One commenter makes a point that renders the Hillary possibility moot. “Of course, the big problem will be to convince Dick Cheney to resign from the post.” The interesting thing is that Cheney might be quite right not to resign. [click to continue…]

Happy no-longer-new year, everyone. Well, the final weeks of 2007 were pretty much like the whole of 2007 in my house: just before finals week, the sewage line in the basement backed up for the third time in four months, and as they say, the third time was the charm. This one left a good two inches of water in select basement areas, where “select basement areas” means “the corners in which Michael keeps his hockey equipment and his drums.” It’s been great fun cleaning everything and ripping up carpet and throwing out stuff and refurnishing part of the basement, but through it all, I know that the house has said to me and me alone, in an intimate and personal kinda way, “GET. OUT.” Of course, that was before the sheet of ice slid off the roof and knocked out our satellite dish thing. The people from the satellite station promised to send out a satellite dish repair person ASAP, which means in a week or so, because we live in the deep uncharted interior of the continent.

So good riddance to 2007. I hope it never comes back around these parts.

But that’s not why I’m here!

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Like so many others, I couldn’t be happier at Obama’s victory. Here’s hoping for more.

Obviously this is flagrantly, shamelessly hypothetical: would Obama/Clinton ’08 be a strong ticket?

One thing seems to me clear: Clinton would make an excellent VP, if she were willing to take the job, if Obama would have her. She would bring a lot of competence, knowledge, connections and machinery to the table. I tend to think she might be better at getting things done, as President, whereas Obama is better prepared to do the right things. Put them together, Obama’s name first. That might be as close to the best of both goods as I could hope to extract from this field.

Would she be an asset as a candidate? I think it would be a mixed bag, but ultimately positive. The obvious negative thought: if Obama is the candidate, you need a white man in the VP slot, preferably a Southerner. (Sorry, I didn’t make the wretched world. Not that I would mind Edwards as VP, not at all. I’d love it, if it came to that. But maybe Clinton would actually be better.) What are some of the positives? Well, first, I think a lot of people might agree with me that she would just plain be good at the job. That’s something. Second, I think you might be able to salvage Hillary’s charisma positives while minimizing her substantial negatives. The Republicans can’t do the full-bore Clinton-hate, if she’s just the VP. That would look silly, beside the point, an implicit admission of inability to attack Obama himself. By now she is so obviously Presidential, so experienced, no one could seriously argue that she would make a bad VP, per se. She says she knows how to fight the slime machine. I don’t doubt it. Obama would obviously be picking someone who can get things done. And yet the positives don’t melt away with the negatives: there would be considerable ‘that’s the least she deserves after all this crap’ sympathy. Not to mention women happy to vote for a ticket with a woman on it. Symbolism matters, and the first woman in this post is going to be a big deal. Not that these considerations would be decisive, but I think they would at least balance the anti-Clinton negatives, adding to the happy glow – the most you can hope for from a VP, election-wise (as opposed to doing-the-job-wise).

Quite apart from it still being early days, I don’t know what the odds are of Obama or Clinton being willing to bury the hatchet. My sense is that the history of the VP slot is one of surprisingly large and vicious-looking, yet successfully buried hatchets. Also, she’s still young. Who thinks Hillary doesn’t want to be President so badly that she’d be willing to suffer the relatively small humiliation of having to wait 8 years for an improved, VP-burnished shot at it? I think she’d wait, if she had to.

What do you think?

Ever since I read Stewart Brand’s _How Buildings Learn_ I’ve been a sucker for then-and-now pictures of cities and buildings. Via “The Online Photographer”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html , I stumbled on a “slideshow”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/paris_changing/ of work by Christopher Rauschenberg at The Morning News consisting of Rauschenberg’s captures of Paris scenes taken by Atget. (I’m also a big Atget fan – so this was doubly great.) There’s also a “link”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/new_york_changing/ to an earlier then-and-now series at TMN of New York.

A sort of follow-up to my last post, which began from the assumption that Huckabee had zero chance of winning the nomination. But what if he does? NB that I’m wearing my Irresponsible Speculator hat, not my Professional Political Scientist one in saying this; I’m not the kind of political scientist who knows this stuff at all well in the first place, and I haven’t gone to the trouble of going through the relevant data and articles so as to partially educate myself. But if I were to argue against those who say that Huckabee just can’t win the Republican nomination, my case for the defence would go something like this.

(1) Part 1 of the case against Huckabee winning is that he’s self evidently clueless about international politics, and has bizarre ideas about domestic politics. But does this _really_ hurt him with a Republican base which has been primed for decades to believe that book-larning and expertise are the tools of Evil Coastal Elites. Attacks on his lack of _savoir-faire_ seem to roll off his back, or perhaps even to make his supporters more enthusiastic. Case in point: his ‘negative advertising without negative advertising’ press conference, which was widely portrayed by media elites as having cooked his goose, but which doesn’t seem to have hurt him one bit.

(2) Part 2 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have any sort of real organization. His decisive win in Iowa demonstrates that he doesn’t need one, at least in states that have a strong evangelical movement. He can rely on the pastors getting out the vote for him. This is one that I’m pretty convinced of – he’s demonstrated that much of the conventional wisdom on the need for organization was wrong. Think of this as the evangelical’s revenge on mainstream Republicans. Much of Karl Rove’s success in 2004 depended on using below-the-radar forms of organization in churches etc to get the vote out. This has created an infrastructure that Huckabee seems to be taking over in the absence of any other real evangelical candidate.

(3) Part 3 of the case against is that Huckabee has little appeal beyond the evangelical movement, and that on its own can’t swing it. This seems true on the basis of Iowa – more than 80% of Huckabee voters in entrance polls were self-professed evangelicals. But while this is the strongest element of the case against Huckabee, it may not be determinative. First, if turnout for primary-type events continues to be depressed, it’s highly plausible that evangelicals (who have their candidate and their cause) are going to be more likely to turn up than other Republican voters, giving Huckabee an advantage in states where the evangelicals can plausibly swing it. Second, it doesn’t look as though Romney, McCain or Giuliani are going to pull out any time soon, splitting the non-evangelical vote three ways (or four, if Thompson stays in too) for a while. Third, as noted in an update to my previous post, “Phil Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2007/12/southernization-of-gop.html argues that Huckabee has an in-built edge because the Republican convention awards lots of bonus delegates to states that support Republican candidates, meaning that the South (with its evangelicals) has disproportionate clout. This seems an _extremely_ stupid policy for a party that wants to expand its appeal, but there you go.

(4) Part 4 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have much money to advertise on TV. But he may be able to raise it in short order (again, evangelicals have excellent fundraising networks), and furthermore, he may not _need_ TV advertising in the primaries as much as conventional candidates. His core voters (a) aren’t likely to change their minds about supporting him easily, and (b) are likely to turn out regardless of people saying mean things about him on the TV.

This is all, as noted above, irresponsible speculation. It may well be that the numbers make it impossible for a candidate whose main base of support is evangelicals to win the primaries. But I haven’t seen any study so far that really demonstrates this (I’d like to see one if it exists). Obviously, feel free to raise objections to any and all of the above claims in comments, or raise new issues as appropriate.

I have a minor annual tradition (as in, I did it once) of beginning the year with a short list of arguments that I am no longer going to have. As I said when I produced the first such list, while not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views

“Are no longer up for argument, pending absolutely spectacular new evidence. I’ve had a number of arguments on all of these points over the last year; I’ve heard all sides, and I’ve made up my mind. If anyone has an argument which they genuinely believe to be new, go ahead, but don’t expect much. Please note also that I am no longer interested in methodological debates over the merits of statistical studies which purport to prove the matter one way or another on any of these propositions.”

It’s basically a way of clearing the decks of old pointless arguments, leaving room for new pointless and bitter arguments (I hope to post next week a short list of things that I plan to argue about a heck of a lot more, being a list of tacit assumptions made by other people that I regard as highly questionable). If you want to have a last go on any of the short list below, now’s the time, but otherwise it is books closed, I’m afraid; I have made a reasonable donation to the Grice United Fund which ought to cover any genuinely deserving intellectual charity cases. So here’s the list – it’s actually shorter than previous years.
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“David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04elect.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin interprets Mike Huckabee’s win last night as the harbinger of a populist sea-change in the Republican party.

Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong. … Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. … First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. … He’s funny, campy … and he’s not at war with modern culture. … Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. … he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed. … Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. … Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition. … A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth … A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists … A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year … Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.

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I haven’t posted one of these in a while. The twist: this one has a worthy cause attached to it.

Free Rice

Test your vocabulary skills and donate rice at the same time.

It’s interesting to note which countries have already fulfilled their pledge in international aid to address world hunger, and which countries haven’t taken any concrete steps. Can you guess?

When last September “Ronald Plasterk”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/index.html, the Dutch minister of Education, Culture and Science, who also holds emancipation in his portfolio, “released his Policy Paper on Emancipation”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/nieuws/35434/Meer-kansen-voor-vrouwen.html, he was criticized for not mentioning men at all. Basically his view is that women should be encouraged to perform more paid work so that they can be ‘financially independent’, and the government should provide the conditions for making this possible, for example by expanding the supply of formal child care facilities. I agree with the critics that what is missing is a vision of what fathers need to be offered, both as a matter of justice for fathers, but also as a precondition for women’s emancipation. So I would like to suggest to Mr. Plasterk, as a first and minimal step towards the inclusion of men in his emancipation policies, that he introduces the right for fathers of a minimum of 2 weeks of fully paid birthleave (and, of course, also for co-mothers in the case of lesbian parents).
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Speaking of G.A. Cohen, “Philosophy Bites” has a brief interview (less than 11 minutes) with him that serves as a nice introduction to his thought.

Since the U.S. Presidential primaries are about to start, it would be nice to be able to get a read on what the betting markets are saying in order to make some retrospective assessments of how well they predicted the result. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for some of you, there’s no such thing as what the markets are uniquely saying. Indeed, there are some arbitrage possibilities (if you have access to each of the markets) the size of which you might find hard to believe.
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Jonah Goldberg’s forthcoming Liberal Fascism. Ahem. [click to continue…]

Time for your New Year’s resolutions.

All best wishes to our readers for 2008. And may you all get things off to a better start than these guys.

bq. CHAPARRAL, N.M. (AP) — Getting a tattoo can be a painful proposition, but usually it’s just the needle you have to worry about. Two men trying to trace a loaded .357-caliber Magnum as a pattern for a tattoo accidentally shot themselves, the Otero County Sheriff’s Department said Monday. Robert Glasser and Joey Acosta, both 22, were treated at a hospital in El Paso, Texas, after the shooting Thursday evening in nearby Chaparral. Authorities said Glasser was struck in the hand when the gun accidentally went off, and Acosta was hit in the left arm. Their injuries were not life-threatening, authorities said.