Politics

by publius

Like Yglesias and Atrios, I find the press’s “Everything That Happens Is Bad for Democrats” narrative extremely annoying. (See yesterday’s Post for the most recent example). The more interesting question though is why it keeps happening. Why do ostensibly liberal reporters keep returning to this narrative frame?

Although unintentionally, I think Andrew Sullivan’s interesting article on Obama provides a possible answer: liberal guilt. Examining how the generation-gap affects Clinton and Obama’s respective liberalism, he writes:

A generational divide also separates Clinton and Obama with respect to domestic politics. Clinton grew up saturated in the conflict that still defines American politics. As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove her deeper into her political bunker. . . . She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives.

Frankly, I disagree that Obama is free from these demons. But still, Sullivan is on to something larger here. And that larger point is that liberals over the past two generations have been afraid to express their real views.

I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe Nixon’s victories. Maybe Reagan’s. Maybe Bush’s. Maybe from 1994. Maybe from the Latina union-supporting, ERA activist who dumped Mickey Kaus in college. I’m not sure. But somewhere along the way, liberals got it in their heads (not always wrongly) that showing their true colors risked professional and political harm.

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by Charles

This is my only front-page post at Redstate in support of a Republican candidate for the nomination. John McCain has little to no chance of getting nominated, but I’m supporting him anyway. My reasons are backing him are a combination of things, having to do with my agreement with him on key issues and for what I see as shortcomings in the other candidates. The slate of candidates is imperfect, so my rationale was to go with the least imperfect one. My three main criteria for picking a president in this election cycle are national security, the economy, and integrity. As I see it, McCain is the most solid of the candidates in those categories, so let me go through them.

More below the fold…

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by publius

I’ll second Andrew Sullivan on last night’s debate:

As someone who thinks Obama is still the best bet for real change in this election, I kept feeling underwhelmed by his performance. You wait for him to go in for the kill … and … he … never … quite gets there. He seems to be possessed of an almost pathological high-mindedness, and an inability to encapsulate his arguments in ways that get traction against his opponents. . . . Goddamn it: stop being so fricking reasonable and above it all.

To his credit, Obama wants to be a world-historical president. He wants to be transformative. He wants to be an FDR. A Kennedy. Even a Reagan. He wants to be what Bill Clinton could have been. He wants to usher in a new age, a new paradigm, and a new coalition.

Like many intellectuals before him, however, Obama is losing himself in a false romantic narrative of the mythical “Great Presidency.” Instead of acting — instead of seizing the existential moment — he is trying to emulate how these presidencies are remembered in the popular mind. He’s seeing what we today remember about FDR and Kennedy’s challenges to the nation, about Reagan’s public optimism, etc. And he’s trying to mimic that through high-minded nobleness. This is bad.

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by publius

It’s true that a Hillary Clinton victory isn’t yet inevitable – but it’s sure getting close. She’s got strong, commanding leads in the polls. Lots of money and institutional support. Tons of experience, etc. In short, she’s got all the things that inevitable nominees tend to have. The catch, though, is Iowa.

Personally, I think Iowa is the only thing standing in her way. And so the million dollar question at this point is how the other states will react to Iowa. It’s impossible to predict, but I’m going to take a stab at it by using information cascades.

What makes Iowa such a wild card is that it can trigger instant information cascades – or “herd behavior.” The basic idea is that cascades happen when people rely on the visible actions of others rather than their own imperfect or limited information.

For instance, imagine you are at a fancy-pants dinner with lots of people and don’t know what fork to use. Let’s say you’re 55% sure that the small fork is for salad. But, you see two other people before you pick up the longer fork for the salad. You get nervous and discount your own private information, opting for the big fork instead. Imagine too that the guy next to you is even more confident that the small fork is for salad. But, with three people opting for the big fork, he does the same. And on it goes until everyone is using the wrong fork. Thus, the cascade. (For more formal statistical discussions, see here – pdf).

We see the same thing happen with bubbles, financial panics, etc. But we also see it following Iowa. And that’s the problem.

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by hilzoy

From the SF Chronicle:

“Leading gay rights organizations, with the pointed exception of the Human Rights Campaign, withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.

The intense backlash by the gay community surprised House Democratic leaders, forcing them to postpone what had been intended as a big House vote this week to include gays and lesbians in the nation’s job discrimination laws for the first time in American history.

The debate playing out between gay rights activists and two of their biggest supporters in Congress raises a classic political question: Are activists better off compromising and accepting progress or continuing to fight for everything they want?

Gay rights groups have been waiting for a decade for the bill to pass, and many say a few more months to try to build support for including gender identity would be worth the wait. They say transgender people will have little chance of winning protection from discrimination if they aren’t included in this bill.

Pelosi and Frank, however, fear the inclusion of gender identity will kill the overall bill – again denying gays and lesbians protection against job discrimination.

Pelosi, D-San Francisco, issued conflicting statements Monday in reaction to the turmoil. The first declared her personal support for including transgender people in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act but asserted she would stick by her decision to drop them from the bill to give it a greater chance of passage.

About three hours later, the speaker issued a new statement saying, “After discussions with congressional leaders and organizations supporting passage” of the bill, committee and floor votes on the bill had been postponed to “allow proponents of the legislation to continue their discussions with members in the interest of passing the broadest possible bill.””

If I were a Congressperson, I would be genuinely torn about what to do. On the one hand, according to Barney Frank, whom I trust, whip counts show that the bill will fail if it includes a ban on employment discrimination against transgendered people, but will pass otherwise. If that’s right, then there’s a serious case to be made for banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians now, rather than leaving the entire LGBT community exposed to legal workplace discrimination. On the other hand, I loathe the idea of not banning discrimination against transgendered people, especially if that would mean that no such ban would be passed for the foreseeable future.

Luckily, however, I am a blogger and a citizen, not a Congressperson. And that means that my duty, as I see it, is clear. First, I should write my Representative, urging (in the case of my Representative) him to support the version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that secures the rights of transgendered people. And second, I should use my blog to argue my case. That argument, which is aimed at those of our readers who don’t know much about this topic, is below the fold. People who do know about it should feel free to add further information in comments. (Note: for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to stick to people who think that their biological gender is flatly wrong, and leave aside people with more muted gender issues.)

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by hilzoy

Those of us who don’t plan to read Robert Draper’s Dead Certain can find a lot its interesting anecdotes in Sidney Blumenthal’s review in Salon. For those of you who don’t even want to read the review (which you should), here are a few:

“In his interviews with Draper, he is constantly worried about weakness and passivity. “If you’re weak internally? This job will run you all over town.” He fears being controlled and talks about it relentlessly, feeling he’s being watched. “And part of being a leader is: people watch you.” He casts his anxiety as a matter of self-discipline. “I don’t think I’d be sitting here if not for the discipline … And they look at me — they want to know whether I’ve got the resolution necessary to see this through. And I do. I believe — I know we’ll succeed.” He is sensitive about asserting his supremacy over others, but especially his father. “He knows as an ex-president, he doesn’t have nearly the amount of knowledge I’ve got on current things,” he told Draper.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor’s mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, “Karl, hang up my jacket.” In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush’s attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him “Pigpen,” for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family — certainly not people like them.)

Bush’s deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, “You looked mad,” he shot back, “I wasn’t mad! Tell them that!”

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: “KARL!” Rove, according to Draper, was Bush’s “favorite punching bag,” and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. “Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president’s support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a ‘Big New Thing.'” Other aides played on Bush’s self-conception as “the Decider.” “To sell him on an idea,” writes Draper, “aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision.” But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.””

Stop and think for a moment: if your assistant greeted you every morning with the words “Thank you for the privilege of serving today”, how would you respond? I think I’d make light of it the first day, but if it continued, I’d say: I appreciate the compliment, but it’s really not necessary. If, God forbid, my assistant went on saying it, I would at some point have to sit him or her down and explain that it made me uncomfortable. The one thing I really can’t imagine is letting someone go on saying that day after day. It’s just too crazy.

Which is, I suppose, just one more piece of evidence that I am not, in fact, George W. Bush.

To continue (below the fold):

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