December 2009 – Page 6

Month: December 2009 (page 6 of 7)

Obama’s problem with the left

There has been a lot of talk this week about criticism of Obama from the left. After Andrew Sullivan posted a number of emails from readers under the subject of “Leaving the Left,” Glenn Greenwald, a persistent (and I think, fair) critic of Obama had enough:

What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics.

I feel like commenting because I walk on both sides of this line. Here’s the blog post that kicked off the “leaving the left” thread, which I was quite sympathetic toward. How can I agree with someone who’s “leaving the left” and someone who criticizes Obama pretty much every day?

I just don’t have much patience for people on the left who seem to believe that Obama is a sellout to interests they don’t agree with. All of these arguments seem to have the same form: “President Obama will not do this thing because he is afraid to stand up to this group.” He is not pushing for the public option because he’s afraid to stand up to Joe Lieberman. He is not ending the war in Afghanistan because he’s afraid Republicans will attack him for it. He didn’t nationalize the big banks because he was afraid of Wall Street. He has not passed financial reform because he’s afraid of Wall Street. The list goes on.

All of those things could be true, but there are other equally plausible explanations for each of them. Take the public option. As Matthew Yglesias explains, the public option had been weakened substantially in its journey through Congress. The public option people were talking about at the beginning of the process is not the public option that was in the bill the Senate is debating and there were efforts in play to weaken it more. Obama detractors argue that had President Obama drawn a line in the sand and refused to accept a bill without a strong public option, a strong public option would be there, but I believe that the Obama administration has a better sense of Congress than the average blogger for the Huffington Post. The probability that a hard public stand for a strong public option would have killed health care reform entirely is greater than zero.

I am in complete support of criticism of the White House for policies you disagree with. There are plenty of things the White House is doing that I find unsatisfying. A few are infuriating. But I don’t assume that because President Obama is choosing a course that does not match my ideal, he therefore does not share my goals, or that he has abandoned the principles that he espoused during the campaign. People can say what they like, but I’ve pretty much stopped listening to those who go that route.

The GOP and identity politics

December 8, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

This assertion by Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com strikes me as completely true:

In other words, although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy they espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind.

And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles. Their politically-motivated, 180-degree defense of Medicare and their inflammatory rhetoric about death panels proves that the GOP is now the party paralyzed by identity politics.

Wargaming Iran

December 8, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Today I’m reading about a completely fascinating wargame that was set up at Harvard to explore which strategies might work with regard to Iran and its weapons programs. Experienced foreign policy professionals were brought in to play the United States, Israel, the Iranian government, and others. Columbia University professor Gary Sick played Iran, and writes about the game on his blog. The details of the game’s outcome (Iran wins easily) are interesting, but I also love the idea of wargaming to explore possibilities and wonder how it could be incorporated more into business planning.

A few years ago I read Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France by Ernest R May (my review is here) and was impressed at how effectively the Germans employed wargaming. Hitler announced his intention to invade France, and the German generals used wargaming to test various plans until they came up with the one that had the best chance of working. In going back and reading the review, I see that when I wrote it (November, 2004), I was optimistic about the future of Afghanistan. How times change.

Commodifying Moneyball

December 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The challenge for Bloomberg is to create software that is better, faster and more visually useful than what rivals offer to help develop players and predict their performances. A demonstration of Bloomberg’s software showed dazzlingly colorful graphics and an easy way to plot statistics and compare players in complex combinations.

The developers say that after studying rival software makers, they can do more and do it better.

From an article in the New York Times, Bloomberg Technology Embraces Baseball. Moneyball was really a book about identifying and exploiting undervalued assets. The main thing that has changed since the book was published is that players are valued much more accurately than they were when the A’s were beating teams with higher payrolls.

Infographic of the climate change argument

December 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Information is Beautiful: Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus.

I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources.

Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.

How World Cup seeding works

December 4, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The system by which World Cup qualifying teams are seeded and assigned to groups is more interesting than you might think. Nate Silver explains how the system works and which teams are winners and losers going into the drawing this weekend.

Over the years I’ve seen lots of complaining about the group assignments various teams have gotten, but never an explanation of how they work. The ways FIFA intentionally sets things up to benefit the host country are particularly interesting.

What’s next for Android?

December 3, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Mark Sigal has a really nice piece for O’Reilly Radar looking at the challenges that lie ahead for Android:

Now, as a developer, do you develop different versions of your software to take advantage of the cool features of each of these different devices (and the lifecycle of supporting same)? Do you focus on just the device that pushes the highest volume (and release more apps specific to that device)? Or, do you pursue a lowest common denominator that strives for uniformity across all form factors?

Accidental Geography

December 3, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The word of the day is cartocacoethes.

Tracking the Obama administration’s progress

December 2, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

With President Obama’s decision last night to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq, I think we can officially declare the honeymoon over. Maybe it was already over awhile back. Obama was always more moderate than many of his supporters had wished, and people always tend to expect that Presidents can accomplish more than they really can. There are a lot of Democrats in the Senate who just aren’t interested in working to pass legislation that’s progressive in any way. The main lesson I take away from Obama’s first year in office is that we have a national government that is unwilling to even look realistically at the nation’s problems, much less try to enact solutions to those problems.

That said, I’m fairly pleased with Obama, maybe because I didn’t expect as much as many other people did. One thing that often makes me feel a little better is the news feed from PolitiFact’s Obameter. During the campaign (and after), they compiled a list of more than 500 promises that Obama has made, and they’re keeping careful track of how Obama’s doing in delivering on those promises. They’ve already rated more than half of Obama’s promises, and while 25 were broken or are stalled, 308 were kept or are in the works.

Most days I open my news reader and see that President Obama is making progress on one or two promises that he made, and it makes me feel better about my vote. The big ticket items get the lion’s share of the limited attention people pay to politics, but there are a lot of other things going on, and they’re easy to miss.

Nearly all political journalism is worthless

December 1, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Ezra Klein’s list of reasons why most political journalism has very little value:

Campaigns don’t really matter. Elections are largely decided by the fundamentals of the economy. The graphs in this article would’ve done more to predict the 2008 election than reading Politico every day.

Presidential speeches don’t matter much, either.

Nor does the executive’s legislative strategy, come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it’s told as the story of the executive, but in fact, the rules and composition of the Congress decide 80 percent of everything — including the president’s legislative priorities and strategy.

Polls are useful for measuring impressions but very bad for measuring beliefs.

The media is a political actor, not an observer.

Pretty much no one watches cable news.

What you emphasize is a lot more important than what you report. People don’t read you closely.

I’d say that coverage that explains the implications of policy choices is important, but that coverage of why it’s happening is almost always wrong, and nearly worthless even when it’s right. People in general prefer a dramatic, personal narrative that describes day to day events, but most of the time events are dictated by broad trends and path dependence. Those stories aren’t very interesting to write or read, so the market dictates that journalists make up a narrative to describe events instead.

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