislative fight to have the apocalyptic glamor of the civil rights days.

The right, meanwhile, increasingly seems to be populated by people who get a headache when they try and think seriously about the health care issue and, therefore, are eager to embrace excuses for not discussing it. What excuse better than war?

Clinton On the VP Choice

My Life, pages 413-414:

I spent the first weeks of July picking a running mate. After exhaustive research, Warren Christopher recommended I consider Senator Bob Kerrey; Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylania, who had worked with Martin Luther King, J. and in President Kennedy's White House; Congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the highly respected chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Senator Bob Graham of Florida, with whom I'd become friends when we served as governors together; and Senator Al Gore of Tennessee. . . .

In the end, I decided to ask Al Gore. At first, I didn't think I would. On our previous encournters the chemistry between us had not been warm. . . . I believed his selection would work precisely because it didn't have the traditional kind of balance. It would present Amertica with a new generation of leadership and prove I was serious about taking the party and the country in a different direction. I also thought his selection would be good politics in Tennessee, the South, and other Swing states. . . . Most important, I thouhgt he would be a good President if something happened to me. . . .

And that friends, is how it's done. You worry about winning the election and you worry about the guy's fitness for office. Personal chemistry is not the issue.

Can They Do Anything Right?

Yes, says Dan Drezner, the occupation authorities in Iraq have done a godo job writing new banking laws and putting the other building blocks of a financial system into place. My landlord works for the SEC and he's taken several trips to the Middle East to work on this stuff, which lead me to assume this SEC job was a cover for his real work in the CIA. Apparently, though, we really have had people doing this.

The trouble here, of course, is that none of it does any good without the security environment and the basic political situation in place. The fact that there are these patches of success makes it all the more frustrating that the successes are being undermined by failures in other, more fundamental, areas. Which is part of the reason I think things like John Judis' anti-imperialist essay in Foreign Policy wind up letting the administration off too easy. When the argument is that this whole notion that you could fight wars and make things better was misguided, then the Bushies seem to have just made one mistake. But if you look at it, plenty of things they've done have turned out fine. It's possible to make this stuff work. They just didn't make nearly enough of it work, so all the newly painted schools aren't going to make a difference.

Ah, Character

Max Boot explains it all to me:

My theory, for what it's worth, is that there's a basic divide between people who value character in their president and those who prefer cleverness. (For some reason the two don't generally seem to go together, at least not since Teddy Roosevelt retired.) At the risk of over-generalization, conservatives like character, liberals like cleverness.

Hm. Or could it be that liberals and conservatives have different conceptions of what good character is. For some reason, some time in the past the country's right wing took a fateful turn for the worse and decide that terms like "morality" and "character" related exclusively to a person's conduct of their sex life. A good person was a person who had conducted himself way with regard to sex, and a bad person was one who did otherwise. A person who cheated on his wife and then, yes, lied about it was immoral. A person who didn't think it mattered whether other people had sex with men or women was a moral relativist. And that was that.

In an even worse turn of events, this lingo -- where "x is a moral person" is true if and only if x led a traditional sex life -- got picked up by the mainstream media despite the fact that, as everyone knows, people in the press don't exhibit any sympathy for this fire and brimstone suff in their real lives.

But liberals care about character, too. We think that when a president submits budget after budget after budget based on deception, that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when the purpose of these budgets is to shift the tax burden off the wealthy of today to the poor of tomorrow that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you promise a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" and don't deliver that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you de-fund housing vouchers while spending tens of billions on subsidies for large pharmarceutical companies and agribusiness concerns that that demonstrates poor character. And we think that when you launch a war of choice and then grossly mismanage it that that demonstrates, well, poor character. It is immoral -- grossly immoral -- to pursue policies that have made the lives of billions of people around the world worse than they could have been.

Support

The Iraqis seem to like the new interim government quite a bit. This is actually a bit weird since none of the top figures in it are especially popular and the composition is rather similar to that of the much-reviled governing council, but if people want to start feeling happier about things for no particularly good reason, who am I to tell them to stop?

Oops! The Wrong Blacks

I'm not really in the mood for a big affirmative action fight, but check this story out, and you'll see that current practices aren't really working. Much better, I think, to move to a class-based system and to refocus efforts on directly eliminating structural impediments to academic opportunity for relatively disadvantaged children.

Bubble, Bubble II

One of the oddest features of the current, potentially bubblish housing market is that members of the Federal Reserve appear to be trying to manipulate the market through misleading public statements. To wit: Chairman Alan Greenspan's advice that people start choosing adjustable rate mortgages even though he knew full well that we was going to raise rates soon after dispensing this pearl of wisdom. Today I saw the head of the NY Fed on CNNfn's Market Call explaining that nationwide, there's no problem at all. On the California coastline and the Washington-Boston corridor, however, he said that if demand were to fall, you would start seeing nominal price declines. Fortunately, he assures us, demand will not fall.

Meanwhile, the Fed is planning further rate hikes, which will cause demand to fall.

I also note that DC area rents appear to be going down while sale prices keep moving up. The Ellington Apartments, a major new rental property on U Street, are going to open soon, and the management company has failed miserably in its initial plan of booking all the space before the building was ready for move-in. Today I got an email promising me "two months free rent" -- de facto, a 16.5 percent rent cut -- if I would sign up today. Other properties appear to be doing the same thing, avoiding cuts in the "sticker price" but offering discounts like rent-free months, included utilities payments, etc., to mask a market in declline.

A Novel Theory

"How To Abuse Accounting Identities," by Tom Nugent of The National Review:

What the senators and media don't get is the basic equation that defines the role of government deficits in the economy: The federal government deficit = non-government savings (of net financial assets). That's fact, not theory, a.k.a. an "accounting identity." Non-government savings include that of both residents of the U.S. and foreigners. If the federal budget deficit of $450 billion about equals the current account deficit, it means that all the net financial assets added by the deficit are being saved by foreigners, who desire to hold all those dollar-denominated U.S. financial assets and are willing to net export to us in order to get them.

This data indicates is that the federal deficit is too small for the U.S. domestic sector to save anything! Domestic savings are low because the budget deficit is too low. Low and unobtainable savings means low demand, excess capacity, and low levels of employment. In other words, to get adequate demand from a healthy economy, a much larger federal budget deficit is needed. Unfortunately neither political party sees the light on this one, and both proclaim a sincerity to balance the budget -- which would totally choke off what growth we do have, as it would actually drain domestic income and savings and further reduce demand.

Er, no. Which leads me to wonder what kind of fools have entrusted their money to PlanMember Advisors, Inc. and/or Victoria Capital Management. If my name were, say, "Ramesh Ponnuru" I would be very embarrassed to be appearing in the same publication as this kind of thing.

UPDATE: I was struggling to devise a good analogy for the "reasoning" on display in this column, but here goes. It's as if I thought I could make my car's engine more powerful by making the car heavier. After all, force equals mass times acceleration!

Funeral

Funeral this morning and associated events after that, so possibly no posting for a while today.

My Life So Far

Admittedly, I'm only one third of the way through the thing, but I'm finding this to be a surprisingly interesting book. Which is to say that I'm a political junkie, and so the story of how a young, smart, ambitious guy gut involved in politics, ran and lost a House race, then became Attorney-General, then governor, then lost, then became governor again, then got re-elected and began involving himself in national politics, etc. is pretty fascinating. Maybe things all go to hell when we get to the White House years and the self-serving factor jacks up, but maybe not.

Of course memoires and autobiographies are never really truly interesting books compared with proper, well-researched biographies, but we'll need to wait a while before Clinton gets his Boswell, so this'll do. It would also be nice if Robert Caro would finish that damn Lyndon Johnson series, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

ĄGephardt No! II

John Judis joins the crusade:

In the primary, Edwards showed a Clintonesque ability to appeal to both of the constituencies with whom Kerry is going to have trouble--the white working class voters who used to be described as "Reagan Democrats" and the independent upscale suburbanites who have been trending Democratic, but are leery of the party's leftwing. Edwards could help Kerry be competitive in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Ohio. (In a Mason-Dixon poll last month pairing Bush and Cheney against Kerry and Edwards in North Carolina, Bush was only ahead by 46 to 45 percent.) He could force the Bush campaign to expend resources in regions it would have liked to take for granted. Gephardt might help Kerry with white working class voters in Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio. But Gephardt's appeal may be more limited than Edwards'. Gephardt is very popular among labor leaders, but, as this year's primary made clear, not necessarily among the rank and file or among non-union workers. He would also reinforce Kerry's image as a Washington insider, making him less attractive to upscale suburbanites.

All true. And, of course, as I've been discovering, Washington insiders not on the AFL-CIO payroll don't like Gephardt either. He's the congressional leader who congressmen don't like; the labor ally who union members don't like; the insider who insiders don't like; the Missourian who Missourians don't like; in short -- a very poor choice. What's more, a dare say he wouldn't be a very good president of the United States, which is something that ought to factor into the decision-making at some level.

Now to be clear, a Kerry-Gephardt ticket would still be worth supporting. It doesn't matter very much who the vice president is, and a Kerry-Gephardt administration would be a damn sight better than a Bush-Cheney or a Nader-Camejo administration. But still, it does matter. These things are worth doing right, with "right" spelled "E-D-W-A-R-D-S" in this instance. If you're running for president, you owe a broad duty to nation, world, and party -- you're personal comfort is not the top priority.

Liberals are Idiots!

Glenn Reynolds teaches me a lesson:

REMEMBER WHEN MOQTADA AL-SADR was going to lead a popular uprising across Iraq? (That was April's we're-losing story). Well, he didn't, and here's the story of how we won. I wonder how much attention it'll get.

Heh.

How silly we all were to think Moqtada would lead an uprising against the US, when really we "won" against him by agreeing to drop the criminal charges against him that started the conflict in the first place and let him set up a political party. But wait -- and here's the part where the anti-war left looks really foolish -- before the US started military action against him he was a marginal figure in Iraqi politics and now he's the second most popular person in the country! So I don't see why these pessimists in the media keep underrating the efficacy of our strategy. Now needless to say, Muqtada still might lose in elections to either of the two major anti-American, pro-Iranian alternative political parties out there, so there's still a lot up in the air.

I'm With Ralph

Wacky times, as Ralph Nader correctly endorses John Edwards for VP. Or maybe there's a better choice than Edwards, but Edwards is a better choice than Gephardt. And some DLC guys told me the same thing yesterday. Everyone agrees. Except the Teamsters. And, maybe, John Kerry. Grrr.

The Two Clinton Administrations

Extremely important historical point from Mark Schmitt about the Clinton administration. I would complify a little by noting that something really needs to be said about NAFTA, which was obviously a sharp break from the intense partisanship that characterized the rest of the Clinton era.

I have my doubts, however, that Mark's right about the notion that moderate Republicans will be easier to deal with in 2005-6 than they were in 1993-4. The Toomey-Specter race and the Club for Growth's general ascension will, I would think, put the fear of God in any GOP legislators. Arlen Spector won, but it was pretty close, and he actually had the support of the entire Republican leadership. If Bush, DeLay, Frist, etc. had been campaigning against him or even sitting on his hands, he would have been dead meat. John McCain, who's a media superstar with an independent following, is probably immune from this kind of pressure, but I don't think that, say, a George Voinovich, a Chuck Hagel, or a Dick Lugar really feel that they can afford to buck the leadership on any important votes, even though they grumble a lot. Now I think the Schmitt Plan is worth a shot, but a Kerry Administration needs to be prepared -- politically and psychologically -- for the possibility that it won't work.

Kerryisms

Well, I buy this explanation of why Kerryisms aren't dishonest, but on that theory it's a little hard to say what the point is. The bare observation that a person uses caveats in his speech doesn't seem very interesting unless, implicitly at least, you're saying he shouldn't be using the caveats. But as we see over and over again, Kerry's caveats are important to spelling out what his position is.

2nd Bill of Rights

I'll be happy to sign on if we can take out the part about the right to sell you farm products at a high price . . . it seems to me that if everyone had "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation," that it wouldn't really matter whether or not anyone in particular could make a good living as a farmer, he'd just have to go work in one of our "industries or shops . . . or mines" and presumably we'd add big office buildings to the list.

More to the point, think back to a simpler moment when a presidential address could contain big, multisyllabic words like "remunerative" without launching a thousand newspaper articles about the northeastern patrician's inability to connect with ordinary people.

Never Fear

Jeff Jarvis assures us that only a "few . . . people in power said that Iraq was behind the attacks" on 9-11. Well, that's okay then. And so maybe they had a few allies in the media. And maybe a few other people in power said things that, in the context of other claims by people in power that Iraq was behind the attacks were a little confusing. And maybe -- somehow or other -- a majority of the US public wound up believing Iraq was behind the attacks. And then -- just like that -- a majority of the public supported a war against Iraq. And, by jingo, we fought one.

It's funny how these things work out.

But don't worry, it was only a few.

UPDATE: If you're upset that I ellipsed out "few, if any, people in power" then let me refer you to Vice President Dick Cheney's statements on the matter which establish that at least one person in power did so claim. Thus, it is not the case that no people in power made this claim. Therefore, we revert to Jeff's alternative that "few" said it.

The System

Benjamin Hoffman is one of several people I've seen around lately reviving the notion that the real sense in which the second Gulf War is part of the war on terrorism is that it was a necessary first step to reconstructing the failed Middle Eastern political system that was a breeding ground for terrorism. One hasn't heard much about this lately, because right now Iraq seems exceedingly unlikely to develop a liberal political order, which makes the whole argument a bit moot.

But only a bit. Unlike our Shermanesque friend Anonymous, I think this broad story of how to cope with terrorism is essentially correct.

The disagreement is about why and where Iraq fits into this whole picture. I think folks who supported the war on these grounds (Tom Friedman, etc.) are suffering from a serious case of false consciousness. In other words, it's not the case that they have a big idea -- The Need for Reconstruction -- and then the small idea -- Invade Iraq -- follows logically from TNFR. Rather, they had a big idea -- TNFR -- and no real idea of what followed from it. At the same time, there were all these people out there saying "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" so they manaed to convince themselves that invading Iraq would be a good way to implement their big idea. But it isn't, and it wasn't.

Iraq has to be considered one of the worst possible candidates for a democratic transitions. It combined a total absence of civil society with a huge case of resource curse, poor relations with its neighbors, and two awkwardly large minority populations. As an Arab model it suffers from the further flaw that an Iraqi democracy would be a Shi'ite democracy, which is not the best example for all the Sunni Arab countries out there. The right way to try and effect transformation would have been to support the states -- Morocco, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain -- that are already transforming, and to try and use leverage to push Egypt to change. Egypt has a dominant Sunni Arab population, is the center of Arab media and culture, has civil society groups, has some pseudo-democratic institutions in place, is subject to American pressure, and has no resource curse. This was not, I readily admit, obvious to me in December 2001 or whenever, but I don't think anyone who seriously and objectively thought about the question could possibly come to the conclusion that invading Iraq was a high-percentage transformative move.

New Column

Iraq-Qaeda links seen through the lense of H.P. Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Really.

Of course one could also generate a classic epistemology case with this material. After all, Dick Cheney might turn out to have an unjustified true belief that Saddam was behind 9-11. I don't know that there are any Gettier problems lurking in the woods here, but I suspect a clever person could gin one up were he so inclined.

Say It Ain't So

Ah! I continue to oppose the Vilsack choice on the grounds that I don't want to learn about Tom Vilsak and his long record in Iowa politics, but a priori (synthetic a priori, at that) it's almost certainly a better choice.

A Betting Man

Kevin Drum reports on a wager offer made over lunch by Hugh Hewitt, radio host extraordinaire, which wouldn't be all that interesting except for the fact that he offered me the exact same bet on the radio last week, and Kevin and I can hardly both control the Hewitt blog simultaneously. Well, there are group blogs, of course, but that's not the point.

Margaret Karen Joskow, Rest In Peace

After several years of serious illness and several days of unconsciousness, my mother died last night at the very young age of 53. Obviously, a very sad event for the entire family, as we all loved her very much. Certainly I did. The silver lining, such as it is, is that this was not unexpected, and we all had ample chance to say our goodbyes and spend some quality time before she left us. I also tell myself that, tragic as the situation is, the death of a parent is something almost everyone needs to experience sooner or later.

In a lot of ways, I usually think of myself as more taking after my father and his family where all these writers are, or even my mother's father and brothers who all do economics and policy stuff. Mom, on the other hand, was a graphic designer, a photographer, and a painter -- a visual person, which I very much am not. When I was in grade school every so often you'd get some assignment that was arty in nature, and I'd be clueless without her help -- I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler. On the other hand, now that I think about it, she worked at Newsweek (and then later at a now-nonexistent publication) when I was little and used to take me into the office there sometimes when she had to work irregular hours. And now here I am in a magazine office, just like way back when, though they didn't have blogs in those days. It's hard to know if things like that really mean anything, but still.

Mom always said that she was proud of me, and while I don't really believe that dead people watch what happens to those they've left behind, you still try to live as if that were true and make them prouder.

I find writing -- especially on this site -- to be very comforting, so there probably won't be any especially notable disruptions in service, except as a travel to New York tomorrow night for the Thursday funeral, and then back to DC again at the end of the weekend. What else can I say?