Matt Yglesias

Ineresting

Rick Perlstein channels Tom Schaller channeling some academics:

Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a “conservative,” controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely–again controlling for racial attitudes–than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites,” or choosing whether blacks are “lazy” or “hardworking”), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller’s writes: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters … the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Interesting stuff. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg has apparently gotten a lot of email from readers who think the “racist” answers to these questions don’t really demonstrate racism. I think that’s a bit daft, but however you want to characterize the question, the point is that individuals’ attitudes toward race (again, however you want to classify those attitudes) have a large impact on voting behavior.

Andrew Biggs

In a somewhat bizarre post, Cato’s Michael Cannon complains that “Anyone who thinks that Democrats might be prepared to work in a bipartisan manner to reform Social Security should be quickly disabused by their disgraceful treatment of Andrew Biggs.” Follow the link and you’ll find:

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare called on incoming Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to block President Bush’s nomination of Andrew Biggs to become the next deputy administrator of the Social Security Administration should he renew the nomination in January, charging that his advocacy for the privatization of the popular entitlement and hostility toward other New Deal-era programs makes him a politically polarizing figure.

In other words, the Democrats have done . . . absolutely nothing to Biggs.

Needless to say, though, I think this would be a great issue on which to pick a confirmation battle. Tanner refers to the “swift boating” of Biggs, but the difference of course is that it’s entirely true that Biggs favors privatization of the popular entitlement program and is hostile to other New Deal programs. The Republican Party, however, is usually quite successful at obscuring from public view the fact that a desire to dismantle Social Security (and, indeed, Medicare) is conventional wisdom in their political party. Hearings on Biggs’ nomination would be a good place to clarify that (a) the Bush administration wants to destroy Social Security, (b) the overwhelming majority of Republican members of congress want to destroy Social Security, and (c) the only thing keeping Social Security in its existence is the Democratic Party and its elected officials.

What’s more, Democrats should be implacably opposed to “reforming” Social Security in a bipartisan manner. Or, for that matter, a partisan one. Privateer interest in handling this in a bipartisan manner is telling; what they want to do is political poison and they’re looking for cover. Instead, they should be made to drink their own brew and suffer the consequences.

Fighting The Next War

Long and frightening Seymore Hersh article argues that the Rumsfeld/Gates switch doesn’t necessarily indicate an administration-wide change of approach to national security. Cheney is still Cheney and still wants to start a war with Iran and Bush just might do it.

Meanwhile, I have to say I sort of hope Baker-Hamilton doesn’t recommend negotiations with Syria and Iran. The official hawk line on why we shouldn’t do this is that it won’t accomplish anything. Meanwhile, it would be the easiest thing in the world for an administration that doesn’t want to negotiate with Syria and Iran to “agree” to negotiate, do so in bad faith, walk away having achieved nothing, further poison the diplomatic atmosphere, and thereby “prove” that such negotiations are useless. In fact, they’re vital, but to do any good they need to be done in good faith. That means either a genuine change of heart by the president (unlikely) or else a new administration in 2009.

Better Idealism

I think Peter Beinart’s column on the relatively successful UN Peacekeeping mission in the Congo is incredibly important. I would just add the observation that not only does the record show that UN sponsored “nation-building” ventures are much more successful than quasi-imperial American ones, but that one of the things that distinguishes these kind of operations from, say, Iraq is that they’re at least largely consensual. You have a war-torn country. You have parties prepared to stop the fighting. You have a peace deal brokered with the assistance of international mediation. And you have, as part of the deal, an agreement to deploy third-party forces to the country to help restore order and build confidence between the parties.

The record of missions of this sort is decidedly mixed, but it’s also decidedly more positive than the record of unilateral endeavors and of preponderantly coercive ones. What’s more, a lot of the mixed results are determined by the fact that rich countries (especially the USA) tend to be reluctant to pony up the forces that are being asked for. People both inclined to believe that “American power should be used to advance our values” and that the sort of sentiment encapsulated by that phrase seems to have led to a giant disaster in Iraq (people like me, in other words) would be well-advised to try and focus future efforts on getting the United States (and other countries, too) to pitch in more on these kind of missions.

Edupessimism Gone Too Far?

Kevin Carey says I’m too pessimistic about the prospects for giving schools the resources they need to implement the sort of reforms discussed by Paul Tough as ways to bring high-poverty schools up to par, citing examples from Massachusetts and Maryland (and possibly soon New York) of school finance reforms.

Jal Mehta, by contrast, is relatively pessimistic, saying “we still know more about creating more good schools than we do about creating good school systems” worrying that “it seems equally likely that the key ingredients that make a place like KIPP work are not easily replicable: strong leadership and teachers who are not only talented, but are willing to work 15-16 hours days plus weekends to bring their students up to standards of proficiency.”

To focus on just one central aspect of creating good schools, how could we create 3,000,000 KIPP teachers? This is a complicated and ongoing conversation, but the only obvious answer is pay – people in our society who are attractive job candidates coming out of college and work 15-16 hour days generally command salaries of $80,000 and up, which would mean a radical shift in our national priorities. Perhaps this could be coupled with some form of differentiated pay, which would make it slightly more affordable and more tenable to conservatives, but it is still a utopian enough idea to be outside of the current policy conversation.

On a more optimistic note, this presumably isn’t a totally binary conversation and making progress on smaller scales might build political support for doing more.

Hmmm…

Henley seems to have the goods; Fairfax County’s move to let the homeless starve rather than expose them to a small risk of food poisoning really does make me want to join Team Libertarian: “residents can no longer donate food prepared in their homes or a church kitchen — be it a tuna casserole, sandwiches or even a batch of cookies — unless the kitchen is approved by the county, health officials said yesterday.”

Classical Music Online

Galen Brown at Sequenza21 has a discussion of the Tower Records issue featuring specific knowledge of the classical music market and, basically, further confirms my lack of concern that classical won’t be able to hack it in the internet age.

The Political Economy of Education Equity

Andy Rotherham remarks: “I’ve gotten a slew of emails asking why I haven’t written anything about Sunday’s NYT mag piece by Paul Tough. Well, what is there to say? Most important education article written this year.” I wish he would say more — I thought the article raised more questions than it answered. In particular, Tough and his admirers mostly seem to read his conclusion as an optimistic one: here’s how to make school work for poor kids, while it actually makes me incredibly pessimistic.

Let’s take a look at Tough’s conclusion:

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Regional Conference!

Nawaf Obaid, adviser to the Saudi government and managing director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project in Riyadh and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speaking strictly for himself says that unless the USA finds a pony in Iraq soon, we’ll be looking at Saudi intervention in the civil war: “Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance — funding, arms and logistical support — that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years.”

As GFR notes this would, in essence, entail Saudi Arabia throwing its lot in with al-Qaeda as a means of fighting Iran and various Shiite groups. Meanwhile, the United States — if we listen to the hawkish right — will be at war with both sides!

Fun With Google Maps

Look here — the park where Marlo does business in Season 4.

Via Kottke.

My Life

This plan floated by Andy Stern sounds like a damn good idea to me. As a health care idea it’s really only “okay” — the real virtue is that it potentially leverages an okay health care policy idea into what could be a fantastic civil society building idea. An effective political system depends, to a large extent, on the existence of meaningful organizations in society that aren’t strictly political advocacy groups. Organizations like that — unions, churches, gun clubs — have the capacity to take people who aren’t “political” sorts and make them see that politics is interested in them even if they aren’t interested in politics. The combination of declining unionization rates with the collapse of other sorts of membership organizations (Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs and so forth) has played a large role in bringing about the current state of corporate domination of the political system. This is the sort of thinking that could turn things around.

UPDATE: Stern mentions this in the course of an interview with Campus Progress.

Empaneled

Gone all morning at an OSI Panel where I and others will be figuring everything out. When I’m back, I’ll share the answers with the world.

Polonium 210

Newspaper reports suggest it is hard to come by and traceable – not so sure, the dose might have been as small as a millicurie or two, and you could buy that for about half a million dollars – it is $690 per microcurie retail.

This from Steinn Sigurðsson who would seem to know what he’s talking about. At first glance I thought — hey, maybe you shouldn’t be able to buy this stuff from a website that proudly proclaims “No NRC license required! All our radioactive isotopes are legal to purchase & own by the general public.” But then again, sure you could kill someone by buying $500 grand worth of Polonium 210 and using it as a poison but why would you? Put this together with the Yuschenko incident and it certainly looks like someone in Russian intelligence circles really enjoys showing off their ability to find obscure ways of trying to kill people.

I have very little to add to your MSM coverage of this story except to note that I’ve seen Boris Berezovsky’s name tossed around in relation to this in a manner that seems to imply he’s some sort of heroic dissident rather than, say, a leading member of the circle of horribly corrupt gangsters who robbed Russia blind during the Yeltsin years and just happen to have been run out of town by the new gang.

Mirror Image

Suppose you were a US government official and you read the following in a Russian or Chinese state-owned newspaper op-ed page:

One of the most intriguing ideas is the creation of a treaty-based “Concert of Autocracies” that, like COMECON or the Warsaw Pact, would admit members only if they met strict requirements. The new institution would allow the authoritarian states to work together as a concerted force within such institutions as the United Nations and could eventually replace the United Nations as a forum for legitimizing international security actions if the United Nations itself proved resistant to reform.

Holy shit, right? New Cold War! Right there in the newspaper. So how are Russian and Chinese officials supposed to react to Jackson Diehl’s op-ed in The Washington Post?

Better Readers Needed

Jonah Goldberg receives (and republishes) email from some real morons:

1. The toppling of a regime that was a constant threat to its neighbors and, potentially at least, to us.

2. Removing the Iraqi threat allowed us to move our troops out of Saudi Arabia. The US presence in the Kingdom was the #1 motivator for Bin Ladenism, and the long term benefits this will have after Iraq are hard to calculate but will no doubt be significant.

3. Worst possible case scenario, we retreat to Kurdistan. No matter what happens in Greater Iraq, the liberation of the Kurds and the implantation of a nascent democracy there is a genuine success.

4. Also in the worst case scenario, we retreat not only to Kurdistan, but also to Kuwait. The virtual military encirclement of Iran will remain, and that is important. An encircled Iran, even with a nuke, is a far different scenario than the opposite.

Toppling a regime that was a potential threat to its neighbors and to the USA is an accomplishment if and only if it’s not replaced with a more threatening situation like, say, pervasive chaos.

The other points all seem to involve misunderstanding the pre-war status quo. Kurdistan enjoyed de facto autonomy from Baath Iraq before the war. Our troops could have been moved out of Saudi Arabia and into Kuwait and Kurdistan before the war. Iran was “encircled” before the war. And what does encircling Iran accomplish, anyway? This seems like the kind of thing someone who’s been playing too much Diplomacy would care about.

Neither/Nor

Alcee Hastings drops out of the race for Intel Committee Chair, while Pelosi is still said to be very unlikely to pick Jane Harman. Sounds like a win-win to me. And, frankly, good for Hastings who seems to me to be doing the right thing here rather than allowing questions about him to cloud the broader question.

From Russia, With Great Power Competition

People have interestingly different views of Russia policy. Eve Fairbanks, for example, is outraged by the Bush administration’s coddling of Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post op-ed page has been known to express the same sentiment. Frankly, I used to say this, too. And I believe I’ve heard similar sentiments from friends who work on post-Soviet issues. These days, I tend to see things differently. Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal says we should return to treating Russia as an enemy of the United States. Mario Loyola agrees. And, obviously, any liberal who thinks Bush should get tougher on Putin is going to have to grapple with the fact that they find themselves agreeing with Mario Loyola . . . a pretty damning critique of any position.

In both instances, the complaints naturally blend concerns about Putin’s authoritarian tendencies with complaints about his geopolitical views — in particular, willingness to sell stuff to Iran and Venezuela and so forth. Anatol Lieven’s convinced me that this needs to be put into the context of America’s policy toward Russia. This started out with expansion of NATO into Central Europe. It continued with NATO expansion into the Baltics — former Soviet Republics that have been in the Russian sphere of influence since the 18th century or some such. Then we helped sponsor the overthrow of Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and Georgia and started talking about adding those countries to NATO.

Now I won’t deny that there’s something to be said on behalf of all of these policies. They do, however, come with a price. If you want to pry countries out of Russia’s sphere of influence and make them formal military allies of the United States, any responsible and patriotic Russian government is going to take alarm and seek countermeasures, including an uncooperative attitude toward Iran. We’re then faced with a question of priorities: Do we care more about Iran, or do we care more about Ukraine? Do we care more about nuclear proliferation, or do we care more about anti-Putin Russians? There’s an obvious deal to be cut here — NATO membership for the Baltics is a done deal, but we can return Russia’s “near abroad” to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc. Some would call this appeasement and, frankly, the shoe fits decently. It strikes me, however, as preferable to either going to war with Iran or to having Iran build a nuclear bomb.

You Go to War With the Militia You Have

Dafna Linzer and Thomas Ricks get a leak of a classified Marine Corps memo on Anbar Province. It notes that “The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there.” The problem, meanwhile, isn’t one that “surging” troops will solve. Rather, “The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as ‘embroiled in a daily fight for survival,’ fearful of ‘pogroms’ by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.” And, of course, this makes perfect sense. If I were a Sunni Arab Iraqi, and an al-Qaeda dude stopped by my house I would greet him warmly, offer a cup of coffee and my thanks, agree to help him out in any way he asked, etc. The fact that I might be, by conviction, an atheist and a believer in social democracy wouldn’t change this at all. Why wouldn’t I support al-Qaeda? Because they’re the bad guys? Don’t be naive — they’re the guys with guns trying to kill the other guys with guns who are trying to kill me. And if pretending to be a devout Sunni Muslim is the price I need to pay for protection, then why not.

Much the same could be said of Shiite Arabs’ attitudes toward Muqtada al-Sadr. Shadi Hamid’s complaints about “the utter incompetence of Nouri al-Maliki government and its continued willingness to turn a blind eye to the increasingly brutal, roving death squads of its Sadrist coalition partners” might as well come from Mars. Why wouldn’t you support Sadr? He has a fairly effective armed force at his disposal that’s willing to protect Shiites who show their loyalty. Wouldn’t you want to work with such a force? Maliki would be insane to side with Iraq’s American occupiers, its Sunni population, and foreign al-Qaeda types in fighting the Mahdi Army, the Shiites’ own self-protection service.

Iraqis of either stripe are right now caught between a guy with a gun trying to kill them and another guy with another gun trying to kill that first guy. Choosing sides isn’t going to be difficult.

Do Americans Overparent?

Kevin Carey ably summarizes the policy upshot of this etremely long article from Paul Tough (awesome name) on the “achievement gap” in public education, sparing you the need to read the whole thing. If you do read it all, however, you’ll find some material on pages three and four that I’d be interested in seeing taken in a different direction:

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We Speak American Here

The quiz speaks the truth. I am, indeed, from the Northeast and even specifically from New York as they specify. Of course the northeast, at least to this northeasterner’s ear, comes with a variety of sub-accents. At least among older and less educated people minimally impacted by the ongoing homogenization of American speech you can detect distinct North Jersey, Long Island, Rhode Island, etc. variations of the accent. A few of the characters on The Wire (Colvin’s Deputy Commander in the Western District, the Assistant Principal at Edward Tilgman Middle) have opened our ears to the traditional speech patterns of Baltimore’s white ethnic types.

This comes via Jim Henley. In terms of American accents, the thing I find really weird are the people who pronounce “bag” like it rhymes with “vague.” I used to think this was just how Canadians talk, but it seems to be widespread in our northern midwest and so forth as well.