politics – Page 19

Tag: politics (page 19 of 23)

A couple of Obama items

I saw two interesting Barack Obama-related items over the past few days. (This isn’t a “vote for Obama” post, it’s more about process.) The first is this spreadsheet of internal predictions from the Obama campaign that was leaked on February 7. In it, his campaign predicts how the popular vote and delegate allocations will turn out in each state, and the thing about it is that it’s amazingly accurate. He underestimates his margin in some states he won, but his predictions aren’t far off until late in the primary season.

Well ahead of time, his campaign predicted that it would lose Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Given that they had a plan for victory, it’s clear that the plan accounted for not winning those states. I think his late season underperformance has to more to do with the fact that he didn’t have to try very hard late in the season. He was going to win the nomination with or without Kentucky or West Virginia, and so he put less money and face time into those races than he would have had he needed to do better there to secure the nomination.

As someone who’s asked every day to predict how long it will take to fix bugs and add features to software, I’m impressed with this degree of accuracy in projecting the future. I’d love to read a post-mortem after the election that explains how the campaign came up with its forecast.

The other thing I found interesting was Obama’s June 6 speech to campaign staff. It answers the question, “How do you explain to employees that they don’t get any days off for the next five months?” I think he does a pretty good job.

Don’t confuse principle and politics

June 2, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I know I’ve been posting a lot about politics lately, but that’s the season we’re in.

After a weekend of hearing arguments about why the delegations from Michigan and Florida should or should not be seated at the Democratic National Convention in August, I’m left with one lesson, and that’s that we should not confuse arguments of principle with arguments of politics.

It’s an argument of principle whether we should provide health insurance to every American, whether or not they can afford it. It’s an argument of principle whether the United States should hold people without charges in secret prisons overseas. Whether or not to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida is not such an issue.

The states in question moved up their primaries because they wanted more prominence in the Presidential nomination process. The DNC stripped them of their delegates because that’s the only power it has in controlling when states hold their primaries. Barack Obama took his name off the ballot in Michigan to increase his chances of winning Iowa. Hillary Clinton signed on to the DNC threat to not seat Michigan and Florida before those primaries were moved up. Hillary Clinton later compared not seating the Florida delegation to the election crisis in Zimbabwe.

My point is that throughout this process, all of the people involved did what best suited their political interests at the time. It’s unsurprising, given their profession. Not only do I hate to see voters falling for these arguments, but I hate to admit that I made this mistake myself a few months ago. There is no moral issue here, no election being stolen, no real argument in favor of justice and fairness, just two camps trying to work the process to get the nomination.

Throughout the rest of this crazy election year, we’re going to see plenty more arguments from politicians that try to get us emotional about political issues so that we see them as moral issues. I’m going to try not to fall for it (again), and I hope other people don’t as well. Once the general election starts in earnest, there will be plenty of issues of principle to argue about. The country will be better off if we stick to those.

Would you want to work for this guy?

May 30, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Here’s a quote:

I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. … You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions.

It’s from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with John McCain. Would you want to work for this guy? The question was, “What do you think motivates Iran?”

Upton Sinclair reviews Scott McLellan’s memoirs

May 28, 2008 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Here’s Upton Sinclair on Scott McLellan’s new memoir:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Apparently McClellan came to understand many things once he was no longer on the White House payroll.

How the media really works

May 28, 2008 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Politico editor in chief John Harris wrote a sort of meta-piece on the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s invocation of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as an example of a Democratic primary that was still going in June. If you really read the piece, you’ll find it’s a sort of shameful confession of the fundamental sleaziness of the political media. His main point is, “Yes, we suck, and we’re surprised to find that the more established outlets suck just as badly as we do.”

Here’s how he puts it:

As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news — sometimes big news, sometimes small — that drives that day’s conversation.

We are unapologetic in our premium on high velocity. In this focus on links and traffic we are not different from nearly all news sites these days, not just new publications but established ones like The New York Times.

Here’s what John Harris said in January, 2007 when Politico launched:

We won’t usually be chasing the story of the day. We’ll put our emphasis on the “backstories” — those that illuminate the personalities, relationships, clashes, ideas and political strategies playing out in the shadows of official Washington.

Guess the race to the bottom lasts about 18 months.

Hillary and the Kübler-Ross model

May 23, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

With the news this morning that Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton supporters are openly pushing for Barack Obama to choose Hillary as his running mate, it has become apparent that the Clinton camp is going through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model of coping with death or tragedy.

Stage one is denial. I think we’ve all seen that in the fact that Hillary keeps loaning her failed campaign millions of dollars even though Obama’s delegate lead is insurmountable and the superdelegates keep shifting away from her.

Stage two is anger. We’ve seen Clinton’s anger on display for the past couple of weeks as she’s blamed the media and sexism for her failed campaign, and she’s tried to push the decertification of the Florida and Michigan primaries as some kind of civil rights issue.

It’s apparent that we’re now in stage three — bargaining. The Clinton camp are trying to bargain with the Obama campaign to get her name onto the ticket.

Personally, I’m ready for depression and then acceptance to kick in.

Priming the pump

May 12, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wonders if there’s something a little wrong with becoming President, using the fame attendant with having been President to build a massive fortune, and then spending that fortune to attempt to get your wife elected President.

He also brings up the point that accepting fees for speaking and then loaning that money to a political campaign seems to exploit the campaign finance laws in a pretty obvious way. If I’m a billionaire, I can donate a maximum of $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or I can hire her husband to speak at a corporate meeting for as much as I like, and he can then loan that money to her campaign with no expectation of repayment. That doesn’t sound right to me.

Why people oppose peak oil on philosophical grounds

May 12, 2008 / Rafe / 7 Comments

Andrew Leonard posts an explanation of why many conservatives hate the the concept of peak oil (and the idea that human activity is causing climate change):

Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter — as a result of our own activities — threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.

Given that many on the left also see peak oil and climate change as cultural battlefields, as weapons with which to assault enemies whose values they politically and aesthetically oppose (see James Kunstler), it’s no wonder that some conservatives are fighting back like caged rats, or that they want to blame speculators for oil prices, or biased scientists for climate change.

It really is a shame that these issues are subject to such strong partisanship. They’re problems that are going to require cooperation to address.

Why I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton

May 6, 2008 / Rafe / 17 Comments

Today I actually get to vote in the Democratic primary. I’ll be voting for Barack Obama.

Let me explain briefly why I’m for Barack. Aside from the fact that his ideas for what we need to do as a country are roughly compatible with my own, it is his philosophy of how to govern that appeals to me. I’ve talked before about the Overton window. The idea is that at any given time, only a certain range of policy options are acceptable to the public. For example, before 9/11, invading Iraq was outside the realm of possibility. After 9/11, the Overton window moved and invading Iraq became acceptable.

A politician has two options. They can restrict their policy proposals to those that are within the Overton window, or they can try to move or expand that window to include the policies they favor. Barack Obama seems committed to communicating directly with the American people to move the Overton window to encompass more progressive values. If he is elected and succeeds in that task, he will change the political landscape in America for a generation. That, in a nutshell, is why I’m voting for him.

Now let me explain why I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton. To be blunt, I feel like that she has run her campaign in such a way as to be unworthy of the Democratic nomination. As the campaign has gone on and on, she has tailored her message further and further to appeal to the basest motives of Americans, and to cash in on sentiments that any decent person should seek to rise above.

In the beginning of her campaign, she ran on a platform of competence and progressive values. When that failed her and she fell behind, she focused more and more on coddling and encouraging the most regressive elements in the Democratic party. To be blunt, there are a lot of people in America who are disinclined to vote for a black man. Hillary Clinton does not encourage them in their bigotry, but of late she has been careful to tailor her message to more strongly appeal to the sorts of people who are already motivated by bigotry.

Last weekend’s display of embarrassing and hypocritical anti-intellectualism was a low moment for her, but was also par for the course for the manner in which her campaign has been run since Obama became the frontrunner. A victory for Hillary Clinton would be a victory for shameless pandering and for all that is small within us. We can do better.

Why food is becoming more expensive

May 3, 2008 / Rafe / 7 Comments

Tyler Cowen links to a comment on the FT Economists’ Forum by author Paul Collier on rising food prices and the political problems that prevent us from addressing them effectively. Collier’s argument is that we’re failing largely due to resistance to industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops.

First, here’s why food is getting more expensive:

Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor.

The distastefulness of industrial agriculture is taking its toll:

We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. Indeed, during the present phase of high prices the FAO is worried that African peasants are likely to reduce their production because they cannot finance the increased cost of fertilizer inputs.

And here’s why people need to get over their resistance to genetically modified crops:

But the true European equivalent of America’s folly with bio-fuels is the ban on GM. Europe’s distinctive and deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated by the agricultural lobby into yet another form of protectionism. The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification.

One of the reasons this piece really hit home for me is that I feel like I’m often on the wrong side of this argument. Generally I feel like food quality has been lost in the rise of industrial agriculture. I think this is probably more true in terms of meat and dairy than in terms of staple grains like rice, wheat, and soy. Given my choice, I’d prefer to buy food from these guys or these guys rather than buying the industrial products from the grocery store, but large scale farming is what enables us to feed 6 billion people on this planet, and that number is going up.

There are plenty of problems with large scale farming, in terms of quality of food, threats to the environment, badly implemented government subsidies, and so on. At the same time, it’s the only way to feed everyone cheaply and efficiently. More activism should be focused on improving the practices of large scale agriculture rather than trying to eliminate it.

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