Matt Yglesias

Nyhan Strikes Back

“[D]oes Yglesias really believe that the GOP won’t try to capitalize on Obama’s past history with drugs?” he asks. Of course I don’t (though I doubt the GOP will do it directly, it’s more an “independent expenditure” kind of thing to do), and I don’t think that’s what I said. What I said was that I don’t see anything racist about inevitable attacks on Barack Obama’s drug use.

I think there’s every reason to believe that a white candidate whose memoir strongly implied a past history of cocaine use would face attacks for it.

Edwards, Shrum, and the War

Chris Bowers reads Bob Shrum’s account of John Edwards’ decision to vote for the war (as Shrum tells it, Edwards was dubious, his wife was very opposed, but Shrum and other advisers convinced him it was politically necessary) and concludes:

More »« Less

Let a Couple Dozen Flowers Bloom

Kevin Carey manages to spin a trip to a Canadian music store into an extremely long analogy in favor of more heavy-handed curricular guidance on the part of college administrators:

This doesn’t mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment and taste in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.

[The point here being that the giant store-full-of-music model was rendered obsolete by the internet, but smaller stores where the staff can offer you judgment and insight still have value]

I’ve always found these kind of arguments about strict core requirements, laxer ones, etc. to be a bit puzzling. There probably isn’t a unique best way to handle this. Which is why it’s fortunate that even if you restrict your attention to the relatively small set of elite colleges and universities there are still a whole bunch of ‘em. It seems to me that there’s a set of defensible approaches to the issue (including no requirements whatsoever) and it’s good for some colleges to adopt each of them. I worry that pressure on each individual school to strike the “correct” balance leads ultimately to a kind of bland uniform compromise that serves no good purpose.

Human Rights Violation

Found on the MNF-Iraq website:

Sgt. Tierney Nowland teaches the Macarena dance with an Iraqi soldier of 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade during a break with Soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division out of Fort Lewis, Wash., on a cordon and search mission in Ameriyah, Iraq, May 16. Nowland is combat camera with the 982nd Signal Company, Wilson, N.C. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Elisha Dawkins.

Disturbing stuff.

A Substantive Post About the Issues

Well, not really, but Josh Marshall has one and it’s damn good. I wish he would write them more frequently. There seems to be a post-Memorial Day lull in the volume of scandals to cover.

Is There Something You Want To Tell Us?

Joe Klein writes about Mitt Romney’s weird campaign. The strangest thing is that thanks to GOP primary politics, he’s afraid of talking about what in a sane world would be the centerpiece of his campaign — the universal health care plan he signed into law in Massachusetts and Romney’s vision of using that plan as the basis for a federal-level plan. Instead, you get this health care page with a heading that promises universal care, a couple of very vague allusions to the Massachusetts initiative, and no policy proposals whatsoever.

Edwards on Spectrum Management

Good stuff. His letter even offers a solid brief description of the issue:

As you know, the Federal Communications Commission is now preparing to auction the 700 megahertz slice of the spectrum. This “beachfront” band is particularly well suited to wireless broadband because it has wide coverage and can easily pass through walls.

By setting bid and service rules that unleash the potential of smaller new entrants, you can transform information opportunity for people across America — rural and urban, wealthy and not. As much as half of the spectrum should be set aside for wholesalers who can lease access to smaller start-ups, which has the potential to improve service to rural and underserved areas. Additionally, anyone winning rights to this valuable public resource should be required not to discriminate among data and services and to allow any device to be attached to their service. Finally, bidding should be anonymous to avoid collusion and retaliatory bids.

This is the kind of thing where the president winds up with a ton of latitude, so it’s definitely nice to see a major candidate committing himself to sound views on this issue — the business interest pressure pushing in bad directions here is intense.

Chilly!

Not to just be all Jon Cohn, all the time here, but his article on Barack Obama’s health care plan says it would be change for the better, but criticizes Obama for being too timid:

More »« Less

The Origins of Big Government Conservatism

Reihan Salam makes some sound critiques of this Patrick Ruffini piece on where the GOP went astray, but I think he’s missing perhaps the biggest problem with Ruffini’s piece. He writes, for example, that “being sympathetic to the needs of seniors became a $400 billion prescription drug plan.”

Back in the real world, a desire to appear more sympathetic to the needs of seniors played only a small role in producing the “$400 billion” (I believe it’s closer to $600 billion than to $400 billion) prescription drug plan. What happened was that the Democrats had a $200+ billion prescription drug plan that was sympathetic to the needs of seniors. The GOP could have decided to demonstrate sympathy for seniors by supporting that plan. Or they could have decided to stand up for small government ideology and opposed it. Or they could have split the difference and devised a cheaper, less generous plan than the Democratic one that still gave seniors some help (perhaps something narrowly targeted at the poorest seniors), combining generosity with fiscal discipline.

Instead, they produced a more expensive plan. Not because they wanted to be more generous to seniors, but because they wanted to be more generous to pharmaceutical and insurance companies than did the Democrats. The trouble is that there’s simply a mismatch between conservatism’s ideological agenda and the agenda of its financial and institutional base. Jon Chait, for example, finds a new conservative magazine primping for more lenient treatment of white collar criminals. One could interpret this as a sign of a growing spirit of soft on crime humanitarianism on the right. The correct way to interpret it, however, is the same as the correct way to interpret the Medicare bill — ideological conservative dogma has been abandoned not in favor of moderation, but in favor of even more extreme advocacy of the interests of rich people.

Counterintuition

Jonathan Cohn: “Hillary Was Right: The Health Care Plan That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” James Fallows loves it, but it’s too counterintuitive for Andrew Sullivan.

It’s worth saying that it’s also too counterintuitive for Jonathan Cohn. He says right there in the text that he thinks a single-payer system would be better than the one Clinton proposed. The thing Clinton’s plan was supposed to have going for it that single-payer didn’t it that it was more politically realistic. But not realistic enough to say, be passed into law and avoid contributing to the 1994 debacle. So there are real limits to how right she was — it doesn’t make a ton of sense to say “politics aside, she had a good plan” when the plan itself was supposed to be a politically motivated compromise.

That said, Cohn raises the interesting point that while Clinton doesn’t think she was wrong about Iraq, she does claim to think she was wrong about health care. But what does she think she was wrong about? Just about the political calculations, or were there some substantive problems? It seems like an obvious set of questions to ask.

Wasting Time

Over the past 48 hours, I’ve spent an unwise amount of time trying to earn 1,000 skill points — and with it, Pro status — on Wii Tennis. Well, now I’ve succeeded and suffice it to say that nothing cool happens when you become a pro. Learn from my mistakes, kids. It’s just not worth it.

Rebranding America

Fred Kaplan and Price Floyd discuss the Bush administration’s catastrophic misunderstanding of how public diplomacy should work. In Floyd’s words, he resigned as head of media relations at the State Department because he got tired of trying to convince people “that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words.”

In essence, the Bush administration has tried to employ the same approach abroad as it has at home — ignore peoples’ real concerns and hope aggressive spin can check them. The trouble is that these tactics don’t work nearly as well abroad as they do at home, since the foreign press isn’t cowed by the American conservative movement, and foreigners don’t have Americans’ instinctive impulse to want to believe the best about the US government. Even at home, meanwhile, the White House’s positition has eventually collapsed in the face of overwhelming reality.

The Real Issues

I still recommend Daniel Levy if you’re looking for analysis of the Labour Party leadership fight in Israel, but only The Spine offers discussion of former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon’s “taut body.”

Too Little, Too Late

David Ignatius says the White House is adopting the ISG recommendations after all, and it’s a case of “better late than never.” But is it, really? It seems to me that to a very large extent we’ve gotten to the sorry position we’re in precisely through the Bush administration’s longtime habit of doing the right thing 6-12 months too late.

Sometimes, things just can’t be done too late. I keep trying to construct an analogy involving boats going over waterfalls, but the point is this. At each phase of the venture, suggests have been made of ways the US could lower our goals in the hopes of achieving something rather than just letting things get worse and worse and worse forever. The Bush administration then dismisses these critics as unduly pessimistic and things further deteriorate. Then, critics step-up their level of pessimism in response to the deterioration. At that point, the administration says the critics are being too pessimistic and adopts the policy recommendations they rejected months ago. But thanks to the continued deterioration of the situation, those old recommendations don’t work anymore.

The ISG, meanwhile, was already several shades too timid back in December. It was, however, at least cleared-eyed about the situation in Iraq. Months later, we’re further than ever from sectarian reconciliation, and the other points are essentially moot.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe

Joe Lieberman visits with the troops in Baghdad, and McClatchy Newspapers’ Leila Fadel is on hand to see what the troops weren’t willing to say to Lieberman’s face. Things like “We’re not making any progress. It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.”

Lieberman himself endorses the Green Lantern theory. “I think it’s important we don’t lose our will. To pull out would be a disaster.” I hear willpower cures gunshot wounds these days.

Prospects for Peace

New blog from the excellent Daniel Levy (Century Foundation, New America, etc.) includes much more coverage of the Israeli Labour Party leadership race than any sane person would want to read.

Perpetual War

Bush’s decision to analogize the US presence in Iraq to the one in South Korea is truly telling. The two situations could hardly resemble each other less. If we take Nouri al-Maliki’s government to be something like Syngman Rhee‘s dictatorship at the core of the analogy, then who plays the role of the North Koreans? How do the Kurds and the Sunnis fit into the picture? Where’s the USSR? Approve of it or not, the decades-long American military presence in South Korea has a very clear-cut rationale — it was there to defend America’s South Korean client regime from the USSR’s North Korean client regime and now inertia keeps it there because the DPRK still exists even if the ROK doesn’t really need outside protection.

In Iraq, none of this stands up at all. It’s just a raw expression of a desire to keep our troops in Iraq more-or-less forever. For no real reason. In a country where they’re clearly not wanted by either the Sunni Arabs or the Shiites, and where our “allies” in the government are as much Iran’s proxies as ours.

When Conservatives Fight

Watching conservatives find themselves staring at the pointy end of the Bush propaganda machine sure is fun. Here Rich Lowry is shocked to see that the White House is sometimes less than honest in its characterization of its own initiatives.

Western Conference

I spent a healthy proportion of the regular season wondering why people seemed to be writing the Spurs off, and now I think everyone’s going to be favoring them to win yet another championship. That said, their brilliant performance in Game 5 did leave me disappointed that San Antonio didn’t attempt to unveil the brutal Bonner-Oberto-Barry-Ginobili-Udrih all-white lineup.

Thompson as Clark

Ezra Klein and Jason Zengerle agree that “Fred Thompson is to the Republicans in ’08 as Wes Clark was to the Democrats in ’04. In other words, the highpoint of his campaign will be the day he gets in the race, because once he’s a serious candidate–and not just the fevered daydream of a dissatisfied base–voters will realize he’s not all that.”

I agree that Thompson’s luster is likely to fade. But what happened with Clark is that it seemed like he’d be a strong candidate — military background, southerner, etc. — but then it turned out he was really bad at campaigning. Thompson’s actually campaigned before and it seems he was pretty good at it. If he stumbles, it’ll be for some other, not-especially-Clark-like reasons.