Category: The Opinionsphere

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics The Opinionsphere

The Biggest Decision Obama Will Make

Friedman:

The Obama presidency will be shaped in many ways by how it spends this stimulus. I am sure he will articulate the right goals. But if the means — the price signals, conditions and standards — that he imposes on his stimulus are not as creative, bold and tough as his goals, it will all be for naught. In sum, our kids will remember the Obama stimulus as either the burden of their lifetime or the investment of their lifetime. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

I think Tom Friedman understates matters here (which is unusual for him). Aside from some unexpected crisis (which of course is likely), Barack Obama’s presidency will not merely be “shaped” by how it spends this stimulus – but it’s historical significance will be determined by how it spends it. As David Brooks reccomended last week, channeling David Porter of Harvard Business School: “do nothing in the short term that doesn’t serve a long-term goal.”

Health care. Green energy. Energy infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure. Education. Barack Obama has laid out clear goals in all of these areas except the latter.

A crisis is always a time of opportunity – for mischief or ill gains if used exploitively; for needed reform if used wisely. Coming into office, Barack Obama will have more opportunity than any president – I would argue – in history. What Obama is able to accomplish with this opportunity will be his legacy.

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Economics Financial Crisis The Opinionsphere

Whiplash Markets

From Barbara Kiviat of Time magazine via Matt Yglesias:

Here’s a look at some different time periods the number of days the S&P 500 has moved up or down more than 5% during the trading day:
1950-2000: 27 days
2000-2006: 7 days
Jan. 1-Sept. 30, 2008: 20 days
Since Oct. 1, 2008: 22 days

This data suggests a follow-up:

  • Is the real economy moving that much faster just this past year? or
  • Are financial markets responding to new data that much faster? or
  • Are the financial markets untethered from the real economy?

I don’t know that anyone knows the real answer yet.

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Barack Obama Election 2008 Politics The Opinionsphere

The Glaring Idiocy of Political Reporters

As pointed out by a political pundit:

You can argue about how important a role Obama’s platform played in his victory. But, to read any newspaper in the days following the election, you’d think that Obama had to start crafting his agenda completely from scratch. “He ran on a platform to change the country and its politics,” wrote Washington Post lead political analyst Dan Balz. “Now he must begin to spell out exactly how.” Now? I thought that by the end of the campaign even blind and deaf hermits could tell you that Obama had a plan that could be found at barackobama.com/plan. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that political reporters don’t feel compelled to familiarize themselves with the candidates’ programs in detail, but they should, at minimum, be aware of their existence.

Jonathan Chait at The New Republic – pointing out one of my pet peeves about the immediate post-election coverage.

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Politics The Opinionsphere

Jon Stewart for Senate

If we can’t have Al Franken (and we still might be able to have him), then Jed has a suggestion:

Jon Stewart for Senate

Now that’s a Facebook group that could get some real momentum.

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Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis The Opinionsphere Videos

How the Media and the Politicians Failed to Understand the Detroit Bailout

Al Gore, in his book, Assault on Reason, described a media and political focus on “gotcha” journalism, on gaffes, on irrelevancies and personal scandals, on the Freak Show – rather than a focus on long-term issues, on character, and on principles as one of the major factors that has led to our current crises. “News” coverage is dominated by questions of whether this or that politician has a mistress (he probably does) or whether this or that entertainer is secretly going out with this or that sports star. Our news has become tabloid.

If, as the drafters of our Constitution believed, a well-informed citizenry is essential to the proper functioning of any nation, then our nation clearly cannot be functioning properly.

This lack of good information, this focus on the trivial over the significant, was evident when the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors went to Washington to beg for handouts. As Jon Stewart sagely observed in a pox-on-all-your-houses bit:

Unable to understand the actual problem, Congress seizes on tangential details for grandstanding purposes.

[Cue tape of various Congressmen expressing various types of outrage in semi-novel ways regarding the fact that each CEO flew to Washington in a separate private jet.]

The media coverage did manage to convey a few things:

  1. All these big shot CEOs travel by private jet.
  2. The Big Three automakers support, directly and indirectly, some 2.5 million American jobs.
  3. These American car companies made a big mistake by focusing on gas-guzzlers on the assumption that oil prices would remain low indefinitely.

Everything else was clouded in some confusion – not all of which is the media’s fault. Many economists asserted that they would normally want the government to avoid bailing out these automakers, but in this economy, believed the government must act. Some opinion-makers blamed the automakers troubles primarily on union-negotiated legacy costs – on the various deferred wages and other forms of deferred compensation the automakers entered into contracts to provide. But what seemed lacking from either the Congressional hearings or the media coverage was any serious and sustained attention to the problems themselves.

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Conservativism Politics The Opinionsphere

Honoring William F. Buckley Jr.

When one declares oneself to be a conservative, one is not, unfortunately, thereupon visited by tongues of fire that leave one omniscient. The acceptance of a series of premises is just the beginning. After that, we need constantly to inform ourselves, to analyze and to think through our premises and their ramifications. We need to ponder, in the light of the evidence, the strengths and the weaknesses, the consistencies and the inconsistencies, the glory and the frailty of our position, week in and week out. Otherwise we will not hold our own in a world where informed dedication, not just dedication, is necessary for survival and growth.

William F. Buckley Jr., Feb 8, 1956, National Review, as cited by Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner yesterday without a hint of irony.

On this day after what would have been William F. Buckley Jr.’s birthday, it’s worth reflecting on the man’s legacy. I am not the proper individual to evaluate Buckley’s legacy completely – but I think it’s accurate to say that Buckley is one of the dozen intellectuals who has most influenced my life. I take from him lessons both positive and negative – from his wonderful, timeless, definition of conservatism as standing athwart history shouting, “Stop!” to his determined resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.

There are a number of things that struck me about Buckley – his confidence, even arrogance; his style, almost delicate; his incredible life – from spy to magazine publisher; his magazine – brash, often wrong, generally provocative; his intellectual force, especially in that book which introduced me to him, Up From Liberalism. But what struck me most of all was that he was sensible. I mean that as the highest compliment.

He opposed Brown v. Board of Education, as poor of a decision as that might have been, for sensible reasons – in an attempt to preserve a system of federalism and social harmony. He opposed liberalism for sensible reasons – preferring the status quo to attempts to remake humanity. When liberalism became overripe and overreached – he was there condemning it. When conservatism became corrupted and overly ambitious, he was a voice of warning.

Buckley was not always right – but he was generally sensible – and it’s hard to expect more in a public intellectual.

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Barack Obama The Opinionsphere

Jonah Goldberg is Shocked

Jonah Goldberg is a partisan hack – and I mean that with all due respect.

In this post today, Goldberg points out that Obama seems to be making a number of sensible appointments to major positions, none of which mark a radical change from the status quo – but all of which, from Obama’s perspective, will be improvements. You would think that Goldberg’s first reaction would be approval – as Obama is not turning out to be the radical that Goldberg had feared he would.

But no.

Goldberg instead channels his inner imaginary radical liberal who is outraged that Obama is going back on what his imaginary liberal thought was a promise of radical change.

He concludes:

It will be interesting to see how long Obama’s charisma can paper over reality.

But what his inner imaginary liberal should have realized – and what most real liberals did realize – was that Obama was not a radical or a leftist. By change, he didn’t mean revolution.

But Goldberg desperately wants to be right about something – reality be damned.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Manufactured Fairness Doctrine Controversy

Yglesias on the manufactured Fairness Doctrine controversy:

It’s very strange. Political movements mischaracterize the other side’s general goals all the time. But I’ve never heard of anything like the current conservative mania for blocking a particular legislative provision that nobody is trying to enact.

Part of this blog’s continuing coverage of the manufactured Fairness Doctrine controversy, especially as related to net neutrality:

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Bringing Back the Fairness Doctrine

Marin Cogan in an investigative piece in The New Republic has trouble finding any media-reform liberals or Democrats who are actually want to bring the Fairness Doctrine back or are trying to do so.

As Kevin Drum points out at The Washington Monthly:

Given the collapse of the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, folks like Limbaugh and Michael Gerson have to create a rallying cry, and there’s no better way to whip up the Republican base than to make far-right activists feel like victims. “Liberals are coming to take away your talk radio!” is, obviously, pretty effective.

At the same time, a conservative effort is underway to label legislation protecting net neutrality (which prevents the internet from being structured to favor certain sites over others and was one of the founding principles of the internet) a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” which may be the only chance the big corporations who oppose net neutrality have to stop it – as Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix pointed out, citing me.

It seems the Fairness Doctrine is one of the key components conservatives will be using to keep their partisan backs up in the coming lean years – as well as being a potential fundraising tool.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Anatomy of an Obama Revolution

Sara Robinson wrote a prescient essay earlier this year (h/t Jeff BlakelyBlakley of Turning Points) exploring the promise of Barack Obama – and how the country was ready for change.

She applied the lessons of Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution (by way of the sociologist James C. Davies) to our current moment and to understanding Obama’s campaign. I’m not entirely convinced by the essay – as I don’t think America was or is as near to revolution as Sara Robinson suggests. I think that one of the touches of genius marking our political structure is that it allows change to come well before revolution is needed. And in our current age, the greater threat than revolution is apathy.

Which is why one of the first points Robinson brings up to suggest that we could be on the verge of revolution strikes me as off. One of Brinton-Davies pre-conditions of revolution is a economically advancing society that suddenly crashes. We are certainly might be headed there – more clearly now than back last winter when Robinson wrote this piece. But the most Americans today – especially younger Americans – have been lacking in that precise quality that comes from economic progress Robinson deems essential to a revolutionary people – what she calls “the kind of hopeful belief in their own agency that primes them to become likely revolutionaries in an era of decline.” (A phrase I have used before to describe this hopeful belief in one’s own agency is “engagement with power.”) Neither today’s youth nor today’s middle aged seem to have that belief – at least not in a political sense. There is a kind of hopeful belief in entrepreneurship – but that focuses on private actions and success in the market – very different from revolution.

However, since Robinson has written this article, it seems that people have become engaged with power again – in the Obama movement, in his campaign, and in the election. Although apathy is still quite real, and if Obama is able to continue to inspire people to participate in politics, he may end up creating an engaged citizenry – which is the key ingredient in both a successful democracy and a pre-condition for revolution.

Robinson also makes an excellent point regarding the essence of pragmatism in ensuring stability in a society such as ours:

Now, we’re also about to re-learn the historical lesson that liberals like flat hierarchies, racial and religious tolerance, and easy class mobility not because we’re soft-headed and soft-hearted — but because, unlike short-sighted conservatives, we understand that tight social cohesion is our most reliable and powerful bulwark against the kinds of revolutions that bring down great economies, nations and cultures…[The] headless ghosts [of past plutocratic nobilities] bear testimony to the idea that’s it’s better to give in and lose a little skin early than dig in and lose your whole hide later on.

Again – I’m not sure that we, as a society, are at the point when the elites (the ones Sarah Palin palled around with rather than railed against – the corporate and conservative ones) need to worry about their heads. But the overall point – that everyone in society must give up something, that pragmatism must rule over pure self-interest or ideology – that point is essential.

I suppose I tend to read this essay as an argument for smart policies to prevent revolution rather than as a prescription, which is consistent with my conservative politics based mainly on trying to prevent a revolution from being necessary. That perhaps is the best way to understand and define Rooseveltian liberalism.