Matt Yglesias

On the Road

Just putting up a quick post from the Atlanta airport to let y’all know that I’m waiting for my flight to Minneapolis to go cover the Republican Convention with some other members of the ThinkProgress team. The exigencies of travel and convention coverage may alter the blogging schedule somewhat for the next few days but I’m hoping to bring some high-quality content to the world including, one hopes, some candid camera footage of what conservative activists really think. To that end, in National Airport (or “Reagan National Airport” as our conservative friends say) earlier I picked up this McCain for president cap — I’ve already been complimented on it several times since reaching Atlanta.

The Proximity Factor

Alaska is close to Russia! Now an official talking point.

UPDATE: Also: “understands what’s at stake here?” What is at stake here? Are the Russians threatening Alaska? Even in Red Dawn that didn’t happen.

The Party of Mooseburgers

Ta-Nehisi Coates says Sarah Palin is “elitism bait” and arguing that “the entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.” Perhaps. But here’s the thing — nobody more out of touch with middle American than I am, and I’ve eaten moose. That’s because, fundamentally, the moose is a snobby, northeastern elitist animal. As per Wikipedia:

In North America, the Moose range includes almost all of Canada, most of central and western Alaska, much of New England and upstate New York, the upper Rocky Mountains, Northeastern Minnesota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

Basically you can find moose in places where no people live (viz: Alaska, Michigan’s UP) and in New England where I’ve had my moose burger. Crucial swing regions of the country — the rust belt, the southwest, the border south — are totally moose-free zones. By contrast, anyone who’s gone to summer campaign in Maine (which is to say northeastern elitists) will at some point have been sitting in a non-moving van waiting for a moose to stop blocking a narrow road. Moose are also found Scandinavia, land of social democracy, where they call them “elk” (confusingly, the animals Americans cal “elk” is different from the one Europeans call “elk”; their “elk” is our “moose.”

Women More Skeptical of Palin Than Men

I don’t think this is very mysterious. Women and men have, on average, different political opinions with women being generally more left-wing than men are. Since Sarah Palin is very conservative, you’d expect women to be more dubious about her. Given a choice between two candidates with similar views on the issues (i.e., Obama v. Clinton) you see women flocking toward the woman, but given a choice between two tickets with very different views (i.e., Obama-Biden vs. McCain-Palin) women will back the more progressive ticket.

Bush: Bolton Not Credible

Here’s a wacky story — hard-core neocons confront George W. Bush about him having abandoned their fringiest ideas:

Boot remained unimpressed. He cited a column in that morning’s Wall Street Journal by John Bolton, who was Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, lacerating the administration for betraying its own principles by lifting some sanctions on North Korea in exchange for an incomplete accounting of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” Bolton wrote.

Bush grew more agitated at the mention of his own former senior diplomat. “Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible,” the president said bitterly. Bush had brought Bolton into the top ranks of his administration, fought for Senate confirmation and, when lawmakers balked, defied critics to give the hawkish aide a recess appointment. “I spent political capital for him,” Bush said, and look what he got in return. The president went on to defend his North Korea decision, saying his “action for action” approach held out the most hope of getting rid of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

Of course Bush is right, Bolton isn’t a credible thinker on national security issues. But Bolton is also right — the inherent unworkability of the Bush doctrine has persuaded Bush to substantially abandon it in the waning days of his administration. But before Bush subscribed to the “Bush doctrine” it was John McCain’s doctrine, and he shows no sign of having left the true faith.

The Bridge to Nowhere

In addition to being only a little corrupt (which is good by AK conservative standards!) the other policy-related thing we’ve heard about Sarah Palin is that she killed Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere.” Except it seems clear that what she actually did was fight hard to get federal funding for the bridge, and only abandoned the project when it became clear that federal funds wouldn’t be forthcoming. Nothing wrong with that, of course, you expect Governors to support pork-barrel schemes that benefit their state, but this alleged bridge-busting was heavily featured in the public’s introduction to this previously unknown figure and it doesn’t even turn out to be true.

Hurrican Campaigning

I know that if I lived in an area that was trying to prepare / evacuate in advance of a major national disaster, what I’d really want would be for a presidential candidate to swing by for a campaign appearance, distracting local political officials and drawing down resources of the local public safety agencies. After all, it’ll look good on camera to be engaged with the problem!

The Tina Fey Factor

Atrios is surprised that this is an official McCain-Palin campaign product; he thinks it “looks like something from a bad Hollywood sitcomish movie about a presidential campaign.” But what it really looks like — exactly like — is something from a movie where the joke is that Tina Fey is John McCain’s running mate. It’s the part she was born to play.

Sarah Palin, Feminist

All the women I know think it’s hilarious to express your political disagreements with female legislators by using the term “bitch” and mocking their physical appearance:

At least we see why McCain likes her so much.

Stevens Hearts Palin

So here’s the ad the very corrupt Ted Stevens cut for Sarah Palin, who’s well-known for being less corrupt than Ted Stevens. It got “scrubbed” from her website, but you can’t stop YouTube:

One thing to consider here is (a) this ad sucks, it’s not up to any kind of professional standard and (b) it was part of a winning political campaign. That’s how far from the big stage Alaska politics is.

On The Upswing?

George W. Bush apparently decided to seize on a week of mixed (as opposed to uniformly bad) economic indicators to argue that the economy’s turning around. I could try to offer a rebuttal, I suppose, but I’m always a bit taken aback by how dominated political arguments are by disputes about the present state of the economy. The economy was, uncontroversially, doing pretty well in 1998 but pretty much everything progressives would put on the table today would also have been a good idea ten years ago. There’s never a good time for your country to have an inefficient, unfair health care finance system and there’s never a bad time to find economically viable ways of mitigating future environmental catastrophe. Or for those on the other side of the aisle, if lowering the tax burden paid by rich people will have a beneficial “supply-side” effect that sparks broad-based economic growth, then this is a good thing to do whether the economy’s faring well or poorly.

For the most part, good ideas are good ideas rain or shine. Of course the overall economic situation is shown to have impact on voting behavior, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that the causal mechanism is the objective economic conditions facing undecided voters, not disputes between politicians about how to characterize the situation. After all, in a continent-spanning country of about 300 million people lots of individual families’ economic circumstances will deviate from the mean no matter what.

The Sexism of the Palin Pick

Read Ann Friedman on the implicit sexism of the theory that Sarah Palin will have some massive appeal to women who, apparently, just have no opinions about the issues whatsoever. Then consider figures like Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe or Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutcheson or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Connecticut Governor Jody Rell all of whom are Republican women who are more conventionally qualified for higher office than Palin, but none of whom pass the “dogmatically right-wing” test to a sufficient degree. Which is fine, if you want to run to the right you run to the right. But expecting moderate-to-liberal women to sign on for something like that is silly — clearly the commitment here is to the cause of abortion criminalization and run-amok oil drilling rather than the advancement of women.

More Drilly Than The Oil Companies

The two main positive things I’ve heard about Sarah Palin from conservatives, reflecting the current mishmash of contradictions that is the McCain platform, is that like McCain she takes on big oil while also loving oil drilling. What does that mean? Gregg Erickson from the Anchorage Daily News explains:

Silver Spring, Md.: You say she “took on” the oil companies, but that she favors drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. In what ways did she stand up to Big Oil, and in what ways might she be in their pocket?

Gregg Erickson: She is strongly in favor of oil development. She just wants the state to get a bigger share of the profits, and wants the companies to develop their Alaska resources faster than the companies consider profitable or prudent.

Meanwhile, energy issues are the one area of substantial national concern that Palin seems to have some real background in. But my general sense is that when people talk about an “energy issue” or crisis or problem, that they’re not trying to say that current policy doesn’t work well enough for oil producing regions of the world. Maybe I’m wrong.

Meeting Mike O’Hanlon

Thursday evening I had the opportunity to appear on Al-Hurra, America’s government-funded Arabic-language television network (and, no, I don’t speak Arabic and, yes, the network might be more popular if it didn’t feature so many Americans-who-need-to-be-translated) to do some commentary on the Democratic Convention before Barack Obama’s big speech. To my surprise, my fellow guest was none other than Michael O’Hanlon (the photo’s not very good, my seat was pretty far from his):

Showing off his savvy TV veteran skills, O’Hanlon brought a pair of sunglasses to the studio that he could wear between our on-camera moments in order to avoid being blinded by prolonged exposure to TV lighting. I’d never met him before, and we only chatted extremely briefly once we were done because I wanted to hurry home and see Obama.

Killing the Brand

John McCain and Barack Obama are both noteworthy for getting better-than-average press and for having savvy communications teams. They’re also noteworthy for the fact that their teams have very different ideas about what their job is supposed to be. The Obama team is constantly frustrating progressive bloggers and news junkies by being extremely cavalier about the news cycle. They don’t seem especially interesting in pouncing on gaffes or in responding to accusations, and they’re not especially quick on the draw or generous with talking points. Instead, they have a very inner-directed approach that’s all about building and cultivating the Obama brand to their own specifications and on their own schedule. The McCain campaign’s not like that at all. They’re obsessed with winning the news cycle and they’re good at it. But they’re much less interested in the McCain brand. That’s one thing you see with the “POW! POW! POW!” schtick — McCain’s war record is a great asset so they don’t hesitate to bust it out in all kinds of situations irrespective of the fact that busting it out constantly undermines the asset and creates a powerful negative counter-narrative.

What you see with the Palin pick, from a political strategy point of view, is I think the McCain campaign’s focus on winning the news cycle taken to a myopic and senseless extreme. The case for Palin in news cycle terms, is pretty good:

1. Crazy pick utterly stomps on the Democratic Convention as a news story.
2. Choosing a woman gives the tired PUMA story new legs.
3. Crazy pick confuses Democratic oppo research and gets into Obama OODA loop.
4. Palin is a hard-right conservative who the base loves so no dissonance.

Alaska Fun Facts Part IV

When John McCain started his 2008 presidential campaign Sarah Palin was not yet governor of Alaska.

VP Who?

Okay, this confirms what I’d only inferred earlier — John McCain’s barely met or spoken to Sarah Palin, and other key McCain aides have never met her at all, with some of his main supporters being as ignorant about her as any normal person would be:

As Chuck Todd says at the end of that clip, this probably won’t matter politically. The Palin choice was a savvy news cycle gambit on one of the few days of the campaign in which VP picks make a difference. If all you care about is “winning” the news cycle, then I guess you don’t need to know the person at all. If you care about governing . . . .

Palin: Global Warming Not Man-Made

It’s common for the top and bottom of a presidential ticket to disagree about certain issues, but it’s a little bit strange for them to disagree about elementary facts. Part of John McCain’s “maverick” status, for example, is that even though he now opposes his own climate change bill his website still says things like “John McCain will establish a market-based system to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mobilize innovative technologies, and strengthen the economy.” Sarah Palin, by contrast, says of global warming “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”

This is perhaps a problem with picking a running mate you’ve never met.

Presumably McCain disagrees, though I’d be hard-pressed to trust the judgment of someone who denies basic scientific realities just because its bad interest-group politics in an oil state.

Palin on Iraq

Make of this what you will:

UPDATE: Apologies, I misunderstood what Time was doing here — this interview actually happened a couple of weeks ago. Still, strange for someone under consideration for the VP job not to have done any preparation.

Good Ratings

Lots of people watched Barack Obama:

Day four of the Democratic National Convention featured the acceptance speech by nominee Sen. Barack Obama. The convention was carried live during prime time on ten networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. Coverage varied by network, all ten aired live coverage from approximately 10-11PM (ET). The final night drew the largest audience so far for the Democrats (24.5% of all American homes), eclipsing the audience reach the three previous evenings.

I wonder about the viewership counts for events like this one that people tend to watch in groups. I think there were a dozen people at my house last night to watch Obama. Needless to say, the fact that tens of millions of people want to watch Obama speaking is sure to be an even bigger liability for his campaign than the fact that 80,000 people turned out to watch it live.