Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Why Obama let Lieberman go

by

A lot of people are upset that the Democrats didn’t go all vindictive on Joe Lieberman and boot him from his committee chairmanship. I have no love for Lieberman and detest his choice to stump for the Republicans this year. But I think I understand what Barack Obama was up to in pushing the Senate Democrats to bury the hatchet.

Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles. But I think Obama meant it, and means it, and means to see what happens when a president actually tries to deliver on that promise. While removing Joe Lieberman from his post might satisfy many an activist’s sense of justice, it won’t move us any closer to fixing the economy, reforming healthcare, or reversing the Bush Administration’s destruction of our functioning government. Whereas holding on to Lieberman’s vote in the Senate might.

In other words, settling scores is, and ought to be, a lower priority than delivering on a big policy agenda. If Obama can achieve that — and anyone who defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won the White House as a black candidate knows something about achieving tough goals — then the scores will have a way of settling themselves.

“One voice can change a room”

by

I guess I’m going through campaign withdrawal, but stumbling on this clip from the end of the campaign (via Mark Bernstein) got me all teary. In four minutes, a perfect oratorical arc, from relaxed storytelling to “Fired up! Ready to go!” With the disasters we face, we’re going to need this sort of inspiration.

“One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

Can we retire the “echo chamber” now?

by

There’s so much to reassess today. Here’s one relatively small — but to me, interesting — thing.

For the past eight years, beginning with the Florida recount and ending with Sarah Palin’s last-ditch culture war, we’ve heard about the intense partisanship of the divide between red and blue. And one common idea about that divide has been the notion that the Web has helped create it, with its “echo chamber” effect. We have become a nation of “confirmation bias” addicts; we only read what we already agree with; we construct our own reality according to our close-minded beliefs. And that is why America is so angry, so split, so impossible to govern.

If that were true, then how did the most Web-enabled presidential campaign in history lead to such an overwhelming, incontestible outcome?

We’ve now had an election that was — whether you choose to call it a “landslide” or not (I do) — not close at all. We had “rednecks for Obama” and “Obamacon” neoconservatives for Obama and Republican loyalists looking up in the voting booth and saying to themselves, “Oh my god, I’m voting for Obama.” We had the most potentially divisive candidacy in our lifetime — an African American liberal from an urban Northern state running on a peace platform! — produce a victory that was won with an almost shocking degree of calm and respect.

Obama himself and his campaign deserves most of the credit for this, of course. But perhaps we can also reserve a little mental space for a reevaluation of our assumptions about the role the Web plays in our political discourse.

It hasn’t been my practice to post writing from my new book here (it’s just a fuzzy draft right now!), but this is a short passage from a discussion about the “echo chamber” argument that I think is pertinent:

Yes, American politics had grown bitterly polarized in the 2000s. But were the angry arguments on the Web the cause of those divisions? More likely, they simply mirrored profound disagreements among the American people about the impeachment of President Clinton, the contested outcome of the 2000 election, the Bush administration’s tactics in its war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq. What kind of media environment that accurately represented the political pysche of the American population would not bristle with rancor under the pressure of such events?

Today, we have at least an opportunity to begin to reduce that rancor and rebuild a national consensus. We have the first president in ages who can legitimately claim a mandate and work with a Congress of his own party. And I think we will see that the Web has a part to play in fashioning such a consensus. It doesn’t have to be a force for division; using it as such is a choice, not a technologically determined inevitability.

Election-night exorcism: the bogeymen that didn’t bark

by

Okay, we can all exhale now.

For all the Democrats who have spent the last several months not daring to get too overconfident, fearful of some last-minute dirty trick, worrying despite all the evidence that some Karl Rovian demon would spring out of the darkness of the national psyche to trip up our candidate: It’s time to let all that go.

Over the last few weeks, I collected a few links for this moment, which I was confident all along we would arrive at — mementos of naysaying that deserve one last snort before we despatch them to the Web scrapheap.

Here, for instance, is a strange post from the Asia Times by “Spengler”: “McCain will win in November, and by a landslide.”

There was also that refrain of concern that Obama was “not a closer” — first outlined by doubters during the primary season, more recently propounded by Karl Rove to spook the Democrats.

Even more insidious was a high-flown piece by Lee Siegel (of sockpuppetry fame) in the Wall Street Journal, which sang the praises of “the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy” in the wake of the Palin nomination, under a headline touting the “edge” that “Sarah Palin and the Republicans” had this fall. Siegel also threw in a gratuitous sneer at Obama’s name (“like having a Democratic candidate for president named Pruschev at the height of the Cold War”).

In the Boston Phoenix, my haunt in the ’80s, Steven Stark spun out the masochistic scenario of a last-minute Truman-like turnaround for McCain.

We can put all that behind us now. There, I feel better.

Obama on the verge

by

I wrote about why I supported Obama back in February. It seems like eons ago. For me the choice between Obama and McCain is far simpler than the one between Obama and Hillary Clinton was. But the four arguments for Obama that I offered six months ago all still hold:

Pressing the reset button internationally — We need a president who can start over with the rest of the world. It’s obvious.

The “Muslim factor” — the lies about Obama’s religion are a pathetic effort to sway the ignorant. But Obama does have a different understanding of the world thanks to having spent some time as a kid in Indonesia. It will help the U.S. to have a president who actually knows something about Islam.

Electability — “Rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way,” I wrote in February. Tomorrow we’ll know whether that proves out, as all indications suggest it will.

Positive vibration — “It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud.” Though the race certainly got tougher on all sides, I think that judgment still holds. To the extent that Obama has campaigned negatively, he has taken aim largely against the failed policies and record of the GOP, not against the person of John McCain. Like many Democrats, I worried back then whether Obama was “ready to rumble” when the Rovian attacks kicked in. But we were wrong. Obama and his team understood that the sharp counterattacks that please his partisans turn off voters in the undecided middle. He kept his eyes steadily on that prize. It has paid off beautifully in the last six weeks, when he could say, accurately, that he’s talked nonstop about the economy while McCain has talked nonstop about…him.

To these arguments, we can now add one more crucial one that has emerged: the even keel.

People are scared, and have been since the market meltdown in mid-September. They want to elect a president who looks like he’s able to figure out an effective strategy to revive the economy and then apply a steady hand in executing it. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Obama can see such qualities in the way he has run his campaign. McCain’s strategy of the week approach, by contrast, feels erratic and opportunistic. (And that’s not even bringing up Sarah Palin.)

The campaign started with McCain as the choice of voters seeking steadiness and reassurance and Obama looking like something of a gamble on the unknown. But we ended the campaign with the two exactly reversed. Of course other factors have been vital: the Obama campaign’s passionate organizing on the ground, the intelligence and heart of the candidate’s speeches, the astonishingly effective online fundraising from small donors, and the determination to contest the election beyond the old red/blue state lines.

But in the end, I believe Obama will win tomorrow because he is the candidate who has earned voters’ trust: trust that he can begin to solve the nation’s myriad problems; trust that he can begin to unwind the Bush legacy; trust that he can handle whatever comes up.

He is the unlikeliest candidate ever, and he had to go a lot further to earn that trust than his opponent. He has amazed us all by going even further than we dreamed.

Noonan: maybe economic crisis will “fade”

by

New Yorker writer (and blogger) George Packer’s series of “end of an era” posts — he begins here, and follows up in three subsequent posts (as of now) — puts a clear and explicit name to the twin convulsion the United States is going through.

Over the past month we have seen the collapse of an entire economic philosophy that has driven our nation for decades. In parallel to this ideological failure, we are experiencing the political failure of the Republican right that has dominated American politics since 1980. These are cataclysmic changes, like nothing we’ve seen in at least 30 years.

Thursday Alan Greenspan sat before Congress and said he had “found a flaw” in his worldview. Indeed! Or as they say in the ‘sphere thes days, EPIC FAIL. It was as if he took a look at the whole foundational edifice of the global economic system he engineered and, morphing into Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, let out a whimpering “Never mind.” Meanwhile, the GOP isn’t waiting for Election Day to begin the customary circular-firing-squad behavior of the losing party, a ritual that most of us under a certain age have only seen executed on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Yet there are holdouts in the punditocracy who don’t seem to have taken full measure of just how much things have changed in the past month. I hate to pick on Peggy Noonan again — hey, some people think she deserves a Pulitzer! But in her column today, headlined “43 percent isn’t nothing,” she engages in precisely the kind of reality-denial that her fans insist she is immune to.

The “43 percent” are the people who are still voting Republican this year. (Time was, not long ago, that the GOP was touted as having built a “permanent majority,” so 43 percent might seem like a real comedown. Then again, President Bush didn’t actually win a majority in 2000, either, did he?) Noonan, ignoring her own candid conclusion six weeks ago that “It’s over,” wants to look at ways McCain might still pull out a victory.

How might McCain still win an upset? Noonan asks, “What if…the financial crisis seems to fade?” (Noonan implies that this is part of an argument in a Boston Phoenix column, but if you read the source, there’s nothing in it about financial crises fading.)

It boggles the mind that any journalist could get such words past a sentient editor. Imagine someone, four weeks after 9/11, asking, “What if the terrorism crisis seems to fade?” Memo to Ms. Noonan: even if the Dow skyrockets next week, the financial crisis isn’t fading any time before November 4. We will be lucky if it has faded before November, 2012. It is a world-historical event. It will be reshaping our economic lives for many years to come, even in the best of scenarios.

Later in her piece, Noonan contemplates the unthinkable — what if Obama does win? — and offers the standard-issue columnist boilerplate advice: he’d better govern from the center! Or else! Then she lets loose this doozy:

if he goes left — if it comes to seem as if the attractive, dark-haired man has torn open his shirt to reveal a huge S, not for Superman but for Socialist, if he jumps toward reforms such as a speech-limiting new Fairness Doctrine, that won’t yield success.

I do believe that we need, not perhaps a new Fairness Doctrine, but a special new Rhetorical Honesty Act — or, I guess, a constitutional amendment, to get the rule past the First Amendment — banning any Republican from trying to spook a Democrat with the “Socialist” label ever again. Because we already have a “socialist” president. His name is George W. Bush, and he is, as I write this, nationalizing the banks and presiding over the greatest expansion of government meddling in private industry that the U.S. has ever seen.

“Stick to the center” is a natural fall-back for the losing party in a presidential election. Winners are free to embrace it or reject it as they choose. I recall that the conservative punditry never offered this advice to George W. Bush in 2000. Once he took office after the most hotly disputed election resolution in American history, he took an unearned “mandate” to radically reshape much of American government and foreign policy.

But if, as seems quite possible, Obama wins a sweep and the Democrats wind up with a strong majority in both houses of Congress, you will hear a loud chorus from the right and center-right press: President Obama, they’ll say, don’t “go left” — you have no mandate. In fact, in that scenario he will indeed have a mandate, and I imagine he will use it. But I also think he will govern toward the center — not because of what Noonan or anyone else says, but because it seems to be his nature.

UPDATE: More “S”: This hysterical piece from Mark Levin at NRO’s The Corner paints Obama as a “hardened ideologue” and “charismatic demagogue” who will wreck America with “the soft authoritarianism of socialism.”

Financial meltdown blame game: Fannie/Freddie or derivatives?

by

The big political argument over the financial meltdown basically goes like this. Democrats point to the rise of incredibly complex financial instruments, in particular the species of derivatives called credit default swaps (CDSes), as ground zero for the disaster. Republicans prefer to point their fingers at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making it too easy for people to get mortgages.

It’s easy to see how these preferences arise. Democrats can argue that CDSes became a problem because the Republican Congress (with limited Democratic help) chose not to regulate them, in keeping with the party’s decades-long deregulation fever. Republicans can argue that subprime mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie became a problem because Democrats pushed to make home ownership more widely available to people who couldn’t really afford it.

These arguments have become a political shorthand, but responsible voters should take some time to sort them out. A couple of places to start: this point-counterpoint style debate between two pundits lays out some of thepolitical faultlines. This news analysis from McClatchy offers some factual background.

My take: Sure, Fannie and Freddie became a big mess, and you can’t let them off the hook. But the subprime mortgages were mostly originated by private banks, not F&F. And if the financial system’s only problem were subprime mortgages, you could simply buy up the worst of them for a few hundred billion and call it a day. That’s not why the banks got into trouble. It was the CDS market that took those mortgages and turned them into something “toxic.” By securitizing the risk involved in the mortgages and transforming it into a market theoretically worth tens of trillions of dollars but actually worth, well, who knows?, the CDS peddlers and purchasers pushed the entire financial world into the unknown. Specifically, they now have no idea what their credit-default swaps are worth.

That is why the banks stopped trusting each other. It’s the uncertainty over how to value these CDSes that seems to have caused the credit freeze that is the heart of today’s crisis. (That’s why Paulson originally wanted a bailout that would buy them — he trhought he could resolve the uncertainty — but that approach apparently proved unworkable.)

The uncertainty over subprime mortgages is old-fashioned and reasonably known: some percent of mortgage holders will pay up, some others won’t. Banks and insurance companies know how to handle that kind of risk. It was the effort to engineer new kinds of securities based on that risk that pushed us over the edge. The CDSes were supposed to reduce risk, and they ended up magnifying it inconceivably instead. And here we are, wishing that someone had had the forethought to regulate this marketplace, instead of keeping hands off, as Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm wanted.

I can’t see how either candidate would be able or willing to go this far into the weeds during tonight’s debate (and it isn’t even that far!). But this is what voters really need to understand.

Obama, McCain: Tortoise, hare

by

When the story of this election gets written, expect to read a lot about how the financial-system implosion gave Obama an unexpected post-GOP-convention boost that turned the dynamic decisively. And of course to an extent that’s undeniable. But this analysis implies that the candidates are mere victims of events. Big Things Happened and there was nothing John McCain could do to recover.

But why, exactly, has it been that the Wall Street meltdown has proved so lethal to McCain’s electoral prospects? Pundits now blithely say that “Democrats are traditionally the party voters turn to on pocketbook issues.” This claim may draw evidence from certain poll questions, but in the history of the past few decades you find the most successful Republican president (Reagan) credited with resurrecting a moribund economy, and you find voters often turning to the GOP as the party that could keep American business humming. So it’s not as though McCain had nothing to work with.

I think that the picture of McCain as victim of Wall Street chaos disintegrates on close examination. The financial situation has hurt him the way virtually every significant event or crisis of the campaign has: it has shown how improvisational, seat-of-the-pants and ultimately unsteady his style of leadership is (which is why his “steady hand on the tiller” rhetoric fails to connect).

Opportunity favors the prepared. And the rich irony of this election has been that, “green behind the ears” though he may appear to be, it is Obama, the rookie, who has been showing us what “prepared” really looks like.

He has run a methodical, strategically intelligent, eyes-on-the-prize campaign from the start to near the finish. He has not allowed poll-dips or transitory squalls to knock him off course. He has applied creative and energetic attention equally to ground organization and Web activism. These are qualities we’re all going to want to see in a national leader as we try to pick up the pieces of the country from the Bush-era wtreckage.

When the markets began breaking down, yes, Obama kept talking about the middle class and the failed GOP policies of deregulation. But he’d been talking about them for a year-and-a-half already. He didn’t have to declare a bogus suspension of his campaign to show how he “got it.”

If the financial crisis has pushed Obama into a firm lead, it is not because events somehow distracted voters from other negatives about the candidate. Rather, the crisis offered a decisive illustration of what kind of president he’s likely to be — and a contrast with what we might get from the other guy.

All of which is reassuring, at a time when we could all use some reassurance. As it turns out, for all the imagery we’ve seen of Obama as the second coming of JFK, it’s looking, depressingly, like we’re going to need him to be FDR instead.

(This email over at TPM expresses a similar view of McCain’s self-inflicted troubles.)

Sarah Palin vs the media filter

by

One of the themes of the book I’m working on is the whole notion so many bloggers have had that the media represent a “filter,” and blogging allows it to be bypassed. Not an idea that’s original to me — you betcha! — but one that is entwined with the whole subject I’m covering.

So you know that my ears perked up in the vice-presidential debate last week when Sarah Palin said:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard. I’d rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

She hit the same point again on Fox on Friday, discussing her disastrous performances with Katie Couric:

I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.

And here she is again in William Kristol’s column today:

She doesn’t have a very high opinion of the mainstream media… She described the debate on Thursday night as “liberating,” and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, “getting to speak directly to the folks.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that “bash the MSM and yearn to speak directly to the folks” is now at the front of Palin’s deck of talking-point index cards, right up there with “maverick.” Before diving in for a look at this rhetoric, a caveat: It may ultimately be impossible to try to read Palin’s words here, as elsewhere, too closely. Like some smudged-out ancient scroll, her text is simply too corrupted in too many ways to support a confident interpretation. Still, her animus against the “filter” is no coincidence, and bears scrutiny.

A filter can be a highly useful thing. Most of us value the idea that the news media will boil down a torrent of information into something manageable. But filters can distort a signal, and they can malfunction: they can filter out something we want, or include something we don’t want. So we need filters, but we don’t always trust them.

Some of the earliest blogs viewed themselves as filters of the Web (Michael Sippey called his proto-blog Filter, or later Filtered for Purity); their idea was a curatorial culling of tidbits found during Web wanderings. (The tradition is upheld today by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.)

But there’s also a long tradition among bloggers of viewing blogs as the antidote to filters. In this view, the media are literally an unreliable middle-man who must be cut out. The media filter will get your age wrong or mangle your words or just not tell your story in the way you think it should be told. Now that anyone can publish, you don’t have to take this lying down. So today we have public figures like Mark Cuban blogging, putting his own statements and thoughts directly on the record.

Now comes Palin, trying to join this parade. The problem is, your typical ranter against the evil ways of the media filter is someone who has been covered for some time and has built up a critical mass of resentment at factual errors or misquotes.

But Palin? Who’s filtering her? She has spent her month as a major-party vice presidential candidate without holding a single press conference. She has submitted to a number of interviews that you could count on the fingers of a single hand, and still have fingers left over. Yet she has the chutzpah to gripe that she would happily “speak directly to the folks,” but the darned media filter keeps getting in her way!

No, Palin’s problem isn’t too much filter — it’s not enough signal.

Obviously Palin’s preference is for a media channel in which no one will interrupt her talking points or challenge her on a stumble or a lie. She longs for some sort of combination of blogging’s directness and the Olympian remoteness of a broadcast medium that brooks no challenge. “Let me talk to you without the filter,” she says, “but I won’t take questions.” Every politician would love that — but nearly all accept that they’re not going to get it.

Alas for Palin, we have not yet devised that ideal communication method which would bypass media filters and miraculously convey her vision directly directly to the American people via, say, telepathy (or even speaking in tongues). There simply is no such thing as “speaking directly to the American people” without also having the “mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard” right afterwards.

They did so right after that very debate that Palin said she “liked” for its directness, so go figure. It’s here, I think, that the unreadable-text problem grows insurmountable. For Palin, what we really need isn’t a filter but rather a text-unscrambler.

In any case, the spirit of blogging is all about mixing it up, posting and counterposting and dealing with critical comments. You get to “speak directly” — but so does everybody else. It’s not the equivalent of having no press conferences at all; it’s like having a continuous press conference in which everyone, officially credentialled or no, gets to ask questions. It would be fascinating to see Palin try speaking that directly.

McCain blames “greed” for Wall St. woes. Huh?

by

It is a strange thing to hear a Republican candidate attribute problems in our economic system to “greed, excess and corruption.” But I suppose we should get used to strange things between now and November.

The problem with John McCain’s new feisty populist talking point is that it’s aimed entirely in the wrong direction. It suggests that Wall Street’s implosion is the result of some moral fault in the individuals who run our financial institutions. They are, doubtless, no angels; but what we’re watching this week is the result of a systemic failure — a failure of government, and not just individuals.

The thing is, the financial marketplace that is at the heart of this week’s meltdown runs on greed. Greed is the whole point. It’s supposed to be that way: you got money, you seek a higher return on investment. Isn’t that, like, capitalism? Take the greed out of Wall Street and what do you have left?

As for corruption: Were there bribes on Wall Street? If so, let’s put somebody in jail. But McCain’s charge is the first suggestion I’m aware of that the collapse of so many financial institutions is the result of outright wrongdoing rather than incompetence and colossally imprudent risktaking.

I’m a liberal Democrat; I know from complaints about corporate greed. But really, McCain’s charges are head-scratchers. Because most of us expect Wall Street bankers to be greedy. Comes with the territory. And when we put money in one of their investment accounts, we usually expect them to get us the best return, too.

The problem is, we expect that investment to take place in an environment where there’s a reasonable guarantee of good information and fair dealing. We expect the brokers and bankers to have a good grasp on the nature of their financial instruments, and to give us good advice on the risks we’re taking when we choose one over the other. What’s evident in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the other continuing shockwaves from the subprime mortgage mess is that, for a long time, the system suffered from a shortage of information and transparency and an excess of risky, blind betting.

We had a decade-long experiment in putting our economy’s assets largely in the hands of entirely unregulated institutions and managers. (Phil Gramm, who was one of McCain’s chief financial advisers until his impolitic comments about our “nation of whiners,” was one of the people who shot the starter pistol for this decade of excess when he served as chairman of the Senate Banking committee.) Now the experiment has proven a disastrous, costly failure. There’s no doubt that we will return to a more cautious, fairer, better-regulated system; we have no choice in that. The only real choice we have is who to trust to execute that re-regulation.

One party has always stood for kicking away safeguards and regulations in the name of the free market driven by — what? — oh, right, greed. The other has a long tradition of believing that responsible government oversight can keep markets fair and open. McCain and his party have a long record of opposition to the very sort of regulation that might have helped avoid, or minimize, the collapse of our financial institutions. The candidate’s eleventh-hour spasm of “eat the rich” rhetoric — however entertaining, in its topsy-turvy-world way — is far too insincere to occlude that record.