State Of The Union 2010

Thoughts as they occur to me:

1. There are probably a lot of people out there more interested in the premiere of the iPad than in the President laying out his agenda for the next year.
2. The whole Supreme Court is right there.  Alito looks so -- small -- compared to Obama.
3. Obama's Desire to associate with Lincoln continues.  Rhetorically compares our recession to the Civil War.  I don't think it's quite that bad.
4. Joe Biden is a terrible actor.  He so clearly wants to be the one giving the speech, not sitting behind and watching it be given.  He doesn't fool me with those frowning nods of agreement.  And he's early on the applause.  Maybe he helped out with the rehearsals.  Or, more likely, he didn't so he doesn't know when the punctuations for applause are.
   
5. Same for John Kerry as the camera pans over him.  McCain is harder to read. 
   
6. Is John McCain really rocking the sweater vest during the State of the Union?  Maybe he doesn't plan on running for re-election.  Oh, wait, he does.  (And a second pan reveals that it was whoever is sitting next to him who was rocking the sweater vest, someone who looks significantly older than McCain.  My apologies, Senator.)
   
7. Dianne Feinstein not only applauds but stands up for "we all hated the bank bailout."
8. Tim Geithner needs to learn about collar stays.  Seriously, they're not that expensive, Mr. Secretary.
9. Populism!  Do I hear populism against banks from the President himself?  I think I may need to have a drink.  Actually, I already do.
10. You cut taxes?  NOT MINE, YOU LIAR!  Sit down and quit applauding all you craven Congresscritters.
    
11. Haven't raised taxes on a single person?  That actually wasn't what you promised to do, you know.
12. Lieberman looks like he ate a lemon.
13. Hmm.  Turns out everyone is in favor of jobs.  Republicans and Democrats stood up and applauded at that.  Oh, and everyone's in favor of America's businesses.  Especially small businesses.  Wow, maybe this government stuff is easier than it looks!
14. Mervyn Dymally looks awful.  Is he sick?  Henry Waxman is showing his age but he looks healthy.
    
15. Flooding the SBA with low-interest money.  Some Republicans look like they've just been asked to sacrifice their pet puppies on the altar of job creation.  Ah, but eliminate capital gains taxes and they know to applaud that.
16. How much of this is just applause?  The speech would be fifteen minutes long if the President weren't getting interrupted by his cheerleaders all the time.
17. Rebates, tax credits, and tax rate cuts.  This sounds like the opposite of keeping the budget under control.
18. Damn I'm glad I have some tequila handy.
19. A lot of emphasis on competition with other countries.  Germany and Japan and China have lots of education, fast trains, and all this.  But President Obama "does not accept second place" for the USA.  You know, it doesn't much matter.  Maybe I read James Fallows too recently.
20. "I am not interested in punishing banks."  Immediately the camera flashes to Chris Dodd.  Someone at CNN has a sense of humor.
21. This is not all that different from a campaign speech.  It sounds like there are a lot of specifics and a lot of knowledge but it really isn't all that detailed.  But it sure makes me feel good.  You know, on the other hand, that's kind of what Democrats need to be doing and saying if they want to hold on to power in 2010.
    
22. More nuclear power plants!  Hey, someone important is finally listening to me!
23. More offshore oil and gas development -- and Nancy Pelosi applauds?  I thought she was from San Francisco.
    
24. There is no such thing as clean coal, Mr. President.
25. Frankly, I question the value of reducing the trade deficit.  If we're making money the trade deficit doesn't matter.  Exports are great and manufacturing is great but again, the question is a low threshold that is above a critical mass.
26. Free trade -- Republicans support this and Democrats sit on their hands.  Same as expanding free trade zones into Chila, Panama, and Colombia.  Then on enforcing trade agreements, it's the opposite.  Bipartisanship at last!  I wouldn't have thought any of that was partisan.  Free trade makes good economic sense.
    
27. He's doing more of the hand-clasp thing.  Maybe that's how he uses the podium.  But he always winds up resting with his fingers intertwined right in front of the mike.
28. Tax credits for student loans, increased Pell Grants, caps on student loan payments in amount and time, forgiveness for old student loan debt.  Sounds great, but I thought we were looking at reducing the deficit, Mr. President.  Also sounds like a bank might not be able to make money on student loans.
    
29. More home mortgage refis?  Who's going to pay for that?
30. Why on Earth are Republicans standing and applauding for the idea of health care reform?
31. Starting to feel the tequila.
32. You know, this isn't the best Obama speech I've ever heard.  I think his acceptance speech was the best.  This is well below his inaugural address and his "speech on race" from the campaign.  There just isn't a lot of inspiration here.  I'm not getting a lot of vision or emotion, especially as we're delving deeper and deeper and deeper into a meta-discussion about the politics of health care reform.  There's not even an explanation of why we need health care reform.
    
33. Michelle Obama is a very good looking woman.
34. Now at least we're getting some emotional appeal for health care reform.  Took you long enough, Mr. President.
35. The plan you've proposed?  You didn't propose anything, Mr. President.  You called for health care reform, and then you picked and chose ideas from DLC Senators, Mr. President.  The "White House" proposal is a modified form of the pending Senate proposal.
36. Neat rhetorical trick -- health care reform is good for deficit reduction.  Doesn't make it true.
    
37. We inherited the bad economy.  Then the shot at McCain?  McCain was, and is, the biggest hawk the Republicans have.  Howsabout we cut to a remote shot of former President Bush the Younger watching from his home in Crawford?
38. Top-down shot of Congress, as in professional football, reveals no useful information.
39. You are not going to freeze spending for three years.  "National security, medicare, medicaid, and social security will not be affected."  You just promised to control 23% of the budget, Mr. President.  Excuse me if I'm not as impressed as I ought to be.  An across-the-board freeze would make more sense as a starting point.
40. This "Bipartisan Fiscal Commission" sounds exactly like one of those Washington gimmicks that pretends to solve problems.  I fail to see how a subdivision of Congress, which has proven itself to be wholly and totally incapable of cutting any spending whatsoever, will do any better than the whole.  So color me cynical.
41. Damn.  CNN feed froze.
42. Oh, I see.  Sun Microsystems chose right now to release a new update for Java which downloaded in the background while I'm watching streaming video and Windows Vista decided to use this exact moment to ask me for permission to update it.
43. No, I do not want to install Octoshape Grid Delivery Enhancement on my computer.  I want to watch the State of the Union address.  He hadn't even got to national security or war issues yet.  Reload, damnit!
    
44. Sure, everyone's in favor of earmark reform in theory.  Except John Kerry.
45. Now he's getting down in the trenches and taking on the filibuster rule and saying that Republicans now have a share of leadership.  Query if overt references to partisanship qualifies as "statesmanlike" or the way a President ought to address Congress.  Maybe it's smart politics.  Maybe not.  It doesn't seem Presidential, like he's somehow elevated above it all.  I'll have to think about that.
46. "Reject the false choice between national security and our values."  Now he's actually speaking my language.  Because I'm right and I have been all along about this.  We don't have to choose.
47. Is he going to talk about Yemen?  Afghanistan?
    
48. Lamar Alexander said on NPR that if Obama talked about jobs, debt, and terrorism, in that order, and then stopped, he would be satisfied.  In fact, Obama has talked about jobs, debt, health care reform, partisan politics, and terrorism in that order.  That's pretty close to what Senator Alexander said.
    
49. We will NOT be out of Iraq by August.  Oh, please.  This war is not ending and not all of our troops are coming home.  See, "we will continue to partner with the Iraqi people."
50. It's been about an hour.  Time to start wrapping this up, Mr. President.  I'm thinking about another drink now that the margarita is long gone.  Two cheese enchiladas and a margarita isn't quite enough to get me through this.
    
51. Some Democrat failed to stand up and applaud during the obligatory tough talk on Iran.  He was too busy tweeting something from his cell phone -- which I thought was not a device allowed on the floor of the House.
52. I'm guessing the guy between the staff sergeant and the political flack, sitting behind the First Lady is the President of Haiti.  I'm glad he survived the earthquake.
53. Human rights?  You were going to finish strong by asking for a commitment to veterans, Mr. President, and now we're going to talk about international human rights?
54. Yep, Biden is over-emoting.  He's a ham.  The President talks about some Constitutional law and it looks like Biden is choking back tears.  Only I don't believe it, he's too cynical and over-experienced.
    
55. "Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the Admirals and Generals sit there quietly.  Both parties applaud that.  Why hasn't DADT not been repealed already?
    
56. No one from the Supreme Court seems to be applauding about anything.  I guess that's appropriate -- indeed, why are they there at all?  Of all the high-ranking officers of the country, they are supposed to be the most removed from partisan and political struggles.
    
57. "Democracy in a nation of 300,000,000 people can be noisy and messy."  Is this the peroration?  Really, this is not his best speech.  I'm getting bored and I'm a political junkie.
    
58. We're going on five continuous minutes about nothing.  We're done here, Mr. President, take us out.  Three examples of Americans doing and saying inspiring things.  
59. "We don't quit and I don't quit!"  Yes, but you should leave the stage now.
60. What about Yemen?  Hell, what about Afghanistan?
61. Really very few calls to action, either for the people as a whole or for Congress specifically.  Certainly nothing memorable.
62. My overall impression is that Obama is uncertain about his own political strength.  Not without good cause.  He had a throwaway line about setbacks within his own administration.  He took at least two swipes at Democrats in Congress for not being able to get their acts together and practically begged Republicans to start working with him.  There is certainly no sweeping White House agenda for Congress to react to -- Obama does not seem to think himself capable of leading such an agenda.  Oh, sure, he'd say different if asked that question directly and in those terms, but the proof is in the pudding and this was a modest, tentative, and uninspiring speech from someone who has proven himself a master of rhetoric and oratorical emotion.

Full text here.  It's longer than the posts where I take on Biblical apologists.  More cause for skepticism, and fact-checking suggesting that the much-ballyhooed spending freeze will reduce the growth of the deficit by less than one percent, brought to you by that well-known Republican news shill organization, the Associated Press.

Taking Charge Of The Reboot?

John McCain wants to re-make the GOP.  Well, someone has to do it:

...those familiar with McCain’s thinking say he has expressed serious concern about the direction of the party and is actively seeking out and supporting candidates who can broaden the party’s reach. In McCain’s case, that means backing conservative pragmatists and moderates.

This is almost certain to put him on a collision course with the future Presidential campaign of McCain's former running mate, who very clearly wants to push the party in the opposite direction. A result which I am not the only one thinks would be bad for the party in the long run.

Pragmatism inherently involves leaving ideological perfection behind and instead focusing on both what works and what is possible to accomplish with the political, fiscal, and social tools available. For that reason, of course, McCain's efforts will be seen as tantamount to treason by the social conservatives. But as far as I'm concerned, they are yesterday's news and the future lies in more or less the direction McCain is pointing to.

Deflate The Rhetoric Already

John McCain is, for the most part, a class act and he proves it again:

Senator McCain does not deserve boos and President Obama does not deserve derisive laughter from this crowd. It is one thing to think a policy is misguided and harmful. It is something else to confuse advocacy of a bad policy with a desire to subvert the Constitution.

To the nice, well-meaning lady who asked Senator McCain that question, I have a very simple response: the Constitution does not contain any limits on the amount of money that Congress can spend. If you don't like Congress spending all that money, your concern is political, not Constitutional.

To Senator McCain: you should lead off with validating the woman's concern, not defending the President. Yes, an assurance of the President's fidelity to the Constitution should be in your answer, and you can also insert yourself in the response. Try this response out for starters: "Well, gee, ma'am, I think you're absolutely right to be worried about all that money and all that debt. You're absolutely right on. And you'd better believe President Obama knows we're still under a Constitution, and he won't forget it, either, because I'm right there in Congress to remind him of that. That's why he's talking with us in Congress about all that spending because under our Constitution, we in Congress control the spending, not the President in the White House."

See, you don't have to give up being partisan, you don't have to give up being an advocate for the policies you think are best, and you don't have to tell people things they don't want to hear -- and you can still be respectful and within the boundaries of sanity while discussing political issues. With that said, I'm glad Senator McCain gave the response he did rather than throwing out red meat to the crowd.

The Popular Vote

Data from CNN earlier this afternoon.

Candidate	Raw Vote	Percentage
Obama	63,909,365	52.434%
McCain	56,413,860	46.284%
Nader	658,679	0.540%
Barr	489,760	0.402%
Baldwin	175,117	0.144%
McKinney	143,244	0.118%
Keyes	35,105	0.029%
Paul	19,583	0.016%
Others	35,510	0.029%
None of the above	6,251	0.005%
Total	121,886,474	100.000%

As I see it, that's a 6.15 point advantage for Obama. McCain and the points played me false and I'm gonna have to cough up a bottle of good stuff.

But you may find some of the (very) minor candidates interesting to learn about.

So Much Fail For One Column

It's easy to forgive a pundit for not getting the right prediction on a race that splits 52-48. It's understandable if a prediction is not quite right in a few details.

But Tammy Bruce's column here is so far wide of the mark that it has to be comedy. Satire of some kind. I just can't imagine that anyone sane would have written this and advanced it as a serious prediction as recently as Monday. Well, on the other hand, I did find it on Fox News while looking for election data. No one will criticize her for being a disloyal Republican, I guess. But she's also demonstrated that we should assign greater credibility to Joe Izusu than to her.

Bad Choice Of Whipping Boys

I'm not all that broken up about Elizabeth Dole losing to Kay Hagan. Yes, it's another step closer to the Democrats winning total control of the Senate. And no, I'm not a fan of one-party rule -- particularly when that party is the Democrats. Experience has taught me that when Democrats take power without any kind of a check, they tend to corrupt very easily.

But at the same time, of all the Republicans who deserved to lose this time around, Dole was it. Shame on you, Senator Dole, for making atheists your whipping boys. You deserve to be thrown out of office for presuming to tell those North Carolinans with whom you so rarely deign to cohabitate that the biggest issue they faced was taking "In God We Trust" off of their money. See, they have to have money in the first place for that to matter!

As I write, the networks have called Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico for Obama. That being the case, the results in Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Florida aren't going to matter. McCain has no chance of taking California, Oregon, Hawaii, or Warshington, so that means it's over; Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States.

What, does this surprise you somehow?

Here's The Prediction

It seems to be the thing that every blogger is doing tonight, predicting what the outcome of the election tomorrow will be. So here's mine -- as optimistic for McCain as I can reasonably forecast. My prediction map shows an electoral vote of 353 for Obama-Biden and 185 for McCain-Palin. In the popular vote, I call it almost exactly a 5% advantage for Obama when all the votes are finally counted. We won't know for sure for a few days.

A Most Compelling Reason To Vote For McCain

Cindy McCain explains why it's in your best interests to vote for her husband.

Looks Like A Mistake To Me

The thing that won the 2000 and 2004 elections for Bush, more than anything else, was a really strong get-out-the-vote effort in critical swing states. So seeing the McCain campaign decide to spend its last several million dollars on ad buys instead of GOTV efforts strikes me as a big mistake. And I'm not the only one -- Patrick Ruffini, for instance, applies the word "crackpipe" as an adjective to describe this decision. I don't think he was being complimentary.

Just A Hypothetical

What if I had been right a year ago? What if the parties had nominated Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama and John McCain? Would the race be as one-sided with those candidates?

Personally, I think that if that had happened, Senator Clinton would still be the favorite to win, but the numbers wouldn't look quite so grim. I think there would have been two reasons for that.

Hillary! would have been faster than Obama to concede certain states to the Republicans. Hillary! would have run a campaign much like her husband had run in 1996, raising money from similar sources and not being as exciting as Obama has been. She would have been more vulnerable in states like Virginia and Missouri and Ohio; Rudy! would be competing there as per the playbook. I think that her running mate would have been Phil Bredesen.

Rudy! for his part, would probably be a lot like McCain has been. It seems likely to me that Rudy! would have had to have confronted most of the same kinds of pressures that McCain did by way of trying to keep the Republican house of cards together -- meaning he would probably have nominated someone with the same sorts of social conservative credentials as Sarah Palin. He might not have picked her, though, facing a female opponent directly. Instead, he might well have looked to J.C. Watts instead. But he'd have had to figure out how to run his own campaign while integrating the RNC machine and running their playbook, too -- which means that organizationally and thematically, a Giuliani-Watts campaign would have worked out more or less like McCain-Palin.

The Georgia crisis would not have been as big a political football as it was. Hillary! and Rudy! would have had essentially the same reaction to the War In The Caucasus and both would have had the same level of credibility going out of that event as they had going in. As it was, the War In The Caucasus was politically good for McCain because regardless of the wisdom of the respective candidates' reactions, they were different and the spin worked better for McCain.

The more profound domestic economic collapse, though, is the big question. Rudy! would have taken a hit, no doubt, for the same reason that McCain did -- when the shit hits the fan at home, you do not want to be the nominee of the incumbent party, no matter how striking a difference you've been able to draw between yourself and the incumbent. So I think that would have been to Hillary!'s net advantage. But I think Rudy! would have had a savvier reaction to the crisis and the bailout than did McCain -- not having to go to the Senate himself and be expected to vote in favor of it, he could have criticized it from the outside. This would have gained him big political points.

I'm assuming that no one would have dragged out any more skeletons from Rudy!'s closet, that the conservative right wing would have rallied around Watts as the running mate and drummed itself up into a frenzy about the evils of another Clinton Presidency, and that the public in general would have suffered from no small degree of Clinton fatigue. Some of these are the same kinds of hazards that Obama has weathered, some are not. And then there's the fact that Rudy! is just plain more charismatic than Hillary!, counterbalanced by Rudy! having to thread the needle just so on abortion to keep his party unified, something that his actual candidacy simply could not finesse.

By this point, most of the country would have become sick to death of both of them. Why? Because it would have probably been the most negative, nasty, personal, and dirty campaign since Adams took on Jefferson in 1800. And people get tired of that. The result would be a dramatically depressed voter turnout -- and low voter turnout tends to favor Republicans, whose electoral base is better-trained to show up and vote whether they're happy about their choices or not.

There's a good chance that I'd have grown disaffected with Rudy! by now, myself, and still wound up voting Libertarian.

But, based on all of these wild speculations, if it had been Hillary! versus Rudy! I'd say that Hillary! would have an overall sixty to sixty-five percent chance of winning right now, with the Electoral College map looking a lot like it did in 2004, and battlegrounds in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Missouri, and Colorado. Yes, Rudy! would have to run the table of those states, but he'd have a realistic, although not probable, shot at doing that by now.

That's how I think it would have looked a week out if the two pre-primary favorites had succeeded as projected.

Conservative Reasons To Vote For Obama

Andrew Sullivan, an unabashed Obama Republican, offers ten reasons why conservatives should vote for Obama next week. I can't blame the guy for trying. And he's got some good points. But he's got some weak ones, too. Read Sully first and then pop back here for my reaction:

10. I don't think Obama can do this. Obama may not be Jesse Jackson and he personally might be kind of past the whole race thing, but I don't think he speaks for every black American on a cultural level. Nor will his Presidency end either the perception or the reality of racial discrimination. It might be a step in that direction, though, which is better than not taking that step.

9. Obama means less debt? In times past, I'd have scoffed at this -- but Republicans have lost my trust on the issue of protecting the budget, so I'd be prepared to believe Obama means a smaller increased in our national debt. Neither Obama nor McCain offers any kind of debt reduction, however. So maybe Sully's actually right here, counter to the conventional wisdom. But that's the difference between paying $10 for a crappy meal and paying $15 for a crappy meal.

8. A return to realism in foreign policy is something that I think McCain offers at least as well as Obama. McCain is no idealist and his foreign policy goals are not informed by the same decision matrix as the incumbent's.

7. McCain understands, better than Obama I think, the role of the commander-in-chief with regards to both foreign and military policy. McCain's military service, in both combat and command positions, and his specialization in military and foreign policy as a Senator qualifies him very well

6. Sully's right here -- Obama has a cooler, more even temprament than Volcanic John, who got voted #2 Hothead In Congress. (Guess who got top honors?)

5. I see no reason whatsoever to believe that Obama will be a "bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism." (Whatever that means.) Obama is a Christian of deep faith, which can be a good thing but does not indicate any kind of sympathy for or understanding of atheists. He is also a man who promises to renew and re-endow the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, a politician who delivers campaign speeches in churches, and whose defining moment in the primary had to do with his relationship with his own pastor. Not that McCain would be any better on this score, really. But Obama has said and done nothing to suggest that he will lift a finger to make America any better of a place for non-believers than it is now.

4. A truce in the culture war sounds good to me. Obama won't be able to deliver it, however. Yeah, he's good at politics, but he's not that good.

3. Obama's Presidency will likely catalyze a reform of the Republican Party. Whether that will be something I embrace or run away from remains to be seen.

2. I'm not super-scared of a Palin Presidency. Only a little bit. There is reason to believe that by the time she would have to take the reins of power, she'd have been schooled enough on what's going on that she could do a reasonably good job. She's just not there yet. Oh, and she's a whackadoodle social conservative, but that's a different point.

1. President Obama will give us better P.R. globally and that's been a neglected front in the GWOT. But President McCain would likely lead us to better military results, and that counts for a lot, too.

So, Sully, I give you about 40% marks.

Not The Right Path

I first saw this idea in a column by David Brooks in the New York Times: The Republican Party is become the party of anti-intellectualism:

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Neither a wild-eyed liberal nor a conservative culture warrior, Brooks is in my opinion a reasonably clear-eyed observer of political and social reality. But when I came across the idea I resisted writing about it right away because it seemed wrong. There are plenty of deep-thinking Republicans of great intelligence and education, and they get their share of press and publicity.

And hints of it had been there for a long time. For instance, way back in April, there was some uproar over Barack Obama's condescending remarks about rural Americans clinging to religion and guns. Now, I had as much fun with that as anyone, but eventually I tried make clear that for better or worse, our leaders are elites and therefore chosen from among the elite, argula-eating class.

Look at the Republican nominees for proof of that: John McCain is hardly a middle-class American, being the scion of an elite Navy family and a member (by marriage) of a family blessed with sufficient wealth that it would take multiple generations to dissipate. Sarah Palin, for her part, seems to come from a somewhat more middle-class background but can hardly be said to be economically challenged; her family may not be there yet, but they are clearly well within the band of income earners that even in these tough times can be called "comfortable" and thanks to Gov. Palin's high-profile public service, they stand at the threshold of entering the elite class.

So too much elite-bashing, I figured, was probably not in the Republicans' best interests because Republicans are elites as much as Democrats. But the Brooks "anti-intellectual" thought unsettled me because it seemed aimed not at economic elitism, but rather mental elitism. You know, being all educated and stuff. And the trope has appeared again and again. Principled, smart conservatives have begun to seriously fret about this. The candidates, in a joint interview with Brian Williams of NBC News, added fuel to this fire:

WILLIAMS: Who is a member of the elite?
PALIN: Oh, I guess just people who think that they're better than anyone else. And-- John McCain and I are so committed to serving every American. Hard-working, middle-class Americans who are so desiring of this economy getting put back on the right track. And winning these wars. And America's starting to reach her potential. And that is opportunity and hope provided everyone equally. So anyone who thinks that they are-- I guess-- better than anyone else, that's-- that's my definition of elitism.
WILLIAMS: So it's not education? It's not income-based? It's--
PALIN: Anyone who thinks that they're better than someone else.
WILLIAMS: --a state of mind? It's not geography?
PALIN: 'Course not.
WILLIAMS: Senator?
MCCAIN: I-- I know where a lot of 'em live. (LAUGH)
WILLIAMS: Where's that?
MCCAIN: Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. I know the town. I know-- I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a ... party with in Georgetown. I'll be very frank with you. Who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

(Emphases added.) Anyone who thinks they're better than anyone else? In what way? Just about everyone in America thinks they're better than other kinds of people in one way or another. Religious people, who think religion is inherently good, think they're better than non-religious people precisely because religion is good and its absence is bad. This kind of elitism becomes more acute when you become convinced that a particular kind of religion is better than some other kind of religion -- Christianity over Islam, for instance, or Southern Baptist Christianity over Roman Catholicism. But I don't think that's what Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin were trying to get to.

So too does anyone holding public office arrogate to themselves the power to tell other Americans what they can or cannot do, based on their own beliefs. Officeholders may (or may not) enjoy popular support for their policy proposals, but policy by its very nature involves telling people what they can or cannot do rather than letting them decide for themselves. Making something illegal means that individuals cannot make that choice. Incentivizing a particular choice through a tax benefit, government subsidy, or a tax penalty for making the opposite choice is to skew that choice. Only by not imposing any policy at all does the government allow individuals to make decisions for themselves -- and officeholders of either party are not very much in the business of removing policies so much as altering ones that currently exist or adding new ones. Bureaucracy expandeth.

So the failure of the candidates to coherently define what this group of "elite" people really is in any way that would let a third party identify them -- a clear sign that the use of the word "elite" is code for something, and that both Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are uncomfortable with the exercise of deconstructing the word to figure out what it's really getting at. You're supposed to just know what they're getting at and Brian Williams asking them to say exactly define that concept is somehow a breach of protocol. This does nothing to assure me either that these two are not members of that elite class as they defined it -- they are both in favor of restricting if not abolishing abortion rights, for instance, and McCain admits to having lived in their world.

Let's be clear about this. Education is supposed to be a good thing. It's better to be educated than not, right? If so, doesn't that mean that in some sense, educated people are better than uneducated ones? Perhaps not in a moral sense (educated people can do immoral things and seem to do so at about the same rate as people without the benefit of education) or in the sense of their votes being worth more than others. But when you are talking about engineering with people, the one who holds a college degree in physics ought to be afforded more authority than the one whose highest educational achievement is a high school diploma. The other person can, perhaps by way of experience, achieve a position of some authority in that conversation, but the presumption is the one with education is in a better position to discuss the subject than the one who lacks it.

One of the reasons that conservative culture warriors are vulnerable to this criticism is that so many of the policies they advocate are diametrically opposed to education itself. Which party contains within its big tent people who do the following:

1. Object to teaching evolution in biology class and demand that creationism be taught as the intellectual equivalent of evolution.
2. Advocate preventing schools from educating children about sexually-transmitted diseases and where babies come from, and oppose giving teenagers access to condoms, the only means known to effectively reduce teen pregnancy and transmission of STDs.
3. Cry bloody murder at anyone who comes in contact with kids even acknowledging the existence of gay people in anything other than terms of moral condemnation.
4. Object to medical research projects on grounds of religiously-informed morality.
5. Position themselves as the victims of ideological indoctrination in higher education because, surprise, most college professors hold political views opposed to their own.
6. Seek to gain political points by mocking scientific research.

Not convinced that Republicans do that last one? Check out this speech from darling-of-the-social-right Sarah Palin (warning, video in link starts automatically):

...Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That's more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good -- things like fruit fly research in Paris, France, I kid you not, or a public policy center named for the guy who got the earmark. In our administration, we're going to reform and refocus. We're going to get our federal priorities straight, and fulfill our country's commitment to give every child opportunity and hope in life.

The money part of the quote I've highlighted, but I include the rest so that her statement can be understood in context. The phrase not in the prepared remarks that she threw in to her actual delivery ("I kid you not") indicates that she was trying to score a political point -- a political point that could only be gained by lampooning the research. "I kid you not" was her way of slam-dunking that basket.

Ironically, that same fruit fly research that Gov. Palin lampoons benefits the very subject that she was advocating for increasing funding for, and a subject that is honestly very close to her home -- helping out kids with autism and preventing autism from happening. But such a link does exist. Genetic research, performed on fruit flies, has produced advances in the treatment and prevention of autism.

Now, the idea that Gov. Palin, herself the mother of an autistic child, should want to de-fund scientific research in that field, is unimaginable. I can only reconcile her speech with the science by concluding that she is ignorant. This is not unimaginable -- indeed, it is exactly the sort of thing that we would expect from someone who is neither aware of nor particularly interested in the subject to begin with. Someone who lacks intellectual curiosity, someone who genuinely does not understand the value of science and sees it as a potential, if not actual, enemy. The result is that the feeling of antagonism between social conservatives and scientists is mutual. Maybe by demonstrating a healthy respect for education and science, conservatives would earn the respect of people who do science for a living.

Democrats, too, say really dumb and offensive things to score political points. Democrats often advocate bad policies. But unfortunately for the Republicans, the Democrats lack culture warriors who similarly advocate restricting the scope of education or teaching nonsense or religion and calling it "science." They don't position themselves as enemies of education or science. About as close as Democrats come to this is objecting to scientific research being funded by way of military research. They object to the fruits of scientific research being used to build weapons. This, of course, is stupid and self-destructive as well -- and like the anti-intellectualism on the right that I'm complaining about today, it only applies to a particular breed of Democrat.

But by pushing an anti-elite kind of populism, this breed of Republicans have also made themselves anti-intellectual. And the rank-and-file members of this wing of the party have embraced that concept with gusto. Adherence to the party line and an arbitrary set of values pushed by the religious right are the coin of their realm. Some Republicans would pick this path as the one that leads to electoral success. I think it can only do harm to the party and the country.

Speaking of Jack Kemp

A commenter spoke warmly of Jack Kemp. That got me thinking about what Secretary Kemp was thinking about the state of the party. So, here’s some comments of his on conservative-friendly Fox News, from way back in March:

Notice how:

1. Kemp correctly predicts that McCain’s age as a detriment to his candidacy would be largely counteracted by his vigor and his sense of humor. That has largely proven true.

2. Kemp correctly predicted that McCain would need a young governor to serve as his running mate. That has largely proven true.

3. Kemp chastised Sean Hannity for ad hominem attacks on Barack Obama, and calls for a searching analysis of Obama’s economic and military policies instead. Had Hannity and his ilk listened to Kemp, we Republicans might not be fighting to hold on to Indiana right about now.

We need more guys like Kemp around. He's a class act and he still has the ability to project an optimistic, credible vision of what an America with conservative principles behind its government can be.

It’s too bad Kemp blew his credibility in 1996, selling out a lot of what made him special and worthwhile to be Bob Dole’s running mate. And that Kemp is now 72 years old and in not quite as good shape as McCain. Kemp would be a great figurehead for the Republican reform movement.

The 86% Endorsement

I hadn't planned on making a candidate endorsement. But I think at this point, it's what's needed.

Now, bear in mind that I've been a pretty loyal Republican for most of my life. I've in the past held my nose and voted for social conservatives and religious extremists because they are the party's nominee. I voted for Bob Dole, for crying out loud (I liked his running mate very much and wished that he were the nominee).

But I didn't vote Republican in 2004. I voted libertarian. Not because I expected Badnarik to win; rather, I did it because I couldn't bring myself to vote for John Kerry and George W. Bush had completely lost my confidence. As I've argued many times, a President who proposes record-setting deficits, starts wars with other nations even if they're headed up by really nasty characters, makes only token tax cuts, enthusiastically expands social welfare programs, systematically and intentionally sets out to circumvent the Constitution, subsidizes religion, and treats the individual rights of American citizens as obstacles to pursuit of his desired policies is not a real conservative the way I had been brought up to understand the meaning of that term. One, maybe one and a half of those sins, I could forgive. But not the whole package. If a Democrat had been doing those things, I'd have been screaming bloody murder. So why should a Republican get a pass? Thus, I voted libertarian in 2004 to protest what seemed like a sell-out of most of the ideals for government that I held dear from the party that I had trusted to promote them.

And Bush has relentlessly promoted a cultural view of the world that blends religiosity, patriotism, and uncritical obedience to government. To criticize the government's abridgment is to intentionally weaken the country, at least in the Bush world view. To exclude religion from the public square is to advocate Islamic extremism. Our rights come from God and therefore it is our patriotic duty to abridge them in the name of God. This is all patent nonsense, but it has been to Bush's political profit to conflate these ideas and encourage people to thoughtlessly accept and indeed promote this sort of thing. I'm no longer sure if Bush actually believes it or not, and I'm certain that most of the Bushmen, up to and including Vice President Cheney, see it only as a political convenience that they do not personally buy into.

The result has been a culture, and in particular a Republican Party, in which intolerance and prejudice are exploited for short-term political gain, and when even the party's nominee for President calls for a very moderate amount of respect to be given to his counterpart, he must endure boos from the sorts of people who should be cheering and applauding his classiness. I do not want to see the Republicans become a party of born-again boors, bumpkins and bigots.

Bush is stepping down from power in ninety-two days. Not a moment too soon, and whatever way the election does go, it will be an improvement. But how should the election go?

One way one can approach a vote is to ask oneself, "If I knew in advance that the election would be an exact tie, and mine would be the deciding vote, what would I do?" My endorsement today is not made from that perspective.

My endorsement is made from the place of recognizing the political reality that Barack Obama is going to win this election, and by a healthy margin in the Electoral College. It is also made from the place of recognizing that the state in which I live, California, is going to vote for Obama in a decisive margin. And indeed, if you do not live in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, or Virginia, the chances of your vote mattering at all are infinitesimally small because forty-three of the fifty states are either solidly blue or solidly red. So my endorsement does not (necessarily) apply to citizens of those states.

My motivation for endorsing as I do is in order to make things better for the future. My endorsement is calculated to encourage a good dialogue about what policies the government should pursue and to encourage both parties to start crafting laws that are about more than political survival.

Now, Barack Obama inspires a lot of hope and will certainly try to push for changes in the way the government does business, in a way that John McCain will not. But we just plain can't afford the agenda that, even now, he still is relentlessly pushing on the campaign trail. We are ten trillion dollars in the hole, people, and that trend needs to reverse itself. Expanding healthcare, overfunding the Department of Education, and cutting taxes is not going to do that.

And John McCain is an unalloyed American hero. I would hope that in circumstances half as exigent as the ones he found himself in, I'd have half the stones he did. I admire at least the motives of his efforts to fight corruption in politics and his political history suggests that he would at least want to be a budget hawk. He is a true-blue expert on matters of military and foreign policy and America would be strong under his guidance. But he has not campaigned on those issues; his platform instead suggests that his priorities will be spending more money on war veterans (while not inherently a bad thing, it is still expensive) and despite being made of the right stuff, he has time and again failed to step up to take leadership of his party. There are also concerns I have that he is ill-tempered to the point that it obstructs his political effectiveness, and he would be our oldest President ever, and a cancer survivor, and actuarially has about a one in five chance of dying in office, leaving us with the worrisome possibility of a Palin Administration. This dude, for one, cannot abide.

That is why I am endorsing Bob Barr for President.

Now, of all the weirdness associated with libertarians -- a return to the gold standard, withdrawal from the United Nations, repeal of anti-discrimination laws -- the fundamental political philosophy underlying modern libertarian thought remains the bedrock of my principles about politics and government. We are obviously in a day and an age in which an Ayn Rand-style utopian anarchy is neither desirable nor achievable.

But the idea of a pared-down government is within our grasp, if only we are willing to pursue it. Social Security may be a permanent fixture of our governmental landscape, but that doesn't mean that we can't impose a means test on it or restructure eligibility rules, particularly for younger workers claiming physical disabilities in a society that employs two-thirds of its workers in white-collar jobs. We can't abdicate our role as a leading military and economic power in the world, but we can certainly adopt policies that encourage free trade and judicious restraint in the use of our military overseas -- and repudiate a policy that overtly arrogates to ourselves the right to conduct first strikes on other nations just because they creep us out. (I'm not suggesting that we don't actually reserve the right to do that, just that we labor more effectively at finding a pretext for launching a war when we need to do it.)

So I have to go a different way. I endorse Bob Barr, former Congressman from Georgia, and the libertarian candidate for President. He hasn't a prayer of a chance of winning, anywhere.

He understands the economy and the role of the government in it. And he doesn't want the government to inject itself any further into the gigantic clusterf--k that our economy has become:

This interview demonstrates that Barr understands the role of the government in regulating the economy and is not an off-his-rocker absolute free-marketer. He is, in other words, a realist libertarian. In that sense, he is like a bunch of other types, many of whom worked hard and with remarkable enthusiasm, who worked for Ron Paul in the primaries. He brings a Mitt Romney-like confidence and experience to domestic issues born of familiarity with them from his experiences in Congress -- without the plasticity of political belief structure that rendered Romney so toxic in my mind. And Barr demonstrates an intelligent humanity and empathy that made Mike Huckabee such a beguiling figure, without advocating the idea that early man hunted dinosaurs in the 2,000-year-old Earth.

The rest of the Barr platform is a palatable, realistic kind of libertarian view of what government should do. Barr proposes scaling back, rather than abolishing, social welfare programs that are expensive, wasteful, and ultimately do not provide much by way of the social welfare they are supposed to promote anyway. He takes civil rights seriously. And by that, I mean all of our civil rights. He would scale back foreign deployment of the military a little more than I would like, but no candidate is perfect

What I like best about Barr is that his service as a Republican Congressman has given him the ability to temper the always-go-to-the-extreme idealism of the Randies and other libertarians who insist on blunt, absolute ideals. What he proposes to do are things that are actually workable and would not cause social and economic chaos during the transaition, and would leave the fundamentally strong parts of the nation and its economy in place. And of course, he still would have a Congress of mostly Democrats and some social conservatives to work with. But he gets that.

Now, if you're in a battleground state, I'll still suggest you take a closer look at McCain despite his flaws and the horrors threatened by a Palin Presidency. As cool as Obama seems, and as much as you might want change, Obama promises Change We Can't Afford. But for most of you, I urge you to vote for a realist libertarian. Some of you in the battleground states may want to consider an "L" vote anyway, especially as things change.

What good will this do, given that 43 of the 50 states are heavily for either the Republican or the Democrat?

What it will do is demonstrate that a sizeable number of people are, like me, upset with the way things are going and the choices they have been offered. It will demonstrate that they want to see the government stick to its knitting of providing for our common defense and providing a baseline for justice and individual rights enforcement, and not take ever-larger chunks of money from us in taxes to be spent on interest for debt incurred back in the days when Elvis was alive.

This is what third parties do in America. They float ideas and demonstrate the popularity of them. Then, one or the other party figures out how to co-opt those ideas and the third party pretty much goes away. A significant number of libertarian votes will incent political leaders in the two major parties to figure out what it is that attracted people to vote for Barr and tailor their future platforms to bring them into the fold. In particular, the Republicans need to do this.

It will remind the social conservatives that they can't do it on their own. They have the willing volunteers and plenty of money, but not enough numbers to win votes -- which are in the end what matter -- without reaching out to other groups of people with different agendas and finding a common cause with them.

In the future, we will observe that John McCain's problem was not that he wasn't socially conservative enough. He's been pro-life all his political career. He's anti-gay marriage. He attends an evangelical Baptist church. He's a lifetime member of the NRA. He's in favor of school vouchers. He promises to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate. He did and said all the right things to make common cause with social conservatives, and after the Palin selection, they embraced him.

No, the real problem with McCain, we will say, was that he never had a clue about the economy. He got hit with a perfect storm of the most massive economic crisis in two, maybe three generations, having to follow in the footsteps of a Republican President who raised the deficit to unprecedented and alarming levels pursuing ill-concieved foreign adventures, and serving as a Republican in a Congress that made itself famous for doling out more pork than Democrats under Tip O'Neill would have been willing to admit even existed (and, I might add, failing to exhibit enough leadership within that body to restrain his colleagues from their porcine gluttony at this expensive trough). If McCain really understood what to do about the economy, if he had stood up to the bailout and opposed the stimulus packages, he could have garnered a lot of political support and maybe even pulled out a win against a remarkably skilled opponent.

No Republican in any credible position to move into power over the next cycle can respond to this without making overtures to the libertarian, small-government, balanced-budget, sorts of Republicans who care about the economy first and all that stupid social shit far lower on the priority list. Indeed, most the likely candidates for leadership coalescence in the future -- Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal -- are all novices, at best, on economic issues. Mitt Romney might be in a position of some credibility on the issue of economic management skill, but he has no credibility on anything else and, let's face it, he doesn't need the hassle and the humiliation of running again.

That's why I say, vote Libertarian in 2008. Even though Barr has a silly thin mustache. It will make for a better Republican Party, and a better America, in 2012.

Might As Well Face It, You're Addicted To Stims

When you have too many stimulants, you start to make mistakes. It weighs you down. You become a danger to yourself and others. Like your children and your grandchildren, whose futures you are spending now to mitigate the effects of a recession that may last "several quarters."

We tried stimulating the economy before. We tried it before things got bad. It didn't work worth a damn. But it devalued our currency and added more than $150 billion to our national debt. It is the height of irresponsibility to do it more. Yet that is what responsible adults with advanced degrees and positions of high public trust are suggesting we do again -- right now.

John McCain is in an interesting position. He can say or do whatever he wants and has a national stage for doing it. His only reliable and long-held position on the economy is as a budget hawk, an opponent of wasteful deficit spending. Now is his time to stand up and say, without any practical consequence, that this is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. I wish he would.

I wish he'd rein in his running mate on the issue of federalism, while we're at it. And offer her a dose of reality -- religion has not been mocked in this campaign season. Every candidate I can think of has gone out of their way to suck up to religious voters. But mainly, I wish he would stick to his guns and his principles and do what is in his power to give the Republican party some credibility on the issue of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.

It's no longer about the 2008 election. It's about what the Republican Party will stand for in 2010, 2012, and after that. By remaining silent on spending a lot of money we don't have to do something we know won't work to solve a problem that can't be solved that way, and at the same time allowing his surrogate attack dog to suggest that we should enshrine discrimination in the Federal Constitution, John McCain is abdicating the responsibility to lead his party and his country to a better tomorrow.

Shame on you, Senator. I expected better of you.

Sarah Palin's Real America

By now, if you're still following news from the Presidential campaign, you've come across the two-day-old trope of pouncing on Sarah Palin for differentiating "pro-America" parts of the country from other areas. Compounding it was another remark, which I'm not even sure that she actually made, that allegedly distinguished "real" America from other places within the geographic limits of the United States that are somehow not "real" America.

I. Deconstruction

The thing of it is, a lot of people claim to know what this odd remark "really" means. It means a place where people vote Republican. It means a place where people are mostly white. It means a place were people are mostly Christian. It means a place that is not heavily urbanized. It means a place where people listen to country music. It means a place where people identify their ethnic background as "American." It means a place where people fly the American flag from the front of their house and otherwise engage in visible displays of patriotism. It means all of these things, or only some of them, or maybe it means something else.

Well, I'm not sure that it really means much of anything. Or at least, it's ambiguous enough that you can read into it what you want it to mean. Actually, this off-the-cuff remark presents a wonderful opportunity for Derrida-like deconstructivism.

Because it's not quite accurate to say that the phrase means what you want it to mean. It's much closer to the mark to say that it means what you want Gov. Palin to have meant when she said it.

If you want to think that Palin is a patriot, then you'll read into it that "real" America is a place where people are overtly patriotic as demonstrated by displays of and reverence for the flag. Being "pro-America" means being overtly patriotic here.

If you want to think that Palin is a racist, then you'll read into it that "real" America is a place populated by white people; they may or may not be tolerant of ethnic minorities in their midst, but "real" America is dominated by whites.

If you want to think that Palin is prejudiced against non-Christians, then you'll read into it that "real" America is a place populated by churchgoing protestants and evangelicals. Questionable, but probably more likely than not, whether Catholics and Jews count as "real" Americans, but quite likely that Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists do not count as "real" Americans.

If you want to think that Palin is trying to drum up the rural vote, then you'll read into it that "real" America is a place where people drive pickup trucks, own shotguns and maybe hunt on a regular basis, listen to country music, own acerage and livestock, and do not place a lot of importance on higher education as compared with other virtues like work ethic or self-reliance. Which dovetails into another ridiculous concept I've seen floating about recently, which is that Republicans have become deliberately anti-intellectual.

You can read into it whatever you want. If you're inclined to think favorably of Palin, then she was saying something nice about the areas she was in, and was silent about other places. If you're inclined to think unfavorably of her, then she was taking a swipe at someone or something and you are likely on the receiving end of that swipe.

In any event, what you think a remark as broad and ambiguous as this one means is at least as telling about you as it is about Palin herself.

II. But You Came Here Because You Care About My Opinion

What, then, do I think Gov. Palin was really trying to get at? (In other words, when I hold up the mirror of deconstruction to myself, what do I think of Palin?) I don't think she gave it a whole lot of thought, really. I think she's smart, but she hasn't been picked for this role because of her smarts. She's been picked for the role because of her ability to fulfill a function -- specifically, that of rallying the base of Republican voters. To do that, she has to be evangelical, proudly socially conservative, and the fact that compared to most other politicians she is young and attractive doesn't hurt either.

So I think that when she said "pro-America," she came pretty close to what was described on this week's SNL skit with Tina Fey -- the one in which the real Sarah Palin actually played a midly amusing part -- in which it was implied that to be "pro-America" means in her mind "votes Republican." I think she's guilty of the same kind of lazy thinking -- a deliberate oversimplification of issues, gross generalization and amalgamation of groups, and conflation of symbols -- that makes Ann Coulter books sell. Even if Palin is mentally disciplined enough to avoid that kind of thought herself (I've seen no evidence of that, which is not the same thing as saying she is unintelligent) she has the job of appealing to the sort of people who buy Ann Coulter books and listen to a lot of repetitive right-wing affirmance on talk radio.

Now, the American left-of-center crowd also possesses large numbers of people guilty of lazy thinking, conflation of symbols, over-generalization, and seemingly intentional inability to concede even good faith or good intentions to the opposition. Make no mistake whatsoever about that! But Palin's job is not to appeal to those people, her job is not to convince them to change their way of thinking. Her job is to use them as rhetorical foils so that the Republican base turns out to vote. Implying that such folks are "anti-American" is a rhetorical excess of fulfilling that function in the campaign.

So I think she made an unthinking, offhand remark. I don't think she attributed much meaning to it at all. She said it because it sounded good and it seemed like a good way to pump up the crowd she was talking to. I don't think she even wanted to imply that other people were somehow "anti-American" because I don't think she thought it through that far.

But that can't be the end of the analysis. Because even if she didn't intend her remarks that way, some people have reacted to them that way.

III. The Big Picture

Palin's remarks should be seen in that light -- an indulgence in rhetorical excess. It doesn't matter what she "really" meant because I think she didn't really think about the remark at all. What she really meant is not all that important because it does not appear likely at all that she will ever hold national office.*

But it does matter how she is understood.

The problem I have with the remark of "real" Americanism being conflated with partisan loyalty is that it is aimed precisely at people who are not going to think critically about the remark. And some of them are the same people who still think Barack Obama is an "Arab" and a Muslim and that he's going to sell us out to the Iranians and who knows what else. He's not, and it's irresponsible to encourage that kind of ignorant nonsense. We don't need to contribute to that kind of social and mental polarization; we already have too much of it.

And protesting that "the Democrats" or "the liberals" or some other group of Others do the same thing -- maybe even worse -- is not a defense. That's a third-grader's retort to a true accusation. It's a speeder who comes in to traffic court and objects to me that "Well, maybe I was driving eighty miles an hour, but this other guy was driving eighty-five." Just plain not a defense.

So yes, it's intellectually lazy, if not intellectually dishonest, of certain left-of-center types to suggest that Republicans want to turn the government into some kind of mechanism for funneling tax dollars to corporate fat cats. But the intellectual laziness or dishonesty of someone on the left is not license for someone on the right to engage in a similar sort of conduct. John McCain's now-famous "No, ma'am" remark should be the model.**

I'm not critical of Palin for saying that some parts of our country are "pro" America and thus implying that others are "anti" America. Like I said before, I think she just has never thought it through. But I am critical of Palin for that lack of thinking it through and instead slipping into the same sort of "us-versus-them" polarization that has tainted American politics.


* We might revisit that issue in 2012, but I think her political fortunes have flamed out for good.

** I do not endorse the title of the linked video, which is both inaccurate and guilty of the same kind of lazy thought that I criticize here. McCain's criticism of Obama and his platform was not then and is not now "fanning the flames" of hatred. But the video provides enough context to see that McCain is trying, hard, to distinguish campainging against someone who advocates a political agenda thought to be ill-advised and viewing one's opponent as less than human or unworthy of respect. McCain can do it, and so should you.

It Begins Again Before It Is Even Over

Why wait for John McCain’s defeat? It’s never too early to start sucking up to those finicky Iowa caucus-goers. So reasons Louisiana Governor Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal. Jindal is headed up to Iowa about three weeks after the general election to speak to a conservative Christian event called “Celebrating the Family” which is sure to provide him with a showcase to explain why he doesn’t like gay marriage, is opposed to abortion rights, and for all intents and purposes launch his campaign for the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

Speculation is that he will be mainly competing for votes with Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. But we’ll see. Someone in Congress will become the right-wing firebrand of opposition to the overwhelming Democratic majority and run from within the Beltway. It’s a long time until things get heated up and there’s a lot of history yet to happen. New faces can and will emerge. And if these are the names that are coming up now, it appears that my hoped-for Republican Reboot is going in exactly the wrong way for me -- these are all people with strong appeal to social and religious conservatives. But again, it's a long time away and no one can confidently predict what will happen -- certainly not at this stage of the game.

But make no mistake. Campaign '12 has begun.

Wait Until The Ninth

Sometimes, you need to wait until the ninth inning before you leave a ballgame.

Last night when we left dinner, I glanced at the TV and saw the Rays ahead, 7-0. I thought, "This thing is over."

Turns out, not so much.

Game six is Saturday and the Sox are playing Beckett. The Rays have their work cut out for them.

(And no, I do not see a political analogy here. John McCain is not like the Boston Red Sox.)

Joe The Plumber

Lots of talk this morning about "Joe The Plumber," an imaginary, "average" American who John McCain started speaking to in the debate last night. Obama picked up the trope and now Joe The Plumber is in every house across this great nation of ours.

Well, thing is, it's hard to find Joe The Plumber in real life. Plumbers, you can find. Getting them to show up on time, now, that may be a different story. A friend at work has this joke -- "How do you become a contractor? Well, the Licensing Board periodically announces the date, time, and place of various exams. If you show up at the right place and the right time, you're disqualified. Showing up at the right place and the right time proves that you're not a real contractor." When he was a contractor his company's slogan was "We Actually Show Up" and they got more business than any of his competitors.

You can find plumbers. And some of them are very well-skilled and in fact a plumber who is good at his job and marketing himself can do quite well. The joke at the bar conventions is that the hotshot trial lawyer gets a stoppage in his toilet, so he calls the plumber. The plumber comes to the lawyer's house and drops a snake in the toilet, and ten minutes later the problem is fixed. Toilet works great. "That'll be $450," the plumber says. "You're kidding!" says the lawyer. "You were here ten minutes and you want $450 for it? I'm a lawyer and I only charge $300 an hour! Ten minutes of my time is only fifty bucks!" "Sure," the plumber says back. "When I still had my law practice, that's what I charged, too."

I digress. It seems that "Joe the Plumber" is a real guy, named Joe Wurzelbacher, who lives in Ohio. It doesn't matter how much you appeal to him; Joe the Plumber (like most Americans) has opted out of the franchise by his failure to register to vote. UPDATE: No, strike, that, apparently he is a registered voter (a Republican), but he's not a licensed plumber. He's discussed buying the plumbing company he works for, and is a single dad raising his 13-year-old son.

Even as figurative a stand-in for the "average American," it's difficult to see what, intellectually, is gained by such an appeal. The average American is hard to define as anything but an obviously nonexistent statistical abstraction -- no one really has 2.7 children. In fact, households like my own with a married couple and no children are the plurality, although the statistically average American has some children.

Now, consider plumbers. The average American is not a plumber. 62.8% of Americans work in an office or some other kind of white-collar capacity. If you add hotel maids, food-service workers and similar low-paying service jobs, that figure rises to an incredible 75.5%. Having hired plumbers in the past, I can assure you that the joke about a lawyer astonished at the fee is true and so it is hard to see how plumbers can be classified as "low-paying" service workers.

"Average" income is an almost useless concept in a country that has sizeable populations of both billionaire hedge fund managers and homeless people living under bridges. "Median" income is a much more interesting number. Now, Joe the Plumber has overhead and stuff, but doing what he does for a living, he's probably clearing fifty grand or more a year, which puts him ahead of the power curve for guys with little, if any, college. That's not to say he doesn't earn it. Plumbers often have to be on-call 24 hours a day and that can interfere with his life, his ability to get sleep or do things with his 2.7 kids.

Finally, what is "average" varies tremendously by location within the U.S. In Arizona, for instance, it would probably be more accurate to talk about Jose the Plumber than Joe the Plumber, and to note that he consumes rougly 15.25 pounds of salsa a year. In Kentucky, what makes Joe average would be his membership in a 200-member Baptist church located within three miles of his house. Boston Joe is defined as "average" by his advocacy for the Celtics and possession of a jealously-guarded street parking permit. Pretty much everywhere, Joe is probably overweight, has a year or so of some kind of school after high school, and it's pretty much up to him to solve his problems rather than his government.

So, Joe the Plumber may well be a typical American, but I don't think he's an "average" American. I'm not sure the "average" American exists. I'm not dense. I understand that by trying to appeal to "average" Americans, the candidates are trying to appeal to large numbers of Americans who identify themselves in one way or another with this concept of "average." But we are a pretty diverse group of people, we Americans, and governing us is a tricker problem than the one that confronted de Gaulle in 1962. Joe the Plumber is a colorful political device, but not a useful tool for figuring out what good policy is.

Why Tonight's Debate Doesn't Matter

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”
-- Winston S. Churchill

Ben Smith at Politico proves Sir Winston right with an astonishing e-mail he got from his buddy, a GOP consultant who was watching some focus group participants explain why they are voting for Obama:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

Wha-a-a-a-a-a?

To think. I’m the one who has to take flak for suggesting that some decisions be made outside of the democratic process. With people exercising their powers of reasoning, nuance, recall, and command of current events like those two, I can’t imagine what I was thinking. These folks can be trusted to make the best decision for all of us. I shouldn’t even bother voting myself.

Anyway, when you’ve got these kinds of sub-average Americans deciding that despite the fact that they know they don’t like and don’t trust Obama, already believe that he was and still is a terrorist, and will turn out to be a bad President, but nevertheless are voting for him because he’s better than any Republican, then that’s yet another sign that it’s time for the guy to take his horse home.