Category Archives: presidential politics

So this site is a brilliant example of the brilliance of amateur (as in the Olympics) news on the net. And just today I realized: This is run by Andrew Tanenbaum. Continue reading →

It took me too long to finish this book. A very close friend had recommended it, writing to me in an email “it is an interesting lesson in how idealism and rationality can become naive in Washington.”
That comment is as depressing as is the book. O’Neill is no idealist. He is, as I described before, a policymaker. He had had decades of experience in Republican administrations; he is a buddy of Greenspan, and had came to the Treasury from ALCOA, where he was Chairman and CEO. He joined the administration believing in the need for a tax cut. But he also believed that the Reagan administration had taught us one important lesson: That irresponsible tax cuts don’t pay for themselves; they instead control the domestic agenda for decades.
O’Neill framed a tax cut to fit the facts as they existed when he arrived. He continued to recommend changes to those policies as the facts changed, and the surplus was eroding into astonishing deficits. But as he pushed reality-based policymaking, he was increasingly resisted by politics-based aparachicki. When the facts became useless, the facts were forgotten.
This is the essence of O’Neill’s criticism of the administration. That they didn’t do the work. They chose policies that drove us into this astonishing deficit, willfully ignorant of the consequences, because to know of the consequences they would actually have to confront the facts. But the Rove-types are allergic to policy-related facts. And the President is painted throughout the book as he always seems throughout: totally incapable of thinking through complicated, factual questions about what should be done.
O’Neill’s portfolio was economics. But as a senior cabinet member, he watched the same evolve with the War. In a particularly depressing end, he watches as the President announces war on Iraq. As Suskind writes:

O’Neill listens to the speech and feels disembodied, as though the world he’d long known was untethered from its moorings. The President is showing conviction, but from what source? A little later, he attempted to make sense of it. ‘Conviction is something you need in order to act,’ he said to me. ‘but your action needs to be proportional to the depth of evidence that underlies your conviction. I marvel at the conviction that the President has in terms of the war. Amazing. I don’t think he has the personal experience …’ His voice trails off as he distills it one last time. ‘With his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of conviction.‘”

And long before the true disaster of this war was apparent to everyone (except the Vice President), the book ends with this:

“O’Neill … was deeply fearful about the United States ‘grabbing a python by the tail … Trust me, they haven’t thought this through,’ he said. He was still hoping there would be ‘a real evidentiary hearing and a genuine debate’ before troops were committed. He knew that wasn’t likely. ‘When you get this far down the path … you want to have a heavy weight of evidence supporting you. If the action is reversible, or if a generation can erase its effects, it’s different than if you bring the world to the edge of a chasm. You can’t go back.'”

O’Neill’s politics are not mine. But the point is, O’Neill is much more than politics — as just about every Administration in modern times before this one was. He’s not your typical conservative — ALCOA confronted the issue of Global Warning (at the time when the President still denied there was such a thing) and issued an aggressive plan for dealing with it; and remember, this is the guy who went to Africa with Bono. But he came to the Administration committed to the values the President said he was for. He left recognizing the particularly pathology that defines this Administration — politics without policy. “Principle” as hype, rather than principle.
And this, then, is the depressing part about my friend’s email. Is it really “naive” to expect that senior policymakers would use facts to do policy? Has reality become “idealism”?
Recall Suskin’s piece in the Times:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Count me in the “idealist” camp. The sort that believes in “reality-based” policy making.
And count this as yet another Orwell moment. Continue reading →

Old news: The President of Zogby on Thursday predicted Kerry. That may be because of this new news: As its headline reports,

Young Mobile Voters Pick Kerry Over Bush, 55% to 40%, Rock the Vote/Zogby Poll Reveals: National Text-Message Poll Breaks New Ground

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This is the South Korea factor: Unpolled voters, with a radically different view from the norm. You can read Zogby’s press release here. Continue reading →

When this story broke, my reaction was the same as Begala’s on Crossfire: There was no way that Bush cheated like this in the debates. And just because Doonesbury believes it that doesn’t make it true.
But now Salon says a NASA photo analyst has concluded that he did. I know on the scale of things — unnecessary war, torture, trillion dollar deficits, the environment — this sin is tiny. But is there anything more pathetic than cheating in a debate? WBSH — George “radio man” Bush. Powerful and effective, so long as he keeps the channel in tune. Continue reading →

Dave took a word and turned it into a site: Presidential Enblogment 2004. According to the numbers as of now, Kerry’s running 85% to Bushs 11%, and Nader’s 4%. And now there are 248 links on Google for “enblogment.” There were none two days ago. Continue reading →

So translation is the hardest thing in the world to do well, so no criticism of the translator intended here, but: There’s something very weird about the translation of bin Laden‘s speech.
As Aljazeera has translated it, near the end bin Laden says this:

And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration notice.
It never occurred to us that the Commander in Chief of the armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone at a time when they most needed him.

He goes on to refer to the Pet Goat incident, so we know he’s referring to the morning of September 11. But what does “carried out within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration notice” mean? Is bin Laden saying he gave the US warning (“notice”) before the attack — which would explain the weird look on Bush’s face before he was told the attack had actually occured?
Is there someone out there who can do better with the translation? Continue reading →

It is astonishing to me how hard it is to talk to friends and family about this election. It must have been easier before we entered the age of the broadcast. People must have expected it. But today, politics is religion � and neither are to be discussed among people who disagree. We feel free to stuff envelopes at an election headquarters. Or even to blather on in a blog. But the act of directly confronting someone else — at least if you know them — and asking them to explain their vote is as rude as asking them to explain their heart.
Most of the time, that doesn’t bother me. But in elections like this, it depresses the hell out of me. My family has had a vicious, extended debate through our mailing list about this election. I never understood how families were torn apart by the Civil War. I understand it now. Yet despite the bloodiness, it feels to me a duty. I swayed just one vote in that exchange with my family; I never expected to sway any. But the expectation of failure is not a reason to concede — see, e.g., the free culture movement.
I think this a duty we all share. We should learn to do it civilly. We need better tools. But if we’re ever to become a democracy that is immune from the spins of the likes of bin Laden and Rove, we need to rediscover, or just discover, the ethic of reasoned persuasion.
We built p2p-politics to ease people into this practice. Despite its brilliant technical implementation, the idea was a bust. Billions came to the site to watch the clips; scores of great clips were submitted; but precious few used the tool to send to someone else an argument, or a reason, or even a clip.
Whatever your tool, make this a duty of citizenship. Not always, maybe not in every election. But at least in this election. I spend a huge part of my time (insanely, my friends say) engaging with people I don’t know who email all sorts of questions and abuse (and even some words of praise). So this might seem more natural to me. But citizenship must mean explaining why. At least this time, it must. We are divided, and furious. We should use that anger for some good. Continue reading →

So Newsweek reports the Nation rallying behind the President, partly in response to bin Laden’s attack on Bush (in particular, his mentioning of this scene of Bush immediately after the attack on 9/11.
We are an astonishingly manipulable people. Continue reading →

It is no surprise to readers of this blog that I would endorse John Kerry for President. I’ve been harshly (sometimes unfairly) critical of the President (though the Secret Service has not questioned me about my criticism), while I’ve withheld criticism of John Kerry, save for questions about his campaign, and anxiety about his views on IP (and subsequent events have calmed both fears).
But every blog owes it to this space to state its case one way or the other, however briefly, so that the reality of November 3 doesn’t distort the views of where we are today.
There is an aspect of George Bush that has made it hard to come to this view. I’ve had no doubt about his policies — except for his views on trade (the steel tariffs embarrassment notwithstanding), I’m against them. But his character (as we see it) has a feature that is rare in politicians, and that as a liberal, I long for. As Bush likes to say, even if you disagree with him, you know where he stands. He’s flip-flopped of course (see facts 88-92 on The Nation’s 100 Facts about Bush), but on core positions, he has remained firm.
This is a feature in a politician, not a bug. It was the great disappointment of Clinton that heat would melt any resolve. Loyalty was a weakness. Commitment to an ideal that was unpopular was simply a prelude to a changing commitment.
Bush is different in this respect. It is a certain stubbornness, no doubt, but when stubbornness reflects principles, it is a rare virtue for a politician. It is how we like to remember Reagan. It’s what gave Lincoln the strength to risk everything for the Union.
But ultimately the question is what this stubbornness is a commitment to. One can respect a man committed to values one disagrees with, but that respect depends upon believing that it is really values that constitute the disagreement.
And here I found the Susskind’s book about Paul O’Neill the most instructive. The Price of Loyalty tells a story about a terrifying White House. The terror is the role of politics in this White House. No doubt, every White House has a political director. But at its core, policy should be the driver. Politics might wrap the policy; politics might guide its execution. But if a Presidency is to be more than a machine to assure reelection, then commitment must be to something more than the machine to assure reelection.
This White House has no policy core, at least according to O’Neill, and confirmed in many obvious ways. As he describes through Susskind, there is just a political shell, with no core policy driving the politics. Policy debates are scripted; arguments are removed from the script. The least curious President gets surrounded by yes men, who are themselves watching for signals not from the President, but from the men in charge of getting the President elected.
This is a criticism we could generalize across branches. The branch I know the most about (though admittedly, not much) is the judiciary. Everyone who lives and studies the law recognizes that judges too have a political shell. They are sensitive to, and react with, the changing mood of a time. But we respect judges not for their political skill, but for the principles that define their legal core. The political shell must answer to those principles. If it does, the judge merits respect, even from those who disagree with the principles at his or her core.
I spend my life as a lawyer in the dreamworld that imagines that principles guide judicial decisions. My students try to wake me from that world; I refuse to wake. And as a citizen, I want to live in the world where the White House is guided by a policy making core, not by a political shell. There is an ideal in the law called getting it right, politics notwithstanding. There should be such an ideal in the White House too.
My values are closer to Kerry’s than Bush. So I start biased in his favor. But in those moments when I let myself imagine that Kerry might actually pull this off, the picture that is most dramatically different in my mind is the idea that getting it right might return to the White House. Getting it right: following the facts, asking questions, testing theories, doing what, in light of these, and the values that frame these questions, is right.
Kerry reads. He asks questions. He gets angry at incomplete answers. He does policy. On this alone, he will be a better President than President Bush. And if he can thin the political shell to its properly secondary place, and not fear standing for some ideals that most think wrong, then he’ll be a great President — greater than Clinton, or Reagan, or just about anyone else.
There’s of course much more one could say. There are the parts that make me rage with anger (torture) and well with tears (torture). But the ideal of a policymaking White House is at least a reason for Kerry over Bush. I won’t pretend that it was reason that got me to my vote. I’m sure that anger and tears will always have more power than reason. But if you want to get it right, here at least is a reason. Continue reading →

The Internet Vets for Truth have created a site that collects the Election 2004 classic clips, from the Kerry testimony in 1971, to the Pet Goat thirty years later. The site is extremely well done. Continue reading →