Politics

Post Mortem

arbus_hand_grenade.jpg

"An Electoral Affirmation of Shared Values" -- Todd Purdum, The New York Times, 11/3/04:

It was not a landslide, or a re-alignment, or even a seismic shock. But it was decisive, and it is impossible to read President Bush's re-election with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country - divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership.

Surveys of voters leaving the polls found that a majority believed the national economy was not so good, that tax cuts had done nothing to help it and that the war in Iraq had jeopardized national security. But fully one-fifth of voters said they cared most about "moral values" - as many as cared about terrorism and the economy - and 8 in 10 of them chose Mr. Bush.
Diane Arbus, Child with a Toy Hand Grenade (1962).

In other words, while Mr. Bush remains a polarizing figure on both coasts and in big cities, he has proved himself a galvanizing one in the broad geographic and political center of the country. He increased his share of the vote among women, Hispanics, older voters and even city dwellers significantly from 2000, made slight gains among Catholics and Jews and turned what was then a 500,000-popular-vote defeat into a 3.6 million-popular-vote victory on Tuesday. . . .

The biggest questions now may be about just what parts of that agenda Mr. Bush will choose to pursue, and just how many fights he will take on with either his liberal opponents or his conservative supporters.

Will Mr. Bush move to create private investment accounts for Social Security, a move that would follow through on an idea he first broached four years ago, gratify free-market ideologues but discomfit fiscal conservatives worried about how he would pay for them and practical politicians fearful of simply touching such a hot issue? Will he pick confirmation fights over anti-abortion judges, or press for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage? Or neither? Or both?

Yesterday, Mr. Bush sounded a conciliatory note. "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he said. "We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us." Mr. Cheney's daughter Mary and her longtime partner, Heather Poe, appeared together at the victory rally.

The power of second-term presidents tends to dissipate quickly and Mr. Bush's will be limited at the outset because he will still be five Republican votes shy of the 60 needed in the Senate to stop a Democratic filibuster.

Senator Arlen Specter, the moderate Pennsylvania Republican expected to head the Judiciary Committee, warned Mr. Bush yesterday against nominating judges "who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade."

James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, said that for all the Republican gains, "the other story is that the nation is deadlocked, especially in the Senate, over what the most important issues are and how we deal with them."

But Grover Norquist, president of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, said that the Republican Party was no longer what it was 25 or 30 years ago, "a collection of people running on their own." Instead, Mr. Norquist said, "there is a coherent vision, and to a large extent voters can tell that Republicans are not going to raise their taxes, are for tort reform, are for free trade."

He said that without the drag of the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush would probably have rolled up a bigger majority.

As it is, Mr. Bush became the first presidential candidate to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote since his father did so in 1988, and he received a higher percentage of the popular vote than any Democratic candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

All those are daunting numbers for the Democrats. Early in his campaign, Mr. Kerry drew fire for musing aloud that the Democrats could win the White House without the South.

Yet for all of their hope that the Southwest could be their new ticket, Democrats were left with the fact that in the past 28 years, only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton among their ranks have made it, and both had Southern and evangelical support. Mr. Kerry, a lifelong Roman Catholic, often struggled this year to speak of his faith in public.

"Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got elected because they were comfortable with their faith," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide. "What happened was that a part of the electorate came open to what Clinton and Carter had to say on everything else - health care, the environment, whatever - because they were very comfortable that Clinton and Carter did not disdain the way these people lived their lives, but respected them."

He added: "We need a nominee and a party that is comfortable with faith and values. And if we have one, then all the hard work we've done on Social Security or America's place in the world or college education can be heard. But people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

Voting Story

"Voting Story" -- Paul Ford at ftrain.com, 11/1/04:

I was talking with a good friend of mine about the weather. "Vote," she said.

"Vote?" I said. "Vote vote vote vote, vote vote."

"Vote vote?"

"Vote!"

We talked about how tired we both had become. "Vote vote vote vote, vote vote," I said. "Vote," she replied, commiserating.

I thought about it for a moment. "Vote," I said. "Vote, vote vote." She nodded in agreement.

The Ownership Society


"A Guided Tour of the 'Ownership Society'"
-- Michael Kinsley in The Los Angeles Times, 9/5/04:

At the moment, we are a Debtorship Society. The government is spending far more than it is bringing in. And even so, our commitments, primarily to supply pensions and healthcare to the elderly, exceed the amounts we are putting aside to pay for them. Then there's the rhetorical commitment of all politicians to do something about the nearly 45 million Americans with no health insurance.

Bush proposes "ownership" as a cure for debtorship. As a general concept, it's fine: Assets are empowering, people spend their own money more carefully than other people's, and market forces promote efficiency. But how does all this apply to the specific problems we face?

Taxes. Our complex tax system is costly in itself and messes up the economy with perverse incentives. Bush says he wants to simplify taxes, and everyone likes tax simplification in the abstract. But people also like deductions. Bush has already promised to protect charity and home mortgage interest deductions. And, he wants to introduce new deductions for healthcare savings accounts and whatnot.

Any change in the tax system that raises the same amount of money means higher taxes for some and lower taxes for others. Are you still for tax simplification if it means higher taxes for you? Bush will probably try to hide this effect by combining simplification with a tax cut. But these are different issues. You can have a tax cut with or without simplification. Are you still for simplification if it makes your tax cut smaller?

Healthcare. This is one area where the ideas grouped under the label "ownership society" hold some real promise. There are vast inefficiencies in the current healthcare system and vast potential for improvement by using market forces -- putting the money in people's hands and letting them make more of the decisions is one way to do this.

However, no one seriously believes that improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery will be enough to pay for our healthcare commitments and goals. There are important limits on market forces in healthcare. You're not going to price-shop for a brain surgeon or negotiate for a visit to an emergency room. There's also a basic conflict between the "ownership society" notion that people should shoulder more of their own risks and the basic idea of insurance, which is to protect you from risks. The more that market forces are built into healthcare, the more people will not have access to the healthcare they need. The more you protect people from that, the harder it is to create market incentives.

Social Security. Here, the "ownership society" solution is a simple mathematical fraud. The concept: Government lets you keep some portion of the taxes you now pay into the Social Security trust fund, you invest those dollars and end up with more than you would have in the form of government benefits, and then (the rarely mentioned third step) your Social Security benefits are cut because you're doing so well. Basically, the idea is that profits on private investments will close the gap between projected Social Security revenues and payments.

The problem is this: The money in the Social Security trust fund is invested in government bonds. This money helps to finance the deficit. Every dollar of Social Security tax revenue that gets siphoned away to private retirement accounts would require the government to borrow one more dollar from the private sector in some other way. Of course, the government could also spend less, but (as with tax simplification) it could also just spend less and not bother with Social Security privatization. Privatization by itself doesn't add to the total pool of capital in the economy or reduce the amount claimed by the government.

Election

Electoral-vote.com tallies state-level polls as they are released and maps them. You can move through the reports and watch states turn pink and baby blue. The New York Times 2004 Election Guide is an interactive map of the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial races. Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth. The presidential election at pollingreport.com. Systematic Bias by Polling Organisation, as measured at goringe.net. Electoral College Meta-Analysis by Sam Wang. A manipulable electoral college map. Larry Sabato’s election website. Stephen Lorimor’s election website. Dale’s Electoral College Breakdown 2004.

Bush’s “hometown” newspaper endorses Kerry. Re: elections, Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem on Wikipedia. Electionmethods.org. Republicans know less about what Bush stands for than Democrats know about what Kerry stands for. More electoral college forecasts: Pollkatz’s Electoral Landscape, RealClear Politics, and
Rasmussen Reports’s Red Blue Chart. A BBC international presidential preference poll. The Election Incident Reporting System’s map of nationwide election incidents.

Texts

Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” (2002). C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1959). Lion Kimbrough, How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (2003). A treasury of Tom Swift texts. An infinity of George W. Bush speeches. NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Christian Bök’s Eunoia. The 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Awards. Seymour Hersh’s address to the ACLU (July 8, 2004) on the unfolding story of American war crimes. People write exactly one hundred words a day and leave them at a website. Discussions among testy copyeditors. An outline of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A scientific method FAQ. The 1,000 Journals Project. A chronology of the secretarial profession. US Presidents’ inaugural addresses and state of the union messages from George Washington to the present. Online books at Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com. 100 top American speeches, most with links to .mp3 audio versions. Online book directories: The Online Books Page at The University of Pennsylvania, links to collections and archives at the University of Adelaide, and a collection of links at The British Columbia Digital Library.

Endeavors

Watch a baseball game. Cy Brown’s hole. Make silver nitrate without dying. Bush/Zombie Reagan in 2004. Three articles about cooking pizza for Kim Jong-il (1) (2) (3). Kevin and Dave visited a decommissioned nuclear missile silo for you. Patrick Combs deposits a junk mail check. Jeannine deals with her Chiari 1 malformation. A visual catalog of the McClintock household. Rebecca Caldwell’s carthedral. Spiderman reviews crayons. NASA’s Mars Rover home page. An explanation of cricket. An effort to find a lost frog. A traveling Gorn. A campaign against lip balm. Job hunting: JobStar Job Search Guide. Interviewing: The twenty-five most difficult questions you’ll ask or answer. Resumes: advice from Texas A&M University, Colorado State University, and The Rockport Institute. Communicating with budgies. Kid of Speed documents The Serpent’s Wall. “Right now, 30 percent of all hermit crabs on our shorelines are living in shells that are too small for them”: an effort to help. Heart ‘n Soul, a music theater group for young people with learning disabilities. Projects at spurse.org.

Texts

The US Constitution, heavily annotated, at the University of Chicago Press. A collection of historical anarchist texts. Patrick O’Brian sites: The Gunroom and Maturin’s Medicine. A lace of hyperlinked words at Blather. Bluebook, a legal citation stylesheet. Worldofquotes.com. Garret Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor” (1974). “With his blue ox, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman traveled across young America and helped the nation grow into the angry powerhouse it is today.” Wikipedia.

War

Faces of the Fallen: dead American soldiers. Coalition casualty report at cnn.com. Another at lunaville.org. Costofwar.com. Peter Bergen on Laurie Mylroie’s influence on the decision to go to war. The Guardian’s Iraq timeline: 7/16/1979 to 1/31/2004 and 2/1/2004 to the present. Empire Notes weblog. More Iraq weblogs: Baghdad Burning, Back to Iraq, Salaam Pax and Raed, Juan Cole, Healing Iraq, and Kevin Sites. See also Sistani.org. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Iraqi Press Monitor. See also The Iraq Blog Count.