Heartache With Hard Work

Taegan Goddard asks: “Did Obama’s Speech Backfire?”

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: it’s a pretty silly question to be asking at all. Here’s the context:

First Read notes that recent polls showing a sharp drop in President Obama’s approval rate seem to confirm that his speech last week on the national debt “might not have played well.”

This is an Occam’s Razor moment. What’s more likely? Option A, where popularity fluctuates, but mostly is indexed to the state of the economy – which people are very pessimistic about. Or Option B, where speeches watched by almost no one (except for the political class) can somehow drive literally millions of people to change their minds overnight?

People love narrative, and there is absolutely a place for it. But using narrative as an explanatory tool is almost never appropriate.

Presidential speeches may have some role in setting agendas, defining terms of engagement, etc. And those things might well matter for long-term shifts in popularity, or other large political shifts. It is almost inconceivable to think they have a meaningful, direct relationship. And even if it’s true that millions of people changed decided to shift their position on Obama based on him saying vaguely mean things about Republicans in one speech, the only thing it could possibly prove is that voters are idiots when considered en masse.

But that’s not exactly news, is it?

Or, to quote Kevin Drum:

This will probably satisfy no one, but I think the answer is pretty simple. First: the vast, vast majority of independents don’t really have any idea what Obama’s plan to handle the deficit is. They just know that (a) the deficit is high and (b) Obama is president. Beyond that, there are kids to get to school, laundry to be done, bosses to be pleased, and leaky faucets to be fixed. The details of the deficit debate are just a bit of partisan background noise that they haven’t really parsed yet.

Crazy Races – The Dirty Diamonds

This debt ceiling thing is crazy. Virtually everyone agrees it would be total catastrophe to not increase the debt ceiling. I get that it’s a contentious issue given the broader milieu of spending concern and so on. And it’s clearly a political cudgel. The out party has traditionally used the vote to draw a distinction – some enterprising folks vote against the increase in order to make a political point, etc.

Obama himself did this during the Bush administration. It’s stupid, but it’s just part of politics. I get all that.

And maybe that’s all that will end up happening here. The flames will rise a little higher because of the specific context, but ultimately it will stay fully constrained. The Democrats in the House will get a reasonable number of Republicans who will provide cover to their more angry colleagues, and all the sturm und drang will turn out to have been mere show. That’s quite possible. I hope that’s what happens.

I’m worried, though, that Boehner will be forced to hew to the line imposed by the more vigorous wing of the Party, and will simply refuse to allow a vote on the debt ceiling without serious concessions.

The question, of course, is why there must be concessions in order to pass something that virtually everyone agrees is 100% necessary. It would be the equivalent of demanding concessions from your fellow passengers to not drive directly into a brick wall. Sure, they don’t want to die, but presumably you don’t either. The language of ‘concessions’ usually implies deal-making and compromise, where in order to get one thing you make a concession on another. In this case, everyone already agrees on the appropriate policy.

The troublesome thing is that I do see the Republicans as more willing to drive into this particular brick wall. But even that isn’t quite right. ‘Willing’ implies some clear decisive agency. And I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. The problem is that the Republicans are extremely divided, in a way that makes crisis more likely. For one subset of them (and a reasonably hefty one) the prospect of debt default is just not that scary. The potential gains to be had for their specific agenda MATTERS to them more than the consequences. Even further, the political costs of potentially being portrayed as endangering the economy for their particular goals don’t seem to scare them very much.

It’s a deadly mix. I think it’s almost certainly a winning position for the Democrats to simply hold the line and say: “look, we all know the debt ceiling must be raised. It’s not a partisan issue. We just need to do it. If you want to get your other agenda, feel free to bring it up independently and we can debate it.” But what if I’m wrong? Or, even if it is a winning issue in itself, what if the Republican base is really willing to shoot the country in the foot to make their point? A winning political issue combined with serious economic damage to the nation is a) bad for Obama’s political chances – the president gets the blame for a bad economy even if it’s not his fault and b) terrible for the nation.

The game theory is icky here, because Obama and the Dems can’t really anticipate dealing with a rational decision-maker. Boehner on his own would be fine in this case. But Boehner is representing a schizophrenic caucus.

It’s an unfortunate truth that when you’re bargaining with the potentially crazy, it’s far less risky to simply cave a little bit, give them some of what they want, even if it makes no actual sense.

I fear that is what is going to happen.

Heavier Than Heavy – The Natural Shocks

This is some fun music for a sunny Northern California afternoon.  Which unfortunately is not exactly what we’ve got going on here.  Still, listening to this little romp is almost enough to drive away the cloud cover and warm everything up.

It also makes me tremendously nostalgic for the mid 90s, when the world seemed stuffed with guitar bands happy to make simple power pop song. Bands with no care for the arch-irony that seems stuck with such projects in this more cynical age of hipsterdom.  Witness the little guitar bit that starts at about 1:20.  Sheer joy, without the slightest hint of artifice.

RIYL: Sebadoh, Teenage Fanclub, Sloan, etc.

The Natural Shocks are an indie band out of Toronto, who will be releasing their debut record Complete With Comfortable Lighting on June 9th.

1. Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they should have done already.

2. Cap and trade for carbon emissions with auctioned permits.  Recycle about 2/3 of the revenue back to help low-income people deal with cost increases, and to fund transition technologies.  Put the other 1/3 of revenue into the general fund.

3. Single-payer health care

4. Don’t start any NEW wars, and seriously limit our involvement in our current (4) wars.  Also, massive cuts to military spending.

Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t involve screwing over poor people, or giving big new tax cuts to rich people, so there’s no chance it will be called “courageous.”

Shine (feat. Cate Ferris) – Nordic Giants

There are certain words that you reach for when trying to write about music. I’m not entirely sure they MEAN anything – but they are suitably evocative. They communicate the feeling of listening, if not anything substantive. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I use them, because I don’t want to believe that I’m just writing nonsense.

In the case of “Shine” the word I can’t help but use is ‘liquid.’ The instrumentation is sparse, like the very lightest sort of rain. And the vocal performance from Cate Ferris moves with an suppleness that seems impossible to picture in solid form.

The first four minutes are beautiful, the final minute is epic. The whole thing is wonderful. The band is Nordic Giants – and a h/t to Knox Road for turning me on to them.

I Can Make The Pain Disappear – Fear of Tigers

A very strange post from Pema Levy at The American Prospect.  The premise is that states are attempting to challenge Roe v. Wade with a lot of niggly abortion regulations, to slowly ratchet up legitimate restrictions in the hope of developing a long-term rollback of Roe.  So far, there’s nothing weird about that point.  It’s a very real, and very problematic feature of the contemporary reproductive rights debate.

The peculiar part is Levy’s particular beef with a bill in Minnesota that seeks to bad abortion at 20 weeks because that’s when the fetus theoretically starts to be able to feel pain.  Levy: “what is perhaps so extraordinary is the assertion that physical pain is something a legislature should try to prevent.”  She then goes on to say “Spinal taps are excruciating, but they also save lives, as do countless other procedures. Should we ban them? As a doctor, pain shouldn’t play into medical decisions, period. It’s important to make this point.”

This is, quite frankly, ludicrous.  Doctors should have no  interest in reducing pain?  Tell that to millions who suffer from chronic pain who go to their doctor seeking relief.  Tell that to people trying to get marijuana legalized at least as a palliative measure.  Centuries of utilitarian thinking certainly matter here too.  Pain matters quite a bit for making judgments of public policy.

In Levy’s world a doctor should not feel any threat to her Hippocratic Oath if asked to torture someone in a manner that won’t produce any physical harm?  After all, it’s mere pain.

Quality of life matters, and it matters a lot.  Legislatures absolutely should concern themselves with increasing it.  And part of that is curtailing pain.

The problem with Minnesota’s legislation is not that it uses pain as a justification for public policy.  It’s that it uses the theoretical pain suffered by a fetus that is not a person by any existing legal standard as a trump card to overwhelm the pain of the potential mother.  And even if you decided the fetus should have legal standing as a person, you can still accept that legislatures should work to reduce pain without believing that the proper mechanism is to coercively regulate the bodies of women.

Intervention – Arcade Fire (live on KCRW)

People really love (for other people) to fight wars. Even people who are otherwise strongly committed to liberal or left-wing values. This post from Jonathan Chait is a prime example. He says “I’m mindful of my lack of relevant expertise, but the case for a no-fly zone and arms shipments to the rebels seems more compelling than the case against. It’s the possibility of a disaster against the likelihood of one.”

And then he goes on to say “Second, the Obama administration’s decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan show that it’s obviously not allergic to the use of military force.” This seems like an irrelevant point. Does anyone seriously think that Obama would have initiated these wars had they not already been started when he entered office?

I’m not categorically opposed to the idea of a no fly zone, but let’s not mince words here. If we’ve learned anything from the previous decade it’s that military interventions are never as simple as they seem. And if we learned anything from the PREVIOUS decade it’s that intervening in non-European parts of the world is likely to provoke significant blowback both at home and abroad—often forcing disentanglement on worse terms.

If you want to make the case that Libya is equivalent to Rwanda, it seems like you have quite a steep hill to climb for making that argument.

And even if you think there is a good case for intervention, it is irresponsible in the extreme to ignore the context of OTHER arguments for reform. That is: who are your allies on this issue? What are their objectives? If you both agree on a no fly zone, is it because you see our relationship to Libya, democracy, the Middle East, etc. in exactly the same terms? Presumably not. So if we DO get involved, who is actually going to assert control over the development of that intervention?

I’m willing to be persuaded that we ought impose a no fly zone. But our presumption should be strongly against this premise. Not out of a status quo bias (as Chait assumes) but because the rush to military response has all kinds of hard-to-quantify biases built into it.

I’m much more interested in people taking these points seriously BEFORE military action than I am in heartfelt mea culpas and investigations of what went wrong in the aftermath (c.f. widespread liberal support for the Iraq war). It’s really easy to get caught up in the moment. We owe it to ourselves, to the people of Libya, and to the world at large to remain cognizant of this.

Well, the state of the blog is: steady.  This post promises no significant changes or major events.  It’s really just to say that the new version of the blog–the one where I post irregularly but more than just once or twice a month–is likely to continue as far as I can predict.  And to make a couple smallish announcements:

– The visitor log is inching ever closer to 400,000.  That’s awesome.  Thanks everyone who has stopped by over the years and contributed to that number.  We’ll shoot for 500,000 next. Half a million is a lot of people.

– The blog also passed its fifth birthday a month or so ago, with no fanfare whatsoever.  It’s pretty crazy that this thing I started on a whim back then is still chugging along.

– I’ve finally joined the 21st century and joined the Twitter-craze.  No promises about keeping it up, or having anything particularly interesting to say, but you can follow me @olneyce.

– Newer visitors might not be aware of the only truly interesting thing I’ve done on the blog: rank every Beatles song from worst to first.  Unfortunately, the move from Blogger to WordPress killed all the comments those posts used to have, which makes me sad.  So please, go read, and yell at me for putting your favorite song at #63, or commend me for my brilliance, or tell interesting stories about the songs.

– Still don’t get Radiohead.  The King of Limbs bores me to tears.

– I have, however, really been digging this Phil Ochs cover:

When I’m Gone – Thea Gilmore

No Delay – The 1900s

So, what’s the deal with filibuster-critics and the current Wisconsin stand-off? Presumably people who were angry about obstructionism in the national Congress should be equally critical of these acts, at least if they were espousing genuine principles.

There is something to this. But I want to offer a couple thoughts that insist on a bit more complexity.

The first easy response is: I object to counter-majoritarian elements within legislatures in principle but as long as they exist I’m not willing to unilaterally disarm. This is obviously a self-serving argument, but I don’t think that renders it completely invalid. It is quite possible to be hypocritical at the level of particularity but still retain credibility at the larger scale. The ‘disarmament’ metaphor is perhaps apt here. A truly genuine commitment perhaps should insist on unilateral disarmament but standard practice is to accept that the principle may be sound but the means for reaching it must be more circumspect.

Still, if that was the only argument here, I wouldn’t find it tremendously persuasive. It’s very easy to criticize and even more easy to fall into the same habits once they serve you personally. But it’s very difficult to walk the line of exploiting while remaining critical.

Fortunately, there’s another reason to see a serious difference here. Most people concerned about the filibuster are MUCH more concerned about the routine ease of its use than they are absolutists about the principle of pure majority rule. The principle that Congress ought to have the capacity to gum up the works in extreme cases is reasonably defensible.

An institutionalized filibuster puts zero burden on the party conducting it. It’s up to the other side to either round up 60 votes, or simply move on.

The case in Wisconsin is different. The Democrats have to pay a serious cost. They are shutting down the entire operation of government on spending issues, and are removing themselves from non-spending issues. This is not something they could duplicate on any old piece of legislation. It must be reserved for issues where forcing delay has a genuine purpose. In this case, they thought the public would rally behind them if they had a chance to raise the issue to a significant level of discussion. It seems like they might have been right.

But if the public had, after a week or so, clearly supported the bill they would have absolutely destroyed their own credibility if had they continued to hold out.

There is no definitive right answer to how much power a minority (or what size minority should be required) to block the normal function of majority rule. But if you’re trying to justify a standard, what’s happening in Wisconsin is MUCH easier to defend than the Senate’s filibuster rules.

If you want to find a way to lock down future applications of fleeing to block quorum calls, you might simply impose a rule that the number of people necessary to make quorum should decline after a set period of time. Say, a month?

I certainly don’t think that the Wisconsin 14 should stay away indefinitely, nor that they should employ this tactic with any kind of regularity. But I really have very little concern that this will actually happen. The costs are simply too high. Again, not personal costs (having to live out of state for a while! oh noes!), but institutional and electoral ones (inability to pass other, good laws and the likely growing voter backlash at over-application of the tool).

A Telegram From the Future – The Russian Futurists

The question is posed: who will still be famous in 10,000 years? This intrigues me.

The major caveat is that 10,000 years is just an insane amount of time. That’s basically equivalent to the entirety of human civilization so far. Thinking that far ahead is like trying to guess who will be president in 2196. It’s not just that you can’t possibly know who will be around at that point–you can’t even been sure the US will exist or that it will still have ‘presidents.’ So we’ll just have to assume that aliens don’t kill us, or that the singularity doesn’t vault us into a higher dimension, or that we don’t go all Canticle for Leibowitz on each other.

With that said, I think there are a few solid answers. The religious folks: Jesus, Muhammad. Abraham, if we consider the historical Abraham to have genuinely existed. Buddha. Confucius has lasted 2500 years so I don’t see why he couldn’t go another 10,000.

I’d like to believe some art will survive. Shakespeare, for one. Homer, perhaps. Though Homer isn’t necessarily a ‘person.’ You’d have to imagine that people will still be keen on philosophy (10,000 years doesn’t seem like long enough to have answered any of those questions) so Plato will surely still be around. The Beatles? I’d have to say yes – though perhaps in this form only.

Who else?