The execrable Joe Lieberman is retiring, thank God. This comes soon after his hard work on the right side of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which is causing some liberals to wonder if he deserves his awful reputation among the left. They argue that Lieberman has actually voted with Democrats much more often than he's voted against them, and that his demeanor and not his substantive positions are the cause of most of the hatred his critics display.
Giving him credit for his votes on climate change, gays in the military and the stimulus is a bit like praising someone for voting against a bill that would legalize beating the elderly with baseball bats for sport: it's great that he got it right, but getting a vote like that right is kind of the basic test that any reasonable adult, let alone a member of such an august body as the Senate, ought to be able to pass. Climate change, gay rights and the stimulus are not "tough" votes. They may be "controversial" issues, but there really isn't any actual controversy to speak of: there are people with facts on one side, and people with bigoted and/or misinformed and/or corrupt opinions on the other.
The fact that our political culture is in the midst of a years-long debate about whether climate change is real (or whether gay people should be allowed to die for their country, or whether government spending in a recession is a good idea) does not in any way alter the reality of climate change (or gay rights or stimulus.) We can debate it all we like, but that doesn't give both sides equal legitimacy. I may dispute that the Bears lost to the Packers last weekend, because I desperately wish it were not true; but that does not make it untrue, and you should not give my opponents any credit for being right on this issue.
Of course it's convenient that I believe the political positions I hold are the objective truth, at least in the three cases cited above. I'm sure a conservative could easily be found who would believe the opposite of what I do, and with equal certainty. But that's irrelevant: I'm right, and that person is wrong. Unless you believe Derrida was right, at some point there must be things that are objectively true, in politics as in anything else. Find me one cogent argument against the reality of anthropogenic climate change, or the rightness of depriving gay people their civil liberties: there is none, and the conservative movement has never even attempted to provide one. The stimulus debate is a bit more uneven, I'll concede, but even USA Today admits that "Eighteen months later, the consensus among economists is that the stimulus worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s."
One might object that, nevertheless, there was political controversy surrounding many of the votes that Joe Lieberman got right. But what was at risk for Lieberman if he picked the less popular side in any of those votes? He'd probably make more money after he left office, and besides, isn't the whole point of sending representatives to Washington that they're going to make tough decisions that we as a populace wouldn't make? Have our standards sunk so low that we're willing to praise the guy who did the absolute bare minimum that we asked of him?
Actually, the answer to that one is probably yes. But I'll retain my scorn for Lieberman anyway.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Strange loop
The President's old Chief of Staff left to run for Mayor of Chicago. The President's new Chief of Staff is the brother of the current (and longest-serving) Mayor of Chicago, son of the second-longest-serving Mayor of Chicago, and would easily be the frontrunner to be the next Mayor of Chicago if he wanted the job.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
How WikiLeaks could lead to a more transparent state
Unusually for Ross Douthat, he makes some pretty compelling points in his blog post on the retrenchment of the secret security state post-WikiLeaks. Everything that he says is pretty plausible, and it's something I've been struggling to come to terms with myself: I think WikiLeaks is incredibly important, Julian Assange is a hero, and this kind of disclosure is long overdue for a purportedly open, democratic state like ours.
However, it's certainly the case that the easiest reaction to this will be to clamp down on internal document security, making it harder and less likely for future leaks to occur. So you could credibly argue that WikiLeaks actually makes the US government less transparent in the future, not more.
The problem with that argument is that it sacrifices the good on the altar of the perfect: what would Douthat, or any of WikiLeaks' critics, do to actually improve the state of government transparency? Would we even be having this debate? Would the idea that the federal government needs to stop classifying everything in sight be on anyone's radar right now? And doesn't that mean that it's even more likely that transparency will wither and die in a world without organizations like WikiLeaks, to keep us focused on the real problems with overclassification?
There's really no way we can design a system of transparency and openness that won't eventually be corrupted by the elites we put in charge of our national security. The best we can do really is to keep making this a public priority, keep talking about it, keep worrying about it, and keep doing whatever we can to encourage governmental transparency. Criticizing WikiLeaks for making a future government clampdown on embarrassing documents more likely is misguided, because it implies that that government clampdown isn't already happening.
In other words, Ross Douthat: Don't just tut-tut about the naivety of Julian Assange, without proposing something better. Otherwise you sound even more unaware of the world around you than you claim Assange is.
However, it's certainly the case that the easiest reaction to this will be to clamp down on internal document security, making it harder and less likely for future leaks to occur. So you could credibly argue that WikiLeaks actually makes the US government less transparent in the future, not more.
The problem with that argument is that it sacrifices the good on the altar of the perfect: what would Douthat, or any of WikiLeaks' critics, do to actually improve the state of government transparency? Would we even be having this debate? Would the idea that the federal government needs to stop classifying everything in sight be on anyone's radar right now? And doesn't that mean that it's even more likely that transparency will wither and die in a world without organizations like WikiLeaks, to keep us focused on the real problems with overclassification?
There's really no way we can design a system of transparency and openness that won't eventually be corrupted by the elites we put in charge of our national security. The best we can do really is to keep making this a public priority, keep talking about it, keep worrying about it, and keep doing whatever we can to encourage governmental transparency. Criticizing WikiLeaks for making a future government clampdown on embarrassing documents more likely is misguided, because it implies that that government clampdown isn't already happening.
In other words, Ross Douthat: Don't just tut-tut about the naivety of Julian Assange, without proposing something better. Otherwise you sound even more unaware of the world around you than you claim Assange is.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Occam's Elections
On election day, two worlds collide: the tiny, Plutonian rock made up of people who care about issues, politics, policy, parties and what happens in Washington smacks straight into the Jupiterian gas giant of actual voters who just don't know that much, and whose behavior is often fairly straightforward to predict.
The first dirty little secret of campaigns is that campaigns don't actually matter. By extension, all the political posturing surrounding them - "should we stage a vote on this bill, in order to force the other party to defend it in November? Is the election a big defeat for Democrats, a big victory for Republicans, or both?" - is also meaningless. This renders the lives and occupations of thousands of influential pundits, politicians, consultants and staffers irrelevant - which is why you never hear this point of view in the media. The media is heavily invested in the idea that political coverage is "serious" and so they take great pride in it, but the reality is that nobody watches it (look at FOX or MSNBC's ratings if you disagree - FOX was the 5th most-watched cable network a few weeks before an election; MSNBC, the second most popular news network, came in 24th, 12 places behind SYFY).
Sure, campaigns matter in individual races - Angle lost in NV even though a standard-issue Republican almost certainly would have won, and I'm sure you can find instances of a particularly well-run campaign winning a close race that they should have lost. But as Matt Yglesias points out, American elections (particularly Presidentials, but also the broad outcomes of midterms (instead of individual matchups)) are really pretty predictable. Typically, even if your staff is pretty smart and your tactics shrewd, the other side has a pretty smart staff and pretty shrewd tactics as well.
Think of it like baseball's Value Over Replacement Player (VORP): in a competition, all that matters is the difference between you and your opponent. At the highest levels, both of you are pretty formidable competitors, so most of your individual greatness cancels out. So the significance of, say, that amazing get-out-the-vote drive you're so proud of isn't that you registered 2 million voters; it's that you registered 100,000 more than would have otherwise done so.
The second dirty little secret of campaigns is that most voters don't know much. Voters, in the aggregate, are morons. Consider that 2/3 of voters thought either bankers or the GOP were responsible for the sorry shape of the economy, and yet Republicans won more House seats than they have since at least the 1940s. Those who said bankers were to blame voted 11% more for Republicans - the party of, by and for bankers. In California, Democrats ran the table by more than 10 points in every major statewide race - except Attorney General, where Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris are less than 1% apart. That means there had to have been hundreds of thousands of voters who voted largely Democratic, except for Cooley - a strident conservative. This doesn't make any sense at all, unless you assume that voters are stupid.
This might sound harsh, but it's been proven to be true in every single election ever: here's some more recent evidence. California's proposition system is also submitted for your consideration in this regard.
Most voters (whether or not they know it) are low-information, whose voting behavior is highly predictable in the aggregate and therefore more or less entirely independent of anything Democrats or Republicans actually do. That's why the second half of last week's This American Life is so painful to listen to - this guy is getting so worked up over the kind of small-bore tactics that just don't matter, and an election that was essentially decided the day after Obama was elected. Keep that in mind as you watch pundits, Republicans and conservative Democrats draw "lessons" from the results of last night.
EDIT: Yglesias feels me.
The first dirty little secret of campaigns is that campaigns don't actually matter. By extension, all the political posturing surrounding them - "should we stage a vote on this bill, in order to force the other party to defend it in November? Is the election a big defeat for Democrats, a big victory for Republicans, or both?" - is also meaningless. This renders the lives and occupations of thousands of influential pundits, politicians, consultants and staffers irrelevant - which is why you never hear this point of view in the media. The media is heavily invested in the idea that political coverage is "serious" and so they take great pride in it, but the reality is that nobody watches it (look at FOX or MSNBC's ratings if you disagree - FOX was the 5th most-watched cable network a few weeks before an election; MSNBC, the second most popular news network, came in 24th, 12 places behind SYFY).
Sure, campaigns matter in individual races - Angle lost in NV even though a standard-issue Republican almost certainly would have won, and I'm sure you can find instances of a particularly well-run campaign winning a close race that they should have lost. But as Matt Yglesias points out, American elections (particularly Presidentials, but also the broad outcomes of midterms (instead of individual matchups)) are really pretty predictable. Typically, even if your staff is pretty smart and your tactics shrewd, the other side has a pretty smart staff and pretty shrewd tactics as well.
Think of it like baseball's Value Over Replacement Player (VORP): in a competition, all that matters is the difference between you and your opponent. At the highest levels, both of you are pretty formidable competitors, so most of your individual greatness cancels out. So the significance of, say, that amazing get-out-the-vote drive you're so proud of isn't that you registered 2 million voters; it's that you registered 100,000 more than would have otherwise done so.
The second dirty little secret of campaigns is that most voters don't know much. Voters, in the aggregate, are morons. Consider that 2/3 of voters thought either bankers or the GOP were responsible for the sorry shape of the economy, and yet Republicans won more House seats than they have since at least the 1940s. Those who said bankers were to blame voted 11% more for Republicans - the party of, by and for bankers. In California, Democrats ran the table by more than 10 points in every major statewide race - except Attorney General, where Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris are less than 1% apart. That means there had to have been hundreds of thousands of voters who voted largely Democratic, except for Cooley - a strident conservative. This doesn't make any sense at all, unless you assume that voters are stupid.
This might sound harsh, but it's been proven to be true in every single election ever: here's some more recent evidence. California's proposition system is also submitted for your consideration in this regard.
Most voters (whether or not they know it) are low-information, whose voting behavior is highly predictable in the aggregate and therefore more or less entirely independent of anything Democrats or Republicans actually do. That's why the second half of last week's This American Life is so painful to listen to - this guy is getting so worked up over the kind of small-bore tactics that just don't matter, and an election that was essentially decided the day after Obama was elected. Keep that in mind as you watch pundits, Republicans and conservative Democrats draw "lessons" from the results of last night.
EDIT: Yglesias feels me.
Last Night
While they were definitely disappointing, let's also not make too big a deal of the Democratic defeats last night: Republicans were always going to do well, and two successive Democratic "wave" elections meant there were a lot of Democratic seats that really had no business being Democratic. Couple that with a typical midterm slump, ridiculously high unemployment and not much to excite the Democratic base, and it's no surprise what happened.
Three of the last three elections have now been "wave" elections, and at some point that term has to stop meaning something. It's pretty clear that at this point, Congressional elections have been highly nationalized - if Democrats are doing well, Dems will win a ton of seats without regard for much of what's happening in those individual districts. That might be a sign of something, or it might just be noise.
It's also sad to see Prop 19 go down, and particularly because it doesn't look like it really brought a high level of young voters to the polls, which had been my hope. But 2012 will be a very different election, with Obama back on the ballot and hopefully a reinstatement of gay marriage as well, so the electorate voting in California in 2012 will be vastly more predisposed to legalize marijuana than this one. 46% is a great place to build from, and considering this was our first bite at the full-legalization apple in decades, and considering there was basically no money behind this proposition until the very end, I'd say we're in pretty good shape.
Three of the last three elections have now been "wave" elections, and at some point that term has to stop meaning something. It's pretty clear that at this point, Congressional elections have been highly nationalized - if Democrats are doing well, Dems will win a ton of seats without regard for much of what's happening in those individual districts. That might be a sign of something, or it might just be noise.
It's also sad to see Prop 19 go down, and particularly because it doesn't look like it really brought a high level of young voters to the polls, which had been my hope. But 2012 will be a very different election, with Obama back on the ballot and hopefully a reinstatement of gay marriage as well, so the electorate voting in California in 2012 will be vastly more predisposed to legalize marijuana than this one. 46% is a great place to build from, and considering this was our first bite at the full-legalization apple in decades, and considering there was basically no money behind this proposition until the very end, I'd say we're in pretty good shape.
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