Matt Yglesias

Amateur Hour

Slate’s John Dickerson asks an obvious question on a conference call with Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary’s career where she’s been tested by crisis?” After an uncomfortably long moment during which neither Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein have anything to say, and then Lee Feinstein tries to step in with a save and starts talking about Clinton’s endorsement by high-level military officials. Give it a listen:

That’s a hat tip to Jennifer Skalka. Feinstein, the campaign’s foreign policy guy, is making the best of a bad situation here. But the more strictly political people walked into a debacle. How could they go forward with that ad without having a good answer to the question on hand? It’s inept in the extreme.

Jews for Obama

An effort to push back on some of the anti-Obama smears circulating in Jewish circles.

NAFTA Crosstalk

Yesterday, Canadian television reported that Obama advisors were telling Canada’s ambassador in Washington not to take the candidate’s NAFTA rhetoric too seriously. Now what really seems to have happened is that Austan Goolsbee tried to get someone from the Canadian consulate in Chicago to be a bit less worried about Obama. Whatever the details, this kind of ambiguous messaging is likely to recur time and again.

I recall being at a meeting in Cambridge, MA around the time of the 2004 Democratic Convention where John Kerry’s top economic and foreign policy advisors were essentially promising a group of assembled ambassadors that all of his anti-trade rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. This seemed like a typically Kerryish thing to have happen, but it would serve Obama may to try to avoid the same kind of thing repeating.

The Dated John Rawls

Yesterday, Tyler Cowen asked “Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?” Ezra Klein decided to turn it around on the liberals, noting that “Rawls would seem an obvious contender, as would Susan Moller Okin.” As it happens, I finished Samuel Freedman’s excellent newish book Rawls — an extended explication of the man’s body of work — recently and among other things it served to me as a reminder of how dated A Theory of Justice seems some respects.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think it “holds up” perfectly well in the sense of continuing to be a vital work of political philosophy. But in another sense of “holding up” it has pretty little to say about our contemporary political debates. The main antagonist of Rawls’ egalitarian liberalism is, in the book, some form of utilitarianism which just isn’t at all the structure of our political arguments at all. That’s not really a failing on Rawls’ part as his project is his project, and not some other thing, but it is a noteworthy aspect of the situation.

Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family by contrast seems to me to have a much more clear and direct relevance to things people argue about today. The premise that women and men deserve political and social equality is something few people would disagree with these days, but Okin shows that some surprisingly radical conclusions about the status quo can follow from that in a way that’s relevant in some obvious ways to arguments that you see in the cut-and-thrust of contemporary practical political debates. Rawls has created something vastly more theoretically ambitious, but in part in virtue of that ambition it’s much less clear what the actual implications are. Arguments about what sorts of policies do or do not maximize the well-being of the worst-off turn out to be extremely controversial in ways that make it extremely difficult to say what a Rawlsian take on this or that would be.

Pick Up the Phone

This seems like a pretty effective and well-made ad to me:

That said, the question becomes who do I want picking up the phone — the candidate who voted for invading Iraq, or the other one? The candidate willing to take some controversial stands on national security issues or the one who’s addicted to the politics of fear as a weapon and timidity as a defense mechanism? Most of all, the ultimate upshot of this sort of “are you experienced?” politics is that John McCain ought to be the next president. But while I’d like to have experienced hands at the levers of power, what I’d really like is a president who has good ideas and the courage to stand up for them.

As someone interested in spearheading the looming nineties alt-rock renaissance, however, I’m pleased to see Matchbox 20 references entering our punditry.

McCain the Sellout

Having heard this, I think it seems somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I met a smart conservative thinker last night who explained to me the conservative base’s fear about John McCain in understandable terms for the first time. Basically, McCain or no McCain this still looks like a bad year for the GOP. If he wins, it’s likely to be a personal win based on his persona and tarnishing Obama’s persona, in which the Democrats still pick up some House and Senate seats. Next up, it’s governing time. McCain’s not someone who enjoys a strong personal or professional relationship with John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, and he doesn’t owe any great debt to the GOP activist base. Under the circumstances, it’s plausible to imagine him striking a bunch of compromises with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on domestic issue in order to get a freer hand with which to conduct foreign policy.

That does seem plausible to me. On the other hand, it strikes me as an equally plausible story about Mitt Romney who had a much more substantial record of reaching compromises with a Democratic legislature. But if you put a lot of weight on purely personality-driven factors, I can see the particular fear of McCain since by all accounts he just doesn’t like the Republican congressional leaders.

That said, a plausible story is just that, a plausible one. Campaign promises are a very imperfect guide to governing, but they’re still one of the best guides we’ve got. The safest thing seems to me to assume that McCain more-or-less means what he says, and that if he wins he’ll govern on the platform he just ran and won on.

The Current

Yesterday, The Atlantic debuted a new feature available on the homepage and also at its own URL called “the Current.” The idea is to take several of the day’s most interesting stories, every day, and combine a brief take by a member of the Atlantic family with a curated guide to the best opinions available on the subject around the web.

The Proverbial Tank

One occupational hazard of punditry and blogging is being accused of being “in the tank” for someone or other. Another, of course, is actually being in the tank in question. But where does that phrase come from? What kind of tank? Julian Sanchez explores.

Demographic Hysteria

People who didn’t get my reference the other day to a “wave of pretty odd demographic hysteria” sweeping the country should definitely check out Johann Hari’s review of Mark Steyn’s America Alone. Alternative, you could read Steyn’s book and experience the hysteria first hand. For a much less hysterical (and less racialist) take that still sees falling birthrates as a huge problem, pick up Philip Longman’s The Empty Cradle.

It seems to me that the Longman version of the thesis, where population decline creates serious economic problems, at least could be true. To be convinced, though, I’d want to see more in the way of models that explicate the argument. Also relevant in this regard is Megan McArdle’s non-alarmist take on the aging of the baby boom generation. In the greater scheme of things, replacing “maybe a proxy war will spin out of control and Soviet ICBMs will destroy major American cities” with “maybe a rising dependency ratio will lead to flat GDP per capita” as a problem scenario seems like a change for the better.

I’m Confused

I don’t understand this Clinton campaign memo at all. Key excerpt:

The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.

Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and – of course – making speeches.

If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there’s a problem.

So if the candidate who’s leading in delegates, national polls, fundraising, and states won can’t sweep the March 4 primaries, then Clinton is the real winner? Maybe they should just go back to arguing that Texas doesn’t count.

Whose Identity? Which Politics?

Ann Friedman has a great column on the subject of identity and solidarity in politics, pivoting off the Clinton-Obama race:

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren’t playing “identity politics” any more than John Kerry’s supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush’s did in 2000. It’s absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power.

Well said. Given that most people don’t have particularly fine-grained or coherent opinions about political issues, questions of identity and solidarity are destined to play a large role in voting behavior. But certain efforts to mobilize concepts of identity are stigmatized, while others are treated as just plain ol’ politics.

Ethics Come to Louisiana

Rising conservative star and now-governor of Louisiana seems to be on the side of the angels with this successful ethics reform package that should clean up some of the bayou muck off the state’s legendarily shady politics.

It does seem to me, though, that the condition of a jurisdiction’s formal policies on government ethics are more likely to be a symptom than a cause of the actual state of play. If you have the relevant social conditions to support good government — competent media, engaged citizenry, civil society groups that can form the basis of electoral coalitions, a political culture that values honesty — then a politician who engages in a lot of shady behavior is likely to find himself voted out of office whether or not the shadiness in question is formally illegal. Conversely, absent adequate social conditions even the most admirable legal framework becomes a dead letter — nobody investigates violations and/or nobody cares. At the end of the day there are always going to be loopholes in whatever scheme you create. You see good government when and where the citizens want it and are able to punish those who don’t give it to them.

Credit Cards

It’s the ultimate credit card infographic over at Foreign Policy magazine. South Korea’s surge of credit card debt is intriguing, I’d like to know more about what the deal is with that.

Good for Metro

WMATA comes to its senses and commits to transit-oriented development in the vicinity of Metro stations rather than just unloading parcels for cash. Meanwhile, for a week now I’ve been obsessed with these two (one, two) bits of Capital Region transit porn.

They Make Music Videos

Funny stuff:

On a less amusing, but more substantive note, it’s worth understanding that these out-of-context snatches of McCainiana really do fit into the broader context of his career. They’re not random gaffes and they’re not primary season rhetoric aimed at ingratiating himself to the GOP base. McCain was arguing in favor of a much more aggressive American military posture when it was unfashionable from 1999-2001, he was in favor of it when it was wildly popular in 2003, and he continued to argue for it when it became a narrowcast message appealing only to hardcore Republicans by 2006-2007. This is more-or-less what he thinks.

Back in 1999, for example, he broke with much of his party’s leadership not to support the Clinton administration’s policy in the Balkans, but to criticize it as both insufficiently forceful and insufficiently ambitious. Rather than a bombing campaign against Serbia with limited objectives, McCain wanted a full-scale ground invasion, arguing on hardball that we ought to “do everything necessary to gain victory” and heartily assenting to Chris Matthews’ invitation to define “victory” as “not to go to the negotiating table with some guy and beg him for a deal, but to tell him what to do.” I think it was clear then and continues to be clear now that launching a land war aimed at Slobodan Milosevic’s unconditional surrender would have shattered NATO, stripped the war of its tenuous international legal legitimacy, and likely gotten us bogged down in a very messy post-war situation in Serbia proper. But McCain wasn’t chastened by the success of a more limited venture in the former Yugoslavia and he wasn’t chastened by the failure of a more grandiose venture in Iraq. This is just what he thinks.

Oh Noes!

Ezra’s certainly right to say that it’s bizarre for George W. Bush to criticize Barack Obama on the grounds that “it’ll send the wrong message” for Obama to hold a meeting with “a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs” considering that Bush does exactly that on a regular basis. Is it a good thing that the people of China and Russia and Saudi Arabia are, like the people of Cuba and Syria and Iran, ruled by dictators? Of course not. And if the lessons of history indicated that some kind of “no meetings ever” policy caused those regimes to melt and transform into wholesome democracies, then we wouldn’t be having this debate.

But things don’t work like that, and in the world as it is it’s hardly practical to eschew all meetings with everyone whose political system you don’t approve on. The question is, thus, whether or not this posture of creating a mostly arbitrary class of “bad guy” that we’re going to take down with our awesome powers of snubbing accomplishes anything meaningful. Obama’s contention is “no.” Bush’s contention is “yes” but he has absolutely nothing to show for it.

Meanwhile, I think being attacked by the president helps Obama. These kind of criticisms may carry some weight when delivered by Hillary Clinton or John McCain, but having Bush give voice to the same concerns merely underscores the extent to which Clinton and McCain are arguing from a position that’s deeply continuous with the mindset of the Bush years. How many people are surveying the mess Bush has made of things and thinking “we need more of the same?”

Leap Day

It’s February 29! Weird!

Talking to David Simon

The Wire’s creator was in DC earlier this week and did some press and events, prompting reports from Kay Steiger and Peter Bryce. At this point, I’m just eager to see how things end . . . I’ve found substantial elements of season five to be disappointing, but there are substantial elements of brilliance and it is quite possible that the end will wind up vindicating much of what I’ve thus far found unsatisfactory.

The Case for Immunity

Watch in amazement as George W. Bush, President of the United States, explains that we must refrain from punishing lawbreaking telecom firms because if they get punished for breaking the law, they might not be willing to break it again in the future. There’s certainly a part of that analysis I’m prepared to endorse.

Friday Prank Time

Funny stuff. That’s via Tim Lee and Julian Sanchez. Of course it’s mostly funny in a sad kind of way.

McCain’s Radical Preacher

Here’s some of Pastor John Hagee’s thoughts on the Jews:

It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.

Basically, we got what was coming to us. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that Hagee might look favorably on a foreign policy aimed at prompting the destruction of Israel at the hands of a Russo-Arab coalition, though it is a bit odd that he’s named his pressure group designed to advance this agenda “Christians United for Israel.” Even odder, many of the erstwhile leaders of the American Jewish community have chosen to embrace the person in question.

John McCain, naturally, is “very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.” Meanwhile, Hagee seems to hate Catholics about as much as Jews, and Muslims quite a bit more so. McCain has a lot to be proud of.

Kitty Hawk to India

The Navy denies it but it seems that rumors are circulating that the United States will step into the breach of stalled India-Russia negotiations about getting India an aircraft carrier by having us give them the USS Kitty Hawk, which is slated to be decommissioned. Robert Farley explains why this is a good idea.

There’s a substantial “international public good” aspect to much of what the US military does, and I think that’s particularly true of the Navy. That’s good for us, as far as it goes, but it makes sense for us to find ways to do that stuff in ways that allows for cooperation and burden-sharing. Helping friendly countries improve their naval capabilities in ways that both brings our countries closer together and save us money would seem like a big step in the right direction.

Butler Even More Injured Than Before

The Wizards’ injury situation gets worse and worse as it seems Caron Butler has a “labral tear” which is worse than what they though he had. He’s out indefinitely. Arenas is out indefinitely. And there are so many bad teams in the East that there’s no guarantee the Wizards can even manage to sink low enough to snag a high lottery pick for the trouble of our ruined season.

Tunnel Vision

Andrew writes that “McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.” Instead, “He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work.”

I’m by no means sure it will fail. A certain notion of can-do pragmatism is deep in American political culture, and that kind of forget the problems of the past let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about what’s working now attitude has a certain appeal. But it shouldn’t work. And the reason it shouldn’t work is that a given military strategy doesn’t just “succeed” or “fail” in a vacuum, it needs to be understood in some kind of strategic context. If you understand the war as a giant mistake which created a large problem that’s now in need of a solution, that creates one set of ideas about what counts as a solution. If you understand the war as an opening salvo in a campaign to use the U.S. military to remake the Persian Gulf, then working becomes a very different matter.

That said, the politics of the war will depend, crucially, on the actual situation. Surge proponents presumably think things will get better and better, whereas skeptics are inclined to see these stormclouds on the horizon and wonder if it’s about to start pouring again. Thus you have two different political strategies built in large part out of different substantive ideas about how events are likely to play out. There’s just no way to do the political analysis without adding a substantive analysis.

Poor Form

Doesn’t it seem like Harold Ickes should wait until the primary campaign is actually finished before dishing like this on the record about his complaints with Mark Penn? This is what anonymous sources are for. You talk on the record after you lose.