I laughed when President Bush declared a federal emergency in the District of Columbia because of the inauguration.
Yes, it was only a way to get more funding to the District. More people are in town than expected, and the city needs to maintain order.
It’s still amusing to think of a simple inauguration as a federal emergency.
Now I hear on the tv that tanks are being brought in. Wait, what?
Comments Off on Tanks for the Memories
Posted in Elections, Executive Power, Political Animals
My houseguests and I were watching some inauguration coverage on the tv this morning. One of the newsreaders discussed some data on Americans’ knowledge of President Obama’s political philosophy.
13% of those polled said that President Obama is a conservative. This was a surprise. 13%? Really?
A second 13% bloc was more honest, or at least more secure about their ignorance. They were the “don’t know/don’t care” contingent. I can respect that.
Now add those numbers up. If the poll’s sample is representative, then more than one quarter of Americans do not know if the president is a liberal or a conservative.
People complain about low turnouts during elections. If this is the state of public opinion, then turnout is far too high.
Posted in Elections, Political Animals
Good people generally do not become president. Good people don’t even want to be president.
Why? Power is one reason. There is nothing dignified or noble about seeking power over other human beings.
Morality in politics is that of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: might makes right. No parent would teach that to their child. It is wrong.
The brutal campaigns are the other reason good people shy away from political careers. A successful campaign for even minor office requires months of the candidate prostrating himself before people he’s never met.
He has to tailor his opinions to match the median voter’s. He dares not follow his own heart or mind; he’d lose for sure.
Good people carry themselves with pride and dignity. The man or woman who voluntarily endures the modern campaign has neither.
Pundits started talking years ago about the notion of the “permanent campaign.” It used to be a cynical joke at the expense of a politician whose powerlust was a little too obvious; proper decorum demanded such impulses to be kept below the surface.
Decorum has declined. People who play for the Red Team are already jockeying to position themselves as their team’s nominee. More than three years from now.
The Blue Team already knows who their nominee will be. And he’s already begun campaigning for a second term. His first has not yet even begun.
The Politico‘s Ben Smith reports that President Obama has even named his permanent campaign: Organizing for America. This is unprecedented.
Smith describes it as a “potentially hugely, uniquely powerful tool, enhancing the muscle of the official who is already the most powerful man in America.”
Power. Always power. Politicians are terrible little creatures. May our children aspire to better things.
Comments Off on The Permanent Campaign
Posted in Elections, Executive Power, Philosophy, Political Animals, Public Choice, The Partisan Mind
Tagged permanent campaign, plato, the republic, thrasymachus
Comments Off on Despicable
Posted in Political Animals
Adam Cohen’s piece in today’s New York Times, “Republicans’ Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed,” is profoundly interesting. I have no idea if the article is representative of Cohen’s thought. But I’m led to believe that he is the type of person who, while very intelligent, did not ask many questions in school.
The standard high school civics textbook paints a glowing picture of the New Deal. So does public opinion. The inquisitive mind does not just take that at face value. It asks questions. Seeks answers. Comes to its own conclusion.
Maybe Cohen did all that, and decided the New Deal was a good thing. I am skeptical that he went to the trouble.
Why? Start with his first argument. It is simply lazy. It is a partisan’s argument. He quotes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and declares, these people vote Republican! Of course they’re wrong!
Yes, Republicans are wrong on many issues. Most issues, in fact. At least from my perspective. But Republican = wrong is just lazy. One must take an argument seriously to determine its merit.
His second argument is also lazy. It appeals to public opinion. This is a fallacy. A quarter of voters didn’t even know which party controlled Congress last election. 55% of Americans reject something as basic as evolution. Public opinion is not to be trusted, in other words. Better to come to your own conclusions. Better to ask questions.
Cohen’s most compelling argument is also his least rigorous: anecdote. He tells a story of a man helped by New Deal spending. Note that he left out stories of people hurt by that spending. Both kinds of anecdotes are right there in the open. Cohen is guilty of cherrypicking.
Then there are the errors of fact. Cohen claims that President Bush rolled back the regulatory state. But 33,055 new regulations passed under Bush’s watch. That’s not a typo. I’ll spell it out. Thirty-three thousand and fifty-five new regulations. Look at the data. Bush didn’t roll back anything.
Cohen is simply mistaken. He didn’t ask questions. He just assumed that Republican = deregulation. He didn’t ask if that was actually true.
As an economist, here’s the real doozy:
“The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.”
Really?
First, the theory. Let’s ask: what was the impact of FDR’s programs? Every dollar spent on them was a dollar that was taken out of the economy, then put back into it. This is not how an economy grows. Growth requires the creation of new wealth, not the redistribution of old wealth.
And the data? One of President Obama’s top advisers, Christina Romer, showed that both the Depression and the 1937-38 dip were largely monetary phenomenons. Not fiscal. Monetary. Look at the data.
What about that fiscal policy? Another economist, Price Fishback, demonstrated that New Deal fiscal policy had almost no net effect on the economy. Again, look at the data.
If one asks questions and looks at the data, one finds that the New Deal did not actually help the economy. Partisan affiliation has nothing to do with it. Neither does public opinion.
Theory and data do. All you have to do is ask them.
Sadly, most media outlets – and their customers – do not want to ask questions. That requires too much thought. Too much effort. Worse, such things can’t fit into soundbites. No, we want people who have answers.
Comments Off on Sometimes Questions Are Better than Answers
Posted in Argumentation, Economics, Media, Philosophy, Political Animals, The Partisan Mind
Carl Oberg takes an interesting look into the mind of Naomi Klein.
The main point: it’s all about power.
She doesn’t like it when other people wield it; power corrupts. Klein gets around this problem by taking a page from Plato’s Republic. Just give power to people who think as she does. Then, magically, power won’t corrupt.
Comments Off on Naomi Klein, Anarchist?
Posted in Philosophy, Political Animals, The Partisan Mind
Nationals Park turns out to have cost more than planned. Not a big surprise. But disappointing all the same. The original figure was $611 million; the final cost is $693 million.
What really caught my eye was that “The team refused to pay rent for much of the year because it claimed the facility wasn’t finished.”
Bear in mind that the Nats only paid for $20 million of the $693 million. Not only did they pay less than 3% of construction costs, but they’ve apparently been shirking on their rent, too.
Try pulling that with your landlord and see what happens.
I won’t. I like having a roof over my head. What a sweetheart deal.
Comments Off on Nationals Park
Posted in Earmarks, Political Animals, Sports
Incoming HHS secretary Tom Daschle hosted a town meeting in Dublin, Indiana to build support for the new administration’s health care policies. It is worth taking him seriously for a moment — he is going to head HHS, after all.
He said that “When we combine the stories of Dublin and multiply that times 300 million people, we begin to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.”
I went ahead and multiplied Dublin’s 697 people by 300 million. That yields a little over 209 billion people, or thirty times the earth’s population.
Yes, this is being too literalist. All the same, politicians are not to be taken at their word.
Comments Off on Appreciating the Magnitude of the Problem
Posted in Health Care, Political Animals
The still-undecided Minnesota senate race has already gone through several recounts. This seems to happen every time the race is closer than the margin of litigation.
First, Al Franken insisted on a recount because he didn’t win. He still wasn’t ahead after that, so he pushed for another, and another. Now he is ahead by 46 votes or so.
Now his opponent, Norm Coleman, wants more recounting because he isn’t winning.
Note the “because he isn’t winning.” That’s the important part. If Franken had initially won, he would not have asked for a recount. Coleman never favored a recount while he was ahead.
To the partisan mind, it doesn’t matter if every vote is counted, or even if the election is honest. Nor does it matter that both sides are being hypocritical. What matters is that your team wins.
If at first your team loses, then change the rules of the game so that you do win. This is one thing if you’re playing a game against a small child. It is another when the game involves grown men and control over trillions of dollars of government spending.
Politicians — and their supporters — are strange, fascinating creatures.
Comments Off on Democracy in Action
Posted in Elections, Political Animals, The Partisan Mind
Over at the New York Times, John Tierney has some excellent analysis of Obama’s choice of John Holdren to be his science advisor.
The Bush administration was often criticized — rightly, I think — for pursuing faith-based science policies. With Holdren as science advisor, it appears this will not change in the new administration. This is to be expected. President Bush is a thoroughly political creature. So is President Obama; you don’t get to be president if you aren’t.
The most important part of the scientific method is its humility. At its very heart is the ability to admit that maybe, just possibly, you could be wrong. If that’s what the evidence shows, then it’s ok to admit it. If you (gasp) don’t know something, that’s ok, too. Instead of just making up an answer, you try to find it out.
The new political science is very different. It replaces humility with Certainty. A large part of the politicized scientist’s job is simply to disagree with the other party. It’s an effective way to raise funding. At least, it is when funding is allocated by political means.
Holdren displays all the hallmarks of The Certainty. For one, he accuses people who disagree with him as being operatives of the other party. Of course they’re wrong, just look at how they vote!
This is not a strong argument. Neither is his primary defense for his party’s preferred global warming policies – the argument from authority. Scientific consensus is on his side. Of course, there once was a time when scientific consensus said that the earth was flat, and the center of the universe. The world as it actually is matters more than merely what people think about it. Millions of people can be wrong, and often are.
But Holdren is Certain. He knows he is right. Scientific consensus is on his side. Just as it was when he and Paul Ehrlich lost that famous bet with Julian Simon. Just as it was when he and others attacked Bjorn Lomborg — who is no Republican — for the crime of dissenting. Tierney notes that Holdren and his co-writers actually “made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in [Lomborg’s] 540-page book.”
This is faith, not science. President Obama ran on a platform of change. I have no doubt that he will change some things for the better. But his science policies will probably just as faith-based, and just as Certain in the face of contrary evidence, as his predecessor’s.
So it goes.
Posted in Certainty, Philosophy, Political Animals, Science
Inertia Wins! 