Thank GOP voters for small favors

If there has been one silver line in the long disgusting spectacle of the GOP nomination contest, it's the failure of Rick Perry to get any traction. As Jonathan Bernstein reminded us early and often, Perry -- a three-term governor of the largest Republican state, with an at least superficially impressive job creation record and an enormous war chest-- was the candidate best positioned to win, or at least give Mitt Romney a serious run. He's failed to break into the top four purely by virtue of proving himself too stupid and (perhaps) cruel and abusive even for Republican primary voters.  Tonight he was in top form -- calling Turkey's leaders terrorists and lumping this NATO member with Iran and Syria, defending the U.S. marines who urinated on Afghan corpses on the grounds that their crime was not as bad as the beheading of Daniel Pearl, and declaring a state of war between the U.S. and South Carolina and between the U.S. and "religion."

While Republicans are going to nominate a shameless liar, they have forborne to elevate an incompetent, a religious fanatic or a fascist. 

Tonight, for the first time, I got fully into the swing of debate-tweeting. Some live impressions @xpostfactoid1.

Better Angels in Super Hornets

The continued U.S. military engagement on behalf of Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan is viewed by increasing numbers of Americans as a legacy struggle -- seen to varying degrees from different perspectives as wasteful, futile, brutal.  Maybe so. At the same, whatever the prospects for success however defined, the manner of its fighting illustrates a major thesis of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: that great powers' recourse to violence grows ever more calibrated and proportional.

Given the waste of the Iraq war, the mishandling of the one in Afghanistan, the hundred-plus thousand lives lost in the one and the tens of thousands in the other, the claim may seem callous and polyannish. Compared to past conflicts of like scope, however, it true nonetheless, and increasingly so.  Today's front-page New York Times report by C.J. Chivers on changing U.S. aerial tactics in Afghanistan provides a striking illustration.  One navy flight commander's experience illustrates the current m.o.:

Shooting skeet was excellent practice. It taught them to shoot skeet."*

In today's Times, Michael Winerip spotlights an important limitation to a widely publicized longitudinal study that found that elementary school teachers who significantly raise students' test scores have a positive impact on their long-term prospects.Winerip notes that the testing in question took place before the era of "high-stakes testing," in which teachers are under relentless pressure to teach to the test and curricula are bent to that end.  Winerip's caveat:

Whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell. It may well be that teachers under pressure to raise their students’ scores through extensive test preparation will get inflated results that do not carry over positively to adulthood.

There's a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work: if you teach to the test, the test results have a different import. Winerip concludes with a personal anecdote that I can bookend with my later experience as a parent:

On leveraged debt bondage

The best articles about Romney, Bain and private equity as it's developed over the last thirty years make it clear that it's very difficult to draw a fair scorecard. Private equity firms can deploy strategic smarts and managerial skill to turn around troubled companies or turbo-charge successful ones; they can also load down their purchased companies with debt, denude them with fees and dividend payouts, and sell them off before chickens come home to roost. Whether PE-owned companies thrive or fail, we never know how they would have done under prior or different ownership. The story of private equity since about 1980 is very much of a piece with the story of American capitalism: impressive growth, but with gains going disproportionately to the very top in a game that seems ever more rigged.

When PE firms (including Bain) do drive a portfolio company into bankruptcy, it's often the result of saddling it with debt.  That highlights a basic fact about private equity that I could never quite wrap my head around: when an investment firm or fund uses mainly borrowed money to buy a company, why should the purchased company own that debt?

Steven Rattner, in a defense of Bain, relays the investor's rationale for high leverage:

Erasing the King of Bain Stain

Romney should be able to beat the King of Bain rap. The film is so obviously over the top in its vilification, it has 'smear' written all over it from the moment the narrator intones menacingly, near the outset, that Bain Capital was initially funded by Latin American money.  Its presentation of every factory closure it treats has been shown to be distorted: either the troubles started well before Bain came on the scene, or after Romney left, or in several stages under several changes of ownership. Even Newt is now demanding that his Pac either fix every error or take the film down -- as if the old demonizing fraudster didn't know perfectly well last week, when he was urging debate viewers to watch it and judge for themselves, that there was not an undistorted fact in the whole.

And yet. Distorted does not mean entirely devoid of truth. The closures were real; Bain did push some companies into or towards bankruptcy by overloading them with debt; and when Romney is shown asking "whose pockets" corporate profits flow into, the film provides a clear answer: disproportionately into his and those of his ilk.

Santorum promises universal daycare!

Igor Volsky relays the historic announcement live:

Santorum: "This is an election about whether you're going to leave your children free. Period.

Citizens Divided via SuperPac

As anti-Romney billionaires fund SuperPacs in support of Gingrich, Huntsman and Santorum, it's obvious that the Citizens United decision has remade the political playing field.  What has traditionally been big money in campaign finance  -- say, $15 million in a quarter raised by a candidate for a major-party presidential nomination -- is chump change to the likes of Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess and Jon Huntsman, Sr. (their contributions thus far may reach only a large fraction of that level, but give them time). Any candidate who shows a pulse can be insta-funded; any attack that suits a billionaire's agenda can be micro-targeted or broadcast.  A nomination that would be wrapped up under the old rules may not still be competitive - -but the level of advertising attack that Romney and Gingrich have sustained or will sustain is unprecedented in a primary race.

In some cases, American voters have shown some antibodies against campaign advertising (see: Huckabee, Iowa; Santorum, Iowa).   We're going to have to develop stronger ones. Perhaps the barrage of internecine attacks will be self-cancelling.

Or maybe, just maybe, if enough Republicans are gored and gutted this cycle by SuperPacAttacks, we'll see a new round of campaign finance reform.  Especially if they destroy their nominee.

P.S. How about a billionaires' truce? Warren Buffett, on behalf of Obama, promises to match all SuperPac funding on the GOP side -- and they all agree to keep their money instead.

Tell us more, David Brooks: why do Americans mistrust government?

David Brooks makes a fair point today: Americans' lack of trust in government undermines liberalism.  But then he can't forbear to give his bias enough play to blame Democrats almost equally for this sad state of affairs.   His diagnosis skips or elides key drivers of this lack of trust.

First, it's cultural. Americans have been railing against the federal government since before it existed. The ratification debate was rife with fear that a tyranny was being established, a fear shared by many members of the Constitutional Convention.  Six-year Senate terms, lifetime judgeships, a vice president with feet in two branches of government, direct taxing power -- all were excoriated as instruments of tyranny. A few decades later, states' rights became the battle cry and vehicle for those who so resented any impingement -- or potential impingement -- on their "right" to hold slaves that they established their own weak confederacy custom-designed to leave them to their pleasures of personal dominion.

True Newt, false Newt

Hate-mongering demagogue though he may be, Newt Gingrich spoke one truth and illustrated another in a response to one question from moderator David Gregory in yesterday's GOP debate in New Hampshire:

GREGORY: Speaker Gingrich, if you become President Gingrich and the leader of the Democrats, Harry Reed says he’s going to promise to make you a one term president, how would you propose to work with someone like that in order to achieve results in Washington?

GINGRICH: I think every president who works with the leader of every opposition knows they’re working with someone who wants to make them a one term president. I mean you know that -- that’s the American process. I worked with Ronald Reagan in the early 1990’s. Tip O’Neil was speaker. He wanted to make Reagan a one term president. We had to get one-third of the Democrats to vote for the Reagan tax cuts and we did.

Perry keeps skidding on smears

Give Rick Perry credit for consistency. His primary mode of political communication remains the smear.  To be more precise, his default mode of attack is the inflammatory insult used to articulate a garden-variety policy disagreement.

Note the structural similarities between two Perry attacks, one made in today's New Hampshire debate
and one made four months ago. Today:

HILLER: Governor Perry, your party’s last nominee, John McCain wrote in the Washington Post in an op-ed about a year ago, his words, “I disagree with many of the president’s policies but I believe he is a patriot, sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America, or opposed to its founding ideals.” Agree?

PERRY: I make a very proud statement and, in fact that we have a president that’s a socialist. I don’t think our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country. So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another that President Obama reflects our founding fathers. He doesn’t. He talks about having a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government.

And on September 15, in a Time Magazine interview:

Santorum double-blind

The core of Rick Santorum's domestic policy and governing philosophy is to boost the two-parent family. That's his anti-poverty program. Here he is in today's debate in New Hampshire:

And I believe that there’s one thing that is undermining this country, and it is the breakdown of the American family. It’s undermining our economy. You see the rates of poverty among single- parent families, which are -- moms are doing heroic things, but it’s harder. It’s five times higher in a single-parent family.

We -- we know there’s certain things that work in America. The Brookings Institute came out with a study just a few -- couple of years ago that said, if you graduate from high school, and if you work, and if you’re a man, if you marry, if you’re a woman, if you marry before you have children, you have a 2 percent chance of being in poverty in America. And to be above the median income, if you do those three things, 77 percent chance of being above the median income.

Socratic Santorum sidetracks students

Rick Santorum laid a bit of a trap yesterday for some indignant college kids who confronted him about gay marriage at a student convention in Concord, NH yesterday.  David Corn recounts:

Two students asked Santorum how he could justify this opposition with his opening remarks that focused on the guarantee, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that no American shall be deprived of the "pursuit of happiness."

"So anyone can marry several people?" Santorum asked. "What about three men?"

 

Santorum...asked the students to justify gay marriage. When one said, "How about the idea that all men are created equal and [have] the right to happiness and liberty," Santorum asked, Are you saying that everyone should have the right to marry anyone?

The student said yes. And Santorum quickly retorted. "So anyone can marry several people?"

No, the student said.
But what if someone can only be happy if he or she was married to five people? Santorum asked her.

Others in the crowd starting jeering him. "That's not the point," one shouted.

But Santorum, who kept cutting off the students, stuck to this argument. When the students talked about equal rights, he repeatedly interrupted, "What about three men?"

"That's irrelevant," one of the students said.

"No, it's not," he said.

"That's not what I'm talking about," she said.

With a smile, Santorum said, "If we're going to have a conversation based on rational, reasonable thought…if people say it's okay for two, then you have to say why it's not right for three."

Santorum was diverting the students (with some success, it seems; I can't find a full transcript).  He was suggesting that their argument was that the state has no right to regulate or define marriage.   The question is on what basis the state excludes some relationships from marital status. For Santorum, it comes down to God's law:

Paint Romney as flip-flopper or right-winger? Both/and!

Methinks New York Times reporter Helene Cooper has posed a false choice for the Obama campaign.  But then, John Sides and Kevin Drum both accept the terms, so maybe I'm missing something.

As a plan of attack against Romney, Cooper asks:

Do they go the flip-flopper route? Or do they go the out-of-touch, protector-of-Wall-Street route?

Cooper acknowledges that the two paths may not be mutually exclusive. But then, recounting the campaign's pursuit of the flip-flopper meme, she undercuts that caveat:

Gingrich goes Bob Dole one better

Lore has it (who knows, maybe the polling data doesn't back it) that Bob Dole disqualified himself for the presidential nomination in 1988 with a testy challenge to George H. W. Bush: stop lying about my record. That was in response to a Bush ad accusing Dole of "straddling" on taxes.

Newt Gingrich, who knows he's going nowhere and counts himself destroyed by Romney's hands-off SuperPac ads, has defined intraparty decency down down down. On CBS this morning, he told Mitt Romney to stop lying about...everything.  Recap below starts with a question by Norah O'Donnell:

Obama through the looking glass(es)

Obama is a radical socialist who vastly increased government spending, saddled our grandchildren with debt and expanded government control of every aspect of Americans' lives.

Obama is a naive weakling who let Republicans frame the agenda in 2011, was seduced by a siren song of compromise, and capitulated to the Tea Party hostage-takers, agreeing to massive spending cuts without winning any revenue increases. 

I'd like to accuse Republicans of the doublethink required to embrace both narratives, but they never really bought into the second -- at best, they projected "weak Obama" onto the foreign policy stage (a bit of a stretch in light of Obama's apparent 'got the sucker' lethality, whatever you think of the wisdom of his various covert and low-key military operations). The capitulator-in-chief narrative belongs to disappointed progressives.

Still, given the Rube Goldberg two-stroke spending cut apparatus that Obama signed onto on August 1 this year, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the Wall Street Journal editorialists' lump-of-coal lament today:

My not-most-read posts of 2011

As Kevin Drum notes today, all the cool kids (himself now included) are putting up their most-viewed blog posts of the year. Well, you know how we uncool kids cope: with variations on a theme.  My most-read posts have all been boosted by links from my more-trafficked friends in the blogosphere. What I'd like to do here is pull out of storage a few posts that I could have wished had grazed a few more eyeballs.

First, recent readers may have noted how stimulated I've been by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  I've kept up a kind of response journal, in which I've oscillated between enthusiastic assent and various doubts and caveats. Why a running annotated read, instead of a finished review?  Well, I'm impatient, and it's a long book. But also: whatever you think about humanity's prospects, and whatever the weaknesses in Pinker's historiography, this is a book that changes the way you view history and the moment we're living in as you read. I keep viewing other things I read, and age-old musings, in light of it. I hope there's some value in recording this process. So here are the posts, earliest first:

The bettering angels of our nature
Better angels in the news
Religion helped develop our better angels
How our better angels' wings might be clipped
Better angels leave their kitchens in Cairo
Can humanity lead itself out to pasture?
Better dead than red, revisited
Better Angels in Super Hornets

Here are a few more posts, mostly nonpolitical, that I'd like to give a second chance:


The best liar in the field
A president confesses error and defends democracy
Rat race or fluid human dance?
Prophets of the new millennium
Five questions for Obama
Jeffrey Goldberg, excommunicator
Slo-mo grow on the plateau: Tyler Cowen's general theory of American malaise
About those free-range little Krugmans and Manzis
Ruth Marcus's false "false false choice" charge
MIA in the latest Jane Eyre

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned in 2012.

EU epitaph?

The headline of what the Wall Street Journal bills as an insider narrative of the escalating European debt crisis is "Dithering at The top Turned EU Crisis into Global Threat."  I'm not sure dithering is quite right. The story suggests that European leaders couldn't agree not because they were indecisive per se but because their national interests were at odds and each was answerable to his or her own people. At one moment, French President Nicholas Sarkozy expressed the problem succinctly:

Finnish premier Jyrki Katainen also complained. His parliament wanted collateral in exchange for more Finnish lending to Greece. "No collateral, no agreement from me," he said.

Mr. Sarkozy was peeved. "All our parliaments can cause problems," he said.

Better dead than red, revisited

Please excuse my flipping this post forward; it got buried...

Early this year, in a 'come to it cold' look at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, I was struck by its beleaguered tone -- its somber sense that freedom and even human life itself were on a double knife's edge of communist domination or nuclear war.

In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, I just happened on a smidgeon of context:

In 1961 Americans were asked whether the country should "fight an all-out nuclear war rather than live under communist rule." Eighty-seven percent of men said yes, while "only 75 percent of the women felt that way -- proof that women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society (location 11629).

Greg Miller, WTF?

In a disturbing and apparently well-sourced article by the Washington Post's Greg Miller on the Obama administration's escalation of drone warfare, one unattributed assertion looks like an ideological plant:

The escalation of the lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven to an extent by early counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s detention program and halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options beyond drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.

How does this compute? Are we supposed to believe that if the CIA had secret torture chambers at its disposal, it would opt to capture some targets rather than kill them? Or is the implication that human intelligence was hamstrung by ending torture, so counterterrorism operatives have nothing better to do than kill their targets? But isn't the very idea of a drone strike predicated on reliable intelligence? 

Question for Republicans

Okay, so now we know that not only did Romney consider his Massachusetts health insurance plan a national model, Gingrich* enthusiastically embraced it as a plan "tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system," asserting that 100% of Americans should have health insurance and implying that the individual mandate was a linchpin to reaching that goal (I don't consider his spokesman's plaint that Newt didn't write the "Newt Notes" in question worth bothering about). As Ezra Klein reminds us, Obamacare is essentially a Republican scheme for delivering near-universal coverage: "insofar as the Republican Party had a plan for health-care reform, the individual mandate was it."

A question, then, for Republicans: When Romney's healthcare plan was news -- from, say, April 2006, when Romney signed his plan into law, until February 2007, when John Edwards came out with a national plan embracing the individual mandate -- was there any prominent Republican or conservative who went on record saying that Romneycare was an interesting and promising experiment, but that a similarly structured national plan would be inappropriate or unworkable?  Did any mainstream Republican or conservative suggest that an individual mandate imposed by the federal government would violate the U.S. Constitution?

*I don't consider the plaint by Newt's spokesman that Newt didn't write the "Newt Notes" in question any more exculpatory than Ron Paul's claim that he didn't know what was in the Ron Paul newsletters. If you're name's on it, and you disavow it, you're a self-confessed fraud.

UPDATE: I have found a libertarian critic of the individual mandate, writing in USA Today Magazine on July 1, 2006: Cato's Michael Tanner, a critic of "big government conservatism." Tanner argued that the individual mandate was unenforceable; that subsidized mandated insurance for individuals would be unpriceable; that minimum coverage standards would become a goody bag for providers of various health services; and that the individual mandate would lead to more government control of the healthcare system.  As prelude to his attack, Tanner noted that "proposals for an individual mandate have drawn a surprising degree of support from conservatives."