Ruth Marcus's false "false false choice" charge

Purporting merely to debunk an irritating and misleading rhetorical device, Ruth Marcus has struck at the heart of Obamaism. Her target is Obama's fondness for what she calls a "false false choice':

The false-choice dodge takes three overlapping forms. The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.

I will argue further down that most of the Obama false choice tropes Marcus takes on are valid.  But first I want to spotlight the seriousness of the charge.  The false choice trope is not merely a tool of rhetorical combat. Setting things up this way reflects a core tendency in Obama's personality and approach to problem-solving.

Aliyah on an escalator

 Updated 4/4, below the jump

Writing in Scientific American, David Schroeder (hat tip to Sullivan) flags research indicating that we humans are literally elevated -- morally -- when we look up or step up.:

Building on research showing the power of metaphors to shape our thinking, Sanna and his colleagues noted that height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc. If people were primed to think about height, they wondered, might people be more virtuous?

In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions. In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken up a short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit [referenced study here].

If that's true, cathedrals, and the world view that produced them, may really have given medieval Europeans a moral boost.  Here's C.S. Lewis inviting his reader to view the night sky with medieval eyes:

The unbearable lightness of me-ing

Thinking for a moment about a writer whose work I don't particularly enjoy though others whom I do like to read praise it highly, I started reflexively marshaling reasons for my dislike. Then I thought, why do this? Is it because I think that those who enjoy this work are seriously in error? No: I haven't paid it enough attention to ensure that my reasons are consistent or based in fact.  And why should I? If this person were promulgating serious errors of fact or logic or a depraved sensibility, a contra might be worthwhile.

But what's really behind this impulse, at least in this case, is something unsavory: a rooted belief that one's every preference is significant, worth broadcasting, cause for pride...a sign of one's superior sensibility or perception.  How can anyone like Brussels sprouts? They taste like condensed garbage.  Etc etc.  This impulse is evident on the playground: ew, you like Barney?

While writing this, I've really just been transposing a line of thought wonderfully dramatized and dissected by Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality:

An unfamiliar young woman entered the sauna and the moment she walked through the door began to order everyone about; she made them all sit closer together, then she picked up a pitcher and poured water on the stones. With much hissing, hot, steam started to rise, making the woman sitting next to Agnes wince with pain and cover her face. The newcomer noticed it, declared, "I like hot steam; it gives me that real sauna feeling," squeezed herself between two naked bodies, and at once began to talk about yesterday's television talk show featuring a famous biologist who had just published his memoirs. "He was terrific," she said.

Another woman nodded in agreement. "Oh yes! And how modest!

The newcomer said, "Modest? Didn't you realize how extremely proud that man was? But I like that kind of pride! I adore proud people!" She turned to Agnes: "Did you find him modest?"

Agnes said that she hadn't seen the program. As if interpreting this remark as veiled disagreement, the newcomer repeated very loudly, looking Agnes straight in the eye: "I detest modesty! Modest is hypocrisy!"

Agnes shrugged, and the newcomer said, "In a sauna, I've got to feel real heat.  I've got to work up a good sweat. But then I must have a cold shower. A cold shower! I adore that!  Actually I like my showers cold even in the morning. I find hot showers disgusting."

How about a doctor's mandate in the health reform law?

The Times' Robert Pear today reports on a major roadblock to expanding health care access in the United States: in many states, few or no doctors in a wide array of specialties will see Medicaid patients.  And the Affordable Care Act aims to add about 15 million people to the Medicaid rolls, while cash-strapped states continue to cut Medicaid reimbursement rates.

I have a solution. It's simplistic, and perhaps someone will demonstrate to me that it's unworkable or unfair. It's surely politically impossible at this point, given the power of the doctors' lobby.  But here it is: require doctors to devote a minimum percentage of their practice to Medicaid patients.  At present, about 28% of doctors refuse to accept any Medicaid patients.  The percentages are doubtless much higher in some practice specialties and states.

2010 tax cuts vs. 2011 budget cuts

As it looks all but certain that Republicans will extract at least a $30 billion pound of flesh from the 2011 budget, endangering the recovery and thus likely boosting their own political fortunes, I thought I would re-pose a question I asked earlier this month: Which is likely to be stronger, the stimulative effect of the tax cut deal Obama cut with the GOP at the end of last year, or the destimulative drag of reduced short-term government spending?

Who won the lame duck?

The late great lame duck session of Congress in Nov-Dec 2011 was widely perceived to have been a season of accomplishment for the Democrats and President Obama. The rush of activity included repeat of Don't Ask Don't Tell, ratification of the New Start treaty -- and, on the economic front, a tax deal that, for the blood price of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, bought Obama hundreds of billions in more efficiently stimulative tax cuts.

It was a busy time, and one thing the Democrats failed to do was pass a budget for FY 2011. That gave the incoming GOP House the opportunity to commence its budget-cutting orgy for discretionary domestic spending a year early.  That includes a head start on the drive to defund implementation and enforcement of the health care and financial reform laws.  And in its opening gambit, the Tea Party delivered.  Its proposed $61 billion in cuts would kill 700,000 jobs by the end of 2012 according to Moody's economist  Mark Zandi,, and shave 1.5-2% off GDP growth in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of this year by Goldman Sachs' estimates.  The Goldman analyst, Alec Phillips, also forecasts that actual cuts in FY 2011 will come in at about $25 billion and, once enacted, will slow growth by 1% of GDP, but that the effect of that sudden hit will fade quickly later in the year.

Question: would the U.S. economy -- and Democrats -- have been better off without the global tax deal but with a Democratic FY 2011 budget passed during the lame duck session?  Does the short-term destimulative effect of the 2011 budget we're likely to get (leaving aside any long-term damage to economic viability) fully offset, or more than offset, the stimulative effect of the tax cut package?

Pay for performance, Baltimore police style

Dana Goldstein cites a a social science maxim to explain powerful evidence that former D.C.schools Chancellor  Michelle Rhee's heavy incentives for improved test score results led to widespread cheating:

In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated maxim called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, a psychologist who studied human creativity. Campbell’s Law states that incentives corrupt. In other words, the more punishments and rewards—such as merit pay—are associated with the results of any given test, the more likely it is that the test’s results will be rendered meaningless, either through outright cheating or through teaching to the test in a way that narrows the curriculum and renders real learning obsolete.

There's a dramatic illustration of this principle at work (with negative incentives) in The Wire, the HBO series about Baltimore detectives' endless and mainly fruitless struggles against the drug trade (Season 3, episode 1, Time after Time).  A city councilman who's trying to get the police commissioner to dance to his tune flays him and the mayor at a public meeting for high crime stats. Under pressure from the mayor, the commissioner promises to reduce felonies by 5% and keep the year's murder count under 275. The commissioner and deputy commissioner in turn lay the wood to their subordinates. Here's Rawls, the dickish deputy (my rough transcript):

You will reduce the felonies by 5% or more or...let no man come back alive.  In addition, we will hold this year's murders to 275 or less...[there's] no excuse I will accept. I don't care how you do it. Just fuckin' do it.

Spencer Ackerman writes a short Obama Doctrine

In response to Obama's speech on Libya, Spencer Ackerman hones in on a passage that I flagged as a sign that Obama's harks back to the future of George H.W. Bush:

One more thing, and it’s peripheral to Libya. But there’s a lot of debate over whether there’s an “Obama Doctrine” or not. (I’d had my own take on that since the 2008 campaign.) It won’t do to simply say it’s to intervene militarily when U.S. interests and values align to stop a given atrocity, since every post-Cold War president says that.

This line may be more instructive: “American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves. Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs; and to see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all.” 

Then Ackerman comes out himself with what strikes me as a nice concise formulation of the Obama Doctrine-in-progress (my emphasis):

Obama on Libya: all-but-vital interests

Some quick notes on Obama's speech on Libya tonight:

1) In the wake of Robert Gates' weekend assertion that "vital interests" are not at stake in Libya, he threaded a needle between "vital interests" and "interests and values"  - a combination of humanitarian concern and, shall we say, not-quite-vital strategic interest:  

There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are.

MIA in the latest Jane Eyre

Well, it isn't a bad Jane Eyre. Mia Wasikowska's Jane has an understated dignity and a measure of strength;  the rather sparse scraps of dialogue preserve a degree of fidelity to the book; the film offers a vivid sense of the interiors of 19th century English dwellings of various kinds; and it has a haunting score that conveys the forces arrayed against Jane, if not the ultimate confidence with which she engages them.

But a lot is missing: the movie lacks the book's force. To understand what's missing, consider three sources of that force: individual ego, patriarchal authority, and let's face it, sisterhood.

A (children's) poem for Sunday

Time in

Da-dum: the heart.
Ah-ha: the breath.
Always on
from birth to death.

In which my energy consumption becomes manifest

The U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population and consumes 25% of its energy.  Americans consume almost twice as much per capita as Germans and Japanese, and about sixteen times as much as the average Indian. 

I can't say I've given these widely cited facts a tremendous amount of thought, but a trip to the recycle bins in my backyard just brought home one sliver of that massive consumption. We have one bin for newspaper and one for non-newsprint -- that is, magazines and junk mail.  That bin is 3 1/2 feet tall and a bit more than two feet square. I opened it, and it was filled to the brim, almost entirely with junk mail -- more than 14 cubic feet of propositions that no one even glanced at.  The bin probably weighs 200 pounds.  I wish I could say how long it took to fill -- it usually doesn't fill all the way,  because a couple of pickups were canceled due to all the snow we had this winter.  But still. For a moment there, the sheer waste staggered me.

The Libyan conundrum, and the blogger's

Those who knew little or nothing about Libya before the current crisis, yet feel the temptation or responsibility to "take a stand, might envy  Nicholas Kristof's understandable pride in the basis of his own judgment:

I opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion because my reporting convinced me that most Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein but didn’t want American forces intruding on their soil. This time my reporting persuades me that most Libyans welcome outside intervention.

For those of us lacking that basis, the demurral of James Downie is refreshing:

O Captain! My Captain! Make us all get in the boat together....

Anne Applebaum invites us to imagine "that President Obama had spent the past few weeks denouncing Moammar Gaddafi, using the soaring rhetoric he has deployed in the past." The results would not be pretty:

Had he done all of that, there would certainly be fewer European members of the “coalition of the willing” that has formed, tentatively, to prevent Gaddafi from entering Benghazi: I can’t see the French or the Spanish falling in behind an aggressive-sounding American campaign. There would probably be no Arab coalition members either...

Enthusiasm and soaring rhetoric would also now lock the United States and its allies into an implied set of promises. If we’d compared Gaddafi to Hitler we’d have to eliminate him. If democracy were the only solution in Libya, we’d have to stay in Libya until it was democratic. If Obama had been talking about nothing else for the past three weeks, his entire presidency would be on the line.

Does that mode of "leadership" in response to the Libyan uprising remind you of anything?  Remember all those calls for a Presidential crusade against the structural budget deficit? The urgings that he embrace the Bowles-Simpson plan, or lay out a detailed blueprint of his own in the State of the Union address and/or in his proposed budget? Obama has been quite explicit about why he refrained from doing this:

“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

The Financial Times hearts dithering

The Financial Times Comment crew is bidding fair to turn "ditherer" into a term of honor. Clive Crook, who slapped the term on Obama during his deliberations over Afghan policy, yesterday cataloged the virtues of dither-beration in the emergence of the strategy in Libya. Today, Gideon Rachman sings a similar tune.

Crook notes that in Obama, Europe has the antidote to Bush it thought it wanted:

Not long ago, Europe complained that the US was bullying, reckless and high-handed. Not long ago, Europe was ecstatic at Mr Obama’s election because this was not his style. You would think, having longed for a president who was cautious, deliberate and respectful of other countries’ opinions – and having voiced contempt for George W. Bush because he was none of those things – Europeans would hesitate to say: “The time for talking is over. Just start shooting.” 

Both kinds of critic – US hawks and Europe’s militant multilateralists – are right to say dithering held up the allied attacks and made the mission harder. The problem for multilateralists is that dithering is built into the system they advocate. If you cannot tolerate dithering, better not demand UN authority for your military interventions.

Another war, another presidential 'terms sheet'

Well, Obama's approach to launching a police action is really singular, It seems that flying off to Brazil at the outset of Operation Odyssey Dawn was a feature, not a bug. He is signaling that Libya is not going to dominate his agenda.  He seems also to think that he can shape reality (i.e.,' lead'?) with such signals.

Yesterday, I noted that Obama seems to be trying to wish away, or command away, the specter of quagmire.  "Days, not weeks" is his watchword -- repeated, this time in public, today. But today he fleshed out why he thinks he's able to say that -- and showed the architecture of what he's tried to construct as a limited United States engagement.

Asked how he "can 'square' the assertion that Muammar Qadhafi is killing people but that he doesn't have to leave power," Obama unraveled his own riddle of the sphinx as it's emerged over three weeks. He asserted three paradoxes or anomalies:

• The U.N. mandate is limited to stopping civilian deaths, but U.S. policy is to force Qadhafi out.
• The U.S is exerting military leadership, but only in phase 1 of U.N.-authorized coalition action (notwithstanding that its policy goals are more expansive than the U.N's). 
• The U.S. is committed to driving Qadhafi out, but not to driving him out militarily. 

Behold as presidential logic, live-blogged by Politico, doth unfold:

Obama's military triangulation

President Obama has not adequately explained why he decided to go to war in Libya. But this reported aspect of his decision-making process disturbs me:

In his meeting with Members of Congress today, sources tell ABC News, President Obama said he expected that the period that the US would be involved in heavy kinetic activity would be "days, not weeks," after which he said the US would then take more of a supporting role.

That recalls Obama's response to the conundrum of whether to ramp up or cut back U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.  Faced with the terrible choice of eschewing or undertaking military action (or reducing vs. escalating), Obama's signature decision seems to be "do it quickly" and "do it at minimal cost."  There's a kind of triangulation here that, while posing as an extreme realism (policy nuance based on the facts of the particular case) may actually reflect a form of escapism -- a bid to shape events to a degree that human activity can't attain. Perhaps that goes as well for the attempt the clothe the U.S.'s role as a supporting one -- though the latter does seem like good policy if you accept the premise that military action was required.

The decision-making pattern seems at least to rhyme with that portrayed in great detail by Bob Woodward in Obama's War.  As I've noted before, while Woodward does not explicitly pass judgment on Obama's chosen course, his narrative skews toward those in the administration's counsels who highlighted apparently insurmountable obstacles to standing up a self-sustaining government in Afghanistan: the total corruption of the Karzai regime, the complete failure to date of "handing off" responsibility to any unit of the Afghan army or police; the near-complete sanctuary enjoyed by the Taliban in Pakistan.  Rather than fully confronting the "mission impossible" implications, Obama imposed his own conditions on the military brass: do it with (somewhat) fewer troops, and do it on a shorter timeline.  That may have preserved his authority in some obscure sense, but seems unlikely to have increased the odds of a successful outcome.

"A spectacle of war and intervention"

Marc Lynch has a balanced and frankly ambivalent analysis of the U.N. action on Libya, noting both its potential to strengthen the rule of law in the world and its potential to devolve into a bloody quagmire with no exit.


Not venturing to call odds on those possibilities, I just want to note one sidelight cast by Lynch's scenario-izing. It's here (my emphasis):

But if it does not succeed quickly, and the intervention degenerates into a long quagmire of air strikes, grinding street battles, and growing pressure for the introduction of outside ground forces, then the impact could be quite different.  Despite the bracing scenes of Benghazi erupting into cheers at the news of the Resolution, Arab support for the intervention is not nearly as deep as it seems and will not likely survive an extended war.  If Libyan civilians are killed in airstrikes, and especially if foreign troops enter Libyan territory, and images of Arabs killed by U.S. forces replace images of brave protestors battered by Qaddafi's forces on al-Jazeera, the narrative could change quickly into an Iraq-like rage against Western imperialism.   What began as an indigenous peaceful Arab uprising against authoritarian rule could collapse into a spectacle of war and intervention.  

What strikes me here is the framing of contemporary war as spectacle -- the implicit acknowledgment that the ground war and the PR war are inseparable, and the implication that the PR war is the decisive one.

No risk-free course in Libya

Max Hastings writes a powerful brief in today's FT against yet another military plunge into the unknown in Libya:

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

What Hastings doesn't acknowledge, though, are the perhaps equally fraught consequences of standing aside. He overstates the upside of eschewing military intervention:

Collective bargaining run amok?

The New York Times editorial board lent strong support to the Wisconsin public employees' unions in their struggle to prevent Governor Scott Walker from stripping them of their collective bargaining rights.  The Times editorial board's opinions, needless to say, do not control news coverage at the Times. So it is that a massive Times expose of widespread, systemic Catholic Church-level patient abuse (physical, sexual and emotional) at New York State's group homes for the developmentally disabled laid much of the blame squarely on the state's Civil Service Employees Association -- and/or the work rules under which the union operates:

The Times reviewed 399 disciplinary cases involving 233 state workers who were accused of one of seven serious offenses, including physical abuse and neglect, since 2008. In each of the cases examined, the agency had substantiated the charges, and the worker had been previously disciplined at least once.

In 25 percent of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the state employees were transferred to other homes.

The state initiated termination proceedings in 129 of the cases reviewed but succeeded in just 30 of them, in large part because the workers’ union, the Civil Service Employees Association, aggressively resisted firings in almost every case. A few employees resigned, even though the state sought only suspensions.

In the remainder of the cases, employees accused of abuse — whether beating the disabled, using racial slurs or neglecting their care — either were suspended, were fined or had their vacation time reduced.

The union offered a defense of their defense of these employees that sounds reasonable at first blush:

Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership V: a counter-argument

Returning once more to Frances E. Lee's demonstration that presidential advocacy of a specific policy increases partisan polarization on that issue: one strand in Lee's data may call in question the notion that Obama can best foster a comprehensive tax/budget reform compromise by keeping a low profile at this stage (because a detailed presidential plan would immediately harden the party battle lines).

Yesterday I noted that according to Lee's statistical analysis in Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Partisanship int he U.S. Senate, tax policy is already so polarized by party that there's not that much room for a President to worsen the division. Therefore, presidential advocacy on tax issues has less of a polarizing effect than presidential advocacy on most issues. More generally, presidential input has a more measurable polarizing effect on issues that are not strongly maked by ideology, such as space exploration, than on issues where ideology already clearly divides the parties.

Presidential input increases partisan division by increasing both parties' voting cohesion.  So again, perhaps if the president does not "go first" in laying out a plan for long-term tax/budget reform, he can increase the chances of a bipartisan compromise. But here's the rub: according to Lee's data, on strongly marked ideologial issues presidential input increases his own party's cohesion signficantly more than the opposing party's. For tax policy, from 1991-2004, presidential input increased his own party's cohesion on roll call votes 10.2 points, from 53.7 to 63.9, while slightly reducing opposite party cohesion, from 48.5 to 47.3. 

Can a president reduce partisan division?

Repetition, repetition, repetition.  In trying to discern Obama's intentions and strategy regarding long term tax/budget reform, I have referred repeatedly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to Frances E. Lee's demonstration that presidential advocacy on a given issue, particularly when put forward in the SOTU, increases partisan division on that issue.  While the theory makes intuitive sense, and is demonstrated in Lee's Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Parisanship in the U.S. Senate by thorough statistical analysis of roll-call votes from 1981--2004, one caveat is in order. Tax policy is already so polarized by party that there's not that much room for a President to worsen the division:

Presidential involvement has little influence on partisanship on votes dealing with social issues and the distribution of the tax burden...These are clearly party-defining issues regardless of whether a president demands action on them. Generally speaking, taxes and abortion sparked partisan division in the Senate at approximately the same levels regardless of their presidential agenda status (p. 83).

According to Lee's tabulations, party division on Senate roll call votes from 1981-2004 concerning distribution of the tax burden was 66 overall, and 71 on tax legislation in which "presidential leadership" was exerted. That's in contrast to nonideological issues, where party differences are relatively small until a president advocates a specific policy, at which point the parties usually divide. Partisan division on votes concerning space, science and technology, for example, averages 30.5 points higher on votes over legislation on which the president has exerted leadership than on votes on which he has not.

One might conclude that in the pre-polarized tax/spending arena, the president has little to lose by drawing the battle lines clearly and fighting it out in the arena of public opinion.  Why shouldn't Obama lay out a tax/deficit plan somewhere left of the Bowles-Simpson plan and throw his energy into hammering the devastation to be wrought by the GOP's wholly unnecessary cuts to discretionary domestic spending -- and to the decimation of Medicare and Social Security required by the "no new taxes" pledge that over 90% of Congressional Republicans have signed? What's he got to lose?

If I were king of the forest

To while away an hour, and not straining to increase my present level of knowledge before amusing myself, let me consider: how would I tackle the United States' budget problems if I could make policy by fiat?

My broad fiscal goals would be to reduce the rate of medical inflation while expanding coverage and improving outcomes, reduce defense spending without compromising U.S. security, make the tax code fairer and more efficient, create incentives to reduce fossil fuel consumption, increase government revenue without crimping sustainable economic growth, make social security solvent, and let discretionary domestic spending levels be determined on a cost/benefit basis, without arbitrary spending reduction targets.

First, I would find a way to give the government (probably federal but possibly state, or some hybrid) the sole power to set uniform prices for all medical procedures.  Every other wealthy nation on earth provides universal healthcare to its citizens, and virtually all of them accord sole pricing power to the government (provincial governments in Canada's case), whether or not they strain those payments through some form of private insurance. In the U.S., we pay far more per procedure than any other country, primarily because the government lacks this pricing power.  Our doctors -- specialists, in any case -- are overpaid, an advantage (to them) partly offset by the ridiculous administrative costs of dealing with multiple insurers, the outsized cost of malpractice insurance, and the huge financial burden of unsubsidized medical school. I would seek to ease those burdens while also reducing most specialists' profit margins and perverse incentives to provide expensive care whether or not it's warranted.

Second, I would empower the medical payment system's overseers to condition coverage for specific procedures on outcomes research. I would do this cautiously, since such research is often ambiguous, and one size does not fit all; expensive procedures that do not seem to be more effective than cheaper alternatives might be covered under certain circumstances, or less fully. But broadly, former U.K. health minister John Reid's watchword would be mine: we cover everybody, but not everything. Also, I would fully resource all of the cost containment measures in the Affordable Care Act.

The art of grilling a tax/budget deal

A dozen or more years ago, I wrote a press release announcing the opening in Manhattan of the Greek seafood restaurant Milos Estiatorio.  The owner, Costas Spiliadis, explained to me that in cooking fish, timing is everything. At Milos they keep it simple, and concentrate on getting it off the grill at the right instant.*

Perhaps that is the Obama theory of bipartisan budget negotiation? The WSJ's Damian Paletta and Naftali Bendavid, reporting on progress in Senate bipartisan "Gang of Six" negotiations toward a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal, has this to say about the White House posture:

 The success of the senators' efforts will depend on whether it is endorsed at some point by President Barack Obama. White House officials have been briefed on progress but have mostly stayed on the sidelines, people familiar with the matter said.

 White House budget director Jacob Lew said, "We think it's a good thing to have members looking for bipartisan conversations where they are exploring ideas."

Writhing out of Norquist's embrace, part III

Grover Norquist is insisting on his bond with the trio of conservative Senators that have begun negotiations on a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal. But Chambliss/Coburn/Crapo are looking for a "pound of flesh/not one drop of blood" loophole.

Shakespeare's merchant had a perfect legal right to claim a pound of flesh from Antonio, who had pledged it to him if he could not repay his debt on time. But Shylock, it was decreed in court,  had no more right than anyone else to shed blood.

In the past two days, Chambliss and Coburn have argued, in effect, that while they promised never to raise taxes, they did not promise to reduce the United States to insolvency. To reduce the deficit to a manageable level, "“We’ve got to close the revenue gap," as Chambliss put it on Monday. 

First, though, they've got to close the rhetoric gap, embodied in Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge. To recap: when reports broke that the conservative 3Cs were working with three Democratic counterpart on a bipartisan budget deal that would include some combination of spending cuts and revenue increases, Norquist sent an open letter reminding them of their pledge never to raise taxes. As I noted at the time,  CCC's carefully-worded response promised to lower marginal rates but most pointedly did not promise that offsetting those reductions by closing or reducing various tax breaks would not result in a net increase in revenue. The letter pitted the "special interests" who would lose tax breaks in an imagined future deal against  the 'taxpayers' whom they were pledged to protect. What it did not note is that most of us are both (see: Chambliss, Coburn, Crapo to Norquist: Kowtow or brush-off?)

Saxby Chambliss seizes the freedom to acknowledge that 2+2 = 4

When the Wall Street Journal reported that a new Senate gang of six was beginning negotiations toward a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal, Grover Norquist put the screws to the Republican half of the gang, publicly reminding Saxby Chambliss, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo of their pledge not to raise taxes.  I noted at the time that the trio's carefully worded response letter seemed to leave the door open to tax reform that, lowering marginal rates while closing loopholes, would raise revenues as a percentage of GDP:

Chambliss et al may defend me as a "taxpayer" while clobbering me as a "special interest" (mortgagee, donor).

Now Chambliss has embarked on a bipartisan roadshow with Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. According to the New York Times, he is unequivocal: taxes must be raised.

While Republicans are adamantly antitax, Mr. Chambliss said, “We’ve got to close the revenue gap.” 

And, breaking another GOP taboo:

A questioner pointed out the importance of military spending in Virginia, home to the Pentagon, bases and shipbuilding, but Mr. Warner and Mr. Chambliss agreed that it must be cut, too.

Bernstein concentrate

Jonathan Bernstein's alertness to the tradeoffs, calculations of political advantage, and levers of influence that are elected officials' stock-in-trade often yield, shall we say, mordant clarity.  So today, waving off the NYT revelation that U.S. military aid to Egypt went largely to enrich well-placed Egyptian officers, noting that U.S. military aid to Egypt was essentially an extended bribe to keep the Israeli front quiet, Bernstein concludes:

I think I'd rather have all that money wasted on a fleet of private luxury jets than spent on fighters and bombers.

Well, me too. And ha ha!  I got a real reader's buzz from that closer. But as is often the case with Bernstein, the worldly insight begs the thornier issues of just how well realpolitik serves the country's ultimate interests. The  question here, was the "military aid" money well-spent, taps directly into the core question about our Mideast policy: has propping up dictators, and so keeping the oil flowing and Israel militarily dominant (odd that military aid to Egypt could support Israeli dominance, but it has), served the U.S.'s ultimate interests? 

Obama learns message discipline

Obama's latest weekly address  reinforces my sense that he is more comfortable working with a GOP that has a measure of power than he was working with a large but filibuster-prone Democratic majority.  What "Omnidirectional placation"  -- Garry Wills' somewhat derogatory and somewhat accurate term for Obama's m.o. -- works better with those under pressure to deliver than it does with those whose incentive is to thwart action.

Obama in 2011 has been far more on message than he was in the first two years of his presidency. He is building on his track record of successful negotiation with Republicans late last year to lock in the expectation that there will be further substantive compromise. He refers constantly to compromise accomplished and bids to set the parameters for compromise to come.  He alternates the olive branch -- we all agree that there must be cuts, and here are mine -- with his line in the sand:  the austerity can't undercut the investments he's defined as essential.   I believe that the repetition will resonate as negotiation heats up.  Here's how he hit the key refrains this week:

Who won the lame duck?

The late great lame duck session of Congress in Nov-Dec 2011 was widely perceived to have been a season of accomplishment for the Democrats and President Obama. The rush of activity included repeat of Don't Ask Don't Tell, ratification of the New Start treaty -- and, on the economic front, a tax deal that, for the blood price of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, bought Obama hundreds of billions in more efficiently stimulative tax cuts.

It was a busy time, and one thing the Democrats failed to do was pass a budget for FY 2011. That gave the incoming GOP House the opportunity to commence its budget-cutting orgy for discretionary domestic spending a year early.  That includes a head start on the drive to defund implementation and enforcement of the health care and financial reform laws.  And in its opening gambit, the Tea Party delivered.  Its proposed $61 billion in cuts would kill 700,000 jobs by the end of 2012 according to Moody's economist  Mark Zandi,, and shave 1.5-2% off GDP growth in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of this year by Goldman Sachs' estimates.  The Goldman analyst, Alec Phillips, also forecasts that actual cuts in FY 2011 will come in at about $25 billion and, once enacted, will slow growth by 1% of GDP, but that the effect of that sudden hit will fade quickly later in the year.

Question: would the U.S. economy -- and Democrats -- have been better off without the global tax deal but with a Democratic FY 2011 budget passed during the lame duck session?  Does the short-term destimulative effect of the 2011 budget we're likely to get (leaving aside any long-term damage to economic viability) fully offset, or more than offset, the stimulative effect of the tax cut package?

The Glasgow housewives' theory of political management

Ezra Klein offers a reality check on how politicians function in the real world:

I can't believe in guys in suits with the ability to plan things.

That's the main thing I've learned working as a reporter and political observer in Washington: No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling. But everyone always thinks everyone else is efficiently and ruthlessly carrying out complicated plans...

There's also a lot less long-term planning than you might think. In general, politicians are overworked and understaffed. They're traveling constantly, buried under too many meetings and constituent requests, and working desperately to stay one step ahead of whatever they're getting yelled at about that week. That isn't to say they don't take on long-term projects, but in general, the way they take them on is one day at a time. 

Of course, it's not just politicians; that account fits for most human endeavor, at least those endeavors that involve managing people. Take a (fictional) Glasgow kitchen in the Depression, for example.  In Men Should Weep, playwright Ena Lamont Stewart's photorealistic account of economic and family stress in a working class family, a harried housewife's riposte to an attack by her (unemployed) husband regarding her working methods might also serve as a politician's lament. In fact, Obama delivered a version of it in the aftermath of the midterm elections. 

Below, Maggie is the housewife, Lily is her unmarried sister, and John her unemployed husband:

LILY   Whit aboot you ironin?

MAGGIE      Och, never heed. I'm that tired it wad kill me tae watch ya.

LILY   It'll be steamie day again afore ye've got that lot done.

MAGGIE   Well, I canna help it.

JOHN   Yous women! Ye've nae system.

LILY   Oh, I suppose if you was a woman you'd hase everythin jist perfect!  The weans a washed and pit tae bed at six, and everyhin a spick an span. Naethin tae dae till bedtime but twidde yer thumbs. Huh!

JOHN   I'd hae a system...

LILY/MAGGIE   He'd hae a system!

JOHN   Aye, I'd hae a system!  Ony man wull tell ye, ye can dae naethin properly wi'oot ye hae a system.

LILY   And ony womman'll tell ye that there's nae system ever inventit that disna go a tae Hell when ye've a hoose-fu o weans an a done aul granny tae look efter.

"Known known": Rumsfeld fixated on Iraq from 9/12/01?

In a well-documented take-down of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir Known Unknowns, Bob Woodward uses records from his own interviews and George W. Bush's Decision Points to dispute Rumsfeld's claim that Bush asked him to look at  then-current military plans for invading Iraq shortly after 9/11 -- on 9/26/01, to be exact. Woodward, offended that Rumsfeld "tries to push so much off on Bush", is at pains to demonstrate that Rumsfeld himself was floating the idea of invading Iraq on 9/11 and 9/12 -- and that "the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires" before Bush did indeed ask for plans in late November. 

Woodward's evidence is from his own Plan of Attack and from the 9/11 Commission Report.  Former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies provides corroboration that Rumsfeld was fixated on Iraq from the beginning. Clarke implies that driving Rumsfeld's focus was Wolfowitz:

On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not yet persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor--Iraq must have been helping them...

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq."  Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda...

Freshman GOP delusions

A freshman GOP congressman's attempt to differentiate a government shutdown today from the shutdown in 1995 is a study in distinctions without a difference  -- and in differences that cut against his argument. From a Jennifer Steinhauer story in yesterday's NYT:

“I don’t believe now and 1995 are similar times,” said Representative Lou Barletta, a freshman from Pennsylvania. “Back then it was more about how to balance the budget. Now it is about how to keep the country from going broke. Unemployment was much lower than now. The debt was 5 trillion. Now it is 14 trillion. In 1995 the Congress wanted to get its house in order. Now it’s the American people that want that, and that’s the only reason why we are here.” 

Let's take these assertions one at a time:

Obama enjoys himself with the governors

I sense Obama hitting his stride now as President.  There was much talk through mid-2010 of his naivete in trying to win over Republicans rather than more or less push Democrats from the left.  I suspect now that he may be more comfortable challenging Republicans than he was herding Democrats.

Obama's "preemptive concession" style of negotiating -- e.g., proposing a stimulus that was more than 1/3 tax cuts -- looked a little strange when Democrats had large majorities. With Republicans in control of the House, though, Obama's "preemptive" proposed cuts in discretionary spending hold a sane mirror up to the House GOPs crazy quilt of radically destructive cuts. 

Half of his speech to the Governors' Association today was a replay of his latest weekly address and of the SOTU: cut domestic spending rationally;  make essential investments in education, infrastructure and R&D; for the long term, focus on health care inflation, the engine of our long-term structural deficit. But the new parts of the speech were vintage Obama. They were verbal judo -- conceding a rational concern at the core of two extreme GOP positions, while challenging their extremist expression on two fronts: a) ending collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, and b) seeking repeal of the affordable care act.

1) On unions:

Annals of busted blog posts

I was going to propose an alternative to raising the social security retirement age: reducing the cost of living adjustment (COLA) as beneficiaries get older.  My thought was that as people get older, they spend less. And they do, except for one thing: health care. But that little exception does effectively kill the idea. Here's what I learned from a 2009 paper by Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, and John Bailey Jones:

Our model predicts that average out-of-pocket medical expenditures rise from $1,100 at age 75 to $9,200 at age 95. While a 95-year-old in the bottom quintile of the permanent income distribution expects to spend $1,700 on medical expenses, a person of the same age in the top quintile expects to spend $15,800. Medical needs that rise with age provide the elderly with a strong incentive to save, and medical expenses that rise with permanent income encourage the rich to be more frugal.

I was motivated by Ezra Klein's point* that raising the retirement age disproportionately affects lower-income Americans, whose life spans have not increased nearly as dramatically as the more affluent, and is particularly hard on those who perform bodily labor, which becomes increasingly excruciating with age. Better, I thought, to have a viable retirement income earlier, and only lose some growth in the payment gradually.  But never mind...

In weekly address, Obama lays markers for long-term deficit reduction

As I've suggested before, I regard Obama's investment agenda and proposed budget as a carefully laid frame for negotiation of a plan to take care of the long-term structural deficit.  The investment agenda -- education, R&D, infrastructure -- is a marker laid down to prevent budget-cutting frenzy from hobbling his long-term goals; his 2012 budget, with its cuts in discretionary domestic spending, is a foil for the GOP's budgetary meat ax; and in the space between preserving long-term investments and a show of short-term discipline, he is laying out the parameters of a negotiation for a long-term budget/tax deal in which all "get in the boat together"

Obama's current weekly address brings that strategy into sharper focus. He begins with anecdotal illustrations of the good effects of investments in education, R&D and infrastructure; emphasizes the discipline in his proposed budget, which he says will bring discretionary domestic spending to "its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President"; blithely waves away the prospect of a government shutdown by expressing an expectation that both parties will compromise on a continuing resolution on his terms ("I urge and expect [both parties] to find common ground so we can accelerate, not impede, economic growth") -- and lays out an interesting set of priorities for long term budget/tax reform.  Here it is:

Still, a freeze in annual domestic spending is just a start. If we’re serious about tackling our long-run fiscal challenges, we also need to cut excessive spending wherever we find it – in defense spending, spending in Medicare and Medicaid, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes.

China low on Gates' worry list

Robert Gates' speech at West Point today was mainly focused on reforming the army's training and promotion practices to foster initiative, versatility, continuing education and skills, e.g. language acquisition, to support interaction with far-flung populations.  He stressed versatility as part and parcel of insisting that it is always impossible to predict where the next war will be, or of what kind.  While warning himself and others against "next-war-itis," however, he also listed possibilities in a way that made his own expectations somewhat clear:

We can’t know with absolute certainty what the future of warfare will hold, but we do know it will be exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and – as they say in the staff colleges – “unstructured.”  Just think about the range of security challenges we face right now beyond Iraq and Afghanistan: terrorism and terrorists in search of weapons of mass destruction, Iran, North Korea, military modernization programs in Russia and China, failed and failing states, revolution in the Middle East, cyber, piracy, proliferation, natural and man-made disasters, and more.

"Russia and China" are pretty far down that list, no?  And in case anyone missed the sequencing, here it is once more:

What we can expect in the future is that potential adversaries – be they terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states, or emerging powers – will seek to frustrate America’s traditional advantages, in particular our ability to shoot, move and communicate with speed and precision. 

A thought experiment on thought experiments

The limitations of argument by analogy, particularly of historical analogy, are well-known. Strands of apparent likeness between two situations may be far outstripped by myriad factors that are in no way like.

But of course, we can't do without analogy. All inductive reasoning is dependent on it. Past results may be no guarantee of future success. But everything we know about the course of human events derives from knowledge of the past.

More broadly, every noun and every adjective is an analogy, or rather a classification, which is an analogy extended across a number of discrete entities. A noun is an assertion that different entities are like enough to share a name; an adjective, that different instances of a quality (brown, angry) are like enough to be classed together. For that matter, I suppose a verb embeds an analogy too -- the rapid motion of your legs is like enough to mine that we can both be said to "run," even if you move twice as fast as I do.


And ah, the eureka of a really good analogy! What comes first to mind (through nether pathways) is the instructive assertion that giving birth to a human baby is like "shitting a watermelon." Less viscerally, what I'm meandering toward  is mentally yoking two really excellent extended analogies that I've come across recently -- each complex enough to be deemed a "thought experiment," as I suppose any really good analogy is. If I can find any common element other than aptness (I'll think about it as I paste them, which doesn't work as well for this purpose as typing them out), I suppose I'll have my own meta-analogy.

First: James Fallows recently relayed a sterling attempt by consultant Thomas Barnett to help Americans imagine the strengths and weaknesses of a rising China:

Young candidate's luxury

Once upon a time a rather longshot Senate candidate proposed:

Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

Playing for Reagan Democrats

Looking at the Democrats' decision to hold the 2012 party convention in Charleston, NC, William Galston frets that Team Obama may be focusing on the arugula vote at the expense of Reagan Democrats:

Taken together, these clues [the convention decision and Axelrod remarks holding up Colorado as a bellwether] suggest that the Obama’s 2012 campaign will focus more on the Democratic periphery—territory newly won in 2008—than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half-century. This could turn out to be a mistake of epic proportions. Why? Because the United States looks a lot more like Ohio than like Colorado.

That is, less educated, more dependent on manufacturing, more culturally conservative than voters in Colorado.

Made to order, then, the labor crisis ginned up by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who seeks to strip those Wisconsin public sector unions that didn't support him of their collective bargaining rights? Some think so:

On ABC’s “Top Line” today, former Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, told us that the battles in states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa could wind up benefiting President Obama politically, particularly since the battles are being waged in critical presidential battleground states.

Ask not what was in prior drafts (oh, all right, do...)

On Fallows' blog earlier this month, I took a "coming to it cold" look at JFK's inaugural address and noted, among other things, its beleaguered tone (Kennedy begins by warning that both freedom and humanity itself are in danger of extinction) and its relentlessly global focus -- there is not a mention of domestic issues, and only the final segment of the speech is directed to "my fellow Americans" as opposed to various foreign audiences.

In the current New Yorker, Obama speechwriter Adam Frankel recounts a remarkable tale of the discovery last month of probably the earliest known draft of Kennedy's famous speech, composed by Theodore Sorenson (Frankel relates that Sorenson and Kennedy seem to have worked concurrently on separate drafts, which they began to meld the day after the newly discovered Sorenson draft was created).  Both points above get some reinforcement from Frankel's narrative. First, the strictly international focus:

In “Kennedy,” Sorensen wrote that J.F.K. thought his early drafts focussed too heavily on domestic issues: “We must begin by facing the fact that history’s most abundant economy has slackened its growth to a virtual halt. That the world’s most productive farmers have only suffered for their success. . . . That too many of our cities are sinking into squalor.” This and other passages from the January 14th version also give the impression that Kennedy and Sorensen were still writing in the language of the campaign...

Charles M. Schulz, Palin prophet

Forgive me for repeating myself, dear reader, but compare:

a.) From the Anchorage Daily News, 2/19/11, reporting the leaked contents of a book manuscript by former Palin aide Frank Bailey:

The manuscript opens with an account of Palin sending Bailey a message saying "I hate this damn job" shortly before she resigned as Alaska's governor in July 2009, less than three years into her four-year term.

b) xpostfactoid, 7/4/09, Why she did it:

A credulous view of Obama's budget/tax strategy

With regard to the looming budget battle and any concurrent negotiations for a long-term deficit reduction plan: as all kinds of mostly faux budget hawks raise their histrionic moral-equivalent-of-war cries about the deficit, the shape of Obama's strategy, beginning with the SOTU, is clearer to me.

A budget deal, for Obama, is means to an end: preserving the country's capacity to make the investments in education, infrastructure, new industries and health reform that have always been essential to his political program.  As the process begins, rather than "lead" as to the means of budget reduction, Obama chose to lead by keeping the end in mind: enabling sustainable economic growth. That means laying down a marker: spending reductions can't come at the expense of the investments that are his top priority.  The looming war over the current budget can't just be about how much is cut, but whether the cuts crimp prospects for future growth (or the prospects for meaningful cost control, e.g. by defunding implementation of the PPACA).

Alan and Erskine bowl a strike

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are out with an op-ed exquisitely calibrated to extend the life and influence of their commission's deficit reduction/tax reform plan and the negotiating process it kicked off.

At its heart is a delicately-couched challenge to the president that takes its force from acknowledging the potential efficacy of Obama's stated strategy:

Sadly, the president does punt on the larger issues. On health care, his budget calls for only a handful of savings and then asks Congress to identify the rest. He falls far short of comprehensive reform needed to simplify the tax code - broaden the base, lower rates and reduce the deficit - and proposes instead a small limit on deductions for higher earners (which Congress has rejected the past two years). He proposes nothing for restoring the solvency of Social Security, simply calling for a bipartisan process.

And yet, he's right: A bipartisan process is where this must start. In his news conference Tuesday, the president said that the fiscal commission plan represented a "framework for a conversation," noting that "this is going to be a process in which each side, in both chambers of Congress, go back and forth and start trying to whittle their differences down until we arrive at something that has an actual chance of passage."

What we should talk about when we talk to Donald Rumsfeld

The estimable Gideon Rachman left out the most important thing, IMO, as recorded in today's Financial Times:

Sir, I love Gideon Rachman’s regular column, but his lunchtime interview with Donald Rumsfeld (“Are we better off now? You bet”, Life & Arts, February 12-13) was noteworthy chiefly for its lacuna. There was no mention of Mr Rumsfeld’s role in approving a systematic programme of torture for US detainees, first at Guantánamo Bay and then at Abu Ghraib.

The rest is here.  FT content is available after a free, brief signup that entitles you to access a set number of articles per month.  Worth the trouble: the FT has the best columnist roster that I  know of anywhere. (A print subscription is a bargain; I've never had to pay over $150 for a year.)

My full FT file letter file back to 2006 is here.

Chambliss, Coburn, Crapo to Norquist: kowtow or brush-off?

No question, Ramesh Ponnuru is far more attuned than I will ever be to linguistic code of true-blue GOP supply siders. So perhaps I should accept at face value his report (via Sullivan) of this little tax-pledge tango between Grover Norquist and the Republican half of the new Senate gang of six currently in early-stage discussions of a comprehensive tax reform/deficit reduction deal:

After yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported on work toward a bipartisan deal on the budget, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform sent three Republican senators a letter noting that the deal, as outlined in the Journal article, would violate their pledge not to raise taxes. The response letter from Senators Chambliss, Coburn, and Crapo strongly suggests that the senators will not support a deal that raises taxes on net. Instead they want a bill that raises revenue only by increasing economic growth.

If you read the letter, though (link above), you might wonder whether Chambliss et al have really promised not to raise taxes "on net."  They do say that the Journal article, which reported that the six were contemplating an (apparently erroneously low) boost in tax revenues, should not be taken at face value. They do intone,  "Like you, we believe that tax hikes will hinder, not promote, economic growth." And they do plead that "we do not believe that our efforts to avert tax increases on hardworking Americans violates any pledge we have taken..." Of course not!  But...

Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership IV

Here is the best evidence yet that Obama's low-profile approach to beginning the long process of budget/tax reform is on target.  Never mind Republicans' alleged glee at his refusal to roll out a grand plan -- they are begging him, Jake Sherman reports, to expose himself:

House Republicans were giddy when President Barack Obama took a pass on entitlement reform in his 2012 budget, ripping him for punting on the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But when they’re pressed for answers about what needs to happen on entitlements, Republicans are punting right back, saying the president needs to take the lead and come up with his own ideas

Before stating their own policy prescriptions, no fewer than a dozen GOP lawmakers and aides Wednesday said that it is Obama’s responsibility to put forth ideas on entitlement reform.

“We need his leadership,” Ways and Means Republican Rep. Wally Herger (Calif.) said. “If it’s something this big to get through, it’s very important for the president to lead.”

Rep. Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the “president looks very small if he doesn’t lead on this issue.” Rep. Patrick Tiberi, an Ohio Republican cozy with Speaker John Boehner, said “you can’t have a big issue that impacts Americans without presidential leadership.” And Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), the president of the anti-Obama freshman class, said “quite honestly, he has a responsibility to America” to put forth his ideas and lead.

Mr. President, Republicans have a playbook for you: Over the Cliff, by Hugo First.

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the WSJ's Jonathan Weisman reports, negotiations continue apace among a new gang of six toward a plan with at least some resemblance to Bowles-Simpson (including, apparently, a lot of magic asterisks). Weisman notes pointedly that two of the six, Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn, are "personally close to President Obama."  Nonetheless, despite further GOP blandishments, the admin is hanging back:

Wrestling with hope for Egypt

It is interesting to watch sober minds grapple with their hopes in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. Nowhere more so than on the Comment page of the Financial Times, where columnists based on various continents address as a matter of course the current and likely future progress of democracy (and humanity), and Fukuyama haunts the space (and not infrequently, visits in the flesh, or rather ink). 

Up today is Martin Wolf, who explains the tidal pull toward democracy in basically Fukuyaman terms -- economic pressure to compete plus an Aristotelian understanding of human nature as essentially political, determined to self-govern. Unanswered in the short space of a column is the relationship between the two: as Wolf points out, usually it's only when a country has reached a certain level of economic development that its people are equipped to express "something deep within us" that demands self-governance.  If the will to self-governance is prior to the economic conditions that unleash it, that suggests that the "democracy drive" is either evolutionary or a product of intelligent design.

As an economist, Wolf places his bet on Egypt in mainly economic terms:

Scepticism is not unreasonable. As my colleague, Gideon Rachman notes, the stability of democracy goes hand in hand with economic advance. The richer the country, the more educated its people, except where wealth comes mainly from resource rents. Again, the higher the proportion of the desperately poor, the greater the likelihood of a successful electoral appeal by ultimately ruinous populists. Finally, the poorer the country, the smaller the resources at the disposal of any democratic government with which to protect itself against its foes...

True, Egypt is a relatively poor country with a sizeable proportion of the population illiterate. Yet its gross domestic product per head, at purchasing power parity, is almost double India’s and 50 per cent higher than Indonesia’s. This does not suggest that democracy is, in any sense, inconceivable. Egypt does have a well-organised Islamist movement. But does this have to be deeply anti-democratic? This must be put to the test. Remember that Catholicism, too, was once widely thought incompatible with successful democratic government.

What interests me is, with the ground thus prepared, Wolf grapples with "naivete anxiety" while giving way, mostly, to that "something deep within us" that yearns for democracy:

Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership, III

Here and here, I've been tracking the evidence that Obama is acting on the theory -- advanced by sitting elected officials and political scientists alike -- that for major bipartisan policy deals, leading with a grand presidential plan is counterproductive.  Just now, in a press conference, Obama came out with it himself:

“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

And since it's buried in an update to yesterday's post, let's note once more that Jacob Lew is singing from the same sheet:

By trimming programs dear to his party's liberals, Mr. Obama may improve his credibility as a budget-cutter. Yet the White House budget plan offers little new on one of the nation's most fundamental problems, spending on mandatory programs, which would grow to nearly $3.5 trillion by 2021 from $2.1 trillion next year.

That omission is by design. Jacob Lew, Mr. Obama's budget director, said such proposals had a better chance in closed-doors talks with Republicans.

Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership, cont.

Once again, Clive Crook combines solid fiscal sense with political obtusity.  Hammering the obvious need for tax reform and tax hikes in response to the U.S. structural deficit, he accuses Obama of a lack of political courage for not endorsing Bowles-Simpson or laying out a revenue-raising plan of his own.  But Crook's argument carries the seeds of its own refutation.

Crook acknowledges the political realities that make it impossible for Obama to get anywhere if he unilaterally proposes the tax hikes the country needs -- even if those hikes come from radically reducing targeted tax breaks while cutting marginal rates:

Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership

Occasionally at least, practicing political tacticians and political scientists arrive at the same conclusions, presumably by very different paths.

In the Times front pager on Obama's proposed budget, the most important perspective comes last, from Kent Conrad:

The budget confirms that Mr. Obama is not taking the lead in embracing the kind of far-reaching deficit-reduction plan recommended in December by a bipartisan majority of his fiscal commission. It proposed saving $4 trillion over a decade through specific cuts in spending for domestic, military and entitlement programs and new revenues from overhauling the tax code. 

Instead, he has called on Republicans to negotiate with him to reach that goal.

While that disappoints deficit hawks in both parties, many say they are sympathetic or even supportive of his caution because neither party seems ready to compromise.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and a Democratic member of the fiscal commission, said: “In this highly partisan environment, if the president proposes something, there is automatically some group that is opposed. It may be better for him to play the role of referee.”

Mr. Conrad added: “To get a result, the president has got to be part of a larger process that involves Republicans and Democrats, the House and Senate. How one gets to the table is not just one move, it’s a series of moves. And it’s very, very difficult.” 

Compare Matthew Yglesias in December, retailing a piece of poli sci wisdom regarding presidential persuasion:

It sounds silly to call for less presidential leadership, but I think the evidence suggests that what’s needed here [in the SOTU] is actually a very vague and generic endorsement of the concept of tax reform plus some themeless pudding. Frances Lee’s important book Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U. S. Senate argues persuasively that what happens when a president tries to “lead” on an issue like this is that a dynamic of partisan polarization kicks in. What you really need to get tax reform is for some hard-working members of congress from both parties to take the initiative in hammering out a framework and building support on the Hill. If such a thing happens, the White House should of course try to play a constructive role. But jumping all over the issue and a creating a dynamic where tax reform becomes “a key priority for the Obama administration” that opportunists on the right want to kill for the sake of a political win would not be a constructive intervention.

Waxing placid, sitting ceremonious

Vaughan Bell calls this lyric by rapper Akala "a remarkably accurate account of the learned helplessness theory of depression:

It's just something inside my head

I wasn’t born this way
My condition was learned
Once bitten twice shy I don’t wanna be burned
When you travel a passage
That leaves your heart ravaged
Your mind waxes placid to limit the damage
Your reaction is passive
Whether you like it or not
You cannot win whether you fight it or not
Your brain swallows the pain and buries it instead
Now.. It’s just something inside my head.

I am reminded of another dispatch from the post-traumatic emotional graveyard by that whispering 19th century rapper, Emily Dickinson:

Out of the mouths of babes (sort of)

Apropos of nothing except a stray memory, a bit of doggerel based on a conversation between my wife and son about a quarter century ago (fused with a misperception of my sister's, about a half century ago):

Human Beans

"Before I was born, what did I do?"

"It's hard to say--you weren't yet you."

"Where did I wait? Did I stand or sit?"

"Don't know. You weren't anywhere yet."

"Well then, where did I come from?"

"You grew from a seed. Inside Mommy's tum."

"Inside Mommy?  What did I do?"

"Just rested and waited. And grew and grew."

"Grew? Like the bean plant out of the bean?"

"Exactly."

            --"And so I'm a human bean?"

"Exactly."

--"And you were a seed that grew?

"I was. And everyone else was, too."

"And when you die, are you planted--like new?"

"Maybe. I think so."

--"I think so, too."

Chinese Civilization and its Discontents

"The urge for freedom," wrote Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, "...is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. It does not seem as though any influence could induce a man to change his nature into a termite's"   (p. 43, Norton ed.).  Perhaps that unshakable resistance to  the group explains not only why so many cultures all but codify certain forms of rule-breaking, but why such widespread and tolerated rebellions are often noted with pride or affection as an identity marker for the group.

That solidarity in transgression may explain my initial reaction to Deborah Fallows' account of the Chinese approach to legal and official authority in Dreaming in Chinese. Fallows  notes that the Chinese have a bewildering array of rules, many of them governing seemingly harmless behavior, then moves on to the garden of transgressions:

Cars pay no heed to green Walk signals for pedestrians, just as pedestrians head blithely into the streets against red Don't Walk signals. Crowds ignore bus attendants who scream at them through their bullhorns to stand back from the curbs. People argue with traffic attendants and even policemen who blast their whistles, trying in vain to keep people off the crosswalks and safely on the sidewalks. Airline attendants warn passengers to stay buckled up until the plane arrives at the gate, but most passengers jump up to rummage through the overhead bins as soon as the wheels touch the runway. People smoke in front of No Smoking signs, spit in front of No Spitting signs, and sit on the grass in front of Keep Off The Grass Signs (158).

Charming, right? Even more so, the rulebreaking is not a matter of simple defiance, but of extraordinarily nuanced subliminal negotiation:

A posture, a look, a hesitation, or any one of a variety of subtle moves adds much to shades of meaning. This subtle kind of body language is not something that can be taught: you use your eyes and ears together to interpret a mismatch between what you're hearing and what you're seeing, or to catch a soft "I don't really mean it" undertone. Finally, you just get a feeling, and you know it when you see it (161).

Fallows has several hilarious examples, but you'll have to buy the book to experience them.

Though by turns amused and bemused, Fallows is not sentimental about this convoluted behavioral code -- and nor, I think, should a reader be. Its underside is harsh:

Times headline deploys adjective...or verb?

Is it worthwhile delving into the mind of a New York Times headline writer? Why not? Consider:

As Mubarak Digs In, U.S. Policy in Egypt Is Complicated

Momentous question of the morning: is "complicated" an adjective or a (passive) verb?  Are we simply suggesting that U.S. policy is complex right now, or that it's being "complicated" as we speak by the behavior of the besieged Egyptian president?

The core point seems to be that, being a step behind fast-moving events, policy is "complicated" at every step by new developments rendering the last pronouncement or action obsolete. For example:

Analytical humility

On Fallows blog today, a tribute to the humility of some commentators trying to make sense of the Egyptian uprising:

...arbitrarily or not, in a single day earlier this week (Jan. 31) three instances of admirable humility in attempts to fathom what's happening in Egypt caught my eye. Do they indicate some collective chastening of American consciousness by events over the last near-decade? Who knows? But here they are.

"Here" being here.

On Fallows' field

Here's the guestpostfactoid harvest of  posts on James Fallows' blog thus far this week, most recent first:

Chastened by history? (2/4)

By Jingo, Obama was not fear-mongering in the SOTU (2/3)

Futurist shock (2/2)

JFK's bridge to the 21st century (2/1)

Darkness in Kennedy's noontide vision

Also in Fallows' space this week, see Xujun Eberlein on a quest to sort truth from the state-sponsored mythology she grew up with during the Cultural Revolution regarding the degree of U.S. involvement  with Chinese nationalist battles and alleged war crimes against the Chinese communists in the 1940s; Bruce J. Holmes on aeronautical challenges from Sputnik to the current alleged "Sputnik moment"; and Chuck Spinney on systemic U.S. follies in defense spending and foreign policy.

Coming soon, to a college near you...

I was just mentally scoping out the prospect of teaching a colleague to tweet, and the phrase "professor of tweeting" popped into my mind. Then, with awful certainty, came the conviction that someone somewhere is teaching tweeting in a classroom.  Certainly social media is being taught...yes, I've now invested two seconds to investigating the matter on Google. In fact it's on the graduate level.  BizWeek:

Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have joined a growing list of business schools that are adding courses on social media to their MBA curricula, addressing the corporate demand for social-network-savvy employees. The two schools are among at least six that have added courses in the past year that allow students to learn about Internet marketing and social media strategy, according to course syllabi and faculty associated with the classes.

Tu-whit Tu-whoo, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

JFK's bridge to the 21st Century

Posted on Fallows' blog: a look at some continuities between Obama's SOTU and Kennedy's inaugural address, and some thoughts about how Kennedy's call for a "beachhead of cooperation between rivals" and a drive to "unleash the powers of science" for peaceful purposes has played out:

Since Kennedy stood coatless in the cold,  the world has experienced a half century of rapid technological progress, fitful but dramatic progress in democratization, equally fitful but dramatic gains in prosperity and public health, and diminished incidence of death by violence.  The world is now struggling with the dynamics of equitable and sustainable growth, and Obama is only the most recent in a succession of presidents who have been able to say, with regard to an inevitably emerging rival , "we do not seek to contain China's rise" (as Obama told Chinese students in November 2009. There is doubtless some ambiguity, and some ambivalence, behind that mantra.  But it is at least conditionally true at present, and represents the country's enlightened self interest.

Here's the rest.

Your government is on top of it

There is nothing genuinely funny about this, but it's found art in the best (month old) Fallows tradition -- this time on Twitter:

As 1000 tweets were blossoming relaying Mubarak's announcement that he will not seek another term, an alert wing of the the StateDep. (US Embassy Ottawa)  let this drop:

President Obama to meet with PM Harper @Whitehouse this Friday to discuss US-Canada relationship and key global issues.

Now we know everything will be okay.

Clouds over Camelot

On Fallows' blog today, a close look at JFK's inaugural address:

The...surprise is that Kennedy's fabled optimism, and idealism, and literally shoot-the-moon can-do-ism, is tempered by, or rather grounded in, a sense of peril that by current standards seems almost apocalyptic.

The rest is here.