The Waning "Democratic" Congress

People like to talk about how the Democrats, with a 70+ seat majority in the House and a 16 seat majority in the Senate, both of which expire in January, why the hell don't they just pass things that are good? It's their last chance, one last shot at the apple, we need to do something before the Republicans take over the House, etc. etc. But there's a giant problem with this: Republicans control the Senate. They can filibuster. There are 42 of them; they can even afford to lose one vote. So Democrats cannot run roughshod over the Republicans. They just can't. Republicans have a plenary veto over legislation, currently. They have that plenary veto over legislation approximately as strongly as they will have it in January. So nothing can pass without getting, now, two Republicans to vote for it in the Senate. And the discipline of Mitch McConnell is a fearsome thing to behold, so roughly speaking nothing Democrats want to get done will get those two votes, and thus it won't get done. Very, very simple. Blame Obama for any number of things, but strict failure to get any reasonable left-wing policies passed through the Congress ain't one of them.

Regime Change

Disclaimer: I'm a pacifist, and if I were in Congress I would automatically vote against any war resolution unless I might be the marginal vote on it, in which case I would think about it but need serious convincing to vote for it. That said...

It strikes me that there are a few conditions which make a foreign-interventionist "regime change" possible in a "successful" manner. The first, obviously, is that the nation in question must be a non-democracy, an oppressive, authoritarian regime, or why do you want to regime change in the first place? (All anti-democratic regime changes treated as illegitimate for this discussion.) The second is, of course, that it will be relatively simple, ideally with minimal collateral damage and casualties, to militarily defeat the incumbent oppressive regime. But the thing that made Iraq and Afghanistan work so terribly badly is that the third condition was lacking, namely a genuine and healthy appetite for democratic self-governance on a basis acceptable to, say, the values of the populace of the invading power. If you have a country, that is, where the people would really like to be democratically governing themselves, but they have this oppressive authoritarian regime that won't let them and is just too damn strong militarily for them to beat it, a foreign military power might genuinely be able to, in effect, join their revolution, either overtly or just by being one hell of an arsenal of democracy. I'm notably not a foreign policy expert, having taken (so far) big fat 0 international relations courses, and being generally less wonky and well-informed about international affairs than domestic policy matters, but it strikes me that such a country might well be ripe for some kind of regime change, again if I weren't a pacifist.

Is Iran such a country? Conditions #1 and #2 apply, definitely, and there is some evidence that Condition #3 might apply as well. Now, of course, I am not, repeat not advocating war with Iran; if I'm advocating anything, it might be an arsenal-of-democracy strategy if a popular revolution starts of its own accord. There are massively bad things about attacking Iran, the oil shock, the general geopolitical destabilization, the "you and what army?" thing, and of course the killing (which is kind of a deal-breaker for me), and of course I don't know that Part III applies there in a way it didn't in the neighboring countries. But I just think that, setting aside the fundamental moral objection to war, from what I know of Iran it seems like it could be a relatively regime-changeable country.

The Calm Before... Something?

So, there's been something very strange happening recently. For the last twenty years, that is. Specifically, we've now gone five Presidential election cycles in which the highest percentage of electoral votes any candidate has gotten was 70.4%, and no Presidential candidate has won a popular vote margin of more than 8.5%. This is only the second time this has happened, ever; that was from 1876 through 1900, when the biggest margin was 6.1% and the biggest share of the EVs was 65.3%, both in 1900. In fact, from 1880 through 1888, three consecutive Presidential cycles were decided by less than one percent of popular vote, and were within a 60-40 split in the Electoral College. Outside of that period and the current period, the longest we've gone with elections as close as the ones we've been seeing was... one election. That's right, there were no consecutive elections meeting both these criteria since the formation of the Republican party except for two exceptionally long competitive bursts.

There's something else, though: the landscape of Presidential elections has been absurdly stable these last twenty years. Specifically, thirty-one out of fifty states, plus DC, have voted for the same party in each of our last five elections. A further nine have voted for one party four of five times. Only ten states have been properly "swing," dividing their vote as evenly as you could ask for (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, of which five are products of Clinton's being a Southerner). Overall, the fifty-one state-like regions that have voted in the past five elections have voted for their preferred party an average of 87% of the time; the similar stat for the post-Civil War era is only 83%. I have no idea if that's statistically significant, but this rough gauge of the stability of voting patterns suggests that we've been at least as set in our ways as that era.

I have a hypothesis to explain this, of course. Basically, I think that American politics, and American partisan politics, has spent a lot of time being unnatural, or not in equilibrium to put it somewhat more precisely. At the Founding, we had one giant cancerous problem, slavery (on which, more at some point in the future when I have time for a long rant), and two parties, Federalist and Democratic-Republican. But the Federalists became deeply personally unpopular, and the D-R's adopted most of their policies, killing that party system. Then we had the Second Party System, Jacksonian Democrats vs. Whigs, but this was the period when the Unions began to come apart. Actually, in some ways the partisan politics of this era were quite competitive, with five straight cycles with popular vote margins less than 7% from 1836 through 1852, but the Electoral College made a lot of those margins appear much bigger. Then there was this thing called the Civil War, and then we went into one period of natural equilibrium: Democrats were, basically, the party of the rural South, and Republicans were the party of the urban north, with the civil-rights implications that came with that, and they were both perfectly happy being that. No problems, no need to mix it up. Then came the Progressive Era, which was just weird in that the two parties didn't really disagree about all that much. Then were the 20s, when the Democrats just kept getting shellacked, but which were basically the same equilibrium of the late 19th century, just shifted +20 toward the GOP.

But then a couple of things happened, and I'm not talking about the Depression. Al Smith, a Democrat, finally managed to run an urbane campaign that appealed to, say, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Simultaneously, I believe (though I can't now find confirmation of this, which is odd), the Republican convention voted down a resolution condemning the KKK, and Herbert Hoover definitely started the forerunner of the Southern Strategy, ditching black officials to win Southern white votes. The result of all of this was that the old equilibrium was disturbed, and as it happened, permanently so. Roosevelt's tent was big enough to fit urban blacks and Southern whites together, but that couldn't last, and when the natural tug of a two-party system toward competitive balance re-asserted itself, civil rights managed to be a winning proposition among Democrats.

The old equilibrium was dead; Southern white racists would never truly be comfortable in the Democratic party unless they could exorcise this new component. And they never could. Democrats walked irrevocably out of the shadow of states' rights and into the light of human rights, and Republicans filled the void. This all happened in stages: Strom winning the Deep South as a Dixiecrat in '48, Goldwater taking the Deep South for the GOP for the first time since Reconstruction in '64, Wallace in '68 and Nixon's Southern Strategy in '72, and then Reagan, Bush and Bush just plain winning the South, and that was all there was to it. Except, of course, that the Dixiecrat wing held on for a hell of a lot longer in Congress, dying a final death only in 1994 (that's what that election was all about!), and the Democratic dominance in nominal party ID and in governorships in the South may only have died this past year, though the former at least has been a pure fiction for over a decade.

The result of this gradual sloughing off of the Dixiecrat wing of the Democrats and the subsequent filling-in of that vacuum by Republicans, which was then accompanied by a sloughing-off of the Rockefeller wing of the Republicans and a filling-in of that vacuum by Democrats, is that we no longer have cognitive dissonance in our parties. For forty years, neither party really knew what it was. Were Democrats the party of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey? Or Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and conservative committee chairs? Who knew? It was both; it couldn't decide. As for Republicans: Rockefeller vs. Goldwater. It couldn't decide. This was an unnatural state: we had two supposedly national political organizations that had no particular governing ideology between them, that did not represent genuine ideological coalitions.

Well, that's changed now. We know who the parties are. Republicans are the party of corporate interests, libertarian and/or small-government interests, military interests, conservative religious interests, and racist interests. Democrats are the party of worker's interests, social-democratic interests, internationalist interests, secular and/or culturally progressive interests, and minority interests. So we're at equilibrium, both parties know what they are, what they want to be, and they are both competitive on that basis. So there's no reason for them to change the formula; thus, the second Great Competitive Era of American politics.

Will it end? Yes, definitely before too long and possibly sooner than that. Sarah Palin could receive a drubbing in 2012; we're due for a proper landslide. Or, theoretically, the Republicans could genuinely split themselves in 2012, with Palin running as a third-partier. Or we could have another close election in 2012, and maybe even in 2016. It feels to me like the Republican party's ideological coalition is stranger bedfellows than the Democrats', but they also are happier to engage in blind partisanship against a common enemy, at least for the moment. What I do know is that being a party that routinely captures a whopping 35% of Hispanic votes in a decent year is not sustainable long-term. This means that eventually something will have to change, and the current holding pattern of the Presidential electoral map will shift again. I just don't know when.

Why The Mets Would Be Stupid To Trade Jose Reyes

There's a rumor that the Mets are looking to trade Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and Jenrry Mejia to the Diamondbacks for Justin Upton and Stephen Drew. Now, that's such a silly trade that it probably isn't worth discussing; numerous other sources have said that the Mets want three or four players of at least AAAA caliber in exchange for just Reyes, as well they should. But there is discussion that the Mets are interested in trading Reyes... as a salary dump. Now, setting aside the fact that Jose Reyes is my favorite player in the game, there would be good reasons to trade Reyes, if you are getting back something just as good, which is somewhat unlikely. I think that there might be a situation where the exchange rate at which it would make sense for the Mets to trade Reyes is higher than the exchange rate at which it would make sense for any other team to take him, i.e. I think he has some value-added as a Met in much the same way that a certain other pathetic excuse for a shortstop I could mention has considerable value-added while he stays with that certain other team.

But trading Reyes in a salary dump just does not make sense, full stop. Yes, the Mets have a whole lot of cash locked up in nine players this year, and thus have essentially no room to maneuver. And yes, Reyes' contract nominally expires at the end of this year. And yes, he's being paid $11 million this year. But you know what? Very little of that matters. First of all, Reyes will be more than happy to sign a multi-year extension with the Mets after, or during, this upcoming year. He likes being a Met, and I think he wants always to be a Met. And unlike a certain other pathetic excuse for a shortstop, I don't think he is particularly likely to insist upon being paid two or three times his fair market value. And second of all, a huge amount of all of that money comes off the books after this year, including the three supposedly "albatross" contracts, Perez, Castillo, and Beltran. The Mets will have room to maneuver starting in 2012. Do you really want to not have Reyes anymore long-term just because we were squeezed this year? Nobody expects the Mets to contend this year. The point of 2011 is a rebuilding year; if we have a solid, mid-to-high 80s wins season, people will be thrilled. Then it's on to 2012, and trying to win a championship. At that point, any short-term salary dump motive to trade Reyes will have vanished into the mists of time, and we'll be left regretting it.

So trading Jose Reyes in an attempt to cut salary would be a not-particularly-effective way of trying to Win Now, in 2011, by sacrificing big-time long-term. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

James Madison was Right, Wrong, and Righter than He Knew

In Federalist No. 10, one of the most famous pieces of political philosophy ever written by an American, James Madison argued that the influence of factions on political society would be best controlled by a large nation, a federal union like that of the United States. It was an argument to counter the conventional wisdom that democracy couldn't scale to a large country like the U.S. Of course, now it's 200 years later, so we have a little bit of evidence as to whether Madison was right or not. My hypothesis is that he was right, wrong, and even more right than he thought he was.

The Spirit of the Constitution

One of the big, meta-debates in constitutional interpretation is whether there is such a thing as the spirit of the Constitution, and if so, how it should be used in interpretation. I believe that the Scaliaites are the ones who like to say that, no, there is no spirit to the document, there is only the words (except that those words sometimes contain rather surprising meanings because that's what someone things the Founders thought they meant). I think they're wrong, of course, and I wish here to give my view of where the text of the Constitution invites the spirit of the document in, what that spirit is, and why the spirit of the Constitution is one that can evolve with time, in a certain sense.

Why We Are All Dead In The Long Run

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. - John Maynard Keynes

This gets quoted, mainly, as "in the long run we are all dead," a retort whenever an economist starts talking about the long run or the idea that recessions etc. don't really affect long-term growth trends. He was, specifically, attacking the idea that inflation would just naturally control itself "in the long run." I'm sitting in economics class right now, listening about the long-term relationship between nominal prices and the real economy (i.e. the same thing as Keynes was talking about), and I think I see pretty clearly why we are all dead in the long run. It's not so much that everyone dies etc. but that we will never get to the long run.

The idea of "the long run" is that, once you let the economy alone for a decade or two everything evens out, and there aren't any noticeable changes in, say, the money supply/the price level, everything adjusts so that, yes, it really is just like you doubled all dollars and didn't change anything. But think about the crucial part of that: "if there aren't any noticeable changes." There are always noticeable changes. Stuff happens, all the time. There are real-world events, technological discoveries, oil shocks, stupid Republican policies, wars, etc. So yes, eventually we will hit the Long Run of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Eventually we will reach the time at which the effects of this particular shock have vanished into the past. But by then, some new factor will be disturbing the equilibrium, and we'll be in the Short Run vis-a-vis it. If you sit on a tropical island and see one particular hurricane sweep across the ocean where you are, yes, you can say, well, the storm will pass soon, and the ocean will be calm again. But if you consider the weather as a whole, you know that, hey, there might be another hurricane a week later.

So since we never really get our decade or century or whatever of clear-skies economics, it makes no sense to think primarily of the long run. It's always the short run somewhere; do you know where your children are? And each time it is the Short Run, there will be real suffering in the present that can either be exacerbated or ameliorated. Yes, long-run growth is an important thing, and policies that encourage long-run growth are a good thing (though they should keep environmental concepts like sustainability in mind). But the long run is unpredictable and rarely all smooth sailing, whereas current troubles are immediate and concrete, as is the real suffering they cause. Attacking the suffering in the present that we know for certain is happening is and should be the first priority of economics.

The Sorting Hat of Politics

Yes, that's right: the sorting hat of politics. It is, after all, the day of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1's coming out, and I am obsessed with politics, so the sorting hat of politics it is. And what I mean by that is that I will go through a list of US political figures, both current and historical, and declare which Houses I think they have the most affinity to. Two notes: first, I'm not putting people 100% into a given House. Instead, I'll give an overall House choice, in bold, and then list what percent share of that person's soul, so to speak, each House has. Second, my interpretation of the various Houses is going to be slightly non-canonical, conforming perfectly neither to the Sorting Hat's songs nor to the actual distribution of personalities amongst the Houses. The song traits focus on primarily the following: Gryffindor, bravery and chivalry; Hufflepuff, loyalty and hard work; Ravenclaw, intelligence and curiosity; Slytherin, cunning and ambition. On the other hand, the real-life traits are more like this: Hufflepuff, boring and bland; Ravenclaw, also fairly bland, tending toward airy; Gryffindor, Being The Good Guys; Slytherin, Being The Bad Guys, and racism. I am not going to treat Being The Good Guys or Being The Bad Guys as controlling. My classification scheme will work roughly as follows:

• Gryffindor: Heroism, assertiveness, sweeping efforts to make the world a better place. Includes the idea that one can apply that aggressive pursuit of good in a misguided way and do much harm.
• Hufflepuff: Some combination of blandness, ordinariness, and the "neutral competence" image. Also with a flavor of populism and/or modesty.
• Ravenclaw: Intellectualism, thoughtfulness, etc. I actually think Ravenclaw's one of the simplest Houses, and it's also clearly the best (though I won't apply it in a good = Ravenclaw way).
• Slytherin: Cunning, self-advancement, and underhandedness. Racism included but not dispositive; that is, some racists may have traits that outweigh the pure racism. Ambition is more or less discounted, since essentially all politicians are ambitious.

Actual classifications coming below the fold.

Musings on Citizens United

Earlier this semester we here at Brown had a lecture/debate/not-really-much-of-a-debate about the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, the case that struck down prohibitions on corporate electioneering. As I said, it wasn't much of a debate; Larry Lessig, the nominally pro-campaign finance restrictions speaker, stated explicitly that he agreed with the Court. And the general consensus of the speakers, including Lessig, his opponent Bradley Smith, and Professor Steven Calabresi, who led an unpacking discussion a few days later, was that the Court had been right, corporations have a full complement of rights including free speech rights, and that the solution to speech is not to silence that speech but rather to talk back. And at the time, I was at least borderline convinced by that argument. (Professor Calabresi also argued that one good solution would be a robust anonymity regime, and while the anonymous spending of the elections seems to argue against that proposal even in theory, I might point out that these donations/ads weren't anonymous to the politicians; that would be the key point.)

But I had a thought today that, I think, shows why the argument is an incorrect one. I, along with some others, asked the question, "If the government creates corporations, why is it required to give them free speech rights?" That is to say, since corporations exist only on the whims of the government, can they really be said to have rights against it? The response was, look, we give corporations other Bill of Rights rights, like 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there's a big difference.

What is a corporation? It is a creature of property. It is an agglomeration of property, a web of contracts given legal force by the government which has been found convenient to picture as a kind of legal person. But it is fundamentally property. It is not a sentient being. It cannot be said to have natural rights of the Lockian variety, if you're partial to Lockian natural rights, since, in the Lockian state of nature, no corporation would exist in any binding sense. So why do corporations have 4th Amendment rights? Because those are rights pertaining to property, and property is what corporations are all about. There would be no point in creating a corporation if you didn't give it property rights, so when the government creates a corporation, assuming it is a reasonable and/or competent government, it will of course grant them property rights. If it doesn't have property rights, it can't bloody well be a creature of property, can it?

But the right to freedom of speech, and especially the right to political speech, is not a property right. Freedom of expression, as in the right to make art or publish a book or have public discussions about ideas, could be argued to be a natural right; again, corporations cannot have natural rights, since they are not natural persons. What freedom of speech rights are, and again, what political speech rights especially are, is political rights. They fall in that great category of rights we ensure because they are a part of the democratic political process. The most basic point of free speech rights is to allow citizens (!) to participate in their own self-governance.

And a corporation does not, or should not, have political rights. They cannot vote. They do not count in apportionment. They may not run for nor hold office. And they should not have these rights. Why? They are not a party to the social contract. The great principle of democracy is that all human beings who live under the jurisdiction of a government should be able to participate in the administration of that government. The people all make an agreement with one another to waive some portion of their natural rights, and in exchange they get a government that can better protect their other natural rights, and that they get to participate in. That's Locke's logic, and since the Declaration of Independence is almost plagiarized from Locke I think it's a reasonable basis to go on in evaluating our government. And corporations play no part in this process. They do not exist when the social contract is made; they have no right to participate in the government formed by that social contract. And one of the most important ways to participate is by speaking.

A corporation is not a political being, it is a propertied being. It is no party to the sovereignty of the government, it has no right to participate in the government. As such, the claim that corporations have, or must have, freedom of political speech is ludicrous.

Note to Republicans

Jon Stewart had a great clip showing how Republicans are fawning over Bill Clinton, while some Democrats have fawned over Ronald Reagan, both saying "now he was a you could work with, etc. etc." And then, of course, he showed the montage of Republicans, you know, impeaching Clinton, or calling him an evil socialist, etc. And he pointed out that we Democrats kind of hated Ronald Reagan at the time. He's got a point, and we'd do well to remember that Ronald Reagan kind of sucked, and Republicans thought the same of Bill Clinton. 

But I'd just like to point something else out. Hey Republicans, you know when you were all loving Bill Clinton and gettin' along and compromising in the '90s? Well, not only did you impeach him. Not only did you call him a socialist in the 1993-94 health care debate. You want to know what you did while calling his health care proposals socialist? You want to know what policies you proposed as the reasonable, conservative countermeasure? I'll give you a hint... sixteen years later, those same policies, which you proposed as the opposition to big evil socialism under Clinton, have now become big evil socialism under Obama.

And of course, it is really true that Reagan held a lot of positions that would be unacceptable in today's Republican Party, #1 being the whole amnesty-for-illegals thing. So Democrats are on much firmer ground than Republicans here in claiming that our opponents get worse and worse, though we should never forget that Reagan still kind of sucked.

On the Lawfulness of the Individual Mandate

I've never particularly entertained the notion that the individual mandate in the health care law is unconstitutional. It consists of a fine on persons who do not obtain some variety of health insurance, and opponents of the mandate argue that it constitutes a requirement that individuals enter into interstate commerce, which cannot be considered an example of regulating interstate commerce. My traditional response to this argument is that an individual mandate, "Persons not buying health care are assessed a tax of magnitude X," is structurally identical to "Persons buying health care are granted a tax rebate of magnitude X, and all persons have their taxes raised by amount X." Literally identical. Would that latter be unconstitutional? Well, the Congress can levy income taxes, and last time I checked, it can grant tax rebates for participating in interstate commerce, e.g. cash for clunkers, and I'm sure there are others. So it strikes me that this kind of conditional tax is not beyond the pale of what the Congress has had the ability to do in the past, since it is literally identical to a differently-worded policy that would clearly be constitutional.

But stipulate, for a moment, that this logic doesn't work. Suppose the simple fact that you can turn the equation on its head and make it sound acceptable is not enough to justify it. The claim is that the power to "regulate commerce...among the several states" does not include the power to compel individual to enter into that commerce. Assume that this is a true proposition, and also that the power to tax and spend to promote the general welfare does not allow the Congress to lay a tax that will promote the general welfare. I think it is still a rather easy matter to show that the individual mandate is valid; here's how.

It is *not* that hard, guys...

I just spent a minute or two playing with the NYT's budget deficit fixer tool. What I found was basically this: using the choices they offer, I couldn't eliminate the deficit in 2030 without doing one of the following three things, namely cut a whole bunch of federal domestic discretionary spending I don't want to cut, cap Medicare growth at GDP growth + 1%, or impose a national 5% sales/VAT tax. I don't like any of those options. I cut a lot of military spending, raised a lot of tax rates, etc., but came up short without one of those three. I think this is a distinctly false choice, though. It's simply not that hard. Deficit = revenues - outlays. Two ways to reduce the deficit: increase revenues, or reduce outlays. How do we increase revenues? Well, the people at NYT want you to think that a substantive national sales tax is the answer. But why? I just don't get why taxing consumption, which is after all the very thing which stimulates the economy, is thought to be a good idea. I mean, I suppose you could theoretically use a consumption tax sort of the way they use monetary policy, to put the breaks on an unsustainable boom, but sales taxes are just so regressive. I can't see any justification for them except to burden the poor. So, here's why it's not that hard: raise taxes on the rich. Substantially. There, wasn't that easy? There is literally no chance that we couldn't raise rates on the very rich enough to give us all the money we need, it's impossible. Would it impede growth? Eh, skeptical; high-end tax rates were pretty high during some pretty strong times in the American economy, and in any event cutting government spending impedes growth and does damage in other ways, too.

Of course, the other alternative lies on the spending side: just adopt a system of properly national health care, like they do in Spain; the benefits you get from being able to coordinate things are enormous, and after all, single-payer would've always been the way to reduce government health-care costs the most.

And now to return to my mind-numbing quantities of Japanese studying. Oh joy.

Thoughts on The Rachel Maddow Show

This is pretty random, there were just a couple of things in tonight's show that I thought worth commenting on. First is the foibles of Mitch McConnell, about which I would only like to say that I was told, during the school year two years ago, that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was a "rat bastard." That's a verbatim quote. I think that declaring, in public, that Democrats who advocated a phased withdrawal from Iraq were in favor of "cut-and-run" and surrendering to al-Qaeda on the very same day that you ask the President of the United States to begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq so that your party will be more likely to retain control of Congress qualifies you to be a rat bastard.

The other is about the fact that we now know, essentially beyond a reasonable doubt even though that standard is flagrantly irrelevant to this inquiry, that a man who was "executed" by the State of Texas on December 7th, 2000 was utterly and completely innocent. Not just "it is statistically certain that some innocent people have been "executed;"" literally the only evidence they had tying him to the scene of the crime proved to simply be someone else's hair. This has caused me to make the following decision: I do not consider execution to exist. It is simply murder. When the mechanisms of a U.S. state government, or the federal government, or any other government around the world kills someone on the grounds that they committed a heinous crime, they are not functioning as a legitimate government. As such, the act is a simple homicide, no messing about, no mincing words. When the word "execution" is appropriate in a sentence I will put quotes around it. It is an illegitimate practice in its entirety and I refuse to legitimize it even remotely by allowing itself to call itself by a fancy name. Killing is killing.

I feel about this similarly to how I feel reacting to Nelson Mandela's autobiography where he describes the various measures taken by the South African rulers in the 1960s, including a "law" "giving" them the "power" to detain a political prisoner for 90 days and, oh, yeah, however long they felt like it after that. It's simply not something a government can do, and so that regime controlling South Africa was not a government, but rather a bunch of people with guns wielding utterly illegitimate power. I don't think that the death penalty in this country totally invalidates our governments in all areas, though I would be open to being persuaded and in theory the strident ideologue in me is attracted to the idea; I just think that, when the machinery of our government acts to kill a person convicted of a crime, it is not acting as a government, it is acting as a bunch of people with guns.

As for the particulars of this case, Claude Jones was executed after the serial denial of his request to have the one piece of evidence tying him to the scene of some brutal murder, a hair the prosecution claimed was his, DNA tested. Two Texas courts turned him down, and the legal office of Governor George W. Bush excluded the DNA-testing controversy from their summary that they presented to the governor. Note that Bush does not bear particular moral responsibility here, though I would say there's a general moral responsibility to look pretty damn hard into any execution you are asked to approve as Governor. But still, the system of the Texas "justice" system conspired pretty damn effectively to murder Claude Jones, on December 7th, 2000, probably in the death chamber with a poison cocktail. God I hate the death penalty. There are two features of our current society that induce a level of pure moral outrage in me that is too strong to put into words; it transcends policy disagreements, and if I think about them for too long I find it hard to have an even remotely palatable opinion of our society. One is the institution that kills billions of non-human animals, almost all of them vertebrates, every year, and another is the institution by which the supposed democratic governing bodies of society kill hundreds of their own citizens every year. I just can't stand it. And now I'm going to go distract myself for a while, because, like I said, when I think about the institutions of meat-eating or capital punishment for too long, I just get mad.

The Great Sanity Debate

Here's the interview between Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. It's really great; you should watch it. I want to highlight a couple of things Jon said, some that I really like and some that I really dislike.

One thing that I like is his idea that Fox News' great triumph is having delegitimized editorial authority while exercising extraordinary editorial authority. I also think this is one of the keys to the true difference between Fox and MSNBC: the two most insidious things about Fox are 1) that they lie, 100% of the time they speak, and 2) that they pretend opinion to be fact. The people at MSNBC may be just as opinionated as the people at Fox, but they never try to pretend that their opinions are anything other than opinions. See this post on the Keith Olbermann affair.

I think his argument that he merely makes his satirical critiques while Maddow and her ilk are actually "on the playing field" is wrong, not because he's on the playing field but because Rachel Maddow isn't, really, either. I think what he overlooks is that media people don't build things either, they just comment. Fox is different in this way, in that it appears, according to a fair amount of evidence, to have overtly sponsored the Tea Parties, in a way that I think the relatively more left-wing side of the media just doesn't do. (If I'm wrong about that, it forces me to retract this part of my comment, at least in part.)

My main trouble with Jon's message in this interview is his contention that the main conflict in this country isn't Democrats vs. Republicans or liberals vs. conservatives, but rather corruption vs. not corruption or extremists vs. normal people. My question for him is, largely, define corruption vs. non-corruption, and give some examples of it; likewise with extremists vs. normal people. And in both cases, make sure that the scope of your examples are such that I can't line up one side of the division with either liberals or conservatives. What is corruption here? Not just the $90,000 in a freezer corruption, as he says, and that's an essential point, but what, then? Is it just some kind of conventional impropriety? Or deeper things like a dysfunctional government? And are there examples of ways in which the left doesn't line up pretty neatly with "non-corruption," and the right with "corruption?" (And keep in mind, I reserve the right to consider conservative Democrats not to be exemplars of liberalism.) Are liberals in the "pocket" of unions, one of the right's favorite corruption charges against us? Or do we honestly believe in labor rights? Is it easy to tell the difference? Likewise vis-a-vis extremists, show me the extremists on the American left. If by extremists we mean, as I think a reasonable narrow definition of the term would, persons who don't want to pursue their agenda using the established processes within society, especially the political ones since we're in a political context, I defy him or anyone else to come up with one person on the left who has advocated the potential extralegal overthrow of the United States government. And if you want me to find some on the right, I can, starting with U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) and continuing from there. There isn't a shortage. If we define extremist a little more broadly, okay, what counts as extremist? I'm a self-avowed socialist, but what I mean by that is approximately the same thing that the second-largest party in the European Parliament means by it, and which is approximately the same thing as the word "liberal"'s conventional meaning in this country. Am I an extremist? What does extremism mean when we're talking about opinions, rather than means? And what's a "normal person"? A person without a defined political ideology? But when did a coherent set of political opinions become a bad thing? Is extremism what happens when your arguments and ideologies are not soundly rooted in public reason, which I think would be a plausible definition? If so, show me the liberals who are making arguments unsound at public reason. Meanwhile, I'll be hauling a truckload of Republican U.S. Representatives who make arguments about the broadest areas of public policy on explicitly religious grounds, something which is defined as being outside of public reason.

I think I would also say that, while I definitely see the American political culture as being home to a fairly sharp divide, I don't think that that part of American culture that is non-political, whatever it may be, is particularly conflict-ridden; at least, it doesn't have very much in the way of arch-conflicts. I think that was a point he made well at his rally: outside of the political context, it's alternate merge, and we're not all that divided; the division is only in the political context. But the political context is an important one, and a very far-reaching one, and if the political world has more conflict than the nonpolitical realm, then isn't the political conflict the main conflict in the nation? Does it mean that we're not as bitterly divided a people as we might seem on election day? Yeah, I think it does, and it's worth keeping in mind that even people one disagrees with so strongly on matters of politics as to make you hold it against them as a person, and I believe there is a level at which that's legitimate, is probably not a bad person in everyday life (though, of course, they could be, as could someone you agree with on political matters).

I thought point about how Anderson Cooper has a specific segment called "Keeping 'Em Honest," whereas that ought to be the main function of the news apart from pure factual reporting was very apt. He went from that point to argue, look, why is it all about teams and supporting the people on your side? Why not just attack bad arguments wherever they may be found? It's a reasonable premise; the problem is the empirical one I addressed at the end of this post, namely, what if all the bad arguments are on one side? And it's more than that: if you respect a person's mental faculties and intellectual honesty, presumably any opinion they hold is one that they believe is correct and that they can defend with good, correct arguments. And therefore presumably they believe that arguments in opposition are wrong in some way, shape, or form. That form can either be the logic of the argument or the premises, and one should keep in mind the distinction. But we should expect that, it is necessary and proper that, it will be only natural that people with well thought out opinions think people who disagree with them are wrong, and therefore either approaching things from an unreasonable set of fundamental goals/priorities/values or making a logically poor argument. Yeah, we should criticize bad arguments whenever they happen. Liberals, in fact, both at MSNBC and at DailyKos or anywhere else, will criticize those nominally on our team just as readily as those on the opposing team, when they make bad arguments. This is usually when they drift toward the "center," but this is again proper because we are liberals.

And finally, a word or two about their discussion of George W. Bush, and whether his bragging about waterboarding makes him "evil," especially in comparison to FDR's Japanese internments. This is one of the reasons why I don't like the word "evil." Is George W. Bush evil? Well, let's see. I think he committed atrocities and shows zero remorse over them. But I also think he probably was making a roughly-speaking good faith effort, to the extent that he was making an effort at all. I think the problem of whether Dick Cheney is evil is a considerably different one, on the facts, but my personal hypothesis about George W. Bush is that he was a slightly simple-minded fellow who does have a fairly straightforward view of What Is Right that the neocons roped in so that they could manipulate him into executing all of their malicious plots. Does that make him evil? Under the Truman principle, Bush has ultimate responsibility for everything the Executive Branch did under him, whether because he did it or because he let Cheney's gang do it. But is he an evil person? I dunno. It's hard to say. That's why I don't like the word evil, or the word stupid, when applied to people. I try never to say, so-and-so is a stupid person. I don't think it's an intrinsic quality; I think it can change, and I think that to the extent that it changes it is mainly about earning it. I believe very strongly that there are stupid opinions and stupid actions, and just as strongly that there are evil opinions and evil actions. And so I believe that there are people who hold a lot of stupid beliefs or do a lot of stupid things, and there are a lot of people who hold a lot of wicked beliefs or do a lot of wicked things, but I have a fairly principled opposition to calling those people "stupid" or "evil."

On a slightly less explicitly moral note, the comparison between FDR and Bush is a telling one, I think. I'm not talking here about "evil" vs. "non-evil," or even "war criminal" vs. "non-war criminal," but rather about "strongly approve" vs. "strongly disapprove." If I look back through history and make a list of my rankings of each President, from strongly approve to strongly disapprove, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets the most emphatic Strongly Approve, and George W. Bush gets the most emphatic Strongly Disapprove. And yet, what they have in common is that they both can lay claim to some of the worst atrocities in U.S. war history. So what's the difference? The difference is as follows. Both George W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt did a very large amount of very bad things in their Presidencies. I think Bush may have surpassed FDR in this regard, and there are other Presidents who are in a similar league. And yes, I think FDR is in the higher ranks of Presidents by the metric of doing bad stuff. But the thing is, he's also far and away President #1 in terms of doing good stuff. Massively. Something close to the majority of all the good things Presidents have ever done were FDR, or at least a percentage wildly disproportionate to his 5% of U.S. history presided over. Maybe 30% is a reasonable figure. No other President comes close. And so, while there is a whole lot to say against Franklin Roosevelt, most notably Japanese internment and the court-packing plan but also some smaller things as well, there is a whole frickin' lot to balance that out. And in my view, he comes out way ahead, especially since every other President after Washington did a fair amount of bad stuff and Washington balanced that by being pretty bland.

But George W. Bush's problem is that he has nothing to balance it. What good did he do? What good things did he do? I think once he added some ocean near Hawaii to a wildlife preserve. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to come up with another example. He wasn't too bad on immigration, but his motive there may well have been a desire to give big businesses cheap exploitable labor. There's just nothing. Meanwhile, you have a staggeringly all-encompassing array of damage he did. And there's just nothing to outweigh it. So that's why, in my book, two of the biggest war criminal Presidents in US history occupy opposite ends of the rankings.

Adventues in Demographic Modelling

I recently developed a whim to try and create a demographic electoral model. That is, a model that would look at the distribution of eight demographic variables across the 51 US federal voting regions (50 states + DC), and use nationwide tendencies of those demographics to come up with a set of topline numbers. In other words, assume that, say, Catholics, or those with income between $75,00 and $150,000 per year, had uniform behavior across the nation (which is untrue), and see what results the elections would provide. To test my model, I used data from the 2008 Presidential election. The results were rather interesting.

On Keith Olbermann

I really like Ezra Klein's take on the Keith Olbermann affair. The point to keep in mind, about whether the anti-donations rule makes sense, is that once you accept that there is no such thing as a journalist without any opinions, the very worst thing is a journalist who pretends they don't have any opinions. The problem with FOX is not so much that they lean right-wing; in fact, that isn't the problem with them at all. The problem is two-fold: one, they lie every time they speak; and two, they have made a massive PR campaign over the last decade or so to convince people that they are "fair and balanced" and that therefore anyone who disagrees with them is biased. No: they have an opinion. Other people, like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, have different opinions. Everyone has opinions. And it's a hell of a lot easier to divine whether someone's being biased when you know what their true opinions are, instead of having to try and figure out what they might believe and then whether they're biasing their coverage in favor of that position. So the anti-donations rule, while it may not have been anti-1st Amendment, was distinctly bad policy. The only way for bias to be effective is to pretend that no one has opinions and that journalists are the Voice of Objective Fact.

On Why Legislator's Voting Records Don't Matter

I just read a post linked from DailyKos about how Tom Perrillo ran as a liberal in a conservative district and did better than you'd expect, though he lost anyway. One of the conclusions is that legislators' voting records don't matter that much. I'd submit that this is true, and that there are several good reasons why it should be true. One of my examples comes from the left, the other comes from the right.

The example from the Right is the rather obvious one, I think, and it applies specifically in the FOX-suffocated atmosphere. What Democrat wasn't attacked as being a radical, anti-American liberal by the Republicans and FOX? Do you think that Bobby Bright, that most odious of Blue Dogs, got to run as a centrist in his race? Do you think Republicans didn't hammer him for having supported an agenda he didn't support? I doubt it. There is, actually, one Democrat who got to run against Obama and have it work, and that's Joe Manchin. But he was the incumbent Governor, and running for Senate. I would contend that just about no one in the House can do the same: Congressional candidates just aren't well enough known. Not anymore, not with as thick a blanket of national media. The "all politics is local" world of Tip O'Neill, I contend, is only slightly relevant in today's world, and in particular with today's media.

And now the example from the Left: Lincoln Chafee. Chafee might've been the last Republican in Congress who was to the left of any Democrats in Congress. He voted against Iraq, he's pro-gay marriage (per se!), he's pro-choice, he's good on the environment, he voted against repealing the Estate Tax, he opposes the death penalty (per se!), etc. etc. And yet, in 2006, Democrats in Rhode Island voted him out of office. He was a very liberal Republican (very liberal, for a Republican) in a liberal state, the last of the truly liberal Republicans, and that wasn't enough to save him. Because people didn't know he was so liberal? No, we knew. Everyone knew; it's who Lincoln Chafee is. But we didn't vote for him, and why? Because he would have voted for Republican control of the chamber; Republican committee chairs; Mitch McConnell for Majority Leader; Ted Stevens for Speaker Pro Tempore. And that was enough to make him worth defeating. If we hadn't beaten him, by a fairly narrow margin of 8 points, we would not have nominally reclaimed the Senate in 2006. So yes, the "R" next to his name is enough to make it worth voting against him. And a "D" next to the name of Tom Perrillo, Glenn Nye, Bobby Bright, or whoever is enough that anyone who has good reason to support the Republicans ought to vote against them. And the way you vote doesn't matter for that: if I'm a Democrat, I should support Democrats. In federal elections, it's even true that I should support Democrats over more liberal Republicans, as long as those Republicans will vote for Republican leadership. (This does not apply in state elections, which is why I proudly voted for, yes, Linc Chafee for Governor!)

And I think people get this now, in a way that we used not to in this country. The way I see the history of partisan politics in this country from FDR's day onward is that the regional divisions that ran across partisan divisions, where a Southern Democrat had more in common with a Southern Republican, or a Southern Whig back in the day, than a Northern Democrat, and vice-versa, gradually annihilated themselves. Now, the parties are truly ideological coalitions, which is after all what political parties are supposed to be: organizations for the promotion of a certain political ideology. So no, we don't have bipartisanship anymore: why should we? We never really did in the first place: what we now call the Republican Party used to be called the "conservative coalition", a group of Midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats who would unite, across nominal party lines, to block New Deal-style programs. But was this really "bipartisan"? Only if you ignore the fact that a Southern Democrat just plain was not the same as a Northern Democrat. These differences have been smoothed over, first by the 1994 election in which Southern Democrats became Republicans at the Congressional level and then in the 2006-2008 elections when the last vestiges of Rockefeller Republicans were replaced by Democrats. Now we have ideologically consistent parties, and so it makes sense to vote party line without caring how the individual legislator voted. It's almost like the House of Representatives is now functioning more like a usual parliamentary-style chamber: you are not voting for a representative, you are voting for a party. Would George Washington like that? Probably not. But Congressmen might be well advised to recognize it, and learn that they can only gain so much by opposing their party anyway.

The Countermajoritarian Difficulty

In my Constitutional Law class, we have just finished reading the section of cases about Article III, the federal judiciary. That reading involved taking a look at the concept of the "countermajoritarian difficulty," an argument that judicial review is problematic, or potentially invalid in a democracy, because it allows unelected judges to overturn the decisions of the people's elected representatives. At the same time, we are hurtling rapidly toward a possible showdown in January over the filibuster in the United States Senate. These two concurrent events lead me to the following train of thought.

On Nancy Pelosi

Apparently the RNC put a sign up saying, "Hire Pelosi!", a reference, presumably, to their "Fire Pelosi!" campaign slogan, which was deeply sexist in any event. At face value, this seems to be an indication that they agree with those of us on the left that Pelosi should remain the Democrats' leader in the House. Because, as one commenter I saw put it, they still want to have Pelosi to kick around. For starters, I think it makes no sense to take it at face value: they would reasonable assume that liberals would read it like that commenter did, and would react in the opposite direction, so in posting it, maybe they were trying to get us to dump Pelosi. Or maybe they're operating at a higher level of reverse psychology, or a lower one. It's tough to discern, really.

But in any event, I think Republicans are misguided if they want to still have Pelosi to kick around. Yes, Pelosi has lousy favorability ratings (better than Boehner's, though). She's never been the most popular politician around, though, and she was part of the Democratic team that won big in '06 and '08. It's not like Republicans didn't demonize her in 2008. But it didn't work somehow, possibly because the fundamentals were the other way. Whether the President's messaging matters compared to "fundamentals" is one thing; I'm highly skeptical that, especially when the President is of the same party, the Speaker of the House's messaging matters very much at all. And do we really think that if Heath Schuler, or some more gravitas-laden centrist, became Minority Leader, that Republicans would stop demonizing them as a liberal? I doubt it.

Pelosi has two dominant House campaigns and one disasterous one to her name; arguably, none of the three had very much to do with her. 2006 was about Iraq, 2008 was about a combination of Iraq and the financial crisis, and 2010 was about the fact that the economy sucks. It's ambiguous whether Pelosi makes an impact, then, in Democratic electoral chances (and 2012 will likely be much more about Obama and coattails than the House itself); what we do know is that the two Pelosi-led Congresses passed a seriously transformative series of legislation, most of which died in the Senate or by George Bush's veto pen in the 110th Congress and all of which either died or was watered down in the Senate in the 111th. She is a truly great parliamentary leader. I'll take a great legislator with ambiguous electoral consequences any day of the week. Oh, and we will, too.

And So It Begins

CNN is out with a 2012 general-election poll of Obama vs. four different Republicans. Huckabee leads Obama by 8, 52%-44%; Romney leads by 5, 50% to 45%; Obama leads Gingrich 49%-47%; and Obama leads Sarah Palin by 8, 52%-44%. A few thoughts.

Mitt Romney does not worry me. Not especially because he wouldn't be a strong general election opponent, which he might be (though I think his negative charisma would hurt him in the end). Because it is categorically impossible that he's the Republican nominee. It's just too damn easy to accuse him of having supported a policy identical to ObamaCare, because, well, he did. No effing way he wins the Republican Presidential primary electorate over.

I have been saying for a while, conditional on his being the 2012 nominee, Mike Huckabee's the guy who scares me. (Also Marco Rubio, but he's more worrisome down the road, and boy is he...) Huckabee's persona doesn't emphasize the "let's screw poor people and give money to bankers!" aspect of Republicanism; in fact, his persona is almost the very embodiment of compassionate conservativism (remember that?). Now, I don't think he deserves that reputation, but he has it. And he certainly does occasionally say things that at least sound reasonable, like when he told Jon Stewart that we need government to that extent that we fail to govern ourselves (aha, I discover that the rebuttal I had meant to write up and post, I never did. That might come soon). I think Huckabee would indeed be a formidable opponent for Obama. I am somewhat skeptical, though, both that he runs and that he would win if he runs. I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not.

I also think it is possible that Huckabee's support is somewhat soft. He's never been in the very center of the public spotlight, and he certainly hasn't been near it of late. It's possible that, given the warm, fuzzy feeling that seems to follow Huckabee around, some people are feeling like they like him and aren't remembering the sometimes-crazy and rather-theocratic stuff Huckabee sometimes says. I'm not certain of this, and I look back at various of my optimistic election predictions from this last year and am somewhat legitimately humbled. But I think it's possible (also for Romney), and it's a noted contrast to the next person on the list.

Sarah Palin is running a net 16 points behind Huckabee against Obama. According to CNN, Republicans would, in nominating Sarah Palin, gift Obama a 16 point handicap compared to nominating their strongest candidate. I think she's running. I don't know if she wins the nomination; she could, but I don't think she's a lock. If she runs and wins, great: I'm happy to have those 16 points (though I suspect that's a slight overstatement), and she's not really all that much worse than any of the others in terms of policy. If she runs and loses the primary, I strongly suspect that she will go fully rogue, and pull a Teddy Roosevelt. And if so, get ready to watch Obama have some serious fun in 2012. In Colorado, Tom Tancredo was able to lose by only 15 points in a D-R-T match-up, but that's because Dan Maes, the nominal Republican, plummeted to 11%. I don't think either Sarah Palin or the nominal Republican could drive the other below 20%. Certainly not into the low-single-digits where they would need to be in order to come close to Barack Obama. So Obama would probably win upwards of 450 electoral votes. And if Palin runs, loses, and stays lost, or just doesn't run, well, no complaints here: she's sooooo dreadful. If she wants to stay away, less power to her.

And as for Newt Gingrich. He is running, I think. He could win the primary; I think he would have a good shot. But I'm fairly comfortable with seeing him run 2 points behind Obama right now. That's partly because it looks like Obama is probably at the nadir of his popularity right now (at least, I hope he is...), so being ahead at all right now is a pretty good indication that he'll be ahead on Election Day. But it's also because I think Gingrich probably has a hard ceiling, and a soft floor. And there's a very specific reason why I think he might have a soft floor. It goes like this: even I have had a kind of nostalgic feeling that Gingrich has gravitas, knows what he's talking about, sounds at least somewhat sensible the last year or two. But, as with Huckabee, that is 100% aesthetic and 0% substance: Gingrich has been giving Sarah Palin a run for her money in terms of pure crazy, and let's not forget that Newt Gingrich was kind of crazy as Speaker and kind of got clobbered on account of it. So I think there might be a few middle-of-the-roaders, or slightly-right-wingers, who have a similar nostalgia for the good ol' days when reasonable Republicans like Newt Gingrich were running the show, but who might have the wool pulled from their eyes if he ends up running for President.

Oh, and if there is a God, and if he/she/it is a Democrat, then please, please let Haley Barbour be the Republican nominee in 2012. He's basically a central casting prototype of a neo-Confederate type. Seriously, if it's Barbour vs. Obama, I think that Obama would be favored to easily beat his performance among African-Americans in 2008 (whom he won 95%-4%). I wouldn't be shocked if Barbour got less than 2% of the black vote. And boy would they ever turn out...

Challenge Accepted

Jonathan Bernstein has a piece in which he argues that Democrats should be, so to speak, irrationally exuberant about 2012, because doing so will encourage stronger Democratic candidates, both in the form of fewer retirements and in better challengers. I agree with his logic, and his example of how 1994-1996 played out, with Clinton winning big in '96 but Democrats failing to capitalize in the House, possible because of premature Eeyorism, is a good one. Toward the end:

So, whatever they actually believe, Democrats should pound the 1996-2012 analogies, remind themselves that reversals are not only possible but happen all the time (I bet there are all sorts of other historical examples easy to dig up: liberal bloggers, consider that a challenge!), and convince themselves and anyone who will listen to them that good times for Dems are, once again, right around the corner.

I like historical elections numbers, so here goes.

Useless Arguments

I have long had a hypothesis that there are two steps involved in a person's reaching a policy position. The first step involves the broad, fundamental goal, value, or priority involved. The second involves translating that goal, value, or priority into a specific, discrete policy. I came up with this framework during arguments with a conservative friend of mine in which, again and again, our arguments collapsed onto the same basic disagreement, namely whether or not it was good to tax the rich to provide services for societal gain. I said yes, he said no, neither of us ever convinced the other, so every time that question needed to be settled before you could decide something, we would disagree.

The lesson I took from these debates is that, while it is definitely fruitful to argue with people you share fundamentals with about specific policies, and while it can often be fruitful to argue with people about fundamentals when you disagree over them, it is essentially pointless to try to argue policy specifics with someone you do not share the relevant fundamental goals, values, or priorities with. You cannot come up with an agreement except by sheer dumb luck, if there happens to be a policy that satisfies both of your goals. Now, when such a policy exists, you're in luck, but there is no particular reason it should exist.

This relates, I think, to Obama's reaction to the midterm elections as a referendum on policy. (See this article by Jonathan Chait, which gave me this idea.) Obama likes to say that no party has a monopoly on wisdom, and he wants to hear good ideas wherever they come from. I think his point there is that he's willing to cooperate with Republicans, within the framework of his own fundamental goals, values, and priorities. But he isn't going to abandon his own fundamentals. He is not going to accept policies that promote Republican fundamentals but are antithetical to Democratic/progressive/center-left/Obama fundamentals. Yet another reason why that press conference was awesome, and made me feel much better about short-term future prospects.

O-BA-MA!

Why I Don't Feel That Depressed Today

Yeah, last night sucked. But I find myself in almost an eerily good mood today. I think I know a few reasons why. First, I don't think that the Republicans are going to experience long-term success. My previous post detailed why I think the Republican Death Spiral is alive and well, and I will add that I think it could bite them between now and 2012, for instance if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling and therefore cause a global financial meltdown, and it backfires. Could happen. Another reason is that Obama's press conference was pitch-perfect; he has himself perfectly positioned to use the Republicans' inability to compromise against them. Another is that essentially all of the candidates I was really personally invested in won, including Rush Holt, my home Congressman, and Lincoln Chafee, my future governor. (One of my Congressman is still a rocket scientist, the other Congressman is gay, and my governor's name is Linc. Seriously.)

The final reason, I think, is that I remember what this is like. By "this," I mean the business of living under a government that the Republicans control at least part of. And intellectually it's a very easy world to live in: much easier than actually having to wrestle with the difficult choices of governance. Now, that doesn't change the fact that the Republican House is going to inflict major, major suffering on the world over the next two years, which sucks and which I will get vehemently mad at them about when they actually do it. Nor does it change the fact that it will be mildly tricky for Obama to convince people that he is completely hamstrung in the business of governing by the fact that the Republicans took back the House, and if he fails, we could be in trouble. But it's almost just sort of relaxing to know that the politics of the next two years, and figuring out what to think over that time, will be so damn easy. No worrying about, is health care good enough? How about financial reform? And what does Joe Lieberman think? No one will ever care again, because he's irrelevant in the 112th Congress and will lose, badly, in 2012. So, here's to two years of not having our intellectual faculties taxed at all by the day's political events. We might as well enjoy something.

Oh, and also: the most directly effective thing you can do to increase the amount of happiness in the world is to enjoy your life. Never forget that.

The Republican Death Spiral Is Not Dead Yet

The Republican Death Spiral, you'll recall, was Nate Silver's idea, conceived the day after a full no Republicans in the House voted for the stimulus, that the Republican Party is stuck in a trap:

Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

Since the name of this hypothesis is the "Republican Death Spiral," something that sounds similar to the predictions of 40 years of Democratic domination, etc. etc., that have just supposedly been rejected by, well, a massive electoral victory by Republicans, it would be easy to say, no, that didn't happen. But I want to make the case that the Republican Death Spiral is alive and well, and that the Republicans are still very much in danger of spinning rapidly down it.

Give 'Em Hell, Barry!

There are, I think, two fundamental models for how a President should cope with losing big in their first midterm election in office: Harry Truman and Bill Clinton. Both the 1946 and the 1994 elections were very similar to the 2010 election, in terms of results in the House of Representatives. Democrats had big, big majorities, and Republicans picked up 50-60 seats, flipping the majority. The numbers from 1946 are eerily similar to this last election, actually. Clinton, in the popular narrative at least, largely cooperated with the Republicans, going along with right-wing policies like welfare reform. Truman, on the other hand, and again in the popular narrative, took a very combative stance, hammering the Republicans as a "do-nothing Congress." Both won re-election. Which strategy should Obama take? Compromise, or fight and denounce? My attitude is, he should anticipate a Truman-style strategy, though he should begin by sounding like Clinton. Here's why.

The 113th U.S. Senate

So, two years of getting nothing done. So stipulated. Let's see if we have the slightest chance in the 2012 Senate elections, going line-by-line.

Speaking of Not Deserving To Lose

A message to liberals. Stolen from Rachel Maddow, but I'd noticed it prior to her brilliant piece on it tonight, so whatever. Suppose that the 111th Congress had not passed the stimulus, health care, or financial reform, the three big-ticket items. What would the legislative achievements of that Congress look like? Mind you, I'm not talking about the fact that without the stimulus we'd be in Great Depression #2; I'm just asking, if you compare policy achievements under this Congress minus the Big 3 to policy achievements in other Congresses, how does it stack up?

Well, let's see. Fair pay for women. S-CHIP expansion. Tripling AmeriCorps. Land management. Pentagon contracts reform. Credit card reform. Regulation of tobacco. Reforming veteran's benefits. Iran sanctions and divestment. Student loan reform (a biggie!). Most of these would be major, major accomplishments for many or most Presidents. Many of them are on par with things like the ADA, Clintonian welfare reform, NCLB, etc., some of the signature accomplishments of the last three Presidents, like them or otherwise. That's ten major legislative accomplishments, by the way. Big ones. Not even counting the variety of small bills, or the reasonably failed programs like the mortgage restructuring thing that didn't work.

If we now add back in a) the largest tax cut, the largest infrastructure spending, the largest investment on clean energy, the largest fiscal stimulus, etc. in American history (with apologies to inflation), b) the largest expansion of health care in this country since 1965, and c) the first attempt at rolling back the deregulation of the Carter-Reagan-Clinton-Bush era, I think we have a pretty impressive Congress.

And all of this in the face of totally unified opposition from the Republicans, a balky caucus in the House (though a brilliant Speaker to manage them!), and a not-quite-governing majority in the Senate most of the time. We didn't have the majorities that FDR, or LBJ had. And we got an amount done in two years that is quite frankly comparable to those storied Presidents and Congresses. We also didn't get a lot done: cap-&-trade, immigration reform, DADT, DOMA, etc. etc. The lesson is that no President certainly since LBJ has been in office with so long a list of things that needed doing. So Obama entered office with a massive list of Important Things to get done. He got a lot of Important Things done. There are a lot of other Important Things he didn't get done, some of which are ostensibly in the same policy area as some of the things he did get done. It would've been nice if he had gotten more Important Things done. Maybe you think some of the Important Things he didn't get done he should've done instead of the Important Things he did get done. But he's done a whole lot. And he'll do a whole lot more if he has power going forward. Here's hoping.

Their Just Desserts

Just for fun, I thought I'd make a list of candidates who either really deserve to lose or really deserve to win. Excluded will be incumbents who deserve to win and will do so easily and were never really in play this cycle. Some of the "deserves to win" nominations will be in the form of "doesn't deserve to lose," usually in the case of an incumbent who seems likely to lose. And no, I'm not going to be 100% pro-Democratic. Don't believe me? Just watch (very long, so below the fold.) [Also, some of these are pretty obvious. Some of them aren't. It's basically just sort of a summary of the election campaign minus the results.]