Obama going to war with Iran?

Daniel Larison illustrates the folly of old, demented David Broder's idea that President Obama should start a war with Iran to get re-elected.

Personally, I think war with Iran is a pretty stupid idea. Launching an attack on Iran for developing a nuclear weapon would lack even the most basic moral authority, so long as we build the damn things ourselves. We don't even have the troops or the money to pull something like that off, along with about a thousand other reasons that Larison goes over thoroughly. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to vote for Obama in 2012 if he did something like that, which I doubt he would. But Broder's argument transcends to true idiocy because of this notion that wars end bad economic circumstances, based solely on one data point. We are, of course, currently fighting two wars which does not include the broader "war on terror" efforts. And yet our economy is experiencing mediocre growth. Broder's historical grasp here merely proves the old adage about how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and shows once again the wrong way to deploy history in a political argument. There are many things we can learn from historical events, and these things are cyclical to a certain extent, but no two situations are ever the same and it's extremely easy to make a superficially compelling historical parallel that really only draws on a couple of similarities between events. But the differences are usually critical. My general rule of thumb is that anyone who uses a historical parallel as an actual point and not an explanation aide or some such is a fraud who should be ignored, since history, while useful in understanding why things are the way they are, is not an exact science (or really even a science in my estimation) and you can find an example somewhere in history to back up any particular point of view.

Bush's memoir: a firecracker?

Doesn't look to be the case:

Matt Drudge appears to have scored an early copy of George W. Bush's memoir, Decision Points, though if his preview is any indication, the book's a snooze: Sections that Drudge highlights include a bone about how Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia almost walked out of Bush's ranch because he was so angry about Israel, until he saw a turkey and took it as a good omen. Drudge also says Bush reveals he gave an order to shoot down planes on September 11 and thought the plane in Pennsylvania had been shot down. Drudge adds that Bush rarely addresses his critics and steers clear of President Obama entirely.

How...banal. Doesn't really seem like someone you would want to share a beer with, does he?*

Then again, it's not all that surprising that Bush wrote a pretty dull book. It has a very dull title, after all, and most memoirs are dull because the people writing them are dull (U. S. Grant being a notable exception to both counts), which seems to be the tendency in politics. Obsessive personalities--which most politicians tend to be, in my reading and experience--are usually insufferably dull. It's funny to think that all those years people were arguing over Bush's faith, leadership style, accomplishments, and personality, the final truth is that Bush really doesn't have much of interest to say about himself.

This is actually one of my deepest points of disgust with the mainstream media, though it's one that I almost never hear anyone make: it's bad enough when journalists take spin at face value, or do a he-said-she-said thing with the two parties' approaches to policy, without any actual analysis. What annoys me most is how frequently the media totally buys into the candidates' public personae. Politicians almost always adopt a public persona that has some fixed points but leaves a lot of space for individuals to project their own beliefs, values, or fears into them. But in nearly every case, that is not anything like the real person. One of the my favorite aspects about Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series is that it tries to take a real look at what powerful people are really like behind all the rhetoric and stunts, and the usual conclusion is that they're boringly ambitious people without too much of an inner life (though this is not exactly his take on Lincoln). In nearly all those books, the high-ranking government officials are the least interesting characters in the narrative, by intention. I think it's easy to confuse the actor and the role in general, especially if part of the enterprise of politics is to deliberately screen the actor from public scrutiny, but I feel like it is the media's job to try to puncture that cloud, and I don't feel like they try that often. If wonder how things would have gone if the media had adopted the idea that George W. Bush is boring (which he always was), since ironically everything I've seen suggests that Al Gore is privately a very witty and entertaining person in real life.

*Will it ever be explained why the "having a beer with Dubya" thing became a thing when Dubya doesn't ever drink beer as a member of AA? I guess it can: Chris Matthews is an idiot.

Law school: a particularly raw deal

Ezra Klein says this article makes him happy not to be a lawyer, and I have to say I agree. Especially this graf:

There are the jobs at white-shoe firms that pay about $160,000 per year to recent graduates, and then there are the rest of jobs, which generally pay between $45,000 and $60,000. Almost no salaries are near the median or the average.

I know there are a lot of lawyers that are passionate about what they do, but my experience in college was that people who wanted to be lawyers were largely in it for the money. Frankly, though, if you want to make money, picking an overcrowded profession with high barriers to entry seems absolutely crazy. As this list proves, the best way to make big bucks is to pick a major with math in it:

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary	Starting Median Pay	Mid-Career Median Pay
Petroleum Engineering	$93,000	$157,000
Aerospace Engineering	$59,400	$108,000
Chemical Engineering	$64,800	$108,000
Electrical Engineering	$60,800	$104,000
Nuclear Engineering	$63,900	$104,000
Applied Mathematics	$56,400	$101,000
Biomedical Engineering	$54,800	$101,000
Physics	$50,700	$99,600
Computer Engineering	$61,200	$99,500
Economics	$48,800	$97,800
Computer Science	$56,200	$97,700
Industrial Engineering	$58,200	$97,600
Mechanical Engineering	$58,300	$97,400
Building Construction	$52,900	$94,500
Materials Science & Engineering	$59,400	$93,600

It seems obvious why these majors pay off so highly: they're really, really tough! At Cal Poly, it was widely known that the College of Engineering had the second-worst GPA out of all seven colleges (Agriculture kept us from last), and the reason for that wasn't that all engineers are stupid, but that the coursework was really freakin' hard, even for brilliant people. I did a CS degree and even though I have a talent for it, it was still plenty difficult. And, honestly, CS is one of the easier degrees on this list. Something like aerospace engineering just scares people who have a visceral fear of equations taking up five whiteboards, which is something I can relate to. But if you can actually make it through a program like that (and most people probably can't) and endure the four-plus* years of brain pain, then you're pretty much assured of getting a well-paying job with decent stability. Contrast this with the law, where you spend four years at college, plus three years of law school, plus the time and money to pass the Bar exam so that you can actually get a job, and all for an entry-level position that pays about as much as a starting job that a Building Construction bachelor's degree can get you (not to mention the opportunity cost of not working for several more years) just makes the law school route seem like the worst of all possible worlds. Then again, a lot of people seem to think that being a lawyer means making huge cash being some sort of stylish bullshitter who never does any work, which only goes to show you that many people still make career choices based on television shows.

*Of course, hardly anyone finishes college in four years anymore. Personally, I worked toward my BS and MS concurrently and did them both in five, which was made possible by AP credits and summer classes, and taking full loads most of the time. Most college kids don't do that stuff, so it can typically take five-to-six years, unless you're a journalism major or something.

Update: I actually did consider being a lawyer for a time, as I have an interest in software patents. Probably should have made that clear. I might have had an easier time with a law career, given that I had a direction and some pertinent education that I could have applied to it, and I wonder whether law students who have a specific focus in mind--like, say, environmental justice--are better able to tailor their bachelor's degrees to what they want to do with the law, and are better equipped to find a job. Then again, it's generally the case that any sort of public interest profession doesn't pay too well, so my particular example might not be great.

Jon Stewart's "moderates" and right-wing "independents"

I rather liked Mike Tomasky's column on the Stewart/Colbert rally taking place in D.C. this weekend, but this misses the point:

Playing off a phrase known instantly in America and dating back to Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million Man March, Stewart wants a "Million Moderate March". To get his viewers into the intended spirit he offered some samples of the sort of placards he'd like to see at his rally. In this age, when Tea Partiers march carrying placards of Obama wearing a keffiyeh or sporting a Hitler moustache, people know they should pay particular attention to placards; Stewart suggested that an emblematic one for his event would read: "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler."

The conflict arises in the fact that this sober and earnest middle is not really Stewart's audience. Stewart's core audience is news-junkie liberals. It's people like National Public Radio host Terry Gross, who, in a recent live dialogue at Manhattan's venerable 92nd Street Y, thanked Stewart for being the last thing she sees at night, which permits her to "go to bed with a sense that there is sanity someplace in the world". It's young urbanites and students. It's the out-of-place blue fish swimming the waters of the vast, red, middle-American sea.

I don't disagree with the qualitative description here so much as I think it misses the point. Liberals tend to like the term "moderate", as we tend to see our agenda as straightforward and reasonable. Common sense, in the parlance of our time. The vast majority of self-proclaimed moderates seem to agree and usually vote for Democrats, which is probably why the term is anathema among conservatives. They tend to see moderation and liberalism as essentially interchangeable terms, and the nom de preference there is "independent", as in not bound to the mainstream dogma. Of course, that winds up meaning commitment to conservative dogma, since the conservative frame of analysis is not regarded as a frame at all. The idea that Bill O'Reilly is in any way independent seems silly to people like myself, and Stephen Colbert has gotten a lot of mileage out of pointing out the ridiculousness of that claim, but right-wingers accept it without irony.

In any event, I don't know if Tomasky's married couple is going to go all the way to D.C., but if they catch some footage of the rally on TV, perhaps it could help the Dems? I think so. I suppose it's possible that it could turn into another iteration of Paul Wellstone's funeral, as Tomasky suggests, but there seem to be some key differences: it's not taking place at a funeral, which made that sorry incident easier to propagandize, and Stewart should therefore have more control over what gets said there. There might be some racy signs out there, but I'm pretty sure it would be easy for liberals to go blow-for-blow over that specific charge.

Thanks, I needed a laugh

Lots of bizarre headlines and events over the past two years, but this is definitely the most bizarre:

Giuliani Mulls Another Bid

According to Politico, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is still considering another presidential bid and has consulted possible donors and other GOP insiders.

Said Giuliani: "The door's not closed."

The real-world equivalent would be like investing your money with Bernie Madoff now.

My not-sinking heart

I was trying to think of something to say to this statement by Anne Applebaum (h/t Balloon Juice), but I mostly just snickered at it:

I don’t know about you, but my heart sank when I read about Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March, planned for the Mall next weekend. My heart sank further when I learned that liberal groups, lacking any better ideas, have decided to take this endeavor seriously. It’s bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a “Rally to Restore Sanity” is to make it into a television comedian’s joke. But it’s far worse that the “moderates” in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Applebaum seems to be under the impression that Stewart is just Jay Leno, but of course Stewart is a satirist and not a hack. He has a point of view and speaks truth that is difficult to find elsewhere in the media. This whole argument is something that bugs me about the media in general. Look, I don't mind if the Villagers get upset when Alan Grayson starts yapping about how Republicans want you to die. That's fair enough. But it seems like literally any attempt by the Democrats to play politics is disdained by the chattering class. Going after the Chamber of Commerce, the megabucks outfit funding your opponents? Unfair. Bringing up Bush and Cheney to remind people of what they have to look forward to? Not classy. Personally, I don't see the problem posed by having popular political commentators holding a rally before an election. It's not like they bill themselves as journalists, or appear on a station with "News" in the name, which is more than can be said for other Washington rally-holders of note.

Rubio's future, considered

Taegan Goddard thinks that Marco Rubio's closing ad makes a good case for a future Rubio presidential bid. I can see how his biography would make for compelling campaign messaging, but I didn't think the ad was as good as Goddard did. It's not bad, but it seems very by-the-numbers to me, lots of flag-waving and old-timey pictures. I suppose we'll see. I am sure Rubio will make a presidential run in the future, but I think the premises of such a candidacy should be considered.

I doubt he would try to do it in 2012. He'd have to declare his candidacy almost contemporaneously with being sworn in, which would look really bad. So let's say 2016. I have no idea what the political situation will look like in 2016, but I do know that the Hispanic vote will be bigger and even more important than it is today. After the right went anti-immigrant in the mid-1990s, it went conciliatory in 2000 with immigrant-friendly George W. Bush. It's hardly impossible that history will repeat itself and the GOP will try to put a less-xenophobic foot forward in 2016. Putting Rubio out there will be smart from that perspective. But aside from the unanswered questions of race and religion (Rubio is Catholic), I think the basic premise of a Rubio candidacy would be his ability to win back the Hispanic vote. Considering that Hispanics went for Obama 2-to-1 after moving a bit toward Bush in 2004, it makes sense for someone like Rubio to run to try to win back some of the Hispanic vote, but after looking at a recent poll showing the typical Rubio lead, I was surprised to see he's only winning 38% of the Hispanic vote. Admittedly, this is a three-way race. He's winning more than the other two candidates. But this seems like roughly the percentage of Hispanics that voted for McCain, with a slight bump due to the dynamics of an off-year election that favors the GOP. That isn't really all that impressive for what is certain to be one of his biggest ostensible selling points.

Now, it's true that a decent amount of Hispanics are still undecided, and he might take a lot of those votes in the end. I don't know. But I think it's extremely relevant because it shows that Rubio is not pre-sold to the Hispanic community. He may or may not be successful with these voters in a national run, but he would not be able to merely assume their support. How does this differ from what any other Republican would have to do to win their support? Maybe he'd have an edge in persuasion with Hispanic voters, I don't know. The pertinent data do not seem to suggest it. Since the vast majority of Hispanics in Florida--home to one of the more conservative Hispanic populations in the country--are either voting for someone else or are still undecided with a week to go, it stands to reason that he'd have to work hard to earn their support in a prospective presidential bid. And it's entirely plausible to me that he'd have a hard time doing that. Rubio's support of the Arizona anti-immigration law seems to me like an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome. Maybe he needed to endorse it to get Republicans to back his nomination, but one has to suspect that it has much to do with the reason why his support among Hispanics trails his top-line polling numbers. It's true that he might well flip-flop to support comprehensive reform in a few years, but the whole episode suggests some cravenness at work that opponents could use against him. But it's not just immigration reform--other issues, like education and health care reform (strongly supported in the community) are extremely important to Hispanics. And then there's this enlightening reader-generated piece from TPM:

While the focus in CA has been on immigration and the Latino vote--and I agree it is a make or break issue in that community--it is not the only issue of importance to Latinos. PPIC has been doing an annual poll on environmental issues for at least 20 years. It has a massive sample size to regional and demographic sub groupings are statistically reliable--i.e., the margin of error is acceptable. I first noticed about sixteen years ago that the most environmentally concerned group in CA was not white, suburban women but was the Latino community---and by a significant margin! This pattern continues to this day. The Latino concern is about air and water pollution.

This is part of an article about Whitman-Brown and Fiorina-Boxer, and California Hispanics specifically, so I can't say for sure if this trend holds everywhere in the country. But it makes sense that it would! It isn't controversial to assert that many Hispanics work out of doors and suffer from the effects of pollution and global warming disproportionately, not to mention their prevailing Catholic bent and that denomination's emphasis on environmental justice. The TPM piece argues persuasively that Whitman's flip-flopping on California's own cap-and-trade system has cost her support among Hispanics. But Rubio doesn't support cap-and-trade, either, and his stances on environmental issues are typically Republican. Frankly, I'm not seeing a lot of plusses here. What we see is someone who disagrees with most Hispanics on the issues most important to them, and has little to offer other than the symbolism of his ethnicity. Can someone tell me how this isn't a repeat of Palin 2008? Wasn't she supposed to bring home the women voters who wanted Clinton to win? I have no idea how all this will play out, and I could well eat my words, but I see some significant downsides to the Republicans with respect to a Rubio presidential run that should keep it from happening.

It means that they're losing

Steve Benen notes the rise of Republicans rebelling against church-state separation, and asks an astute question before getting too hyperbolic:

But putting aside the fact that these unhinged Republicans simply have no idea what they're talking about, I have a related concern: what is it, exactly, they'd replace church-state separation with?

Liberals like to freak out about this stuff, and maybe I'm too sanguine about it. But I'm not that worried because there is absolutely no content to these rantings. There's no argument, no priorities, no solutions. I'm sure people like Buck and Angle believe what they're saying, but this all comes across as crude cultural signaling to me, with a certain desperation that seems to scream, "I don't know what I'm doing." And let's be honest: neither Sharron Angle nor Ken Buck is terribly bright, neither are very good politicians, and in a normal year neither one would be the nominee for anything. Fearing a secret plan from these guys seems perverse to me--not that I'm saying that we should not worry about having people with their sensibility in public office, but rather that they're more likely to ultimately make their causes more radioactive through their efforts than to make them more appealing.

I generally don't have much respect for the political abilities of George W. Bush, but I think his team was smart in the way they went about pursuing church-state synergy. They took a position that wasn't (and still isn't) all that popular, that there should be more cooperation between the church and the state, but spelled out what that would mean--like faith based initiatives--in a way that made most people either happy or indifferent. Of course this program was abused to some extent (and one hears stories about Focus on the Family writing government policy on reproductive rights, of course), and I think it wasn't really a great idea in the first place, since churches can already apply for federal contracts so long as they obey certain limitations. But Bush's initiative was sold in such a way that it sounded like a good thing to people who didn't know much about it. Money for religious charities is very politically appealing.

But the fact is that the concept of church-state cooperation has been losing steam. A recent poll showed broad unpopularity for the concept (though with some support for particular cases like religious displays on government premises). Hell, even most Texans don't like the broad concept of bringing religion and government together. Bush's administration seemed to understand this and tried to keep their agenda on this matter specific, as some of the concrete aspects of religion-state synergy are reasonably popular. But then there was the evangelical tone of Bush's administration, the increasing vitriol of the religious right, and the religious-inflected Bush wars, which together did great damage to the overall concept of breaking down the church-state wall. As America becomes decreasingly religious and increasingly secular on a personal level, one expects the religious right to become more desperate in maintaining its position, which only seems to contribute to the aforementioned secularism. What does all this mean? It means we're winning.

And for the record, there is a clarification that needs to be made here. The right has become conditioned to believing that "church-state separation" means "people of faith should not be in politics", which is something nobody really believes. It doesn't mean that one's faith (or lack thereof) won't affect one's politics. My faith certainly does. Ultimately, what we're talking about is the principle that religion alone shouldn't be the basis for public policy decisions.

What Brown can teach other Democrats

Ezra Klein finds a really hilarious closing ad by Jerry Brown:



Meg's closing ad is a bit less cheery.

I have to admit that I'm still surprised by how this race has turned out. Brown has turned out to be a stronger campaigner than I thought he would be, it's true. But what's helped him the most is that Whitman's megabucks and the associated huge ad buys have become a big-time problem for her. Brown is partly responsible for making an issue of it, but the thing is that while attack ads can be quite effective, there is a need for proportion in these kinds of things, and it's important to be wary of overkill. Whitman is a novice politico, and evidently thought that applying enough resources to her strategy would be enough to win. This has not remotely come to pass.

There is a lot to learn here, actually. Democrats tried for a time to hit the Chamber of Commerce for its highly partisan role in this year's elections, but evidently the complaints of David Brooks scared them off. The simple fact is that most of the money in politics pays for ads, and the enormous surge of Republican money has led to an increased capability to run lots of negative ads. Turning that into a liability might have made helped out the Democrats, as in, "Notice all those ads for X? They're being funded by outside groups, paying X's ad bills with money raised from sources they won't disclose. What happens if X gets to Washington, and those groups' bills come due?" My perception is that people say they're concerned about the deficit but that they're really worried about the state of the economy and the power of corporations over our politics. Too many Democrats seem to buy the media's perceptions of the public (which are indebted to the right's perceptions of the public) as infuriated over deficits, instead of taking these complaints with the grain of salt they require. Maybe it's different for someone with lots of training and experience in the software game, but my view of clients is that they usually know what they want, but they don't always say what they want, and it's part of your job to cut through the inexactitude. I think it's wise for politicians to view voters in the same way.

The military after Vietnam used to have as a mantra the saying, "You can't win a war with only air power." That seemed to go away after Desert Storm, when we basically won a war with air power. But it's true in war and in politics. I don't think you can win a campaign just with ads, and the Brown campaign managed to neutralize a pretty important asset to Whitman's team. If the other side is bombing you relentlessly, try to use that to bring together the other people on the ground against the common enemy. That's just common sense.

Additionally, if you're interested in California politics, this is a valuable piece from TPM.

An auspicious occasion

Talking Points Memo is turning 10 in a few weeks. I'm definitely a big fan of the left-leaning site, which I feel is one of the few popular sites of its kind that isn't run by an obviously insane person. To be fair, most right-leaning sites are run by obviously insane people as well. But TPM is generally a great resource for both breaking news and commentary that has a perspective but doesn't overdo it like Fox.

Since I was a little bored I decided to utilize the Internet Archive to dial up the oldest version of TPM they had, from February 2002, since who isn't nostalgic for the early '00s? And I found a piece that made me laugh:

Are liberals hopeless suckers?

You better believe it.

Back in 1997 and 1998, as the presidential contenders were readying their engines, all Democrats pretty much realized that the nomination was Al Gore's to lose. But liberals were discomfited by Gore's centrism and casting about for some standard-bearer. Dick Gephardt decided he was that man.

Eventually, Gephardt decided that the Gore juggernaut could not be stopped and he stepped aside and endorsed Gore. But until then he pitched himself as the real Democrat, the Democrat who wasn't afraid to admit he was a Democrat (as Jim Fallows put it in this article), the Dem who still believed in the old time New Deal religion. Throughout the latter years of the second Clinton administration, looking toward the 2000 primaries, Gephardt consistently positioned himself as the leader of the party's liberals -- and signaled his stance by bucking the administration on some key votes.

I had just started working at the American Prospect -- the publication of liberal Democrats -- at the time and people had totally taken the bait.

Now, we're getting ready for 2004 and the lay of the land looks a little different. Gore wants to run again. Maybe Tom Daschle (though TPM feels confident this will never happen). And others. Now, Gephardt has decided he's going to run to the right of everyone else, as the one who doesn't believe in the same old tax and spend, who doesn't want to revisit the Bush tax cut, and so forth.

There are two possible explanations here. Either the Democratic party has lurched hard to the left in the last four years or Gephardt is a shameless opportunist...

And they say Bill Clinton's slick willie? That Al Gore's constantly reinventing himself?

I guess it's more hilarious since not only did Gephardt go from New Dealer to conservaDem to Bush's Democratic floor leader on the Iraq War, but since leaving politics he's become a particularly soulless corporate lobbyist. Marshall was even more right than he could have known.