Obsidian Wings

Ambinder on VPs

by publius

Marc Ambinder takes a look at the alleged “short list” of Democratic VPs — Bayh, Biden, Kaine, and Sebelius. I don’t really agree with his analysis though. In fact, I think he gets it precisely backwards.

First, Ambinder — correctly — notes that some VP selections are “campaign” helpers, while others are “governing” helpers. Cheney falls into the latter category, while Edwards falls into the former. (The ideal candidate does both).

But in applying these categories to the potential candidates, Ambinder gets it backwards. He calls Kaine and Sebelius — two people with as much DC experience as me — “governing choices.” Biden, by contrast, is a “campaigning” choice. He writes:

Sebelius and Kaine are both governing choices, not campaign choices. . . . But they are solid; they are centrist-in-style; they are Washington outsiders; they know how to balance budgets and deal with Republicans. As an historical analogy, think Clinton's choice of Gore.

. . .

Biden is flashy and might upstage Obama, but he'd be the best sheer campaigner and his selection would bring a jolt of enthusiasm to the Democratic ticket[.]

Really? I would actually say just the opposite. Kaine and Sebelius are campaign choices that provide little governing help. They’re Red State pragmatic governors and the media would love the narrative. Biden, by contrast, would be an excellent governing choice — maybe the best. But I don’t think he’s going to set fire to the campaign trail. I mean, I love the guy, but he won’t generate the same attention Kaine and Sebelius will.

Also, Al Gore was not a Washington outsider.

The Audacity of Openness

by publius

Some very good news on the net neutrality front — the FCC is all but certain to punish Comcast later this week for blocking BitTorrent traffic. This is a big deal — largely because it strengthens the political and legal foundation for full-blown net neutrality in the future (especially with a Democratic FCC).

Anticipating the loss, Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell took to the Post’s op-ed page to criticize the imminent ruling. He’s not trying to affect this week’s decision (that’s hopeless). Instead, he’s looking ahead to the next battle.

His op-ed makes several arguments — some reasonable, others misleading. But I want to address one argument in particular — namely, the idea that the Internet succeeded because the government left it alone. He’s wrong about that — and it’s important to understand precisely why because it really strikes at the heart of the larger policy and philosophical questions underlying the more narrow net neutrality debate.

McDowell writes:

Our Internet economy is the strongest in the world. It got that way not by government fiat but because interested parties worked together toward a common goal. As a worldwide network of networks, the Internet is the ultimate "wiki" environment -- one that we all share, build, pay for and shape. Millions endeavor each day to keep it open and free. Since its early days as a government creation, it has migrated away from government regulation.

Actually, the Internet is successful because the government regulated the bejesus out of it. That doesn’t mean regulation is awesome — it just means that the government got this particular regulatory scheme right.

Our MoDo Problem

by publius

I don't read Maureen Dowd much for a variety of health and digestive tract-related reasons. But Amanda Marcotte articulates the problem with Dowd as succinctly as anyone I've read:

[Today's Dowd op-ed is] a classic example of her worst impulse to think that she’s speaking for the common man by assuming that the common man is 100% douchebag. This is empathy, you know. Her low opinion of the great unwashed flyover masses really shines in this quote[.]

Captures it pretty nicely, no? You begin with a bitter contempt for people, and then spend your days complaining about what your imaginary cretins think about, say, arugula.

Who Put Monica Goodling in Charge? And Why?

by Eric Martin

Because Republicans take terrorism seriously:

In today’s Justice Department report on Monica Goodling’s and other DOJ officials’ politicization of the department, the investigators reveal that Goodling’s political considerations were “particularly damaging to the Department because it resulted in high-quality candidates for important details being rejected in favor of less-qualified candidates.”

In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire “one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country” because his wife was a Democrat...

Click through the link and see who got the job.  If only Monica Goodling were the only example of ideological purity/cronyism being placed ahead of the national interest by Republican leaders in the White House, Congress and elsewhere. 

The Republican Party under the stewardship of people like George Bush and Karl Rove has lost its ability to effectively govern.  Though it started many years earlier with Gingrich and his predecessors.  Sadly, McCain has taken the baton from Karl Rove and is lowering the political discourse in ways that can astound even after the last 7+ years of perfidy.  What McCain is doing is simply beyond the pale.  Or at least, it used to be. 

Criminally Minded?

by Eric Martin

An article appeared in the New York Times over the weekend which contained some interesting analysis of the Sadrist trend's recent fortunes. The lede:

The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq.

It is a remarkable change from years past, when the militia, led by the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, controlled a broad swath of Baghdad, including local governments and police forces. But its use of extortion and violence began alienating much of the Shiite population to the point that many quietly supported American military sweeps against the group.

To some extent, the author is correct to note that the Sadrist trend has been weakened.  Considering the size and scope of the anti-Sadrist operations that have been undertaken over the past several months, it would be remarkable if the trend hadn't suffered serious setbacks.  As I argued recently, while disagreeing with Andrew Lebovich's contention that the anti-Sadrist actions had actually made the movement stronger:

A Tale of Two Press Biases

by publius

There’s been a lot of whining about the press coverage this election. Both sides are complaining that the press is being unfairly soft on the other candidate. The McCain campaign complains about the press almost daily, while liberal pro-Obama blogs do the same from the other direction (Obama himself has been quieter on this front).

Sure, some of this complaining is simply working the refs, but I also think it’s a sincerely-held grievance on both sides. So they can’t both be right, can they? If both sides think the press is in the tank for other side, someone must be wrong, right? Not necessarily.

When people talk about press “bias,” they’re really talking about two different things. There’s not some uniform bias (“incompetence” is a better word) — instead, the press has been bad in different and distinct ways with respect to the two candidates. I don’t think the incompetence has been perfectly equal — sorry David Broder. But both candidates have some legitimate gripes.

I think that McCain’s most legitimate gripe is just that the press seems to cover Obama more. It’s not so much they praise him — they just cover him a lot. It’s understandable — Obama’s the new guy and he’s an intriguing story. That said, Obama's also better at generating “free media” attention through compelling events, powerful images, etc. Commanding press attention is, after all, one of the skill sets presidential candidates need.

The press has been too soft on McCain, by contrast, in a completely different way — specifically, they don’t hold him accountable for his gaffes and policy positions. It’s not that they never criticize him. To be more precise, they don’t hold him accountable to the level that his gaffes deserve. McCain operates in a consequence-free bubble that allows him to say whatever he wants — e.g., denying he said “timetable,” calling Social Security payments a “disgrace”, and so on.

Obama, by contrast, has to walk on eggshells 24-7. It’s a completely different standard. For instance, a few weeks ago, the press went into full mob mentality over “refine” even though it merely affirmed the positions he’s had for virtually his entire campaign.

If Obama had made just the slightest little misstatement on the overseas trip, it would have dominated coverage. Hell, every description of his trip was premised with “but he’ll have to be careful not to screw up.” They were ready to pounce (in part because of guilt for covering, I suppose), but Obama didn’t oblige.

McCain, by contrast, attacks timetables for years and then endorses one and then denies he ever used the word. It’s quite literally a universe away from “refine.”

Plus, McCain’s campaign has been relentlessly negative. All he does every day is attack, attack, attack — and in increasingly vitriolic and Grandpa Simpson-esque terms. But with the exception of Joe Klein, no one in the press seems all that bothered. In short, I think the press has been more than generous to McCain considering his actions and behavior on the campaign trail.

Looking ahead, my fear is that the press feels like it needs to do penance for the Obama European coverage. Thus, expect Obama’s next gaffe or misstatement to be amplified about 100 times more than it should.

UPDATE: I should have linked to this LAT piece providing some empirical support for these claims. (Thanks to commenters).

Who Speaks For John McCain?

by hilzoy

Last week, I wrote about a Tax Policy Center report that found that there's a big difference between the tax policies John McCain says he'd enact in his speeches and the ones his campaign describes. A $2.8 trillion difference. To put that in perspective, the extra $2.8 trillion McCain promises to cut in his speeches is equal to the entire cost of Barack Obama's tax policies as stated by his campaign, using the least favorable scoring method; it's several hundred million greater than the entire cost of the proposals Obama describes in his speeches.

Slate asked the campaign about this. Here's the response:

"Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official."

Ah. I see. A citizen at a town hall meeting asks John McCain a question, expecting to get, well, an answer. John McCain gives one. The citizen, naively, believes that John McCain knows what his own policies are, and that when he says something, it's "official". According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, that citizen is wrong. You can't find out what McCain's policies are by asking him and believing his answer. You have to -- well, do what? Check the website? Become one of those experts to whom the actual, official details of McCain's tax policies are disclosed?

That's some straight talk, my friend.

Some enterprising reporter should ask McCain about this. Offhand, I can think of only three real explanations:

(a) The normal case: Holtz-Eakin has said that he, not John McCain, gets to say what John McCain's economic policy is, without any backstory. He's just saying: "don't listen to him; listen to me." In that case, I would expect Holtz-Eakin to be fired.

(b) McCain and Holtz-Eakin are making a calculated attempt to deceive. McCain says one thing in public, Holtz-Eakin quietly backtracks to experts; as a result, Holtz-Eakin gets to protest when anyone tries to cost out what McCain actually says, or to point out that it blows a hole in the federal budget. In this case, reporters need to call this attempted bluff.

(c) What Holtz-Eakin says is basically accurate. McCain doesn't know enough about economic policy. He has therefore outsourced his economic plan to people like Holtz-Eakin. So far, so normal. But in a normal campaign, the economic policy people go over various ideas with the candidate, the candidate chooses among them, and then that is the "official" position, which both the candidate and the campaign know about and try to defend. In this case, the economic policy advisors have gone over different ideas, McCain (let's imagine) wants to do the various things he's talked about on the campaign trail, his advisors say: no, that would blow a huge gaping hole in the budget, McCain agrees to a less costly policy, but that fact somehow doesn't take hold in his mind, and when he goes back on the stump, he reverts to his old ideas.

This scenario raises serious questions about McCain's fitness to be President. A President needs to be able to make commitments and stick to them. He needs to know what he has previously agreed to. If McCain cannot do that, that's very serious.

Personally, I suspect that (c) is most accurate. But whatever the truth is, we need to find out who actually speaks for John McCain.

A few more wonky details about Holtz-Eakins' response to the report below the fold.

I Want My Sirius-XM

by publius

I was happy to see that, after approximately 50 years of regulatory review, the Sirius-XM merger finally got approved. It was a little absurd, frankly, that it was even controversial. Just call me Grover Norquist on this one.

The strongest objection to the merger — raised primarily by broadcasters (more on them in a sec) — was that it would create a monopoly. But what makes a monopoly is not so much the existence of a single provider, but whether that provider has the ability to screw you over in certain ways (e.g., raise prices, suppress output). Here, the new company won’t have that ability. And I don’t think it’s a close question.

Unlike true monopolies, the new Sirius-XM will face substantial competition. Take cars for instance, which is satellite radio’s strongest area. When you get into your car, you have several music choices. You can listen — for free — to terrestrial radio, eagerly anticipating the next Katy Perry song. Or, you can play your own music (CDs, iPods). Or, you can purchase satellite radio. If satellite radio suddenly, say, doubled its price, then the other options would look comparatively better.

That’s why the broadcasters’ argument was so misguided. They claimed the new Sirius-XM would face no competition, but that’s obviously false. In fact, the whole reason broadcasters cared in the first place was because they compete directly with Sirius-XM. If terrestrial radio weren’t so god-awful, there wouldn’t be a need for satellite radio.

Plus, the demand for music is not exactly inelastic. If the cost of music suddenly quadrupled, I’d survive without it (I already have Thriller anyway). If, by contrast, the cost of water or electricity or broadband quadrupled — well, that’s a different story. The demand is much less elastic — you gotta have that stuff regardless of how much it costs. That’s why the competitive concerns raised in the broadband access context don’t have much relevance here.

But to step back, the real reason I’m so annoyed is because broadcasters were involved. It’s not too much to say that broadcasters — particularly, NAB, their trade association — are a force for evil in the communications world. Their primary skill is blocking — or delaying for decades — the emergence of cool new technologies (see also, The History of Cable Television).

For instance, they’ve been sitting on top of beachfront spectrum for decades, blocking attempts to do anything more productive with it. Maddeningly, a lot of them don’t even use it. It’s criminal how much spectrum sits idle on a daily basis, particularly in rural areas.

Even though they have to give some spectrum back after the digital transition, they’ll still have tons of awesome spectrum. And that’s particularly absurd since only a sliver of the population still relies on over-the-air broadcasts.

It’s really a question people should ask more often — why do we allow broadcasters to have any spectrum? Why not just take it away from them? If they only care about keeping it for must-carry rights, then grant them the frickin’ must-carry rights and boot them from the spectrum.

But anyway, merger good. NAB, bad.

Luck-Makin'

by publius

Eugene Robinson made a good point yesterday about this idea that Obama’s been “lucky” lately, with events shifting his way on Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Obama, Robinson points out, made his own luck. He made the right choices on the big issues, and events are now vindicating him.

If I could extrapolate a bit, I think the whole “you make your own luck” observation is a good way of thinking about third parties too. Take Bob Barr for instance (I saw clips of him today at the House impotence hearing or whatever it was). In some sense, you could argue that McCain is extremely unlucky that Barr decided to run.

But a better explanation is that Barr’s candidacy is a direct consequence of choices the GOP has made over the past eight years. The GOP has never really been all that pro-libertarian, but they’ve really rubbed libertarians’ noses in it lately. Torture, spying, Patriot Act – the GOP has been ostentatiously anti-libertarian in the Dubya years.

The inevitable result? Radicalized libertarians.

Ron Paul is only the symptom of a much larger discontent bubbling beneath. And Barr is very much an extension of this trend. He won’t get many votes, but he’ll get some. And McCain needs every vote he can get this year.

This same “luck” observation applies to the Nader 2000 vote as well. Yes, on some level, Gore was extremely unlucky that Nader ran and got all those votes. Remember, though, that Clinton-Gore spent a big chunk of 1994-2000 running away from liberals. In fact, Clinton’s post-94 comeback was explicitly premised on disavowing progressive positions. The inevitable result was Nader.

Democrats today, by contrast, are a lot more willing to embrace unapologetic progressivism, and Nader will therefore be less of a factor. One hopes.

Gary Farber Productions Presents: Open Thread

Directed by Eric Martin

Something to play with for the weekend. 

Me?  I'll be assaulting the liver relentlessly.  The liver is bad and deserves to be punished.  It had it coming.