Zero-dimensional chess

Obama can also loose the elections, do as if he won them and achieve absolutely nothing at all in a heroic crowd-pleasing way. Is that we should do? Because if it is, maybe he should just cancel the elections; sounds like the more honest thing to do.

(I do hope he wins the elections)

He does compromise on things which he doesn’t view as central.

Yes, but those things frequently are central to being liberal.

He made a bad call on rolling over re: state-secrets defenses, torture investigations, etc. The rationale that he didn’t want to antagonize the Right was nonsensical — they literally could not hate him more regardless. And I like to think I’m not the only liberal he’s alienated on the issues that did more than anything else to make me rabidly anti-Bush.

Shorter Anderson: if you can’t stand up against torture, what *can* you stand up against?

The public does not, in fact, love torture.
He came in promising a radically different approach to indefinite detention, and executive power more generally, than he has delivered. Read Charlie Savage’s series of pre-election articles on the different candidates’ self-proclaimed views.
I’m willing to accept that on most of the issues, he is and always was a split-the-different centrist, but he really made a big deal out of executive power issues. And no, it’s not enough to say, “well, sure, but no president is actually going to limit his own power.”

Zero-dimensional what?

inaction on unemployment etc.

And it’s especially disturbing that the NYT’s sources list deficit reduction among the areas that Obama is prepared to compromise with Republicans on.

The political dynamic here is ominous. The Republicans, for the foreseeable future, are going to be politically rewarded to the extent that Americans are damaged, and the normal constraint against bad behavior – traditional pro-Americanism – no longer seems to apply. It’s a negative feedback loop, and it’s not clear to me how to escape it.

Any bad thing you can imagine – double-dip recession, terrorist attack – plays politically well for the Republicans, and they know it.

I think that Obama’s political calculation is that if he fights it too directly, he’s politically screwed. That’s a debatable proposition, but it’s not obviously wrong. Given how bad things are in the US, Obama is remarkably popular. There’s a case to be made that (politically) he knows what he’s doing.

So yeah, there’s a strong case for despair.

There’s a case to be made that (politically) he knows what he’s doing.

In the sense that he’s willing to let the country go to hell to improve his chances of being re-elected, sure.

Anyone who thinks Obama will be primary-challenged from the left (or right) in 2012 is crazy. Institutional Democrats still remember how Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 kamikaze campaign against Carter went; and there is nobody outside the administration as popular as TK was then. If Hillary really wanted to sink his re-election she probably could, but why would she? And anyone to his left who ran against him (Kucinich? The likely-soon-to-be-unemployed Feingold?) would be denied union support, almost all the large party donors, minority groups, youth enthusiasm, etc.; find it hard to get any traction, and get squashed like a bug in the primaries. I think it’s much more probable the flushed-with-victory Republicans overplay their hand then Obama underplays his.

I don’t think it’s at all true that “the public loves torture”, and I note as evidence that in 2006 and 2008 the Democrats did well partly with a strong rhetorical push to knock that stuff off. I think it’s true that the media/pundit class loves torture and project their sickness onto the rest of us.

The public has no problem with the torture of what they see as the “bad guys”.

It would take about 6 minutes to explain to the public that NKVD/Chinese “brainwashing” techniques are the Worst Possible Way of getting useful intel. A few commercials where professional interrogators mock torturers would also be very effective.

But that would require some effort, which would require some conviction. What are Obama’s convictions? … Anyone? … Don’t all speak up at once….

The Right is a lot more radical than in 1994, and has better message discipline. Independents (few though they actually are) are more feckless than ever. Obama’s miscalculation of the appeal of post-partisanship meant that the legislation he’s gotten has been limp, and what he’s going to get in the next Congress will be basically nothing: Republicans are being rewarded very handsomely for obstructionism in 2010, and there’s no reason to think the reward won’t be even better in 2012. And his opponent in 2012 isn’t going to be the Senate majority leader, but someone who really is from outside who will believably claim that Washington is completely broken.

Obama’s only hope is that the Republicans go completely crazy, and try an impeachment over the birth certificate, or 20% cuts to non-defense, non-entitlements, or cutting SS to people over 50. If they can restrain the radical fringe — which is still something of an if — Obama the one-termer represents a historic failure of liberalism worse than Carter.

The reality is if the elections go well for Republicans, they will continue their Tea Party approach which probably means a pretty extreme candidate will emerge.

Obama will be the only somewhat moderate choice then. I doubt that Hillary Clinton will suddenly decide to run against an incumbent president. The real choice will be the usual one – stay home and hand the election to the extreme candidate or hold your nose and vote for the less evil choice (if that is how you view Obama).

I haven’t seen a lot of shift in Obama’s positions.

He ran on torturing terrorist “suspects”, assassinating US citizens abroad, and generally expanding illegitimate executive authority? I breathlessly await your documentation of this claim.

I doubt that Hillary Clinton will suddenly decide to run against an incumbent president

Why not? She’ll run as the only person who can win, thus saving the Democratic Presidency and Party.

If you just think of Clinton as Tim Robbins to Obama’s Peter Gallagher, it’s no problem envisaging this at all.

Don’t assume that the other side will go about things as mindlessly as they did in 1995.

They almost certainly will not “shut down the govt”. Far from even threatening such a thing, they will prevail by offering a means of resolving budget disputes without either side being able to threaten to shut down the govt.

All they have to do is divide spending into “core” vs “controversial”. They will offer as a plan the idea that, as the deadline for having completed the spending bills approaches with no resolutiuon in sight, both sides agree to pass spending on things that both sides agree is core and central, govt functions that both sides want to see continue. That will, they will claim, clear the field of any threat that either side could make to shut down the govt unless the other side gives in. What could be more fair or reasonable sounding?

Of course, what they would do if ours side accedes to this plan, would be to take the core funding and never even actually consider funding anything else. They will define “core” as everything they want funded (which will be most of the what’s in the budget already — these folks are radical in their means, not their ends), and “controversial” as everything they don’t want funded. Our side will have trouble competing at this game, because we will almost certainly not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and therefore won’t have an alternative, Senate, version of the core/controversial distinction on offer to contrast with the House version.

Our side would have no alternative other than capitulation vs shutting down the govt by refusing to play along with even the reasonable-sounding plan of separating out the core from the controversial budget items. Which side do you think would be blamed for a shut-down, if it occurs in this way?

Of course our side will attempt to use control of the presidency to conduct any shutdown in such a way as to deflect blame from us and onto them. But, given the composition of the federal judiciary after many cycles of packing with Federalist Society stooges, I wouldn’t count on Obama being given free rein by the courts to shift money around to his liking in a situation created by the constitutional hardball of denying something like the ACA the discretionary funding it needs to fulfill obligations created by the law, including the distribution of its own non-discretionary funding.

In general, it is arguably a mistake to think about the consequences of a Tea-bagger takeover of the House in terms of the power struggles we are used to seeing. Specifically, I wouldn’t fixate on the presidency, or what the administration might do in response. Insofar as that movement does succeed — and even insofar as the Rs really win because the economy is in the shitter, but they take the credit for R victories — it will have no choice but to deliver at least constitutional hardball, if not full-blown revolution. It won’t be able to play by the conventional rules, even insofar as its revolutionary positions are really just insincere talk designed to fire up their base, because it has promised revolution, the voters fulfilled their part of the contract by voting them in, and now they have to live up to their end of the bargain and deliver revolution.

The one fairly firm prediction you can make about the consequences of a convincing Bagger win this election, is that the one model we won’t see in operation is “business as usual”. Specifically, the imperial presidency, the central role that the presidency plays if we go by recent business as usual, is almost entirely a matter of “unwritten constitution” that we have accepted the past two generations. The constitutionally founded presidential powers are, aside from the veto, either vaporous or easily outflanked by the legislature. The other side may not have any conscious intention of ending the imperial presidency, but such and end could happen inevitably as as a casualty of constitutional war, and would not be to the disliking of their corporate funding. These folks found it more congenial to control the govt through stooges in Congress, rather than presidents, during the Gilded Era. They could make that work again, as the Imperial Presidency gives way to the Oligarchic Congress.

Steve,

But we’ve agreed that the United States is an oligarchy. Oligarchies don’t return to democracies, they convert into monarchies. Examine the development of the medieval city-states: they gradually became oligarchies as the higher end of the burghers (bankers, international traders) took power and froze everybody else out. They couldn’t expand into the countryside because the peasants took one look at them and didn’t see any difference between the oligarchical city-state and the nobility. The monarch is the only way out of the conundrum.

This is precisely what will happen in the United States. All oligarchies are illegitimate and this one will soon crash. The replacement will be the monarch. Because of that, it is correct for the Presidents to increase their power so that they will be able to fill the role of monarch. It is better to simply transition from President to President-Monarch rather than to have a series of revolutions or civil wars, at the end of which we’ll probably have a king anyway.

You see that as problematic, but I don’t think it’s either avoidable or problematic. The Republic is at least partially dead already. Why revive it? So we can repeat the degradations of 1980-2010 again?

“And, even if you were willing to give him a pass on torture and immunity for war crimes, there’s the public option, DADT, inaction on unemployment etc.”

The public option? Obama supported it, but didn’t state that it was a requirement. In fact, the compromise that was developing (allowing a buy-in to Medicare for older workers) was looking like a better deal than the public option up until Lieberman torpedoed it out of spite. And we needed Lieberman for Climate Legislation, so it’s not like we could turf him out of the caucus. By then, the “trigger option” deal with Snowe was off the table.

Specifics matter. Like the fact there was only a six-month window between Franken getting seated and Brown winning the MA seat.

I’m as disappointed as anyone by Obama’s continuation of Bush-era legal agruments about what the Executive can do in the name of national security; but this may not have been a decision as much driven by politics as by Obama’s (otherwise laudable) willingness to consult experts: in this case, people in the intelligence/military sector who said “Now that you know what we know, you can see that X would damage our vital mission (or the morale of our agency), so don’t do X”–and Obama hasn’t.

“Translation: Mr Obama and his aides plan a series of pre-emptive capitulations, after which the Republicans will demand the repeal of the healthcare act (or maybe abolition of Social Security). When/if that is refused, the Repugs will shut down the government, and this time they will hold their nerve until Obama folds.”

Why? Obama can look to the Big Dog to see that in a shutdown, the President wins the air war.
And Boehner will have a lot more unruly a caucus and a less sure hand than Gingrich. Much as I loathe Gingrich, he was the architect of the 1994 GOP takeover and the 1994 GOP freshmen owed him their election. But there’s few GOP freshmen who’ll owe the GOP establishment favors. There’s going to be a lot more crazy than under Gingrich or DeLay.

There’s the analogy made between the present GOP and the UK Labour Party in the 1980s. But it was pretty easy to take over a Labour constituency party with a few dozen activists who were willing to go to meetings and talk out the agenda until everybody else went home and you could carve out the delegates and get elected to the key committees (especially the membership chair).
The GOP establishment’s problems in getting control of their party back are a lot more serious, given that 30-40% of their supporters are, frankly, willing to believe any old shit Fox or a random right-wing email tells them, whether it be death panels or Obama being the Anti-Christ. The Tea Party is a populist phenomenon in the way that Militant or the Weasels or the IMG weren’t. That’s bad for the U.S., unless Obama does some ju-jitsu to turn the Tea Party into a liability for the GOP. Maybe this announcement is the beginning of that. I hope so.

both sides agree to pass spending on things that both sides agree is core and central, govt functions that both sides want to see continue

There is no chance of this happening. Repubs get all tongue-tied when you ask them what do you want us to cut from the budget?. Because they won’t cut defense, they dare not cut Medicare or Social Security, and the states would Freak. Out. if they significantly cut Medicaid. Not a helluva lot left after that.

So I can’t really see anything significant by way of agreement on “core governmental functions” either.

If that is true, then the utterly spineless opportunism of Democrats is all the more remarkable.

Well, yeah.

/me shakes his head…

Man, it’s like one of those semiliterate football forums in here, only literate, with the low point of Obama==Buchanan.

You can plaintively ask for change, all you want, but it’s pretty apparent to me that Obama is facing serious institutional resistence–in Congress and within his own executive administration. Do the “Blah Blah Baaaaa Green Lantern Theory of Governance Blah”, and all anyone is ever going to do is ignore you.

And laugh at you when your back is turned.

And that has what, exactly, to do with the kinds of highly illegal practices which I listed, and which Candidate Obama ran on promises to stop?

I assume, from your post, that you have access to the internet.

Go read.

Daniel Larison, whose domestic policy positions I abhor but who is consistently clear-eyed about the people he disagrees with, writes of Obama: “almost every bill he signed was less to the liking of progressives than his original campaign positions.” True dat.

Larison quotes himself (from a now-defunct source) on his estimation of Obama in 2008:

An apt description of what the next President will actually represent was penned, in a different context, by columnist Robert Samuelson, who once described Obama as the “sanctification of the status quo.” Though his lifelong search for stability and rootedness are frequently lost in the polemics and panegyrics about his life, close study of his biography reveals a desire for consensus and accommodation to structures already in place. Assimilation to the norms of the American cultural and political elite makes Obama seem alien mainly to those who feel great alienation from most national cultural and political institutions where Obama has thrived (i.e., conservatives), but the very elitism that they (correctly) perceive is also evidence of Obama’s aversion to challenging established norms and introducing radical change.

This will reassure most of his enemies as much as it disheartens many of his friends. If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

There is some truth in that.

Arne Duncan has a new yorker article (but it is not online):
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_rotella

He has played basketball with Obama for over 20 years.

Some of you can make all the excuses you want, but Americans have never cared to hear excuses. Obama was put in office to improve life for Americans. If he didn’t think he could do that, either because he didn’t want to or because Republicans would stop him or because of institutional resistance, then he never should have run for office in the first place.

the bottom line is that Partisans will always find excuses. That is why most Democrats still vote for Democrats. Leaners never do, and Obama is getting killed among us.

There’s no “it”, JM. The Obama DOJ’s outlandish claims about what AUMF “authorizes”- I assume that’s what you’re referring to- would be laughable if they weren’t sickening (and the fact that they’re presenting such odious briefs is part of the indictment- it’s EXACTLY the kind of thing Obama ran against.) And even if I were to grant them for the sake of argument, to defend Obama you’d have also to argue that AUMF OBLIGES him to engage in assassination. Good luck with that.

If that’s not what you’re trying to say, stop being coy and present your argument.

Some of you can make all the excuses you want, but Americans have never cared to hear excuses. Obama was put in office to improve life for Americans. If he didn’t think he could do that, either because he didn’t want to or because Republicans would stop him or because of institutional resistance, then he never should have run for office in the first place.

So in a situation where the situation for Americans is guaranteed to be worse because it is the beginning of a global economic depression, only crazy people should run for office because only optimistic people deserve to be in power.

JM, are you being obtuse or actually dishonest? You really want to argue that 1) AUMF can only be interpreted as per the DOJ’s brief, and 2) DOJ’s position is that AUMF OBLIGES rather than merely permits Obama to engage in these practices? If you seriously mean that, you’re an idiot ,and thus entitled to no further response from me.

Then what exactly is your point? Obama 1) doesn’t have to do that stuff, per AUMF or for any other reason, and 2) ran on promising to stop it. You have yet to make a coherent response to either of those points. Do you have one or not?

Sorry, John, but I laid out what I thought was happening at #39 and #55 and thought that was clear enough. I even provided two related examples. I honestly thought Steve was just pissed off, and was not attempting any “disruption.” I meant it when I said I wasn’t going to hold his hand, so I also object to “coy” and “nonsense.”

But it’s your blog. Do what you want.

Anderson,

The problem is you yourself support most of the failed institutions. It is exceedingly difficult to re-establish the republic – re-establishing old regimes almost never succeeds. There is no way we can retain the old failed institution of property rights and fight against the oligarchy, for example. To re-establish the democracy, we need to quickly and publicly seize the oligarchs’ wealth, punish them, humiliate them and ostracize/exile them. But you can’t do that because you support the principle of property rights and fair trials.

Either the Democrats are going to be destroyed, or the Republicans are going to be destroyed. I say destroy the GOP.

No. Because the repudiation of Carter was taken as the repudiation of him and everything to the left of him.

Henri,

Oligarchy is certainly a very common form. However, the possibilities now are, since we are in an oligarchy:

1. Can our oligarchy be converted into an aristocracy? This is extremely unlikely.

2. Can we recover the republic? This is possible, but also quite unlikely. Again, if you support the principle of property rights, the oligarchs will always rise again. The republic needs to have the tools to redistribute wealth, thus the citizens can have no theoretical property rights. We must modify our principles of free speech, since we know that the oligarchs can buy up the media. And so on.

3. There is the possibility that the oligarchy will be converted into some sort of military junta. Admittedly, the military junta is probably preferable to the oligarchs, but this is a very bad solution (and will not be stable over the long term).

4. Can we convert the oligarchy to a monarchy? I argue that this is the best practical solution. The President will become some form of a President-Monarch, a process which is well underway anyway. Further, this is a liberal solution compared to the oligarchy, the junta or the dictatorship.

Thus, while no. 2 is the best path in theory, we must radically alter the old republic to do it (high inequalities of wealth cannot be permitted, the press must be controlled, the universities be made public, the oligarchs exiled, freedom of religion revoked in favor of government control over extremist sects and teachings, and so on). I think it will actually be less turmoil in moving to the President-Monarch than in establishing the Second Republic.

I have the impression that Aristocracy and Military Junta, are definitely species of Oligarchy. So is Republic, as long as it’s technocratic enough (the ‘elite’ are the oligarchs there). So is Monarchy, unless it’s a radically absolute monarchy where the apparatus is subject to frequent massive purges – something like Stalinism. But then Stalin dies, and it’s back to Oligarchy.

Pretty much any government is an oligarchy, and if it isn’t it’ll be soon.

What is the point in bothering to vote for candidates in the U.S. anyway? Issues on the ballot I can understand taking the time to vote for or against for example if you live in California there’s a reason to vote for Proposition 19 if for nothing else to further expose the Obama administration as reactionary by its response to its passage. But for actual candidates? Total waste of time.

After the Dems swept into power in Congress in the 2006 midterms on a platform of “Vote for us if you want to end the war in Iraq” and then refused to actually do anything to, you know, end the war in Iraq like cutting off funding for it by refusing to vote on supplementals that should have told anybody with common sense that they’ve been bamboozled. After Obama gets elected as a supposed “change agent” and despite a Dem majority Senate and House gives the American people a health care “reform” bill written by the big insurance companies and Big Pharma; after giving us a Wall Street “reform” bill written by Wall Street that does nothing to prevent their casino-like behavior; after getting a Nobel Peace Prize then immediately escalating the gas pipeline war in Afghanistan; after promising us a government of accountability then adamantly refusing to have his attorney general go after the war criminals Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, as apparantly accountability for torture, for the mainstreaming of police state measures with the Patriot Act and the starting of a war of aggression isn’t worthy of examining as he’s “moving forward, not looking backward”; as Obama has enshrined these police state measures and expanded upon them; and as Obama’s surrounded himself with an administration made up of ruling class pukes from the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group and A.I.P.A.C. what can a sensible, informed person conclude but that it is an exercise in futility to go out and vote? Why bother when all the wealthy ruling elite will allow us to vote for are obvious conservatives and thinly-disguised conservatives? That’s as undemocratic as Saddam Hussein’s elections but with somewhat more sophistication.

Unless private money is taken completely out of political campaigns with each candidate instead getting an equal (but small) amount of public funding with campaigns lasting a couple months instead of a couple years the system will continue to be as artificial as professional wrestling. Candidates will continue to be nothing more than puppets of their wealthy corporate backers, answering to them instead of the average people of this country. Face it America: You don’t have a democracy. What you have is a dog & pony show every few years, designed to make you think you have a say in what kind of government governs you. It is painfully obvious that you don’t.

“But hell, Obama’s incompetent at even nominating, let alone firing.”

It only takes one senator to hold up a nomination. One GOPer (Shelby) is holding up Peter Diamond’s nomination to the Fed’s Board, because despite having Just Won The Fucking Nobel Prize in Economics*. After Diamond won the Nobel, said GOPer still insisted Diamond wasn’t qualified for the Fed’s Board of Governors. Despite writing a paper, which, according to Krugman, is *the shit* on rises in structural unemployment.

But I’m sure if Obama nominated Jude Wanniski, the nomination would sail through. Is that what you think he should do?

* Yeah, its the Swedish Riksbank’s Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobody cares about the difference, you know.

Did you really not notice the last two years?

I’m not allowed to answer that.

“Then Obama can say he extended a hand of cooperation and that the GOP swatted it away to go after Climate-”gate” and the New Black Panther Party, wasting the taxpayers’ time.”

Of course, that’s assuming that the several dozen inquiries launched by the GOP don’t turn up anything impeachable.

I’d say there’s a 30% chance that some pseudo-scandal like “Bill Ayer’s cousin’s daughter-in-law’s boyfriend getting a grant from the NEA which has a board member who knows Michelle Obama’s aunt” will be turned into a cause for impeachment, and that the U.S. media will run with it. 50% chance they try to gin up a pseudoscandal for impeachment but don’t get traction in the media and the motion never hits the floor of the House. 20% chance Boehner reins the nutcases back and stops any impeachment attempt.

But several cabinet members and undersecretaries will be hounded from office and their positions left unfilled because of similar bullshit.

“Obama could have made the Repugs pay for their constant blockage.”

How?
“He didn’t even try. Also, he didn’t have to nominate somebody like Geithner.”

It is a tragedy that Daschle’s nomination for HHS came after Geithner’s, rather than the other way around.

Why are we treating the NYT as being credible on this topic? They are an establishment paper that is dedicated to the establishment view. Creating the expectation that Obama is going to capitulate to the Republican agenda is what the establishment wants but there is no reason to think that his base wants to see that.

The administration has to pretend that they are serious about dealing with the debt but they know that there is no way they can cut the military budget and that is the only way the books can ever balance. The US currently spends more on weapons and militarism than the entire rest of the planet combined – including US allies. Meanwhile the US allies by themselves outspend the rest of the planet excluding the US. So the US and its allies combined currently outspend the rest of the world three to one.

There is no way that I am going to let the Republican party steal my goddam pension so that they can give tax breaks to their cronies. Which is what the GOP social security proposal amounts to.

The administration has to act as if the GOP are reasonable actors. But they are not fools. They know that the GOP does not have the slightest interest in acting for the best interests of the country. They are a political faction that stands only for themselves and their greed.

“It only takes one senator to hold up a nomination.”

Socky, Obama hasn’t even *made* nominations to *scores* of positions, and many of those he *has* made took waaaaaay too long.

And as Piglet notes, it’s not like Obama has done much to fight GOP abuses, like calling them out on it, getting the rules changed, or using the recess-appointment power like it’s going out of style. Again, I suspect, the Dems wanted to preserve the power for obstruction in anticipation of their own minority status.

I think the temptation of sending a budget that e.g. reduces the EPA, OSHA, and the State Department’s total funding to a Euro, two Canadian cents,* and a stick of chewing gum is going to be too great to resist for the GOP.

Well, I hope you’re right, b/c that would piss the public off — it would be gross enough even they could figure it out. (I wonder … don’t certain private-sector projects have to have EPA approval before they can be commenced or completed?)

Obama is a classic Democrat in the mode of Roosevelt (ridiculous diversionary court-packing), Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson (war, war, war) doing his best undermine the strong tide of reform clamored for by the public. Walter Karp may be a bit cynical for some tastes, but he nailed Obama’s tactics and Congress’ last legislative session fifteen years ago in “Indispensable Enemies.” Read it and weep. The duopoly plays their game, and shocked critics spend hours trying to psychoanalyze the President’s motivation. He’s not stupid. He is evil – and he is a tool of the oligarchy which is why I keep predicting that the Republicans will nominate a loonie in 2012 to ensure his re-election. He is doing everything they want, and Wall Street’s complaints are a pure theater.

Jack, there’s a WarGames joke there that you might’ve missed: zero-dimensional chess is like love and nuclear war, in that the only winning move is not to play.

I’ve been disappointed with aspects of Obama’s performance and I understand the view that he represents a “perpetuation of the establishment,” but I also think he has some accomplishments to his credit (including the health care reform bill, which I do not view, contrary to some, as worthless).

The ‘Afghan surge,’ which I was ambivalent about initially, I now think was probably the wrong tack, and the sharp increase in drone strikes in the Pakistan border regions is troubling for several reasons. (Ditto the newly announced military aid package to Pakistan.) On the other hand, as far as the scope of executive power is concerned (which much exercises several commenters): doesn’t every president take a broad view of executive power, esp. in foreign policy/natl security-related matters? I don’t follow the policies w/r/t detainees/interrogation closely, but I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that practices in this area were at least a little better than under Bush, despite the failure to close Guantanamo.

As for the discussion upthread about oligarchy/monarchy/etc: the history of late-medieval and early-modern European political organization is interesting but has no direct relevance to contemporary US politics. The US may well be an oligarchy in some sense but it also has the forms (if not the full substance) of democracy and exists in a totally different historical context than late-medieval Venice.

@mregan

Obama won the nomination in 08 as the centrist. Hillary was the real liberal, and everone knew it.

Well I certainly didn’t “know” this. What I knew was that Obama and Hillary Clinton were virtually identical on the issues. Both of them were–and were running as–centrists. The liberals in the race were Kucinich and Edwards. Needless to say, neither proved to be very strong candidates, though largely for reasons extraneous to their liberalism.

@83, ah, plutocracy. I see what you mean.

So Pr Q’s heading implies that the Obama-DEMs are stalemated in a single position with no space to move (zero-dimension) and, having already exhausted all their moves (chess), are pre-emptively declaring check mate .

What?

Dsquared is of course correct: not in check + no legal move = stalemate = draw.

You can also have a draw by repetition.

Surely the title is a reversal of “Obama playing three-dimensional chess” [vs Republican strategies] that was kicked around in the first year of his term.

Also for that other pop reference:

WarGames is a 1983 film about a plucky 80s kid hacking into the nuclear control centre. It produced the geek-quote “the only winning move is not to play”, when the AI finds no winning solution to nuclear warfare.

A mathematician would definitely say that it’s a two-dimensional game – you have a list of legal operations to perform on an 8×8 matrix, and when no legal operation can be performed it’s either stalemate or checkmate. It’s just that you don’t need a physical two- or three- dimensional object to represent the two-dimensional space of the game – but on the other hand, you don’t *need* a Rubik’s cube if you can do three-dimensional linear algebra in your head.

No. Because the repudiation of Carter was taken as the repudiation of him and everything to the left of him.

Why not: …”the repudiation of Bush was taken as the repudiation of him and everything to the right of him.” Wasn’t that the mood less than two years ago? I remember lots of talk about how may seats the Democrats could pick up in 2010, how the GOP was to become a regional southern party etc.

By the way, didn’t the Republicans lose badly in the 1982 election?

And, like a Cartesian coordinate system in the plane , chess is a two-dimensional game. It’s not three-dimensional, you can’t move the pieces up and down in space.

Thinking about it Salient is clearly right – you can teach a Turing Machine to play chess, so it can’t be intrinsic to the problem that it’s two dimensional.

“Socky, Obama hasn’t even made nominations to scores of positions, and many of those he has made took waaaaaay too long.”

Looking at:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/nominations-and-appointments

There’s ~950 nominations, with >200 unconfirmed, some dating back to mid-2009 and stil unconfirmed. You might recall Sen. Shelby alone holding up 70 earlier this year ‘cos of some hissy fit over a contract for Northrup Grumman.

“And as Piglet notes, it’s not like Obama has done much to fight GOP abuses, like calling them out on it,”

Look, almost half the GOP base believes or is willing to entertain the notion that Obama is the Anti-Christ born in Kenya. As far as an incumbent GOP Senator is concerned, getting slagged off by Obama for obstructionism is a feature, not a bug.

“getting the rules changed,”

You can’t change the rules for the Senate in the middle of a session without a two-thirds majority. Also, Obama doesn’t sit in the Senate. Separation of powers.

“or using the recess-appointment power like it’s going out of style.”

Recess appointments would only last to the next session in Jan 2011.

should be: S Q R T ( bugger-all ) -server-side shenanigans at work

Henri,

That type of plutocracy is only possible at relatively low levels of economic development. It usually is a heavily agricultural economy – the plutocrats own the land, have comparatively little liquid wealth and most of the population is working in agriculture. Once you have liquid wealth, the bankers are going to grow rapidly in power. The agricultural plutocrats will either be overthrown, or will join forces with the bankers.

The bankers have the opposite interests from the agricultural plutocrats. The agricultural plutocrats need the population to be (at least somewhat) friendly to them. They need the agricultural workforce to bring in the crops. They try to build support by engaging in military defense of the country, supporting the gods, engaging in public works and so on.

The bankers have comparatively no interest in the workforce. They are primarily interested in the liquid capital of the country, not the labor force. They do not need any support from the countryside. That means that, in contrast to the agricultural plutocrats, their interests are in creating arbitrage opportunities for themselves – gaining control of the government to manipulate public bond issuance or tax codes or public spending, etc. If the country crashes through these abuses, they take the liquid assets and move to the next hot capital market.

We see this empirically in the decline of the medieval city-state and in Athens’ failure. What we see from this evidence is that if you have a society which is developing beyond agriculture, the stable way to rule it is through the monarch (the ultimate agricultural plutocrat and controller of the laws). A reasonably competent monarch can resolve the contradictions – he suppresses the other agricultural plutocrats by putting them to work (the Prussian model) or putting them to play (the Louis XIV model). He suppresses the bankers by controlling their efforts to arbitrage the laws, having them form the bulk of the bureaucracy, channeling the liquid capital into productive uses rather than speculation and so on.

This monarch only needs a reasonable amount of competence to pull this off, precisely because the other alternatives are so bad. He only needs to do the following:

1. appear reasonably religious and hard-working to gain the trust of the people
2. control the agricultural plutocrats by shoving them in the army
3. control the bankers by making them clerks in the government bureaucracy
4. avoid losing wars and avoid debt
5. ensure that he has legitimate male issue

If we chopped up the 8×8 board and made it 1×64, all the rules could transfer over and chess could still be played

Which brings us back to Turing machines again. But it’s still misleading, because one could infer from this description that chess was inherently one-dimensional. But there’s no inherent dimensionality to, e.g., a collection of tuples representing all possible states of the ‘board’ and a bunch of operations for interconverting them, is there?

“Hausdorff?”
“Oh, he’s feeling much better, thanks. Howe’s Theorem?”

… Yglesias has a timely remark:

Marketing and public relations are nice, but opinion is fundamentally driven by results. And on this, Obama has it backward. A party whose leaders realized that economic results were the most important driver of public opinion wouldn’t have renominated a conservative Republican to head the Federal Reserve. Even more astoundingly, having given Ben Bernanke a second term in office, the Obama administration didn’t get around to nominating anyone to fill the other vacant posts on the Federal Reserve Board until April 2010.

Word.

Maybe John’s metaphor refers to dimension as degrees of freedom rather than geometric space.

Thing is, I didn’t really understand why John referrred to “chess” in the first place, let alone chess of a zero-dimensional nature. Metaphorical chess, of course, I understand that, but being something of a one-man campaign against the loose and inaccurate use of chess as a metaphor, I didn’t (and don’t) really see what he was driving at.

“STOP using chess as a metaphor!” (to the tune of Pat Benatar’s “Sex as a Weapon,” a song whose only valid purpose for existence was to provide parody fodder).

Norwegian Guy, I don’t know who thought in the wake of the 2008 elections that Republicans would fare yet worse in 2010 but they must have been assuming some kind of historic anomaly. Like a booming economy, or a war or something.

it would be nice if the general impression of the 2008 election was the rejection of conservatism. Conservatives have been howling that it wasn’t, and tea partiers claim ad nauseum to have been just as upset about Bush era spending (they just didn’t tell anyone, or, you know, think they needed to ‘take back’ the country). The corporate media is essentially conservative, and employs a bunch of columnists who like this line. So, there we are.

Democrats did well in 1982, but not because they embraced liberalism. I’d say, off the top of my head, that it was like 2010 in that hard economic times and low turnout from the formerly winning coalition made a big difference. What was different is that Dems avoided any hint of radicalism.

dsquared @ #99 said:

I think ejh is right and Jack is wrong here – although a game of chess ends if the player whose turn it is has no legal moves to make, it doesn’t end in checkmate unless that player is also in check.

ejh’s response to my comment was little more than grunt and cock his head side-ways when peering at an unfamiliar object, which is not “right” in my book.

Okay, I should have said “already exhausted all their [legal] moves”. My bad, its a blog remember, so no copy editing.

A game of chess can end anytime one of the players wants it to end. Its perfectly acceptable for a chess-player to “preemptively declare check-mate” when he sees defeat coming with no hope of escape ie he concedes. That is, I think, the argument that Pr Q was trying to get across when he described Obama’s current political strategy “a series of pre-emptive capitulations”.

FTR, my best guess is that Obama will go for a compromise stalemate and the Tea Party will fold. Their base has too much to lose if access to the federal tit is cut off.

But I have to admit, the TP may have stumbled on Nixon’s “mad-man” negotiating strategy (credible threats of going ballistic), so anything is possible. And the mildly depressive Obama is not the kind of CO you want with your backs to the wall.

Whether this summary bears any relation to Pr Q’s “zero-dimensional chess” metaphor is anyones guess. I guess part of the pay-off compensating academics for their unfairly low remuneration is the right to crack these erudite and esoteric jokes so they can enjoy watching we jack-asses scratch our heads.

I’ts perfectly acceptable for a chess-player to “preemptively declare check-mate” when he sees defeat coming with no hope of escape ie he concedes.

But not when they are “stalemated”. Because that’s already a draw.

This piece by Chris Hedges seems relevant.

@129, if you don’t like Japan, what about, say, the Scandinavian states? It would be silly to pretend that their model is some egalitarian paradise; it’s the same plutocratic model, only better balanced. Do you think they, in the foreseeable future, are heading for the gutter as well?

Obama has gotten around to noticing the filibuster problem. You can’t slip anything by him, can you?

Jon Cohn, a solid member of the Stop-Hatin-Obama-You-Silly-Lefties front, comments:

Obama’s frustration with the filibuster isn’t news. But Obama’s emphasis on it is, I think. Over the last two years, administration officials complained constantly about how the need to find 60 votes in the Senate was stalling and, in some cases, thwarting their agenda. But ending, or even curbing, the filibuster never became a major priority, at least as far as I know. You didn’t hear Obama calling out Congress to allow majority rule; you didn’t hear about him pushing privately to change the rules.

If he had done those things, he might have been able to enact a bolder agenda–or, at least, enact the same agenda more quickly and painlessly. It’s one area, I think, where the left’s criticism of the administration has a lot of merit.

[right, well last night I found I had typed the following before stopping myself on the grounds I didn’t really know what I was talking about. But as almost always in such cases, it turns out (I think) I was wrong about that. Philosophical acumen rules!

And it was still sitting here in the tab this afternoon, so here is a big slab of stream-of consciousness about what maths must be like if only I knew any:]

Salient @115 – Well, I was thinking chess must be at least dimension 1 rather than dimension 0 – i.e. on the assumption that whatever we are talking about can be called dimensionality. FWIW, the cardinality of the set is not the thing, but the ordering. It’s not that you can embed chess into one, or two, or three dimensions, but that if you are going to get into the rather unprofitable business of embedding chess in dimensions at all, you can’t (if in fact you can’t ) embed it in less.

I suppose the way this would be understood would be by one of those rare applications of Occam’s razor that is not obviously stupid (i.e. is a proper application of it). In mathematical ontology, even more than in philosophical ontology and certainly more than in fundamental physics, a principle of parsimony might be taken as a guide to reality (or ‘reality’) . So, I boldly conjecture, there is no more economical set of mathematical procedures for generating games of chess (which can generate any actually possible game and no actually impossible one) than a direct translation (ahem) of the rules of chess as we know them into their (ahem) most economical mathematical form.

I mean, the basic formula for moving a bishop (including no move) on a 2d matrix (chess board) would be delta-x = delta-y (plus staying on the board). What would it be if all the ranks (or the files, or one set of parallel diagonals) were laid end-to-end (or if the squares were jumbled even more than that)? I certainly don’t think anyone would want to play it. Actually, for ranks laid end-to-end, it would be (delta-x = n +- 8n (and staying on the board), or something, but what about the horse? The castle would be (delta-x mod 8 = 0, and staying on the board) OR (staying within what we 2-d players would call the same rank)…Now how about if the board were cut into quadrants and they were stacked on top of each other, neatly making a cube? How would a rook move? In 2d, it’s delta-x*delta-y = 0. In this 3d nightmare? (Actually, you make this point, but put it in terms only of intuitive meaningfulness – I’m suggesting that – as a result of the fixed fact that chess was anthropocentrically developed in the way it was, objective simplicity may make something very close to the rules of chess the salient – canonical, fundamental, real – way of describing the game. (Determining objective simplicity has its problems of course, but possibly not insuperable ones.)

If this conjecture is correct, then chess has dimensionality (in some appropriate sense, which I will not supply!) above 1. This result can’t be evaded by hiving off an arbitrary amount of info onto the operations rather than depicting it in the states of the board, as is done if a 1-d array of squares is depicted instead of a matrix – information about the relative positions is lost from board-state and has to be supplied in more complex rules). As an aside, if you do want to take that tack, then you could just have a single symbol for each possible state of the board (or tuple of {possible state of the board, next mover, winner}) and a tree-like structure relating them. Or why not represent each possible game by a symbol, and have a simple rule that says ‘pick one’? (Or, if you don’t mind losing info, just represent that disjunction (=the game of chess) by one symbol. Or no symbol.)

No, no, I say. We must have Humean chess, with no sneaky rules smuggled out into some transcendent ‘operation’ space. And such Humean chess is (on the sense of ‘dimensional’ that I haven’t even made up) 4-dimensional, since it is 1. the set of all games, each of which is 2. a succession of states of the board, each of those states being 3. a set of positions of pieces, and each position being 4. a pair of coordinates. Or something.

& @123: the lowest conceivable dimension Surely we can make, er, space for dimensions below 0? Some kind of hypo-point? I bet someone somewhere can define such a thing. I mean the units of measurement are there for the taking: … cubic metres; square metres; metres; cancelled-out metres, or lengthless units (I would try and get you to agree you are committed to this one being conceivable); reciprocal metres; reciprocal square-metres… Much depends on what you mean by ‘conceivable’. I think the above may get us to conceivably conceivble.

Chess 1. The specification in a rule provided that the move producing this position was legal or mention of legal moves seems pretty odd; redundant anyway. I mean if it’s not legal it’s not a move is it. It’s not like you have a penalty for false moves or anything – there’s no wide or no-ball. If you’re going to start adding that kind of qualification, where do you end?

‘Save only that it may not leave or expose its own king to being in check blah blah, a bishop may move through blah, provided that it hasn’t just been constructed by putting a hat on a pawn, and none of the pieces have been moved around nor the board extended, nor some of the pieces painted a different colour… Redundancy is not a logical sin, but if some principle of interpretation imposes a presumption of nonredundancy, it may open a whole can of unintended worms.

Chess 2. It’s mildly interesting that no distinction is made between stalemate in which a player is pinned down and unable to move, and the game being stalemated in a way that in principle involves determining every possible outcome. If the rules allowed a final move of taking the king, rather than stopping just short with ‘checkmate’, many (all?) of the former and none of the latter would end with a clear winner. That would also mean allowing moves into check I suppose, which would not make much difference, since a loss by moving into check would amount to conceding the game (unless the other player weren’t trying to win).

Chess 3. Since a stalemate occurs when it’s not possible for either player to force a win, it’s possible that some apparently conceded games might in fact have been drawn before the supposed concession, possibly under some freakish circumstances when there are a good few pieces on the board. Someone must check this.

Norwegian Guy, I shared those expectations. I assumed that Obama would spend the two years blaming the Repugs for the recession and running around the country doing stuff about unemployment. On that basis, even with limited results, I thought the Dems would surely gain votes.

Whoops. “Oh it does happen” should have been inserted at the start of the paragraph before the one where it actually appeared. Never mind.

I should perhaps add that while it’s theoretically possible to concede the game while in a position of stalemate, that’s only possible if the stalemate goes unrecognised. It’s not possible to recognise that stalemate is present and yet to resign in anticipation of a future checkmate, because stalemate is a position where no further moves are possible. Neither those delivering checkmate nor any other kind. Which is why #89 was a nonsense.

Tim, the maths of chess explicitly requires it be 2-D

I think this is overstated. For one thing, to say “the maths of chess” is to elide a more general true statement — there are multiple mathematical models which encode information about the game state of chess and its possible propagation. That one model in particular is interesting to combinatorialists, and easily available for reading on the Internet, does not imply that there is a unique “maths of chess” which must be used in order to model chess.

For another: Okay, I guess you could think of the graph-theory model of chess as constructed on a particular subset of Z x Z or some particular set indexed by Z x Z, though there’s no reason the points need to have that arrangement, except for making models coherent to humans and easier for us to describe. (Nothing wrong with ease of use, but it’s not inherent to the maths.)

You can certainly think of Z x Z as a “two-dimensional” Abelian group, it has two linearly independent generators; but that group structure (and the associated notion of dimension) is entirely irrelevant to finite subsets, like the chess board. (They wouldn’t be closed under the operation/action of addition.) More importantly, there is no group structure inherent in chess (no notion of adding, or of an action on the pieces that would conform to the rules of addition, if you prefer).

On the other hand, we could define a graph’s dimension according to the kind of shapes we can make by connecting adjacent vertices, I guess. In this case, chess would be three-dimensional, because knights cause weird adjacency patterns that produce a three-dimensional structure,^1^ or two-dimensional with ad-hoc accommodation for knights by a special rule. So for example, the five-point set \{ (1,1), (2,1), (1,2), (2,2), (2,3) \} with all its edges, would constitute a 3d set. This is because (2,3) is adjacent to (1,1); without knights, I think we’d have a clean 2d model.

Perhaps this numerical value ought to be called a graph’s dimension. It depends on what we want that word to mean. If we want to embed the points in R^n and draw the adjacent edges so that none of them touch, the minimum n for which we can do this could be called the ‘dimension’ of the graph.

There could be an equivalent 1-d game, but it wouldn’t be the same game

This must be some new definition of “equivalent” with which I’m not familiar. :)

the set of possible Hamilton Cycles (?) for the pieces and indeed the sets of pieces wouldn’t be the same

Actually yes, these would be the same, in the sense of being identical up to relabeling. The cycles would just be described differently, and those new descriptions of permissible propagation iterations would be less intuitive to human players. You’re perhaps thinking of this in a group-theoretic context. However, a board is not a group, and modular arithmetic doesn’t make sense in chess; you can’t move off one edge of the board and onto the opposite edge.

Presumably 0D chess occurs on the “null” board ([0]x[0])

There is no reason to presume this instead (for example, why not [1]x[1]?) and it’s not clear what you mean by a [0]x[0] board. I certainly don’t know what a [0]x[1] board would look like, so writing [0]x[n] in general seems problematic. You could say that [0]x[0] is the empty set, but then, why not just assert that presumably 0D chess must occur on the empty set? The board notation’s irrelevant.

I assume that a [0]x[0] board does not have even one point

Furthermore, this assumption doesn’t make sense to me. Are you suggesting that an isolated point ought to be assigned a dimension greater than zero?

I think you can model chess as a general field theory on a three dimensional space of finite size

This is imaginative, and I like the idea in principle, but doesn’t it ignore the fact that people make choices in chess, so movement is not deterministic or even probabilistic unless we assume the players play according to some deterministic/probabilistic algorithm?

John Quiggin @ #138 said:

Norwegian Guy, I shared those expectations. I assumed that Obama would spend the two years blaming the Repugs for the recession and running around the country doing stuff about unemployment. On that basis, even with limited results, I thought the Dems would surely gain votes.GFC

Yup, I thought along those lines, but I was wrong. Hereunder a review of my mixed bag of US politico-economic predictions made 2008-09.

Through most of 2009-10 I predicted that the DEMs would lose a bit of their House majority, not become the minority party. The Tea Party and defection of independents to REPs has made a mockery of my amateur psephology.

In late 2008 I predicted that Obama’s first term would be “janitorial”, rather than “messianic”, fixing up Bush’s messes. I also assumed that his electoral base (young people, Hispanics, Blacks) would not be so fickle.

In NOV 2008 I did make a point of referring to the US’s significant “right-wing ballast” as a counter-weight to loose talk of a “national re-alignment”, REPs being reduced to “regional party confined to South”, “emerging DEM majority”. So I expected a right-wing reaction, but nothing as momentous as the Tea Party.

From about mid-2009 onwards I figured that Obama admin had gotten on top of the financial side of the GFC through TARP. I thought the “bear market rally” would “last for a while”, long enough to get the DEMs over the line in 2010. So my best guess was that the US would not suffer a long depression, more likely a slow, halting climb out of recession

So on 29 MAR 2010 I predicted that in the congressional mid-terms Obama would lose a few seats but “retain control” of both houses. Losing a few seats in the House seemed most likely outcome, given that the first term Presidents party usually takes a small haircut in the first up election.

I predict that the DEMs will retain control of Congress in the 2010 mid-term elections, although they will no doubt lose a few seats in both houses.

From MAR 2010 onwards I predicted that the Tea Party was a “flash in the pan”, “over-rated”, “more smoke than fire”, would “burn out soon”. Their staying power is amazing considering complete absence of coherent policy, flakey candidates etc.

Although I am not sure if the TP is what is driving the major anti-DEM swing in the polls. There appears to be a large swing amongst moderates (independents etc) against the DEMs. If so this is most likely just a standard electoral reaction to “jobless recovery” of the kind that hit the DEMs hard in 1994.

Which really means that Obama-DEMs have no one to blame but themselves for their electoral pickle. They piked the stimulus package, should have gone in hard and fast for a mega-stimulus like the PRC. Then they would be sitting pretty, both economically and electorally.

Moral of the Story: Bi-partisan compromises with REPs is a one-way street and losing proposition.

@Jack #144
“Moral of the Story: Bi-partisan compromises with REPs is a one-way street and losing proposition.”

Dick Armey put it more succinctly: “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.”

As a former House Majority Leader for the Republicans, and current boss at the Orwellian “FreedomWorks” which puts the astroturf into the Tea Party, he knows *exactly* what he is talking about.

@Salient: with, I believe, the sole exception of castling, all the allowed moves of chess are invariant under translations in 2 dimensions, subject to the proviso that pieces can’t go off the end of the board. Several classes of moves are also invariant under some of the rotational symmetries associate with the square lattice. The obvious model is precisely a chess board, which is manifestly 2-dimensional. (E.g. the adjacency graph of the squares is planar.)

I don’t see why it should be relevant that the moves can be encoded in various ways. Theorems and proofs of Euclidean plane geometry are usually encoded using 1-dimensional strings of words and symbols, but it doesn’t follow that the Euclidean plane is 1-dimensional.

Theorems and proofs of Euclidean plane geometry are usually encoded using 1-dimensional strings of words and symbols

…No they’re not, in the sense I meant the word encode, unless you mean to say something like ‘most theorems in Euclidean plane geometry involve interactions between one-dimensional objects.’ If you’re saying that (x, y) is one-dimensional because it’s written left to right, this is confusing the encoding of a structure of a set with the symbols we put on the page to denote that encoding. Probably we’re using the verb ‘encode’ in different ways, maybe ‘represent’ is better.

Still, your point about general translational invariance is good, and I appreciate it — it’s better to think about what would be true if no boundary existed, in order to get a handle on dimension, and then introduce boundary. So the (translation) action of Z^2^ is an important feature, which would get lost or mangled in a non-2d model. There are a few exceptions you didn’t mention — en passant and being able to move a pawn two sqaures from its initial position — but those quirks are just exceptional distractions from the general rule of translational invariance. Which verifies that the natural space to work on is a finite dimensional subset of Z^2^ and gives a solid argument for the importance/meaningfulness of assigning that dimension to chess. (As you implied, non-pawn movement is invariant under rotation, but I’m not sold on requiring a rotationally invariant model, just because the rules for pawn movement are such an integral game component, no pun intended. But that invariance is not essential to your point.)

Someone reminded me that it’s possible to map R^2^ to R bijectively by interlacing the digits of the numbers x and y, which is further reminder that invariances are more important to a meaningful notion of dimension than I’d recalled. I’ll accept checkmate on this one; chess is most appropriately assigned a dimension of 2.

Yes, when you’re out and about enjoying the social whirl it’s important to know that CT comments threads are kept neat and pure and on topic, with none of this messy and distracting interlacing of separate threads. It’s like having insects crawling all over you. Delete them!

the leve Asperger’s syndrome if painfully high

This statement makes no sense, but kudos to you for reviving a thread that had lain dormant for nearly 48 hours in order to complain about the activity there.

Barry, your two comments make you sound like an insane person. I just thought you would like to know.

I for one think JQ should delete the whole thread, so as to make it zero-dimensional. :P