The Newseum has a fun feature called Today’s Front Pages, the front pages of newspapers from around the US and the world. As of my posting this at 3 AM Eastern time Nov 5, it hasn’t yet ticked over to showing the Nov 5 papers, but maybe it will have by the time you read this. Here’s the link if you’re reading this after Nov 5 2008.

Right now the NYT home page has a tall all-caps OBAMA as its lone topline, then a smaller subhead below. I like this presentation best of the newspaper pages I’ve seen so far.

Another site that should have good stuff tomorrow: The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s blog of giant-size photos.

My fellow prisoners, the end is near. Here are a few predictions.

Let’s start easy: Obama wins the presidency.

Of the close states, Obama wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Florida (by a whisker), but not North Carolina or Indiana.

Democrats get 57 seats in the Senate (not counting Lieberman, of course).

Obama doesn’t get assassinated any time in the next four years. (Attempts and woundings don’t count.)

McCain doesn’t run again. His health declines precipitously sometime within the next four years, provoking a collective shudder in the US (and the rest of the world), and setting forward a few years the age considered acceptable for a presidential candidate.

Sarah Palin does not become the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Neither does Guilliani.

North Korea attempts to back out of its non-proliferation agreement with the US within a few months. Result: Big fuss. Widely considered Obama’s first big test.

Some time in the next four years, North Korea suddenly collapses. Handling the fallout becomes a much more significant foreign policy priority for the Obama presidency than almost anyone expected.

US troop presence in Iraq is reduced quickly, but there are still at least 5,000 US troops in Iraq in 2012.

The Republican party bounces back surprisingly quickly.

The Obama Presidency becomes the best thing that has ever happened to Fox News. Fox News plays its role as Unofficial Opposition with great gusto and makes a ton of money doing so.

Here’s an easy one: The Bush team behaves in a deeply unprofessional way during the transition. The media’s response is disappointingly tepid.

Politics becomes interesting again. For eight long years, the country has been run by hateful, blinkered people. During this time, and especially over the last four years, politics has only been interesting because it involves issues vital to our lives and often to the fate of humanity. What’s been largely missing is a sense that an intelligent contribution to political discourse could ever have a meaningful impact on the people who actually make decisions. For all the disagreements among Obama supporters, I think that there’s going to be a real, and extremely refreshing sense, that political debate is an area in which intelligent, well-argued, evidence-backed contributions might conceivably sway reasonable people in positions in power. A lot of very smart people all over the country are going to find that wildly exhilarating. There’s an incredible amount of pent up energy, enthusiasm and ideas out there. May it make a difference.

It’s been a long, annoying ride, my friends, and right now we all just want it to be over. Looking back, I think this little clip sums up the entire campaign. It’s the contrast between someone who is, for all his imperfections, an adult talking to other adults in an adult fashion, and a glib, uninformed college kid struggling very unsuccessfully to fake her teaching assistant into thinking that she’s done the readings.

Good luck, Mr. Obama. You’re going to need it.

Gosh, it sure it nice to see Obama kicking McCain’s ass.

How’s he doing it? Well, no ass-kicking this serious has a single cause. McCain has run a campaign that seems almost designed to highlight his weaknesses, among them a lack of discipline and coherence. His basic campaign pitches are so stupid—Obama pals around with terrorists, Obama is a socialist—that they really amount to an insult to the intelligence of the voters he’s trying to woo. And, of course, there’s Palin, the gift to the Democrats that keeps on giving. On top of all this, the media smells blood, and has started to call the McCain camp out on some of its stupider stuff recently.

What else? Ah, let’s not forget the money. Obama has lots and lots of money. And he can spend it too, thanks to his decision to break his earlier promise about accepting public money in exchange for spending limits. It’s been widely remarked that this has given Obama a real advantage, though McCain’s camp is running such a crappy campaign that I’m not quite sure how decisive it is. Still, I’ll bet it’s made some difference, and perhaps quite a significant one.

This is an issue I’ve not been inclined to think about much recently. It’s been simply too sweet to watch McCain getting his ass kicked. And looking around at other blogs I see that other people seem to share my view. But seriously, can you imagine how we’d howl if our preferred candidate were being outspent by such a wide margin? After breaking a promise about accepting public funding?

I’m starting to think that fans of Obama should be more troubled by this than we are presently. For one thing, I think everyone now recognizes that the system of public financing is dead. This is bad. It certainly wasn’t a perfect system, but reforming it would surely have been preferable to seeing it die.

It also seems potentially bad from a long-term tactical point of view. It’s not as if the Democrats’ fund raising advantage is likely to remain a deep structural feature of American politics. (Is it? I’m just guessing.) So long as they make any pretense to look out for the less fortunate, the more fortunate are, all other things being equal, going to be giving more to the other side. Serious reform of campaign finances seems to me to be in the long term interests of any left-leaning political party.

And then there’s this, which the right-wingers are talking about a lot recently, and everybody else not so much. I’m not sure what to make of it, or whether there’s something left out of this story that I don’t know about. But it certainly doesn’t look good, and that matters too.

I’m so happy about Obama’s big lead right now that I have to really work to care about this issue. And of course I’m only letting myself care now that he has a wide lead. But I’m guessing that some time in the not-too-distant future, I’ll find that caring about campaign finance issues comes much more naturally.

Here’s a short video to watch (unless you are sick to death of US election stuff). It’s a take-off on a series of beer ads from several years ago which had a group of friends going “Wassup?” “Wazzzzzzuuuuuupppp?” to each other on the phone.

Wassup 2008

Keep watching to the end.

It’s astonishing how quickly the bottom has fallen out of John McCain’s support among prominent Republicans recently. The latest defection is that of Charles Fried, of all people. Fried isn’t just a prominent and respected senior Republican. He was also, until recently, associated with McCain’s campaign as an adviser. He’s since dumped McCain, reportedly citing as his main reason, “the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis.”

OK, so obviously this is a good reason to dump McCain. McCain’s choice of running mate demonstrates a serious lack of judgment. Still, I have to wonder about all these Republicans who suddenly seem to consider it a bad idea to put someone unqualified and not very bright in a position of enormous responsibility and power. There is of course the most obvious comparison, Dan Quayle, who certainly didn’t help Bush Senior, but who also didn’t provoke widespread outrage and a number of high profile defections. But there is also George Bush himself. Is Sarah Palin really that much less qualified than George Bush was in 2000? Is she really that much less intelligent or intellectually curious than him?

Everybody is dumping on poor McCain for having the temerity to propose that someone utterly unqualified might make an acceptable President. But this is exactly the proposal that the Republican party made to the rest of the country when it nominated George Bush a little over eight years ago. You can hardly blame McCain for thinking that he would get away with it. Practically everybody else in the party has.

I can’t really figure the reasons for the difference in reaction to Palin, Quayle and Bush. It seems likely to me that if Palin had been a big hit with the public, or even if the McCain campaign were simply doing better, many of those expressing qualms about Palin now would have made their peace with McCain’s choice. It also seems to me that a whole lot of people have been really looking for a reason to dump McCain, and that the Palin choice just gives them a convenient and socially acceptable way to explain their decision to themselves and others.

And sometimes, too, I wonder how much sexism has to do with the intensity of the reaction to Palin in certain quarters. You see Quayle and Bush routinely mocked for being stupid and uninformed, but you don’t see nearly as often such a widespread consensus in American politics that being stupid and uninformed is some kind of disqualification for higher office. It wouldn’t surprise me if a woman could more easily provoke a sudden fit of concern about minimal standards than a man, however reasonable the concerns are in their own right.

Everybody has been so busy recently marveling at the stupidity of Sarah Palin’s statements in her interview with Katie Couric that I think they haven’t stopped to savour the stupidity of some of the questions Palin was asked. How about this:

Couric: When President Bush ran for office, he opposed nation-building. But he has spent, as you know, much of his presidency promoting democracy around the world. What lessons have you learned from Iraq? And how specifically will you try to spread democracy throughout the world?

Bush, of course, has not been “promoting democracy around the world.” Changing this to “attempting to promote democracy around the world” would be almost as bad, implying that Bush’s efforts have at least been sincere, which I doubt, and which in any case Couric is in no better position to judge than I. The question accepts a highly partisan, and totally idiotic, way of framing the entire debate about Bush’s foreign policy.

Palin has no excuse for being so uninformed and unprepared, but at least she can point to the fact that she’s attempting to compose answers on the fly. But that’s Couric’s prepared question. She and her staff had time to think about it. And that’s what she asked.

I just got back from watching the debate with some friends. I haven’t seen any commentary about the debate yet, except for a few minutes of talking heads right afterward. Anyway, my impression is that John McCain kicked Obama’s ass tonight. He came off as more personable, tougher, and more in command of the facts than Obama. Obama seemed to me to miss countless opportunities to knock McCain down a notch, and much to my frustration, repeatedly stressed points of agreement with McCain, even as McCain repeatedly claimed that Obama was confused on some point or another. In a sane world McCain would not be in any position of power, because he’s a rash, unprincipled warmonger whose stated policies would be disastrous for the country, and whose actual policies would be worse. But it’s not a sane world, and people would have to know something about the issues involved to catch the difference between the men, thanks in part to McCain’s impressive delivery, and in part to Obama’s nearly complete failure to press points with any effectiveness. They don’t, and so I think in the political sense the debate went clearly to McCain.

My only consolation is that there weren’t any game-changing gaffes, as far as I could tell, at least. Also, George Bush lost the debates in 2000 and 2004, in my opinion, but he still won the second of those elections. So perhaps these debates don’t matter too much, unless one candidate badly slips up.

Ugh.

Steve Schmidt’s behaviour, as reported in stories like this one and this one, is a bit hard to figure. In case you’re not in a click-on-links mood today, he’s acting like a bitter child whenever the press comes up with a story he doesn’t like (or fails to put out a story he does like). I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be just one more example of the long-established practice of working the ref, which has worked especially well for Republicans in the past. Both sides do this. Both sides are expected to do this. But it’s a delicate business, and there’s a note of petulance in Schmidt’s complaining that seems to me to convey weakness rather than strength.

(Note: I apologize for breaking Explananda with this post last night — I let my enthusiasm override my remembering-how-to-post.)

I suppose it’s fitting since my last post was right before the 2004 election, but I never thought my return would be about politics. Well, kind of.

For various reasons, including the interesting Obama/Clinton delegate math, I’ve been following this year’s election in greater detail than any in the past. Which, unfortunately, means I’ve been reading a lot of political articles. In the course of my travails I came across a particularly egregious example of the mis-use of statistics that got me worked up enough that I had to write about it somewhere. So here you go.

I found this in a post yesterday by Peggy Noonan at WSJ.com:

I’m bumping into a lot of critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. “You do the math,” the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. “We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos.”

The worst thing is that this even passes the sniff test; 262 times 100,000 is way, way less than 100,000 times 10,000, so it does seem like there are more people living in small cities than big cities.

Except: the first alarm should go off when you look at the numbers for small cities. 100,000 times 10,000 is 1 billion, and the population of the US is just over 0.3 billion. And of course, when you actually get to the facts, you find that over 58% of the US lives in cities with over 200,000 people.

The trick is using a floor for the number you want to minimize, and a ceiling for the number you want to maximize. The counting in the quote above counts New York City as a city of 100,000, and counts Eastport, Maine (my ancestral home, population 1640) and many other towns with population under 1000 as cities of 10,000.

Another example of this fun statistical manipulation: only 1% of the US population has a household income of over $400,000, but over 50% of the population has a household income of under $50,000. Clearly, the evidence show that most of the wealth in the US lies in the hands of working families.

Matthew Yglesias. Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats

I enjoy reading Matthew Yglesias’s blog, so it’s hardly surprising that I also found Heads in the Sand such a pleasant read. Because I usually stick to his blog posts, I’ve tended to think of him as a master of the short form post, typically a clear, succinct line of attack against a single idea. But it turns out that he’s also got a knack for holding my attention over the length of a book. If you like reading about American foreign policy, this well-written and intelligent book is well worth your time.

Heads in the Sand reviews the Bush administration’s policies since 2001 and compares them unfavourably to Yglesias’s preferred alternative, liberal internationalism. This is the view that conflicts between states can, and should, be handled by international institutions, rather than raw zero-sum power politics. Moreover, although powerful actors within such an international system may sometimes seem better off if they ignore the shackles and restraints imposed by such a system, in fact adherence to rules agreed upon by all can in fact be very beneficial even to the powerful. The Bush administration, needless to say, has tended to take the superficial view, regarding international laws, norms, and institutions as irrelevant annoyances. The result has been, in my opinion, far less freedom of movement than it might otherwise have enjoyed. (Or perhaps, far less freedom of the kind of movement that the U.S. ought to desire. Had the Bush administration respected international norms and institutions, it would not have had the freedom to invade Iraq. But this freedom was hardly beneficial.)

Yglesias is very hard, and rightly so, on the political and substantive merits of the strategies pursued by the Democratic party’s politicians and strategists in response to the Bush administration, especially since 2001. Perpetually stuck in a “defensive crouch”, they end up conceding keys elements of Bush’s outlook, and tend to quibble about tactics (like troop numbers in Iraq, for example), rather than attempting to reconsider the wisdom of the Bush administration’s overall strategy. The result is that Democrats look weak, uncertain, and incoherent. Electorally, they were punished for this in 2002 and 2004. 2006 was much better, but Yglesias warns that the failure to be clear-headed and honest in offering a genuine alternative to Bush means that the gains are easily reversed. This seems to me absolutely correct, and I frequently found myself hoping that Yglesias’s book was making the rounds within the Obama campaign.

One criticism I’ve heard of Yglesias’s writing is that he rarely engages with positions to his left. Perhaps part of the reason for this tendency is an extremely well-justified frustration on Yglesias’s part (which I share) at the habit of some left and centrist thinkers of training an inordinate amount of attention at very left-wing positions, as though these were actually held by people in positions of power. Because attention (and column space) is finite, the attention qualified as inordinate precisely because it so often left unchallenged toxic, popular, and deeply hawkish views held by people actually in positions in power. Michael Walzer serves as an exemplar of this sort of thinking in the book, but Yglesias has some other fine examples too.

Fair enough, I say. But Walzer-style finger-wagging is hardly the only way to engage with positions to one’s left. Indeed, one might consider . . . engaging them to see if they’re actually worth adopting, or to explain why they’re not to intelligent people of good faith who hold them. In particular, I would have appreciated much more engagement with principled scepticism about the justifiability of certain uses of American power that Yglesias regards as consistent with liberal internationalism. (Yglesias’s preface thanks the wise and venerable Jim Henley for reading a complete draft of the book. And Henley must have given Yglesias shit about this too.) Yglesias, for example, seems to embrace the consensus that the first Gulf War – “a swift and lost-cost victory” – was a fine affair:

The first Bush administration, acting within the internationalist tradition, chose to seize the opportunity [to use the UN to prevent aggressive warfare]. By waging war on Iraq through the mechanism of the UN, and by fighting for the limited objectives of expelling Iraq from Kuwait and forcing it to abandon the research and development of illegal weapons, the Bush administration did more than preserve Kuwait’s independent. It established a new, long-dreamed-of-norm — the principle that aggressive war, long notionally banned by various treaties, would actually be repulsed by concerted international action. This achievement was—and is—fairly remarkable and, though it’s seldom commented on, has held up shockingly well in the intervening years.

It’s here, for example, that I think Yglesias could learn a thing or two from sterner critics of U.S. foreign policy. It’s very true that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait presented an enormous challenge to a world looking to put aggressive war behind it. And the quality of Iraq’s brief stay in Kuwait left little doubt about what lay in store for Kuwait had Iraq not been forced out. When legitimate concerns about Iraq’s weapons programs are added to the mix, the case for this war deserves a respectful hearing, even if not acceptance.

But in retrospect the case against the first Gulf War looks stronger and stronger to me. First, when Yglesias points to “a swift and lost-cost victory,” of course he means it was a swift and lost-cost victory for the U.S. and its allies. For Iraqis it was anything but. Obviously Yglesias, who tends to be fairly sensitive to these issues, doesn’t mean to imply otherwise, but I often wonder how seriously people weigh this cost when they consider the competing considerations involved in assessing the justice of the first Gulf War. The U.S. systematically destroyed Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, resulting in massive and widespread suffering and death among its civilian population. This was deliberate policy. Because, contra Yglesias, U.S. goals went beyond forcing Iraq out of Kuwait and dismantling Iraqi weapons capacity. It was quite clear throughout both the elder Bush and Clinton administrations that the sanctions imposed would not be lifted so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power, and that the purpose of the original destruction was to discredit him as thoroughly as possible in order to facilitate his overthrow. (And while Iraq was obviously seriously dysfunctional by the time of the first Gulf War, the decade of sanctions, isolation, and suffering have surely contributed to the difficulties Iraqis now face as they struggle to rebuild their country. They are recovering from far more than Saddam Hussein.)

All of this encourages the thought that the case for the war is less obvious than is often assumed. At the very least it serves as a warning that even a war responding to a serious threat to international security is likely to be waged by people with a pathological indifference to human suffering, who are willing to use techniques over an extended period of time that are vindictive, cruel, uncivilized. Yglesias’s book is not about the first Gulf War, and so I don’t want to ding him for failing to go into length about it. But if I’m right that the first Gulf War is seriously morally problematic, then I do think it’s a problem for someone who takes it as naturally flowing from the liberal internationalism that he champions.

Kosovo provides another example of this. Yglesias takes Kosovo as a difficult case for liberal internationalism, but the war at least arguably squeaks by on his telling. But I think Kosovo is problematic for all kinds of reasons. In addition to the wholesale bombing of yet another country’s civilian infrastructure, here’s one: The air war was so damn easy for Americans that it really did play a role in fostering a mentality among many influential Americans that made the Iraq War possible. I’m sorry but that is a serious cost of that war.

Now, just because these wars, which strike me as problematic, are consistent with liberal internationalism as Yglesias understands it, doesn’t necessarily mean that liberal internationalism isn’t an outlook worth adopting. It might simply be the case that liberal internationalism needs supplementing with additional principles about the uncertainty and unpredictability of war and a good helping of scepticism about the people likely to wage it.

Soon enough, with a bit of luck, we may see a return to the American tradition of liberal internationalism. That tradition makes the Bush years look very bad in comparison. But then again, what doesn’t? If we see a return to this tradition, we’re really only getting started in thinking about the proper uses of American power and influence in the world.

Palin will “win” (in the sense of coming out of the debate with more people on her side) the televised debates with Biden. This is because nothing Biden’s advisers do beforehand is going to be able to stop him from highhandedly and condescendingly lecturing her throughout the debate. He simply won’t be able to resist, and when he gives in to the sweet temptations of condescension he’ll inevitably hand the other side a real gift. It’s a good thing it doesn’t count for too much.

Jane Mayer. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

After the scandal of Abu Grieb, the Bush administration insisted that the torture and abuse of detainees had been the work of a few bad apples. But of course the abuse was only a manifestation of a much deeper rot, for which top officials bore primary responsibility. I’ve sometimes had the impression of similar excuse-making in the attitudes of even some of the fiercest critics of the Bush administration, in the claim that the Bush administration represents a radical and unprecedented break with the past. It strikes me as naive to depict the Bush administration as a few bad apples, in an otherwise upright tradition legal and ethical conduct. On the contrary, the Bush administration seems to me part of a larger moral and legal rot that is systemic, and has unfortunately deep roots in American political culture (alongside much more admirable tendencies and traditions).

Jane Meyer’s new book The Dark Side has helped me to reflect on, and to a certain extent, modify, these assumptions. Mayer is familiar with the Church Committee, and with past American abuses of power. She doesn’t base her argument for a significant break with the past on what the Bush administration has done so much as on the legal arguments that the administration has advanced, most often in secrecy, to defend and support its policies. Much of this is new, and its long-term consequences are likely to be wretched.

A great deal of the action in Mayer’s book is, for this reason, legal. The new legal doctrines advanced by David Addington, Cheney’s legal counsel for the period covered by the book, and John Yoo, among others, were fiercely resisted by other lawyers in the administration. Meyer meticulously details the legal arguments and maneuvers used by various parties to this debate against the background of events in the so-called War on Terror.

Mayer book is, as far as I can tell, balanced, careful, and accurate, while rarely engaging in the pointless he-said/she-said style of reporting that so many journalists use to avoid the implications of their reporting. When an official lies, she points it out, clearly and unequivocally. A book like this is difficult to ignore, if you care at all about moral and legal issues surrounding torture and the Bush administration’s policies. If even a quarter of the book is accurate, the United States would only need to be a country serious about following its own laws for hundreds of people, from the President on down, to be put on trial for torture and other serious crimes.

Reading this, it occurs to me, not for the first time, that the U.S. could benefit substantially by making a fairly minor change to the rules governing Presidential pardons: don’t allow outgoing Presidents to issue them. If Bush wants to pardon a bunch of people preemptively for torture and other war crimes, let him do it before the election and watch his party pay the consequences. Similarly, if Clinton had really wanted to pardon Rich, he should have been forced to do it before the public decided between Gore and Bush.

This one modest change would curb most of the worst abuses you get in the current system. Indeed, the suggestion is so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to post it here. And yet, go look and see: matters are still arranged in an obvious stupid way, and there’s little sign that things will change any time soon. So perhaps there’s a point in saying the obvious.

What with all the jokes about bombing Iran and killing ordinary Iranians, I’ll be disappointed if McCain’s campaign doesn’t go with this classic tune.

Two quick points about Mukasey:

First, the Senate must vote against confirmation. A vote to confirm a liar who is clearly unwilling to enforce the country’s laws and international commitments guarantees more of the same rotten behaviour that got the U.S. in the trouble it’s in today. No deal the Democrats cut now and no private assurances that they’re given will change that.

Second, you just know that some Democrats will want to back down on this because they’re afraid of the way the issue will be framed: that they’re weak on national security. Let me just point out that there is nothing weaker than constantly fretting about the perception of weakness. Republicans will try to frame the issue this way no matter what, so the way to respond is not to capitulate again and again and again, but rather to loudly insist on reframing the issue. How about: “We’ll confirm the first candidate Bush nominates who is actually willing to enforce U.S. law.” How about: “Mukasey is clearly lying, and experience has taught us that we can’t have a proper working relationship with an A.G. who lies to Congress.” Let Bush nominate someone else. I’m sure that person might be worse than Mukasey. Reject that person too. Make clear that candidates for A.G. will be rejected – every fucking last one of them – until Bush proposes someone willing to enforce the laws of the country. That’s how you win a fight and reframe an issue.