Matt Yglesias

Less Than Zero

All season long, I’d been resisting the temptation to proclaim the Wizards “better without Arenas” but the evidence from this playoff series against the Cavaliers is really tending to change my mind. The fact that Agent Zero has a solid backup in Antonio Daniels is what makes this work, but the whole rest of the team really does seem to play with both more defensive intensity and more tactical acumen in key offensive situations without Gilbert. Certainly I don’t think it’s a no-brainer at this point that Arenas should be paid more money if he chooses to opt out of his current contract.

Solutions, Not Speeches

Sam Stein: “Expert Support For Gas Tax Holiday Appears Nonexistent”. By getting on board the holiday bandwagon, John McCain mostly reenforces one’s impression of him as someone who doesn’t have real ideas, principles, interest in, etc. domestic policy issues. I think that, by contrast, Hillary Clinton is managing to undermine the perception — something she’d embedded in even a lot of people who aren’t hugely sympathetic to her campaign — that she’s the candidate of substance, the earnest policy wonk type who really knows how to fix America’s problems.

It’s a reminder that Bill Clinton, who certainly stands out among presidents for his wonkishness and interest in policy detail, also wound up gravitating toward a political strategy that leaned heavily on what you might call “policy gimmicks” rather than a serious effort to grapple with national problems.

100 Years

Moira Whelan has a good rundown of the whole question of where the “100 years” talking point came from, and is it really unfair to attribute a desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq to John McCain just because he kept emphasizing his desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq before deciding it was politically inconvenient to be attacked for it.

One further point to ad is that McCain’s apparent belief that our military bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf are entirely unproblematic seems to reflect a limited comprehension of the overall situation. After all, even our military presence in Saudi Arabia hasn’t been casualty-free and it’s extremely likely that we wouldn’t be able to keep all of the Gulf bases we currently have were the region more democratic. At the moment, the extraordinary weakness of the Iraqi state and the general lack of security have tended to obscure the basic reality of how unpopular are presence there is.

MoveOn On McCain

New ad continues to hit the 100 years theme:

They’re obviously making a rhetorical point at the end about being worse than Bush, but my guess is that on Iraq as such McCain is likely to be somewhat better as he has over the years seemed more engaged with the various tactical questions about how best to proceed. Where he’s most likely to be worse than Bush concerns our relationships with other major countries like Russia and China, where Bush has generally been cautious but McCain might take a substantially more confrontational approach. Still, for political purposes probably nobody’s going to care about Russia and China, so the fact that McCain, like Bush, will ensure that troops keep fighting and dying in Iraq for as long as he’s in a position to order them to do so does seem like the salient issue.

Cheney Versus Whales

Just to prove that he is, in fact, evil Dick Cheney seems to have decided to launch a secret OVP effort to stop government scientists from helping whale preservation.

Gassy

What Jonathan Alter said about the gas tax. Beyond that, though, it’s worth saying that real harm is done to people’s lives by this sort of gimmickry. It’s not at all clear to me that ordinary voters understand that the underlying supply and demand trends make it overwhelmingly likely that the cost of gasoline will continue, on the whole, to move upwards in the future. But that’s the reality — the market will fluctuate and it’s possible that policy choices about the SPR can influence those fluctuations, but we’re not finding new sources of cheap oil at the same rate that global economic growth is making people want to burn more oil.

Both as a country, and as individuals, we need to plan accordingly. Not everyone will agree with my preferred policy prescriptions, which tend toward denser land use and more transit, but we need some long-term policy response. And people need to respond in their own lives when they make decisions about which car to buy and where to live. But when national leaders act as if they believe current fuel costs are a passing phenomenon to be weathered with short-term measures, then at least some voters are going to believe them and make bad personal and political decisions that we can ill afford. A lot of electoral gambits are nonsense without being actually harmful, but McCain and Clinton are making problems worse just with their rhetoric.

Straight Talk By Lobbyists

Matt Duss notes that Randy Scheunemann has a background as a lobbyist for the government of Georgia (the foreign country, not the state), the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, etc. To be fair to Scheunemann, though, this really seems to me a case where someone gets lobbying work because his sincere convictions (in favor of a more confrontational policy toward Iraq and Russia and basically everywhere) happen to line up with someone’s lobbying agenda.

It’d be like if Big Train started giving me money (which, frankly, they should) rather than like the highway lobby hiring me and then suddenly all my opinions change.

The Good Friedman

I feel kind of bad that my book opens with something about the evils of Tom Friedman at just the moment when he’s returned to columnizing with a new focus on environment and energy issues where I generally agree with him. Today column, for example, is all good.

At any rate, if Friedman or anyone else wants to throw some pie at me, the place to do it would be tomorrow at 6PM (that’s the correct time, I messed up and mentioned 6:30PM earlier) at the Borders at 18th and L. Alternatively, you could just hear me talk about the book, answer questions, sign copies, whatever else you might like.

Some Collegial Advice

Whether or not one enjoys blogs and blogging, I don’t think that writing a blog that seems to consist primarily of complaints about blogging is likely to attract a large audience to the new Jeffrey Goldberg blog. Blogs are mostly read by people who like blogs — writing about the evils of blogging is probably a good op-ed subject.

Like rather than wondering aloud “why more people don’t simply pick up the phone once in a while” why not pick up the phone once in a while and write a blog that’s dramatically better than all the phone-less blogs out there, thus proving the superiority of phone-based blogging? Meanwhile, though, thanks to the blog I saw Goldberg’s Q&A with Shmuel Rosner in which he makes a ton of good points.

More Powerful Than a Less Powerful Locomotive

Via Ryan Avent, true high-speed rail is coming to Argentina which will make them the first in the Western Hemisphere. Someday maybe we’ll get some, too.

McCain and Policy

Tyler Cowen ponders John McCain’s health care proposals for a bit and then muses:

Trade aside, so far I’ve yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp. Mostly I’ve seen attempts to signal that they won’t do anything too offensive to the party’s right wing. Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to. I don’t even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals. We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals.

I’m a little unclear on how this happened myself — the GOP seems to have decided to blow a not-very-appealing idiosyncratic element of George W. Bush’s personality into some kind of principled objection to policy proposals. Meanwhile, I understand that free traders are not very impressed with Democratic rhetoric these days but I think it’d be generous to describe this as a policy proposal:

John McCain Will Lower Barriers To Trade. Ninety-five percent of the world’s customers lie outside our borders and we need to be at the table when the rules for access to those markets are written. To do so, the U.S. should engage in multilateral, regional and bilateral efforts to reduce barriers to trade, level the global playing field and build effective enforcement of global trading rules. These steps would also strengthen the U.S. dollar and help to control the rising cost of living that hurts our families.

There doesn’t seem to be a recognition here that the multilateral WTO trade process has basically run aground. But it’s run aground. A president who wants to lower barriers to trade in a way that’s economically significant (as opposed to, say, the Colombia deal) needs some bright ideas about how to do this. In McCain’s defense, such ideas are hard to come by, but if you want to tell people that lowering trade barriers is an important part of your economic strategy then you need some.

Predictions About the Future

The news that Q1 economic growth, though extremely low, came in somewhat above recession levels is a good opportunity to once again remind people that the big sources of uncertainty in the general election have to do with objective reality rather than candidate-attributes or campaign tactics. That stuff can matter, but the evidence suggests that it doesn’t matter as much as the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are, in a sense, unknowable.

Certainly if you made me pick, I’d say the economy will continue to be lousy and Iraq will continue to be a mess, and the Democrats will have a big advantage, but neither of those predictions can be offered by me (or anyone else) with any real degree of confidence at this point. And yet those factors will probably determine the outcome in November to a much greater extent than controversies about lapel pins or McCain’s bizarre campaign finance shenanigans.

Rise of the Humanzees

It’s not something I focus on as much as the robot threat, but via Ronald Bailey comes Jenny Hawthorne’s report for the Scotsman on the possibilities of human-chimp hybrids: “A leading scientist has warned a new species of ‘humanzee,’ created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.” Interestingly, I believe it was the Scotsman that also broke the story of Joseph Stalin’s efforts to breed a humanzee super-soldier so they’ve clearly marked themselves out as your go-to source for coverage of this vital issue.

Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids? Did such a ban pass?

Subjectivism Goes to War

Jumping off some of Hannah Arendt’s observations about Vietnam, Dave Meyer has an excellent post about Iraq and war as a “signaling” strategy:

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning.  Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful “Suck. On. This.” Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that “every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our “strength.”

To add some further context and specificity, I point out in Heads in the Sand that the Bush administration wanted to simultaneously get more rigorous about cracking down on nuclear activities in unfriendly states and less scrupulous about U.S. compliance with the multilateral non-proliferation regime. Consequently, they wanted regime change in Iraq not just for its own sake, but also to “send a message” to would be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.

As Dave points out, however, among many other problems with using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home — “Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message.” This is especially true in the modern world where it’s essentially impossible to segment your message. In the past, it might have been viable for an administration to communicate one message, in foreign language, via the foreign press, to foreigners while allowing for a more muddled national dialogue in the domestic press and vernacular. But those days are gone, and today message discipline requires totally discipline.

I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you’re going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet

End of an Era

The Steve Nash Era in Phoenix has been a pretty amazing thing for NBA fans (especially those of us with no allegiances to any other Western Conference contenders) to behold. When the Suns signed him to his deal, the move was pretty widely criticized, but with Nash and Amare Stoudemire in the mix the 29-53 Suns of 2003-2004 became the 62-20 Suns of 2004-2005 and electrified fans with an up-tempo game. Then Amare went down with injury and the 2005-2006 Suns stunned us by going 54-28 with the previously unheard-of Boris Diaw serving sometimes as center sometimes as a backup point guard.

Then Amare came back the next year, they won 61 games, and lost again in the playoffs. I was hoping to see them do better, just as I was hoping to see them do better this year. I think a lot of us were. It was a great story, and they played a really fun style. And now with the Shaq trade and last night’s first round exit, it seems like that era’s over. It’s hard to imagine Shaq or Nash or Grant Hill getting any better next year and hard to see what kind of moves they can make. The window has closed, and it’s too bad.

“Obama is Essentially Right”

Here’s a crazy media moment. ABC News is reporting on the candidates’ gas tax dispute and instead of just going with claim and counterclaim a reporter informs us that he spoke to several economists about the issue and they all agree that “Obama is essentially right” that what Clinton and McCain are proposing wouldn’t accomplish anything:

Strange days.

What About the Good News?

There’s some good local news out today. For one thing, the city government’s public private partnership with ClearChannel to launch a bike sharing/rental service is getting off the ground. Good! And the “silver line” new Metro spur to Dulles Airport is back on track with the Bush administration deciding to un-kill the proposal in a rare triumph of sound policymaking from this crew. Good! And last, Prince Williams County is starting to edge away from the draconian anti-immigrant policies it implemented during last year’s hysteria.

Off The Fence

The pace of superdelegate endorsements seems to be picking up this week, with Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley signing on with Obama, Rep. Ike Skelton going for Clinton, and before that Senator Bingaman for Obama and also someone else whose name I forget. That’s as it should be. Whichever candidate you prefer, it’s just better to have the superdelegates state their preferences sooner rather than later.

Change

Nice ad from Obama hitting back on the gas tax thing, tying his process/change argument to the concrete issue of energy prices:

If only there’d been a bullet point about transit.

Trade-Offs

Here’s Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s top foreign policy aide, talking about Georgia and U.S.-Russian relations and casually dropping tid-bits of his bizarre theoretical approach. For example, here’s his view of diplomacy:

Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.

That’s right, he thinks the entire process of bargaining for mutual advantage that lies at the core of diplomacy — and, indeed, of almost all constructive human interaction — is a relic of a bygone era of power politics. In the brave new future, either the Russians give way on all points, or else we raise up the national missile defense system and it’s bombs away.

For a more rational take on international relations, you might want to come by my Heads in the Sand event tomorrow at 6:30 PM at the Borders at 18th and L in DC.

UPDATE: That should be 6:00 PM at Borders, apologies.