Republicans Should Take Note

Not that I've been following the news closely, but I don't think this story from the Center for Responsive Politics is getting as much play as it should.

Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain's haul.

Looks like it's not just liberals who support an early exit from Iraq.

The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare

A great irony may be unfolding before our eyes. In July, Democratic nominee Barack Obama raised $51 million dollars, while Republican nominee John McCain struggled to raise just over half that ($27 million). Obama’s total of $390 million is more than twice McCain’s $153 million. And yet Obama’s lead over McCain has narrowed.

Democrats have long complained about the power of money in campaigns, and bitterly resented that the Republicans could nearly always outspend them by tapping the wealthy business class. So now they face the stunning possibility that they could outspend the Republicans by a wide margin, yet still lose the election.

That would be ironic indeed, and just how devastating would it be to the Democratic Party?

Hillary's Snake-Oil Economics

Whether or not Clinton would have gotten much of the economist vote anyway is debatable, but she's certainly thrown it away now.

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

Of course economists are a pretty small demographic, and you can always pick up votes in the U.S. by being anti-intellectual (cough, George Bush, cough).

But it's not the pandering that bothers me. It's the pretense that economists would make people's lives worse, and that ignoring economic advice is the best way to help people. Because it's material well-being that she's talking about, and that's what economics is about--understanding how we can enhance humanity's material well-being. To wholly ignore economists when that is the question is no different than to ignore physicians when the subject is one's physical health, and to "put your lot in" with witchdoctors, herbalists, and faith-healers.

It's snake-oil economics, and it makes me angry because she will continue to blithely assume she cares more about people than economists do, while she actually harms them more than any reputable economist ever would.

She should take the time to look at Adam Smith, who showed us that free markets are for the benefit of consumers, not businessmen, or Alfred Marshall, who clearly saw that studying economics was the path to improving people's lives. As Todd Buchholz quotes Marshall in New Ideas from Dead Economists:

From metaphysics I went to Ethics, and thought that the justification of the existing condition of society was not easy. A friend, who had read a great deal of what are now called the Moral Sciences, constantly said, "Ah! If you understood Political Economy you would not say that. So I read Mill's Political Economy and got much excited about it. [Then] I visited the poorest quarters of several cities and walked through one street after another, looking at the faces of the poorest people. Next, I resolved to make as thorough a study as I could of Political Economy."

I began studying political science because I thought that was the science of human well-being. Later I realized it is actually the science of human conflict, and important and interesting in it's own right, but only when it is securely intertwined with economics--when it is political economy--can it honestly be about the well-being of humanity.

If only Hillary, or any of our presidential candidates, understood that.

Obama Appointed CEO of General Motors

OK, not really, but he seems to be convinced he's a better businessman than anyone in Detroit, as he criticizes them for the "mistake" of building SUVs instead of more fuel-efficient compact cars."

"I think it was a mistake for them not to plan earlier, and now we're seeing a huge growth in fuel-efficient cars that is benefiting the Japanese automakers and Detroit is getting pounded some more."

OK, except for two things:

1. The Big Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) haven't been able to hold onto market share in compact cars. Toyota, Honda and Nissan have consistently built cars that are less expensive and better quality. Although the Big Three's quality has dramatically improved, they haven't been able to price their cars competitively without losing money on each unit sold.
2. Every year for the past three decades, truck models (SUVs, pickups, minivans) have outsold car models in the U.S.

So you're an auto exec, you know high gas prices will be coming--sometime--but right now you can sell far more trucks than cars, and make a profit on each truck, while you lose money on most cars. What do you do?

Obviously Obama didn't say this to Detroit 10 years ago--he's so smart that he can see what's wrong now that it's actually happening.

Granted, a number of people have been saying for years that the Big Three need to get more competitive in fuel-efficient cars. But they're not the ones who have had to try to keep the company in business. Staying in business today takes priority over being in business 10 years from now, because the first is a prerequisite for the second.

And does anyone really think the Detroit automakers haven't looked ahead and known this was coming? Does anyone think they really needed Barack Obama to point it out to them? After all, they have a little more at stake than their critics do, so they just might have spent a little time thinking about it. Yes, once again they're behind their Japanese competition, but they have been investing in alternative fuel vehicles, hybrids, etc.

In a nutshell, they were in a tough spot. They could successfully compete in a market that they probably knew was somewhat limited in its duration, but could not (yet) succesfully compete in the market that will probably dominate in the future. They've made plenty of mistakes along the way, as any industry analyst can point out, but their options were never as simple as Obama seems to think.

Odd, isn't it, how people who've spent their whole life in politics, who've never had to meet the bottom line, who've never had to worry about containing costs, increasing efficiency, keeping up with a changing market, always feel qualified to tell us how things should be run?

Black Men vs. White Women--Round 147,384

The Detroit Free Press (aka, the Freep), has a front page article this morning on the split between white females and blacks in the Democratic Party. I was thinking about the same issue two days ago as I began work on a policy brief about the presidential election. In a nutshell, if Clinton gets the nomination, black Democrats might be angry because the black candidate got shoved out by a white person, and if Obama gets the nomination, white women Democrats might be angry because once again a women got shoved aside in favor of a man.

It's a real issue...maybe. Right now some folks on both sides are threatening to sit out the election if their favored candidate doesn't get it, which is pretty childish, and good evidence to support the Founding Fathers' distrust of the masses. The question is whether the threat is any more serious than the religious right's threat to sit out if the Republicans don't nominate a religious zealot. I suspect most of those Democrats will go to the polls anyway, the primary exceptions being those who don't normally vote anyway, but who got involved this year just because their favored candidate was representationally ideal for them.

But the complaining overlooks the really important point. Already crucial barriers have been broken. There have been only a couple of semi-serious women presidential candidates, Pat Schroeder for the Democrats, and Elizabeth Dole for the Republicans. The campaigns of each went exactly nowhere. There never has been a serious African-American candidate. The fact that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama quickly rose to the top of a field of mostly white men (with the partial exception of Bill Richardson, who is 1/2 Latino, although it's not clear most voters knew that), is itself an important statement. Especially notable is that neither did it by relying wholly on women (for Clinton) or whites (for Obama). It's been a huge breakthrough, although there are few, if any, obvious women and black candidates for the near future. Then again, who'd ever heard of Obama 5 years ago?

Romney: American Voters Are Surrendering in the War on Terror

Mitt Romney's a real piece of work. Here he is on Feb. 7, 2008, explaining why he's dropping out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." (AP)

Yes, if we citizens elect Clinton or Obama to the presidency, we've surrendered to the terrorists!

Let me put this as clearly as I can: Fuck you, Mitt. I not only prefer McCain to you, I prefer both Clinton and Obama to you, because not one of them has tried to hold me psychologically hostage by telling me a vote for their opponent is a vote for terrorists.

There are few things lower than accusing your political opponents of being the disloyal opposition. Samuel Johnson must have been thinking of the Mitt Romneys of his day when he said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Edwards Drops Out

With any luck, we've heard the last of John Edwards, who just dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. I've never liked him much, but I'm still surprised he managed to be a distant third behind a woman with a grating voice and a black man with no experience. We really have come a long way, because Edwards, a white guy, has barely any more experience than Obama (the black man, in case you didn't guess), and much less than the woman (you did guess, Clinton, right?)

Hopefully Edwards' plea for economic protectionism and regulation will die with his candidacy. He wants to take the U.S. back to the 1970s, when your only choice of cars (unless you were wealthy) was one over-priced badly-made American car or another, because of strict quotas on Japanese imports. When flying was a delightful experience, but only the well-off could afford to do it. When telecom regulation meant phone customers still rented their phones from Ma Bell.

I also dislike Edwards because he thinks the president's primary responsibility is for domestic policy. Read the second article of the U.S. Constitution carefully, and compare the presidency's domestic policy responsibilities (few, and all in concordance with Congress), and its foreign policy responsibilities. I'm not sure Edwards has read it. After less than 2 years in the Senate, he felt qualified to be the leader of the free world, and began his campaign for the presidency. Over the succeeding 4 years he spent so much time campaigning that he probably didn't gain any real experience even from being in the Senate. Is he ready to deal with North Korea, Iran, China and Russia?

If you doubt foreign policy is a president's real task, look at George W. Bush. He had one big issue in his first campaign, cutting taxes. He knew nothing about foreign policy and didn't want to focus on it (e.g., his cutting off of talks with N. Korea), but his presidency will be defined by the war in Iraq. Or look at Jimmy Carter: he wanted to save the environment, but got bogged down by the Iran hostage crisis. He also brokered the still-strong peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, but that just reinforces the point--a president will be defined by foreign affairs.

That's my criticism of Obama, as well. The difference is, I like Obama. I lived in Illinois when he won his Senate seat, and I remember thinking, "this is the kind of person the Democratic Party needs to reach church-going Americans again." I thought he might make a great presidential candidate in about 10 years--not 3! Depending on who the Republican nominee is, I could consider voting for Obama, but mostly to be on the right side of history, so to speak. I don't mean I would do it for affirmative action, but that I think Romney is no more qualified, and is in many ways more repugnant, so if I have to choose between two unqualified persons, any other criteria is good enough grounds to choose. But since I usually vote Libertarian, my only reason for departure from voting for a certain loser yet again would be to make the statement that it's ok to elect a non-white to the oval office.

I like Hillary far less than Obama, but am more supportive of her for President. Despite her failed national health-care fiasco--actually, because of it--she clearly learned a lot about being president in her 8 years as first lady, and in the Senate she has served on the Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She's smart enough to have learned a lot that a president needs to know. I would also vote for her over Romney, for much the same reasons I would vote for Obama.

But I still favor McCain, because I don't care about a president's stand on taxes, abortion, or campaign finance reform (McCain is the author of the First Amendment gutting McCain-Feingold law, for which I will never forgive him). A president's job is to deal with other countries, and I don't see any other candidate remotely as qualified for that task as John McCain.

I Hate the Media

I teach American Government. Every single term. I teach it live in front of living, breathing, (occasionally sleeping) students, and I teach it online. I teach it for two different colleges at the same time. I will teach 8 sections of American Government this calendar year alone. I know American Government.

The media knows shit.

I should be more specific: the blow-dried, primping, smug, self-satisfied, breathless, and cynical prima donnas on Tv don't even know shit. The ones on the radio, even on NPR, don't know shit, either.

There are a few people out there who know something, most prominently David Gergen. David Gergen worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, maybe not what you really want on your resume, but he sure as hell learned a lot.

I'm always pissed at the media during campaign season. It's not just that the focus almost wholly on the horserace instead of the issues, it's that they can't even do that well. How often do they fact check what candidates say? A handful of serious reporters do, but it takes time, and the primps on the network and cable news might miss the opportunity for a soundbite if they had to spend time looking up facts.

OK, their general idiocy is the ultimate cause of my disdain, but here's the proximate cause that pissed me off right now. Yesterday on NPR they were talking about McCain's win in Tuesday's primary, and all they could talk about was momentum, and who had won which states.

But here's a news flash: the parties don't count up the number of states won in order to determine their nominees, they count up the number of delegates won, and delegates are based on population, so Florida, for example, has more delegates than Iowa. But that's the easy part (and they even managed to miss that). Because each state sets their own election rules, some state parties give all their delegates to the winner of the primary (winner-take-all), and some divide them up depending on what proportion of the vote a candidate receives. My wife can vouch for the fact that I was yelling at the radio, begging them to tell me how Florida distributed the delegates, and how many delegates each candidate had received. But no, the didn't, and I have my doubts they were even aware of this issue.

OK, yes, I teach American Government, but I didn't know the answer. What I know is that with 50 different states, and frequent changes in state policies, keeping track of what each state is doing on each issue is more than a 1-person full-time job. But at least I know that's the situation, and know it's important. For the record, it appears that Florida usually does allocate delegates by congressional district (win the district, win its delegates), but in response to the Republican National Committee stripping it of half its delegates (again, punishment for moving the primary ahead), it switched to winner-take-all, and CNN.com keeps a running record of delegates won.

They also stated baldly that Hillary Clinton "didn't win any delegates" in Florida, despite winning, because the Democratic National Committee has stripped Florida of its delegates as punishment for moving its primary ahead. Maybe, but I'm always hesitant to predict the future. Imagine Clinton and Obama head to the convention with Obama just slightly ahead. You don't think Hillary and Bill will stage an all-out scorched earth battle to get those delegates, and the ones she won in Michigan, seated?

That's ok, though. All you really need to report politics is a degree in journalism and good hair, right? Right?

Stupid Newsies

I just read an opinion piece from an Indiana high school teacher in which he claims,

because of my own ignorance about national politics, I feel eminently qualified to offer some opinions."

Geez, no wonder my college students come out of high school knowing jack shit.

But the guy also said,

I know as much about national politics as I do global economics. Both subjects have their own gaggle of experts, and they don’t seem to know much, either.

Now this is pure stupidity, too, but I know where it's coming from. The fact is, there are experts in global economics, and they do know what they're talking about--this guy just doesn't know who they are. The same is true of experts in national politics. So who is he really referring to? I think it's the talking heads who dominate the political chat shows, most of whom are like high school students, not knowing Jack Shit.

For example, here's the repeated theme from the New Hampshire Primary--"Clinton, coming off a disappointing third-place finish in Iowa, rebounded to first place...", or "Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, overcoming a third-place finish in Iowa"

OK, for the newsie who's brain has been overheated by too much time in front of a blow dryer, let's clarify this.

1. John Edwards had 30%, Hillary Clinton had 29%. That's called a statistical dead-heat, or a virtual tie for second. A tie for second place ain't that devestating folks.
2. According to CNN, Obama won 16 delegates in Iowa, Edwards won 14, and Clinton won 15! It might seem counterintuitive that Clinton could get more delegates than Edwards, with less of the vote, but here's how it can work: Assume a state with 5 equal size precincts: Candidate A wins 3 precincts with 51% of the vote in each, while candidate B wins 2 precincts with 90% of the vote each. If you just total up all the votes from the state, B appears to have won, but because the delegates are selected from precincts, B has actually lost. In the end, it's not what percentage of the vote any candidate gets, but how many delegates, and on that scorecard, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards finished in a virtual tie for first.
3. There's no reason to think that New Hampshire voters take their cues from Iowa voters. To listen to the media tell it, everyone except Obama might as well have given up after Iowa. Like this already obsolete jewell from teh L.A. Times, "The results were a serious setback for Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton." Hell, why bother with the whole primary schedule? Let's just let that 10 or 20% of Iowans dedicated enough to participate in the caucus choose the parties' nominees.

So just because the talking heads chatter about national politics, and just because someone is introduced as the network's political analyst, that doesn't mean they're actually an expert--they just play one on TV.

Study Refutes Romney

Mitt Romney recently claimed that "Freedom needs religion," which I previously noted is logically dubious, at best. But a 2005 study in the Journal of Religion & Society makes a better refutation. Author Gregory S. Paul did a cross-national comparison, using measures of religiosity and social measures. To quote from his abstract:

Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.

I'm a semi-regular church-goer, neither devoutly religious nor devoutly anti-religious. I am fervently pro-analytical studies, however, and the data are pretty clear.

The full cite is:

Paul, Gregory S. 2005. "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies." Journal of Religion and Society, volume 7.

More Bad Religion in the Presidential Race

Two bad events in the past week: Romney's pathetic attempt to be Kennedyesque, and Huckabee's claim that God has caused his climb in the Republican presidential candidate race.

Let's take Huckabee first:

Huck claimed that his rise in the polls had "only one explanation," divine intervention. So apparently all of the following are true:

• Huckabee recognizes that without divine intervention he is incapable of convincing voters he's a good presidential prospect.
• God is overriding free will by directly changing the minds of voters.
• God personally likes Huck more than the other candidates.

The first one I'm tempted to agree with, and I think time will prove it true.

The second just reveals that he hasn't really thought about his claim. (Note: Huck's a Baptist, not a Lutheran, so free will as a theological issue really does matter.)

The third reveals his astounding arrogance. He's claiming the mantle of God's favor for himself! Therefore, a vote against him must be a vote against God. Don't get too near him, les the lightning strike you, too.

As for Romney, whose whole speech can be read here, he set a whole new standard in hypocritical pandering. While he was attempting to be Kennedyesque (referring, of course, to one of Kennedy's very few good moments), Romney got it all wrong. He tried very hard to argue that the details of his religion didn't matter, but then went out of his way to emphasize the one and only detail he thought conservative protestants would agree with him on, pointedly noting

"There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

He thereby implicitly admits that the details of his religious beliefs do matter. But not any of the other details!

My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance.

And he also made it clear that he thinks that being religious is in fact a requirement, unless we want to lose our freedom.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Other bloggers have noted the logical idiocy of his statement--clearly freedom does not require religion, or the states in the U.S. with lowest church attendance, like Oregon, would be less free than those with higher church attendance, like those in the South, when in fact you have a broader base of rights in Oregon than in, say, Mississippi (or for that matter, Utah). But more disturbing is the thrust of the claim--if you don't elect a religious person to the presidency, you will lose your freedom. Romney is imposing a religious test.

Kennedy, in contrast, said,

neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsent: "Governor, you are no Jack Kennedy."