US Politics

By way of a break from everything about the US elections in the blogosphere, here’s a post about the US elections.

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I think the Instapundit must still read Andrew Sullivan’s site. Does he just skip the parts about how our venture in Iraq is a total disaster? (Honesty compels me to mention that I was a supporter of this invasion, and so am either a) uniquely qualified to pronounce on its disastrousness or b) a certified idiot who should be mumbling apologies at all my anti-this-war-now brethren rather than parading my original bad judgment as a badge of honor. You decide.) I mean, the US military can’t guarantee security in the Green Zone?

At a briefing earlier this month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone’s perimeter said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating the compound’s defences.

The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad’s centre, is one of the most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have not been able to penetrate it.

I’m very sorry to say this, but we are f%$#ed. I don’t mean particularly to pick on the Instapundit, but he is both a big name and representative. Where is the pro-war blogosphere on this? Is it really all about the pseudo-kerning? Can Hugh Hewitt honestly not think of anything, anything at all the US Congress might better do with its time than hold hearings on “Rathergate”? This is becoming surreal. John comes home from work, not having had time to read the news yet, and asks me over dinner, “what happened in the world today?” Admittedly, I do say, “those memos were fake.” But mostly I say things like, “lots and lots of people got killed in Iraq today and things are looking very very bad.” From Christopher Allbritton:

I don’t know if I can really put into words just how bad it is here some days. Yesterday was horrible — just horrible. While most reports show Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra as “no-go” areas, practically the entire Western part of the country is controlled by insurgents, with pockets of U.S. power formed by the garrisons outside the towns. Insurgents move freely throughout the country and the violence continues to grow.

I wish I could point to a solution, but I don’t see one. People continue to email me, telling me to report the “truth” of all the good things that are going on in Iraq. I’m not seeing a one. A buddy of mine is stationed here and they’re fixing up a park on a major street. Gen. Chiarelli was very proud of this accomplishment, and he stressed this to me when I interviewed him for the TIME story. But Baghdadis couldn’t care less. They don’t want city beautification projects; they want electricity, clean water and, most of all, an end to the violence….
In the context of all this, reporting on a half-assed refurbished school or two seems a bit childish and naive, the equivalent of telling a happy story to comfort a scared child. Anyone who asks me to tell the “real” story of Iraq — implying all the bad things are just media hype — should refer to this post. I just told you the real story: What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America’s making.

Could we please have a national debate about this war?

UPDATE: In Hewitt’s defense, I wrote this last night. Now there is one sentence on his blog about Iraq. Of course, it points to this post explaining how all the casualties the US suffered this month were the right sort of casualties, the kind that indicate how little the situation in Iraq is descending into chaos.

SECOND UPDATE: Henry rightly pointed me to these posts by Orin Kerr, Volokh conspirator, who is bucking this trend.

THIRD UPDATE: if, like some commenters, you want to hear at length about how I was totally wrong on Iraq, and what I should have thought instead, then you can read about it here.

I recently went to see a speech and Q&A session by Marty Peterson, deputy executive director of the CIA. Some notes:

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One of the tragedies of living in Houston is the knowledge that Tom DeLay has his seat here. My friend Charles Kuffner, proving again that he’s one of the few bloggers who matter, has an interview with Richard Morrison, the Democrat who is trying to defeat Tom DeLay in his suburban Houston district. He’s also written a bit of a primer about the race. Apparently the most reliable poll shows DeLay at 49% and Morrison at 39%.

Interested Americans have the option of donating to Morrison here.

If you are a Democrat living in Wisconsin I’d like to encourage you to vote, tomorrow, for Tim Michels in the US Senate primary, and, if you live in the Second District, for Ron Greer in the Congressional primary. The Democratic candidates in the general election are Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin respectively. At present Russ Darrow seems the Republican most likely to cause trouble for Feingold; Michels is not (quite) as wealthy, has worse name recognition, and is more immoderate: I think Feingold would find it easier to beat Michels, so I’d like to see him win the primary. Greer makes Alan Keyes look like a raving pinko (in both senses of pinko). His opponent, Dave Magnum, seems fine in many ways (‘fine’ here being a relative term, in a world in which pretty much everyone is pretty awful), and is much more likely to give Baldwin a real fight. If you care about Kerry winning, by the way, a Greer candidacy is more likely to trigger lefty voter turnout in this district than Tammy alone or than Kerry himself (unless he turns out to be the Manchurian candidate).

All registered voters are allowed to vote in the Republican primaries; it’s just that in doing so you disqualify yourself from voting in the Democratic primary. In several Wisconsin congressional districts nothing is at stake in the Dem primaries, so there is no opportunity cost.

Of course, in a better electoral system parties would not allow their opponents to participate in candidate selection. But between them the Republican and Democratic Parties and the State of Wisconsin have given you this power, so I am encouraging you to use it.

There were the personal tragedies of 9/11 for the family and friends of those who died.. and then followed all the other tragedies. Michael Froomkin links to this disturbing film.

By now you’ve probably read this story about what Dick Cheney said yesterday:

bq. Indicators measure the nation’s unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay. “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” Cheney told an audience in Ohio. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.”

John Edwards said this morning that “If we only included bake sales and how much money kids make at lemonade stands, this economy would really be cooking.” I see three possible responses from Cheney.

* Say you’ve changed your mind and that women’s domestic labor _should_ be counted as part of the formal economy. Job-creation problem solved.

* Issue a corrected transcript of the speech, with one of the following corrections: “Four hundred thousand“; “trading on eBay NASDAQ”; or “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago I just pulled out of my ass right now, because I think you’re all idiots.”

* Glance out the window, turn to Scooter Libby and say, “Let them sell tchochkes.”

Kosuke Imai and Gary King have just published an article in _Perspectives on Politics_ that’s controversial – but quite important. King is a noted methodologist, who’s made very considerable strides in the application of models of ecological inference in the social sciences. On behalf of the _New York Times_, Imai and King applied their methodology to the disputed election results in Florida. The results are eye-opening.

(1) If overseas absentee ballots had not been counted illegally, there is a very small chance that Gore would have won the election outright. In Imai and King’s account (where they admit that there is some room for alternative interpretation), the chance that Gore actually should have won the election on this alone is around 0.2%.

(2) More to the point: if the recounted votes in Miami Dade and Palm Beach had not been rejected by Katherine Harris, Gore would have won with 82% probability. In Imai and King’s words

bq. To put it one way, the massive differences in probabilities from 0.002 to 0.82 for a Gore victory were due to the decisions made by Katherine Harris.

Finally, and most damningly, Imai and King find “strong and independent support” (albeit indirect) for the proposition that:

bq. the propensity of local election officials to violate the law and accept bad ballots was substantially greater in counties where Bush strategists believed there was more absentee ballot support for their candidate and tried to convince election officials to accept bad ballots.

One should note some caveats – ecological models are still as much art as science. Still, Imai and King have done their homework – they present a strong body of evidence to support the contention that Republican efforts to manipulate the count had a decisive impact in Florida in 2000.

As Kitty Kelly's hatchet-job on the Bush family nears publication, lots of people are linking to these additional revelations about George W. Bush by the Poorman. And you know what? So am I, because they’re great. Go read, especially if you are a staff writer for the Kerry campaign.

David Aaronovitch in today's Guardian , defending the idea that poor people in the US might have good reason to vote for George W. Bush:

bq. But suppose, for a moment, that the Kansas voters aren’t so dumb. Suppose, first, that they don’t buy the economic prospectus unwittingly along with the social populism, but consciously because they actually agree with it – because (and this hurts) it does actually tie in with their concrete experience. In other words, their consciousness is not false at all. Why might a poor person be opposed to tax increases and social benefits? Possibly because they hope to be richer themselves, maybe because they believe that high benefits are a disincentive to work and conceivably they believe both because that is exactly what they see happening around them – folks getting rich and folks idling.

I’m sure that Aaronovitch underestimates the importance of stupid people in determining elections. There are, after all, a lot of stupid people about (even here in Yoorp). Nevertheless, we can ask whether the beliefs Aaronovitch attributes to the Bush-voting-Kansas-poor are rational, given what we know about social mobility in the US, the extremely small section of society that benefits from Bush’s tax cuts etc. It is also rather odd that he decries the idea their beliefs might be the product of false consciousness on the grounds that they are rather the product of their lived experience. But the Marxist-educated Aaronovitch ought to know that it is a highly characteristic feature of ideological beliefs that they involve extrapolation by the believing subject from the immediate and local features of their experience to beliefs about the social world as a whole. So Mrs Thatcher’s belief that national economies should be managed on the model of a greengrocer’s shop in Grantham certainly “tied in with her conscious experience” and was ideological for all that. Why is Aaronovitch writing this stuff?

[Down]load the flying bats!

First get iTunes. Then go to the Apple music store. Scroll down; right under Eric Stoltz’ celebrity playlist is an RNC link, taking you to a bunch of free ‘audiobooks’ of the speeches. (You can also go to music store->audiobooks and get the Dem’s convention speechs. They just aren’t on the front page right now.) Oddly enough, “Bat out of Zell” Miller didn’t make the cut. No speech from him. Hmmm. Maybe they just haven’t gotten it up yet and tomorrow it will be available. (Anyone up for a little iPod ad parody photoshopping of Zell?)

How is the Iraq debacle affecting Bush’s popularity? This is the subject of another intriguing APSA paper, co-written by Erik Voeten and Paul R. Brewer.[1] Like most papers being presented at APSA this week, it’s a work in progress – for one thing there’s a couple of months’ more data to be collected – but it makes some very interesting arguments.

A couple of key points emerge. First, public opinion on the war is affecting Bush’s popularity – but the relationship is complicated. The paper suggests that public opinion on the war can be disaggregated into three different evaluations – (1) of whether the war was a good idea in the first place, (2) of whether the President is doing a good job in prosecuting the war, and (3) of whether the war is going well. According to the paper, evaluations of whether the war was a good idea in the first place should have the strongest relationship with Bush’s popularity. However, they’re also the most strongly rooted of the three, and thus the most difficult to change. Evaluations of whether the war is going successfully or not, are the most likely to be changed by events – but also have the weakest effect on Bush’s popularity. A 1% change in the number of respondents who think the war is going well corresponds to a.29% shift in the evaluation of Bush’s performance in Iraq, and only a .17% shift in the the number of respondents who think the war was worth it.

The data suggest that there is a strong relationship between support for the war and Bush’s approval rating. A 1% increase in support for the war equates to a .74% increase in Bush’s approval rating (and vice versa). However, support for the war seems perhaps to be becoming less important in relative terms – there is some tentative evidence suggesting that economic confidence is now becoming an increasingly important influence on Presidential approval ratings.

The paper is an empirical investigation rather than a political brief, but it’s hard to avoid the temptation of trying to draw political lessons from it. First, it suggests that the war is hurting Bush’s popularity – but that in order to really make substantial gains, the Democrats would have to convince waverers not only that the war is going badly, but that it was a misconceived project in the first place. Given the rather remarkable level of cognitive dissonance that many war supporters seem prepared to tolerate, this is a tall order. However, as Erik and Paul note, a major event in the war could have quite substantial positive or negative consequences for Bush’s support. Second, while the war is still a key political issue driving support (or the lack of it) for the administration, the economy may be starting to play a more important role. Structural explanations of public opinion have their limitations of course – they can’t capture the more evanescent political controversies that may affect elections. Even so, there’s good reason to believe that the war and the economy are going to continue to have a powerful effect on people’s voting intentions – and on current form, that can’t be good news for Bush.

fn1. Full disclosure – Erik is a colleague of mine at GWU and a grad-school mate of Kieran and Eszter’s.

A while ago, I discussed the idea that the forthcoming US election would be a good one for the Democrats to lose, eventually reaching the conclusion that the damage that would be caused by four more years of Bush would offset any political benefits from finally discrediting the Republicans.

Now Niall Ferguson looks at the same question from the other side. Like me[1], he thinks this would be a good election for either party to lose. But, since he’s taking the Republican side of the debate, the damage that a second Bush term would cause is an argument in favor of his case. He concludes

moderate Republicans today may justly wonder if a second Bush term is really in their best interests. Might four years of Kerry not be preferable to eight or more years of really effective Democratic leadership?

fn1. Though not for exactly the same reasons. He puts more weight on criticisms of Kerry than I think can be justified, and less on the extent to which painful economic adjustments are already inevitable.

I’ve got to give today’s MVP in debunking to Fred Kaplan at Slate.

Here, one more time, is the truth of the matter: Kerry did not vote to kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry’s committees.

This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC. Those who bothered to look up the fine-print footnotes discovered that they referred to votes on two defense appropriations bills, one in 1990, the other in 1995. Kerry voted against both bills, as did 15 other senators, including five Republicans. The RNC took those bills, cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and inferred that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces; but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters to read the document more closely.

What makes this dishonesty not merely a lie, but a damned lie, is that back when Kerry cast these votes, Dick Cheney—who was the secretary of defense for George W. Bush’s father—was truly slashing the military budget…

I’m not accusing Cheney of being a girly man on defense. As he notes, the Cold War had just ended; deficits were spiraling; the nation could afford to cut back. But some pro-Kerry equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Zell Miller could make that charge with as much validity as they—and Cheney—make it against Kerry.

The whole thing is great.

P.S. In the comments to a thoughtful Obsidian Wings post, a few people have said that delegates were chanting “Hang ’em” when Kerry or Edwards (or maybe just Edwards) were mentioned. Can anyone confirm or deny? Is there a reasonable story behind this?