Matt Yglesias

The Cossacks Work for the Czar

“I like Hillary,” writes the mighty Atrios, “I just don’t really like the people she surrounds herself with (with some notable exceptions). As the campaign goes on it’ll be harder and harder to rationally distinguish between the two.”

I’m not sure I really grasp the content of the distinction. Mark Penn doesn’t become a person’s political guru by accident. It’s worth noting that the general approaches of the sort of political consultants who might do work on a presidential campaign are sufficiently well-known that, by hiring the strategist who determines the strategy, the candidate is, in fact, determining in advance which strategy he or she will be advised to adopt. In short, you don’t run a certain sort of campaign because you hired Penn, you hire Penn because you’ve decided to run a certain sort of campaign. This phenomenon become famous with regard to Bob Shrum, but it’s more-or-less true for everyone in the business.

Social Security in Circles

I’m confused. James Capretta argues in The Weekly Standard that Social Security benefits discourage large families and that, therefore, we must cut Social Security benefits in order to increase the birth rate in order to . . . make it easier to pay for Social Security benefits.

There’s some truth to this argument, but on another level I think it pretty obviously doesn’t make sense. One needs to first decide whether or not one believes there should be a generous defined benefit public sector pension program and then think about child rearing issues in light of that. All that follows from this is that there needs to be some level of balance between public sector support for retirees and public sector support for kids and their parents. The conservative solution is to level down, by reducing benefits for retirees and the progressive solution is to level up with better education, day care, work-family policy, etc. The conservative way, people need to have more kids to support them in their old age, and women will need to stay at home to care for these larger broods in a world without high-quality preschool options. The liberal way, better preschool and children’s health care benefits slightly increases both the fertility rate, the workforce participation rate, and the overall level of human capital. Either way, in principle, you can make the math work out.

Risk and Reward

Rich Lowry quotes some of George Tenet’s book and argues that the Iraq debate “was always fundamentally about how much risk we were willing to tolerate in a post-9/11 environment.” Or, as Tenet says, Iraq “was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.” Two points in response. One is that while this was, indeed, one of the debates taking place within elite circles that has almost no resemblance to the public debate playing out in the media which was a demagogic scare campaign designed to convince people that the country faced an imminent threat from Iraq.

The other is that it’s staggering how wrongheaded that Tenet/Lowry framing of the issue was. The underlying presumption was that achieving the goals of the campaign — replacing Saddam’s regime with a stable one congenial to American interests — would be basically unproblematic. Perhaps somewhat costly in terms of money or achieving secondary diplomatic objectives, but basically something we could achieve if we just decided to. To not invade was to tolerate a certain level of risk, whereas to invade was to proclaim the risk intolerable. Off the Lowry/Tenet tables was the basic reality that the downside risks involved in engaging in preventive war are actually enormous.

It’s The War, Stupid

Michael Cooper’s New York Times article on how John McCain is trying to “recapture” the “vigor” of his last campaign nicely encapsulates the congenital unwillingness of the political press to cover issues. I’m not nearly so naive as to think that issues and public opinion of the issues is determinative in electoral politics, but in the case of McCain’s waxing and waning fortunes, that’s clearly what’s happening. Back in 2000, McCain’s ultra-hawkish national security views were low-salience and moderately popular, and the process issues on which he has a lot of appeal to moderates were high-salience.

Today, the relative salience of these issues has flipped and McCain’s national security views have become very unpopular among moderates and independents. Meanwhile, McCain was never well-liked by the conservative base. The “vigor” of his previous campaign derived from the fact that his political profile at the time was popular with many independents and moderate Republicans, not primarily the reverse.

Democratic Islamism

It’s hard for me to imagine anything more wrongheaded than Michael Rubin’s on-again, off-again crusade against the Islamist AKP Party in Turkey. Obviously, not being a Muslim of any sort I have a hard time imagining myself backing an Islamist political party and would expect Rubin to feel the same way. But as a third-party observer of the Muslim world, it seems to me that things like the AKP are exactly what we should be hoping to see — political mobilizations based around the appeal of Islam that nonetheless abide by democratic norms and don’t see Islamist politics as entailing violent confrontations with the West. If America takes the attitude that only rigid, Attaturk-style secularism is an acceptable form of political organization, then this is precisely the sort of thing that drives the view that the United States is engaging in the global persecution of Muslims and Islam. Rubin, however, is having none of it:

What is most amazing is that the State Department has downplayed Turks’ concern about the Islamist agenda. If there was any truth to Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried comparison of the AKP to a European Christian Democratic Party, Turks would not be rallying for democracy and secularism. Perhaps it is time for some introspection in Foggy Bottom and at the U.S. embassy in Ankara.

Rubin’s right that the comparison to a contemporary Christian Democratic Party doesn’t hold all that much water. Ironically, the correct comparison is to the Republican Party in the United States. This is a political party that draws much of its support from the political mobilization of Christian sentiment. The policies and rhetoric it employs to tap into Christian political mobilization are deeply controversial, are capable of prompting mass protests by more secular-minded people, and — yes — wind up with the party backing somewhat illiberal policies on various scores. All that said, the GOP is still obviously a participant in a democratic system of elections and governance. Dennis Hastert surrendered the Speaker’s chair to Nancy Pelosi. And while the Republicans’ deep ties to Christian political have tended to drive non-Christian voters in droves to the Democrats, the GOP does get some support from members of religious minority groups like Rubin himself.

Earthships

One of the odder things I saw in New Mexico was this colony of “earthships”, houses built out of garbage and packed dirt, powered by their own solar and wind units, and featuring self-contained systems to capture and recycle rainwater. Operating without air conditioners or heating units, the buildings are designed to maintain stable temperatures thanks to design features. The point, of course, is to be environmentally friendly.

I wonder if some of my more eco-aware readers might be able to weigh in on the validity of this. Based on the movie, I have a few doubts. Mostly, they seem to be completely ignoring the environmental impact of living in such a sprawling fashion. A low-density compound of people living 15 miles outside of Taos, New Mexico is either going to result in a ton of driving, or else is going to be curbing its environmental footprint primarily through its residents never going anywhere or buying anything. This is fine, perhaps, when you’re talking about people with total commitment to the cause, but it’s not really pointing in the direction of a systemic solution. My understanding is that it’s much better to encourage people to live in relatively small apartments where they can walk to the grocery store and take mass transit to work than it is to get everyone to stick solar panels on the roofs of big exurban houses. But perhaps I’m wrong?

The Big Squeeze

Michael Winerip provides a plethora of anecdotal evidence for the conclusion that it’s becoming much more difficult to get into an elite college. Roughly speaking, he interviews Harvard applicants, they seem much more qualified to him than he was when he successfully applied back in the day, and none of them ever get in. And, of course, these scare stories are based on data. Everybody knows that “several Ivies, including Harvard, rejected a record number of applicants this year.” The trick, as Kevin Carey has helpfully pointed out is that this isn’t really true. For every applicant, there are some number of applications and the number of applications-per-student has been growing rapidly:

When the number of applications grows faster than the number of applicants, it creates a false sense that admission standards are getting tighter. Imagine 20 students, each of whom applies to five schools and gets into two. Now imagine if the same students each applied to ten schools and got into two. The outcome for the students is the same: two acceptance letters. But the schools report lower admission rates, and the odds of admission seem worse.

In particular, Carey notes that the number of acceptances at the Ivy League increased 10.6 percent between 2002-2006, which was faster than the rate of increase in the number of high school graduates. It was, however, slower than the 28.6 percent rate of increase in the number of college applications. And it’s easy to see why students are mailing off more applications — compared to other things prosperous families do to help their kids get an edge in the admissions process, just mailing more applications is simple and relatively cheap. From a social point of view, however, an escalating arms race in which everyone is applying to dozens of colleges won’t be a very happy end point.

Freakonomics

Walking home from the Metro today I saw a $5 on the sidewalk. How funny, I thought to myself as I walked past the bill, isn’t there some saying in economics about how you never see a $5 on the sidewalk? Then greater wisdom cut through the travel-induced fatigue and I remembered to pick up the money.

Warriors Win!

Amazing stuff. Who has the Baron Davis sneaker endorsement deal?

The Penn Factor

Anne Kornblut offers up a profile of Mark Penn for The Washington Post that everyone ought to read. To make a long story short, though, if you think the problem with the Democratic Party is that it’s insufficiently inclined to support wars, you’ll like Mark Penn. If you think the Party is insufficiently friendly to the interests of major corporations and wealthy individuals, you’ll like Mark Penn. If you think Menachim Begin was a great man and that the world needs more Dick Morris acolytes, you’ll like Mark Penn. And if you like Mark Penn, you’ll love Hillary Clinton since he “controls the main elements of her campaign . . . has consolidated his power, according to advisers close to the campaign, taking increasing control of the operation . . . has become involved in virtually every move Clinton makes, with the result that the campaign reflects the chief strategist as much as the candidate.”

The one thing I’d really have to quibble with is the notion that Penn has “undisputed brilliance.” I would dispute the idea that he’s brilliant and I’m fairly sure I’m not alone. He’s a clever businessman who’s made a good deal of money for himself, but so have lots of other consultants. The view that the correct general election strategy on every issue is for the Democratic candidate to move to the right doesn’t seem like really innovative thinking to me.

Smells Like Team Spirit

I think I agree with just about all the substance of David Brooks’ concern trolling about the GOP (see, e.g., my final American Prospect column which made some similar points), but this minor aside strikes me as wrongheaded in an interesting way:

Second, there is the corrupting influence of teamism. Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness.

I think there’s perhaps some infelicitous phrasing in Brooks’ apparent contention that the true soul of conservatism lies in the thinking of “new and adventurous thoughts” (this doesn’t sound all that conservative) but one knows what he means. The conservative punditocratic establishment doesn’t reward independent thinking or clever new notions. Instead, it tends to reward team play and a somewhat abstruse and scholastic in-house quibbling rather than deep thinking about policy. That said, why shouldn’t “being a good conservative” mean “sticking together with other conservatives?” It seems to me that that’s exactly what it ought to mean. Insofar as someone — David Brooks, say — reaches conclusions at odds with an emphasis on sticking together with other conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism, but it’s still the case that to be a good conservative means to stick with the conservatives.

When I Hear The Word “Fluxus,” . . .

An intriguing signpost in the history of blogospheric development as Chris Bowers analogizes the netroots to the Fluxus movement in art and means it in a good way.

Sweet Victory

I managed to see the end of Chicago’s game four win over Miami before boarding my plane in Albuquerque. Now I’m actually on a layover in Midway Airport still savoring the loathesome Heat’s defeat. This probably just ends up with the Bulls losing to the Pistons in Round 2, but Chicago’s a young team with a bright future, so good for them. But more to the point, bad for Miami, which isn’t going to be getting any younger.

Sunday Hot Pepper Blogging

A colleague sends this LA Times article suggesting it as “perfect for New Mexico blogging.” And, indeed, it is. The subject is New Mexico’s chile industry, which has been in trouble lately because “since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the state’s chile crop has plunged almost 50% as cheaper foreign imports from Mexico, Peru and China pushed local growers out of the market.” As a result much former cropland is being sold for the developers who bring you the southwest’s impressive sprawl. To the rescue, of course, come education and technology so chile scientists working at New Mexico State University are looking to preserve the state’s chile competitiveness by developing superior peppers.

The Masons

For some reason, Freemasons seem to be big in New Mexico. Big and powerful. This temple, for example, is right by the only place we could find parking near Santa Fe Plaza the other day, and the lot turns out to be under Masonic control. And, of course, the main thing I’ve learned on my trip is that outside of my cozy Northeastern home, if you control the parking, you control the world.

Meanwhile, in Taos we went to the Kit Carson Home where it was revealed that Carson, the “legendary” mountain man neither of us had heard of, had been a Mason, as were most of the important figures in 19th Century Taos. Not only that, but the tour guide darkly hinted that the home/museum complex was still under the thumb of the Masons and that the Masons actually had the power to blot a person’s name out of history. Which is all fine as far as it goes, but it raises the question of who’s really behind Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign — does he serve the American people, or the vast Masonic conspiracy? Think about it.

Comment Approval

What, you may be wondering, is the deal with the requirement that comments be held for approval before they’re published? The deal, in short, is that it’s a mistake and it’ll be fixed soon. This is one of the reasons why we’ve been playing around with the site a bit this weekend before the “official” launch tomorrow.

Incidentally, as I’m sure you can tell from the nav bar, The Atlantic is offering other fine blog products besides this one. In particular, James Fallows and Ross Douthat are doing Atlantic blogs and, of course, Andrew Sullivan’s been blogging away here for a while. Clearly I would say this, but I think it’s a pretty stellar cast of blog colleagues I’ve got here.

Counterinsurgency Fun

Bad news for folks who thought the appointment of David Petraeus to command in Iraq was going to single-handedly undo centuries worth of the American way of war — we’re back to launching artillery barrages against neighborhoods in southern Iraq. Read the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (PDF) that Petraeus wrote if you want to know why that’s a bad idea. Or read Jeffrey Record on how it is the US never seems to get this right no matter how many times we resolve to do things differently.

Small Numbers

ESPN’s Daily Dime proclaim’s Allen Iverson’s Saturday performance the day’s worst:

Was Iverson bad? Not exactly. Was he good enough? No way. His 7-for-20 shooting (0-for-3 on 3s) was not what Denver needed in such a big game.

Here’s a question: Why does Iverson ever have games where he puts up three treys? The guy is an okay three point shooter — he sinks the NBA three 31 percent of the time, which is a heck of a lot better than most people can do — but though this is close, it’s distinctly below the break even point. Score three points on 31 percent of your possessions and you’ll rack up an offensive efficiency of 93 points per hundred possessions — terrible. Teams can easily afford to give him that shot all day. This is, I think, the sort of thing where looking at the numbers really does matter. Watching games, the difference between a 31 percent three point shooter and a 37 percent three point shooter isn’t going to be obvious. Over the long run, though, the 31 percent shooter is probably hurting his team while the 37 percent shooter is almost certainly helping. By eyeball, though, these are both guys who hit about one shot in three.

Credentialism

I hadn’t heard this story about MIT firing its Dean of Admissions not for any shortcomings in her job performance but for having lied 28 years ago and said she had a college degree when she first applied for a low-level position at MIT. I think Kevin Carey says most of what needs to be said about the irrationality of this and the broader social and cultural obsession with the potentially meaningless bachelor’s degree.

There’s this current well-intentioned mania for producing policies that will get more people to go to college, and to some extent to get more people to graduate from college, but it’s clear that the first step in anything along these lines is that we need to know something about why a college degree is valuable. Insofar as it’s a pure screening mechanism (and there’s considerable evidence that this is at least what it mostly is) then expanding access to college is only going to devalue the credential. Presumably there are some actually useful skills being imparted to some college students (my appreciation of the flaws of semantic internalism has, for example, much application to my role as a professional political pundit who must occassionally offer views about “originalism” as an approach to jurisprudence — and, yes, this is irony in case any Atlantic readers out there aren’t used to it) but it’s really crucial that we figure out what these are and find ways to spread the skills themselves rather than the credential. Meanwhile, the habit of disqualifying perfectly competent people from jobs based on a lack of degrees has become yet another brick in the American wall of inegalitarianism.

Why Don’t You Guys Ever Report the Good News?

Possibly because the “good things” happening in Iraq turn out to be sandcastles: “inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.”

I’ll Take The Low Road

We drove this morning to Taos along the highly-touted high road. It’s pretty cool. On the way back to Santa Fe, we took the faster but less-touted low road. In my opinion, this less-touted option — running alongside the Rio Grande along the bottom of a vast gorge — is actually much more interesting. Taking one way going and the other way going back is probably the smart play so it doesn’t really matter, but I really do wonder what these high road advocates are thinking.

Retaliation

Robert Wright is making sense:

We reacted to 9/11 by freaking out and invading one too many countries, creating more terrorists. With the ranks of terrorists growing — amid evolving biotechnology and loose nukes — we could within a decade see terrorism on a scale that would make us forget any restraint we had learned from the Iraq war’s outcome. If 3,000 deaths led to two wars, how many wars would 300,000 deaths yield? And how many new terrorists?

Or, by contrast, and Hillary Clinton and John Edwards:

Obama said he first would assure there was an effective emergency response and not a repeat of what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

He then turned his attention to the issue of intelligence. “The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, A) to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and, B) to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.”

He went on to say that what the United States must avoid at such a moment is alienating the world community “based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast,” adding that “we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own.”

His answer appeared shaped by the reaction, at home and abroad, to President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he was suggesting clearly that he would not follow that model in confronting a terrorist attack.

But in rapid succession, former senator John Edwards (N.C.) and Clinton offered rather different responses, sounding a far more aggressive tone in their determination to retaliate and unequivocal in their willingness to use force.

I sometimes face some skepticism from people about whether the foreign policy differences between the Democrats really matter. After all, people say, in the wake of Iraq nobody’s likely to just start up a new war for no reason at all. This is probably true. But the essence of national security policy is that the environment is always changing in unpredictable ways. It’s very doubtful that the Bush administration ever would have invaded Iraq had 9/11 not created the political moment in which it could be done. It’s very important that, if the country suffers a terrorist attack under the next administration, that the country be run by a group of people who’ll respond intelligently rather than by a group of people who’ll think Priority Number One should be lashing out to demonstrate “toughness.” Edwards, I think, mitigated his sins on this question by acting very well on the “war on terror” show of hands. Nobody in this race has really won me over on security questions, but Clinton has consistently managed to accomplish whatever the reverse of that is.

Hookers!

On the other hand, sometimes things do change. I leave DC for a week, for example, and suddenly we have hooker scandals popping up and the Deputy Secretary of State in charge of foreign aid programs is quitting. Not to be too shallow about it, but that’s a lot more interesting than the student loan graft that was in the papers before I left. Of course in many ways here the real scandal is that a guy in that position “a former chief executive of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co.”

The New Era

It looks like the new site is up and running. I’m still in Santa Fe — went to Bandelier yesterday and I’m going to drive to Taos later today. But if you’re hungry for political commentary, let me note that the timing of George Tenet’s anti-administration tilt sure is odd. It was clear years if you peered deeply between the lines that Tenet personally and the CIA generally were being made scapegoats for things that were primarily the fault of folks in the White House, in the Office of the Vice President, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. But officially Tenet, like Powell, remained a good solider on board with the party line.

Now Tenet flips. Not before Bush’s re-election, not before the midterms, not with the country still “deeply divided” about his administration, but with his approval ratings mired in the low thirties. For people who collaborated in the distasters of 2002-2004 to turn around and tell us now how terrible everything was is the political equivalent of taking cheap shots at a fighter whose already collapsed unconsious to the mat.

But not really. Really, it’s just the old DC suck-up. Tenet wasn’t happy with Bush before, but as long as Bush was riding high he was happy to be loyal, happy to take his medal and retire quietly. Now that Bush is weak, people want to say they had nothing to do with the whole mess. It’d be sad were it not so deadly serious.

A Weekend of Significant Transition

Okay, kids. I need to pack this computer up and drive to Santa Fe. By the time I make it there, I think we’re going to be in the transition window during which you shouldn’t see any new posts. Soon enough, though, the MatthewYglesias.com URL will start directing you to the new Atlantic site. I hope you like it.