Did bob predict what would happen to digby? I missed that.
Once I heard the rumor that digby was a woman, I was hoping she would never, ever become public, just because of course that's what going to happen. People are dicks.
al--The blogger you say you've known for a long time: is that Yglesias or Ezra?
We need to bomb Yggs' nuclear plants for sure, though.
What Blume said. Who fucking cares about mcmanus.
I haven't time to quash blogcrushes, I have 1100 + 400 fucking pages of Randall Collins to read.
I'm more comfortable with Heebie being right all the time than bob, if we're voting. Hope your posting is a sign you're feeling a bit better.
Except clothes from the 90s. I can't remember if she was right about that or not.
7: Can we blame Heebie for those trashbaggy capri-length "shorts" with cargo pockets?
8: This is what all shorts for toddler boys look like.
That's because their little legs are so short you don't really have anything but capri-length.
Did Bob predict Digby's falling off the face of the earth (in terms of links and such) once she came out of the closet?
Pokey's ratios seem to have evolved enough that all of his nearly ankle-length shorts from last summer now sit a bit higher, and are merely at his knees. Less goofy and Dorf-On-Golf looking.
Heh. No! I have taken great pains to locate and buy all the normal short length toddler shorts!
(It's already painfully clear that O is gonna be a bro, but he needn't start dressing that way just yet.)
If you've managed that, why don't you try to coordinate something to clean up Japan's ruined nuclear reactor.
Digby remains one of the best bloggers ever, and her cob-loggers aren't too shabby either. Well worth a regular read.
I've been reading Digby all along.... was not aware she's no longer cool.
What happened to Digby? She wrote something today. Did she write about some negative experience? I missed it.
16: Yeah, I somehow missed both bob's amazing prediction of the fall from grace and the fall itself.
17: Links to Digby's blog, which had once been numerous throughout the liberal blogosphere, more or less dried up when she revealed herself to be a middle aged woman*. Digby herself has not changed, but "What Digby said" is no longer all over the left blogosphere.
* I wonder what people thought she was prior to that. I figured the blogger behind the pseud was at least middle aged, but had no real sense of gender. I assume that the people who suddenly dropped her from their regular reads must have thought she was Kevin Bacon or something.
19: Isn't it also that the left blogosphere just doesn't exist in the same way it used to?
Just to be devil's advocate, links to everything dried up about five years ago. When did she reveal herself? (Wasn't she outed? Or am I thinking of someone else?)
I wonder along the same lines as 20. It seems like Leftie Internet Team B got pretty fractured and everybody no longer quotes everybody else. I know longer see Atrios coming up everywhere anymore either.
Yeah, it's a lot easier for there to be unity when there's not a split between firebaggers and whirly-eyed Obots. (Also, I genuinely don't get the mad on people have for Ezra Klein, who I think is doing a pretty amazing job within the constraints of working at the Washington Post.)
Just to be devil's advocate, links to everything dried up about five years ago.
I blame Obama.
21, 22: It was easy for a while for everybody to, for the same or superficially similar reasons, (i) hate the Dubster and (ii) Love! The! Internet! ("I just found this great new thing/blog/rant/cartoon of Dick Cheney eating Pikachu! C/ory D/oct/o/r/ow linked to it!").
I also wondered about the five year ago thing but wondered if it only looked that way to me because five years ago is when I stopped having a mind numbing job where I was online with dual monitors forty hours a week. I definitely recall reading certain blogs less before the job switch due to some of the egregious nonsense getting posted during the presidential primaries.
Five years ago is during FBs explosion, which siphoned off a lot of blog energy, too.
no, no, mcmanus was right in that a certain set of people rose from the arena of popular but amateur blogging to professional punditry, and another set of people didn't. there were a few salient features there. and then of the people who got into those well-paid jobs--would one be inclined to say they had perhaps moderated themselves? or even adopted somewhat contrarian positions solely for the purpose of distinguishing themselves from unreasonable angry blogging types? that. thing. is the thing that mcmanus was right about. now, look, if you take every position on every issue, you are bound to be right sometimes, but I think I was insufficiently cynical in these matters.
separately, the blogger in question is yggles, who is a lovely person but honestly what now?
with a yet more finely-grained distinction I am...medium. I have an exciting new, additional spine problem. I suppose I could have been much more considerate to my spine over the years, but I feel hard-done-by. the migraines have abated a lot and since they are worse than horrible back pain that is good. minor hallucination problems as the docs up the nerve medication so high? or just general getting "liked" by cthulu? unclear. you can abandon the OP now and argue over whether feminism prohibits women from pickling more organic vegetables than than already are right now, or requires them to pickle more, or prohibits pickling entirely, or what.
I blame Karl Marx. If he were less wordy and obtuse, maybe leftism wouldn't be so fucking annoying.
20,21: Both true, and but the claim is (and I have no quantitative data to back it up, just an impression) that the drop off in links to Digby was sudden and came with her revelation of herself at some lefty blogger con or other. It's been long enough that my shitty memory is failing me on details of the con, but I do remember it being remarked on in feminist blogs I read at the time, and I recall believing the claims based on my reading of various lefty blogs written by men and noticing that links to her appeared less often, if at all.
The lefty blogosphere has changed a lot, and the changes were fairly rapid during the time period in question, so it's entirely possible that it's all a coincidence. If so it's a coincidence that happens to line up with my understanding of how women's views on political issues (and especially issues of war) are not taken as seriously by Very Serious People and those who aspire to be VSPs.
26: Whatever its faults, the liberal blogosphere was not in the habit linking to fucking C/ory D/oct/o/r/ow. I had no idea who he was until he appeared in an XKCD cartoon.
additionally, did you guys know mcmanus started that friendship bread thing that was so lame? true fact.
I personally tend to suspect that bob is right most of the time - at least in broad outline - because things seem to be getting pretty fucking dire in a lot of ways and that's basically always been bob's line on any given thing, that it will get pretty fucking dire and that the optimistic/liberal narrative about good intentions, etc, is just a smokescreen for power.
Also, hasn't bob pretty much been saying "it will take a democrat to get rid of social security"? And - again, broadly speaking - that seems to be what is going to happen, which fucking terrifies me, as I am rising forty and social security has been part of my retirement planning all along, such as both it and social security are.
I wish these things were not true. But we're all doomed, basically.
Say what you will about Yglesias, but he's the leading light of Westeros econ-blogging.
with a yet more finely-grained distinction I am...medium.
For a second, I thought you'd gone into the field of psychic reading. Hope the spine gets better.
This might be confirmation bias on my part, since I was cynically expecting it to happen, but Digby links started drying up not too long after she confirmed she was a woman. She eventually went over-the-top pro-Clinton, which probably didn't help, but my recollection is that the links started drying up first.
36.2 - I think there are some gaps in that analysis.
24 gets it right in all particulars. Klein is a great mainstream reporter if you think of him as a mainstream reporter. Yglesias turned into a smarmy contrarian dick who looks like someone stuffed too many eggs into a Van Heusen shirt. It's sad how divisive Firedoglake has been despite being named after the three awesome things: fire, dogs, and the Lakers.*
*speaking of which, I owe someone money. No I'm not masochistic enough to look up the details of that bet, but if someone can find it I'll pay up.
Let me also straddle the fence on what happened to Digby -- as everyone said, links to her dried up right when she came out, but it was also right when links to all the bloggers who didn't have paid gigs started drying up, making it really hard to tell what the cause was. I'm with tologosh and Walt in that I thought at the time it was about gender -- I noticed that she disappeared before I noticed the blogosphere was changing generally -- but that doesn't mean I'm right.
(I'd also love to know if I was insightful or just guessed right about her gender. I 'knew' she was a woman all along, but just because I was both certain and right doesn't mean that my reasoning was valid. See various thought experiments about Fords.)
Who was the blogger that was outed as the offspring of some older prof?
Who was the blogger that was outed as the offspring of some older prof?
Hilzoy is the offspring of some older (imagine if it had been younger!) prof, but is also a prof in her own right.
Right, that's who I was thinking of. Who outed her again? Was she known to be female before that?
One theory I have is that the Bush Administration lent itself well to blogging, because it was so fucking insanely stupid that its stupidity could be picked apart in two paragraph blog posts by total amateurs procrastinating from their day jobs. The medium was perfect for that (and Yglesias in his day was one of the best at it). It doesn't really lend itself to analysis of complex issues.*
*not a dig at Digby, who seems great.
I don't know that she was outed as such -- she was only softly anonymous as long as I remember (that is, a little googling got you her real name, and she wasn't bothered by that). She's someone I really miss from the parts of the internet I read.
Come to think, I should see if I can friend her on FaceBook. She's probably being interesting there.
I think I was thinking of Publius being outed against his will, at ObWi, and blurring that with Hilzoy.
51:Your probably know this, LB, but she comments occassionaly on Ta-Nehisi's blog, most frequently lately, on the Leviathan posts.
the Bush Administration lent itself well to blogging, because it was so fucking insanely stupid that its stupidity could be picked apart in two paragraph blog posts by total amateurs procrastinating from their day jobs
Ah, I miss my glory days . . . and that one time DeLong linked to me . . . good times.
Like others, I had no real sense that links to Digby had dropped off, or dropped off more than had happened to other prominent bloggers. It may be that I just haven't been reading the right blogs--but then, I never really read all that many primarily political ones.
Along with FB, Twitter had its impact. Which disappoints me, as I can never imagine myself really embracing Twitter. The character limit and bias toward mobile devices shuts me out save as an occasional reader, catching up on a weeks worth of tweets long after they've been forgotten by others.
I've always thought that, despite having a paying blog gig, Kevin Drum was one of the most dramatic cases of declining links. The recent attention to his writing on lead seems to me to be one of the first times in ages he's been paid broad attention to in years (though again, perhaps I just read the wrong sites). And this from a guy who used to be (in my experience) everywhere. In addition to the usual reasons, I blame the move to Mother Jones. Not only might the different platform mark him differently to other bloggers, but it happened during the time when many sites simply stopped adding or updating links. One day he's on the blogroll at Eschaton and regularly linked to in the posts, the next day he's not.
Sometimes I feel like Brad DeLong has gone insane, but then I realize that, no, his aesthetic sense on his web page is so unbelievably bad that he just seems like an insane person.
49: everyone's favorite shill for the Malaysian government made a point of mentioning her real name, but she was never dedicated to maintaining pseudonymity; she just didn't want the blog showing up in Google searches for her real name, because she wanted to keep her political opinions separate from her teaching.
I wish I posted more at my other blog. Remember when it actually had both posts and comments? Those were the days.
everyone's favorite shill for the Malaysian government
Who can pick just one?
If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.
I would add a comment at your other blog, but it's easier to just comment here. Have you seen Scott Aaronson's paper on complexity theory and philosophy (and if you did, what did you think of it)?
The boom in blogging was when it was due to blogging platforms and other technology; I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence that it coincided with the horribleness of the Bush administration. Liberal organization also coincided with the horribleness of the Bush administration, and I don't think that's a coincidence. The few, embattled sane people had to stick together. I think it's been declining since then both on blogs and off them. Anecdotally, I know some chapters of Drinking Liberally aren't doing nearly so well as they were.
56: There's really very high correlation between a terrible aesthetic sense and craziness, I think. All the weird crackpot theories people send to me involve bizarre illustrations, random changes of typeface and font size, and almost unreadable layouts. And most of the people I know who think clearly also produce well-illustrated, nicely typeset papers.
I don't think I've seen Drinking Liberally mentioned by anyone since, I don't know, 2008? Earlier?
65: Our local bar still hosts one twice a month, but I suspect at this point it's just people who like drinking together and not A Thing anymore.
All the weird crackpot theories people send to me involve bizarre illustrations, random changes of typeface and font size, and almost unreadable layouts.
Both crappy page design and crackpot theories come from not thinking even in the slightest about how your ideas will play with an audience. Its all about lack of perspective.
I disagree with all of 39.
I don't perceive any change in digby's status beyond what others have noted has taken place in the blogosphere in general. And digby was always under-appreciated.
She eventually went over-the-top pro-Clinton, which probably didn't help, but my recollection is that the links started drying up first.
digby didn't see Hillary as being much different from Obama, and she thought a lot of the abuse hurled at Hillary was a result of her gender. This seems self-evidently correct, but even if it weren't, digby's writing couldn't be properly characterized as "over-the-top pro-Clinton."
Given that Obama's alleged key difference from Hillary was rooted in foreign policy, I think anyone who thought they were importantly different needs to reflect a bit on where that belief came from. At a minimum, one ought not denigrate digby for having been right.
I have my problems with Yglesias, but he's still nowhere near as bad as McMegan who is a complete fraud and con artist. Also, Ezra is a responsible purveyor of reasonably solid interpretations of the data, I don't mind him. (Despite the fact that he's successful, that shouldn't be a disqualifier). Thankfully, he seems to lack the Slate/contrarian impulse. If we lived in a better world than we do then Ezra *would* be David Broder -- the anchor of middlebrow centrism. Instead you have mush-minded bullshit bipartisanship and Ezra off to the side doing graphs off CBO's latest.
Right -- everything where Obama's been really heartbreaking, as opposed to just stymied by the Republicans in Congress, has been the sort of issue where he was supposed to be much better than Hillary.
digby didn't see Hillary as being much different from Obama, and she thought a lot of the abuse hurled at Hillary was a result of her gender. This seems self-evidently correct
It pretty much is self-evidently correct but as I recall was an extremely controversial opinion around these parts in 2008.
I have my problems with Yglesias, but he's still nowhere near as bad as McMegan who is a complete fraud and con artist.
This. While I agree with the criticisms of him lately, he hasn't made it over the line into "dead to me". (He has gotten to the point where I wouldn't hire him for a blogging gig -- I think he's net damaging to the issues I care about -- but none of it looks so much like he's a terrible person as that he has the flaws he always did and his current gig really brings them out in him.)
just stymied by the Republicans in Congress
the degree to which Obama's presidency is shaped by Congressional Republicans has been greatly exaggerated.
We're not going to agree on this one. How could having the House controlled by a disciplined majority committed to blocking anything that might make the presidency look like a success (on top of the obvious substantive ideological differences) not have a huge effect on the administration's capacity to do anything useful?
none of it looks so much like he's a terrible person
Stealing someone's seat when they go to the bathroom, though...
70, 71: There's not that much reason to suspect Hillary wouldn't have been worse, except that she has a much higher sheer-cussedness quotient than Obama. If relatively dove-ish Obama is up to his neck in drone killings, imagine what she would have done! It would have been interesting, given her previous fuck-up on health care, to see what she would have done vs. the PPACA we got.
Better than stealing someone's seat and then going to the bathroom on that seat.
As I've said before, I sort of regret my vote for Obama over Hillary in the 2008 primary. I think Hillary would have gotten one of the single biggest issues for the administration much more right -- she would have been aggressive about funneling money to state and local governments in 2009 and 2010, which would have been the single biggest thing to help mitigate the recession. There's also some (not much) chance that she would have been more aggressive on climate change in 2009-2010. Both of these beliefs are obviously rooted in somewhat wishful thinking and can't be proven right, but what I know about her general interests, connections, etc suggests to me that they are at least possibly right.
I have my problems with Yglesias, but he's still nowhere near as bad as McMegan who is a complete fraud and con artist.
It is unclear that Yglesias has hit bottom - certainly every time I think he has, he proves me wrong.
His reflection on the Bangladesh clothing factory - and his subsequent apology - were McMegan-like in their fraudulence and bullshittiness.
PGD's 71 is also totally right.
64. I watched a documentary about Helvetica a couple of weeks ago. Type designers are an outlier-- presumably they produce stuff that looks nice, but they'll say things like "Helvetica leads to regimented thinking." There are also numerous well organized people where I don't see much payoff for close attention. It's a necessary skill for communicating clearly, but not sufficient. I'm not a great planner, though, so bias.
61. I started that! Interesting, nice bibliography, but I'm not impressed yet. He seems to be suggesting that faster algorithms necessarily imply useful abstraction, which I do not see as necessary. He mentions the 4-color proof, which seems like an important case to consider, but basically as an aside for other work. But I haven't finished reading it yet.
There's also some (not much) chance that she would have been more aggressive on climate change in 2009-2010.
Candidate Hillary was less vocal about climate change than Candidate Barack, so I'm not sure why this would be.
79: Yeah, while I say he hasn't hit 'dead to me' yet, if he does, I'll think I should have thought so years ago. If you see what I mean.
I watched a documentary about Helvetica a couple of weeks ago.
Oh crap, I knew there was something I forgot to post.
I still think there was a decent argument that, given what we knew at the time, Obama was the better choice. There was more of an upside potential.
My interest in digby faded partly because of the election, for reasons which probably don't reflect well on me, but mostly because her blog became diluted with writers I didn't find as compelling.
82 -- I'm not sure that's right, but the general belief is based in her being more closely tied into the various players. Obama basically just handed the whole issue to Congress and paid absolutely no attention to it in 2009-2010.
I have a belief that Hilary would have received 5x the Republican Wrath that Obama has received, and thus been equally shut down.
Also it was really off-putting to me to have the same two families dominate the White House for decades on end.
I found 87.2 unbearable at the time also, but in hindsight maybe who cares.
74: Ah, how quickly they forget the Democratic House of 2008-2010. Assuming you still lose the House in 2010 then legislation stops but legislation is not the only thing a President can do.
76, 78: I go back and forth on Hillary. I think overall there is not a reasonable chance, though far from a certainty, that she would have been better than Obama. Ironically, I think she would have been less of a 1990s Clintonite than he has been; Obama was relatively inexperienced and I think really reached back to the Clinton brain trust, was comfortable with them because of a shared Ivy elite background, and just rooted himself in that ideology. I think Hillary had more of her own mind. But it's pretty speculative. Foreign policy would have been a wash, I just think Hillary would have been better on a number of economic/domestic policy issues (along the lines of Halford's 78).
89.2 should be 'there is a reasonable chance', don't know why I dropped the 'not' in there. No doubt others will say it was an unconscious admission of the weakness of my argument.
I think 87.1 is spot-on. Hillary was hated with a burning intensity on the right during the 90s. Getting elected would have just brought that prepackaged lunacy back.
Another consequence (maybe) of a Hilary victory is that there would have been an energized "liberal" wing of the party centered around Obama, which might have been politically useful. I realize we're in "what happens if the Germans win WWI" territory here but his kind of thing is fun.
92: If Hilary had won, would she asked Obama to be in her cabinet? Would he have accepted?
89: Which mostly (all? given Kennedy's incapacity and the delay seating Franken, let alone Lieberman) did not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
I have no idea what the differences between an Obama and Clinton presidency would be because none of the things I thought would be different about an Obama presidency haven't happened. So my conclusion is that I know nothing about predicting these sorts of things.
We may yet see a Hilary Clinton presidency, at which point maybe we'll know something about the differences. Or maybe not.
92: It is fun to imagine an alternate universe in which Senator Obama led the left opposition to President Clinton's refusal to release or try the Guantanamo detainees.
91 is correct, but I'm not sure Obama has been hated any less intensely. Going forward, I'm sure the right wing base will have no trouble mustering the same level of visceral, intense hatred for any Democrat that gets elected president. The particular reasons for hating the particular Democrat are just rationalizations and window dressing.
In short, Democrats should abandon the line of thought that goes, "If we just elect the right candidate, Republicans will work with him/her." Ain't gonna happen.
Democrats should abandon the line of thought that goes, "If we just elect the right candidate, Republicans will work with him/her."
Does anyone think this?!
For what it's worth I think 87.1 is wrong. The House landslide in 2010 was not due to losing hardcore Republicans, who never would have voted D anyway. It was due to losing white independents over 50, and very notably, huge reversals among white women over 50. Hillary would have done much better in that demographic, and it wouldn't have mattered one bit what they said about her in the fever swamps of the hard right.
Furthermore, if you think that a white Midwestern woman was going to attract 5* the hate that a black guy named Obama attracts then you are missing something about America. The hate for Hillary was very much a noise machine product, the stuff on Obama is deeper rooted. Even though, don't get me wrong, Obama is personally popular with a majority of the public, and quite effective in that way, he loses independents in certain demos decisively in a way Hillary would not. You could see this coming in Hillary's landslides in various Appalachian states during the primaries.
87.2, 88: Not that this was driving either of your reactions, but I really think the reason this got played as a big issue was all sexism. W got a 'huh, that's interesting, kind of a family tradition' reaction for being a president's son (and of course there's precedent for it historically), Hillary got "OMG, dynasties are controlling our government" for being a president's wife.
You're right that the dynastic issues this exposes are symptoms of a bad thing, but that it was never a big deal until the beneficiary was a woman, and that the 'solution' to the awfulness of it all was to vote against a particular woman rather than to look into the manner in which people without strong personal connections get shut out of politics, both seem to me to have been very much about sexism.
I still think there was a decent argument that, given what we knew at the time, Obama was the better choice.
This was my opinion at the time. In fact, I'd go further and say that - even given what we know now - that view remains defensible. Unlike Halford, I don't have any significant misgivings about my Obama vote.
I don't know who digby supported, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that she thought, on balance, that Obama was preferable. I'd be interested to see some backing for Walt's claim of "over-the-top" Clinton support. I missed that entirely.
I do know that people who were deemed to despise Hillary insufficiently were inaccurately assumed to be Hillary supporters.
I've always thought that, despite having a paying blog gig, Kevin Drum was one of the most dramatic cases of declining links.
I stopped reading him for a while, and didn't miss him particularly because I never saw many links to him. But then I started reading him again last year and now think that he's completely indispensable.
Speaking of which . . .
the degree to which Obama's presidency is shaped by Congressional Republicans has been greatly exaggerated.
Perhaps, but I find Kevin Drum convincing in his argument that if Obama needs House Republican votes, there isn't much he can do to get them:
All of which gets us to the guts of the problem: most likely, nothing is going to work. But if you're the president, you can't say that. You can't even act like it. You have to go out day after day after day insisting that progress is possible and deals can be made. This gets you lots of flak from fellow lefties who think it displays terminal naiveté, but what choice do you have? Obama pretty obviously understands everything that his lefty critics understand--he's not an idiot, and this is hardly rocket science, after all--but he also understands one other thing: he can't admit it. I imagine it's frustrating as hell.
Also, this post today seems relevant:
This is a bill that got the support of 21 out of 45 Republicans in the Senate. It's genuinely bipartisan. And yet, it's still a question mark in the House. If a bill with support from Amazon, support from most of the business community, support from most of the states, and support from half the Senate GOP caucus ends up not passing in the House, we're in even worse shape than we thought.
I thought the House landslide in 2010 was largely due to the difference in turnout from 2008, and that there weren't a whole gigantic tide of people who voted differently.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with 99.2 entirely.
I think 87.1 is spot-on. Hillary was hated with a burning intensity on the right during the 90s.
Yeah, I suppose we all have to acknowledge that Obama hasn't attracted that kind of irrational loathing.
For a Muslim man born in Kenya and following a carefully scripted life-long plan to undermine the United States, Obama has attracted almost no irrational loathing.
Obama has proved amazingly popular come election time. He smooths over the mainstream voting public really well. Sure, 27% crazification factor, but nothing like Hillary would bring.
And I still think Hillary will be well-suited to win the presidency in 2016. 2016 is very different from 2008.
Kevin Drum may be the blogger for whom my opinion has changed the least since I first encountered him. I thought the world of him as a voice for what should be sensible moderate leftism (a few blind spots, less of a firebreather than would be ideal, but nothing that hard to correct for), and is unfortunately on our political spectrum pretty far left, when I started reading him, and haven't changed that estimation a bit. Very smart, very clear, and rarely says anything that makes me think ill of him.
Randall Collins, Sociology of Philosophies
When we ourselves formulate "what is happening" in the intellectual world, we invariable impose an image of one or a few currents, typically distorted by partisanship. Intellectual historians may be less partisan because of greater distance, but their view remains partial, fitted around a few patterns and necessarily limited to a manageable number of names and themes. But the intellectual world is much bigger than that, and not so tightly focused.
107: She'll be quite old. Not impossibly old, but pretty close to it.
103.1 -- from NY Times summary of 2010 midterms:
For the first time since 1982, when exit polls began measuring support for Congressional candidates, Republicans received a majority of women's votes. Two years ago, House Democratic candidates won women by 14 points....Catholics, independents and voters age 60 and older also sided with Republicans by margins not seen since 1982.
I guess 99.2 is speculative.
I'm pretty skeptical of 100, I think Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton is crazy enough that people would have been plenty bothered by it if the latter Clinton had been a son. That said, I'm not sure how to get evidence on either side as both situations are pretty unprecedented. (E.g. we might try to introduce Indira Gandhi as evidence one way or the other, but that's a long time ago in a very different country, at a very different period of its history.)
98: One of the reasons the "pre-packaged Hillary hatred" argument was salient was the idea that Obama would not face the same level of hatred out of the starting gate, and he might therefore enjoy a grace period in which Republicans would not have a knee-jerk objection to everything he proposed. This idea was, in hindsight, a bit naïve.
(This is not to say that I would hop in my time machine and support Hillary over Obama in 2008. Just that that particular rationale goes out the window.)
You're right that the dynastic issues this exposes are symptoms of a bad thing, but that it was never a big deal until the beneficiary was a woman,
I want to make a few very fine distinctions here.
Hillary (I claim) wasn't subject to this particular double standard because she was a women, but rather because she was sympathetic to women. Al Gore - an extremely accomplished individual who was, nonetheless, the son of Sen. Al Gore - was a Washington nepotistic-insider-elitist, unlike the son of the president.
Likewise, the hatred that Obama attracts for being African American is very similar to the hatred that Bill Clinton received for being openly sympathetic to African Americans.
Would African-American turnout have declined preciptiously after a Hilary primary victory? Especially if her victory was widely attributed to racial dog-whistles?
Especially if her victory was widely attributed to racial dog-whistles?
Why would this have been the case?!
116: Do you remember the primary campaign at all?
I completely agree with 108, which is why my sense of a decline in his links (over and above the general decline of blogs) to be surprising. 102 to the contrary, for a while it seemed like my daily political blog reading consisted of links back and forth between Yglesias, Atrios, John Marshall, and Drum, and then it stopped, with Drum especially falling off a cliff. People still link to Yglesias if only to hate on him, after all.
111 doesn't actually address who stayed home and who actually switched and voted differently than they had two years earlier.
117: But she wouldn't have been running against Obama in the general. Why would she have kept that up, against McCain?
112: Part of my thinking is that while the Bushes really were a political dynasty, the Clintons aren't. W's grandfather was a senator, let alone his father being president. He was groomed for a political career from birth, as was his father. (Al Gore, who I think the world of, also the scion of a political dynasty. There's a lot of them out there, and reacting as if it's only an issue for a single office, the Presidency, seems off to me.)
Neither Bill nor Hillary was groomed for anything -- both of their political careers were derived completely from their lives as adults. Now, Hillary's career is definitely derivative of Bill's, in the same way that, say, James Carville's would have been if he'd stayed close to Bill and moved from campaign advisor to some elected office to a plausible candidate for the presidency. But reacting to a woman who's a plausible candidate because of her connection to someone she met as an adult, rather than because of her ancestry, as more, rather than less, objectionable than all the dynastic heirs out there again seems strange to me.
120: I was referring to her (hypothetical) victory in winning the Democratic nomination. Of course after she was the nominee she would have made some attempt to repair relations with African-Americans, but this would not have been easy.
An interesting counterfactual is what if she'd kept her name, so we were looking at Bush/Clinton/Bush/Rodham. I think that actually would have bothered people less, while presumably you think it would have bothered people more. It just looks bad to have such a long string of the same names, it's embarrassing.
123: But Bill would never have been elected President!
Oh, I didn't read 115 carefully enough. I thought you were contrasting hypothetical '08 general with hypothetical '10, had Clinton won.
I agree with LB that Hillary's dynastic negatives are far less than those of either Bush or Gore. She would have been Somebody even without Bill, not a presidential candidate maybe, but a mover and shaker or some sort.
126: Eh, I mean, she certainly could have been a big deal in, say, Chicago politics or whatever. I'm doubtful that she HAD to rise to national prominence.
Also, assuming a Hilary primary win, aren't we back to the hypothesis that a lot of Black and Hispanic voters might well have stayed home in an HRC vs. McCain election?
One test for my theory: I predict that when she runs this time around, there's much less made over the dynastic issue because we've just had 8 years of Obama to interrupt the run; unless her opponent is Jeb Bush in which case we should expect more to be made over it.
Obama has proved amazingly popular come election time.
This seems like a weird assertion, given the studies showing strong evidence that Obama underperformed relative to what a white Dem candidate would have done. I've seen it compared to giving first McCain and then Romney the equivalent of a home state advantage in every state. Now, these aren't rock solid findings, but the idea that Obama is more popular across the whole electorate than either HRC or Generic Democrat would have been seems to me wholly unfounded.
There just seemed something tawdry about having political power alternating continually back and forth between two families -- it feels like the kind of thing that happens in some third world banana republic, not the USA. I guess this feeling might have been exacerbated by sexism (including for me) but it doesn't much feel that way. As I say, in retrospect it might not have been a big deal.
unless her opponent is Jeb Bush
How far has the U.S. fallen? So far that a Jeb Bush candidacy is, on balance, an optimistic scenario.
I think we should just elect George Clinton and get the common-name issue done with.
You know what I would like to see? Some serious thought given to how the Dems are going to reverse the post-2010 gerrymandering after the 2020 census. Start the campaign now -- get some think tanks on it, articles in Harper's and what-not. Build up to 2016 and 2018 elections that have "reverse Republican gerrymandering" as a major point of contention. Get Shepard Fairey to do a poster or something. Get the Black church involved. Anti-gerrymandering clubs at the big universities. Ballot initiatives. That kind of thing. Also, pass the ERA. And some ponies.
Neither Bill nor Hillary was groomed for anything
Evidence: this photo of the young Bill and Hillary, with Bill at least looking as though he had never been groomed for anything in his life.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/14-photographs-that-shatter-your-image-famous-people/
91: Is prepackaged lunacy better or worse than original lunacy? I think it actually might have been better. Easier to recognize as such by the mushy middle, probably.
98: I don't know if anyone actually believes that in their heart of hearts, but a lot of conservatives - DINOs, the pundits who like them, Republicans who care about looking reasonable - seem to say it a lot.
Were there similar expressions of embarrassment when Rabin's second stint as prime minister followed up on Shamir's second stint? On my theory you'd imagine some consternation because it just looks a little embarrassing to keep going back to the old people.
||
Bleg. Cool things to do in Paris?
I've been a couple of times, and done much of the touristy stuff, but I'm going to be there next week for work, and will have most of a day and a couple of evenings free.
So suggestions?
>
134 -- that photo was taken by my good friend's mom.
132: George Clinton and the Senate Funkadelic lacks a certain ring, no?
I always thought the dynastic argument was silly, given that Hillary is obviously qualified and a skilled politician - it's not like the distasteful thing where Senate widows are constantly elected because, well, name + stand-in for husband.
If HRC had been the equivalent of Laura Bush, that would have indicated a creepily closed system.
Ultimately, given all the issues of nepotism and self-dealing and revolving doors in our system, Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton barely rises to the level of concern.
137: What part will you be staying in? What day is free?
I'm still not convinced that HRC could/would have done a single thing better than BHO has done. Nothing in her tenure at State suggests either political or organizational capability beyond mere competence. Or in the Senate, for that matter. (Or in seeking the Presidency, where she was beaten because, among other reasons, she hired people who apparently didn't bother to look up the delegate selection rules.) What the First Husband would have been up to no one can guess. He'd be less of an asset than the current First Lady.
One even has to wonder if she would have won. With HRC, there's no Palin, and maybe the R side ends up with someone serious, who has serious things to say in the six weeks following Labor Day. (I think even Romney would have been a great asset, because he could have looked for 6 weeks like he understood what was happening, and what to do about it, pretty much better than anyone getting attention in DC at the time).
This seems like a weird assertion, given the studies showing strong evidence that Obama underperformed relative to what a white Dem candidate would have done.
I haven't seen these. I've just seen that he handily won two presidential elections by large margins and solid turnout.
Oh, I wanted to say that the idea that Obama would get any honeymoon with the GOP was, indeed, pathetically naive, but I would argue that he did, in fact, get much more of a honeymoon with the press (including some of the more respectable right press, such as Brooks) than HRC would have. I don't know what that does to the actual political dynamic - maybe nothing - but it would have been a real difference.
142: I'm also unsure that Hillary would have been better -- all I'm sure of is that Obama's been as bad as anyone thought Hillary was going to be.
135.1: Fair enough. There might have been a "oh not this shit again" effect, but there's also the effect of repetition to the point where people begin to think there must be *something* going on with all those Arkancides and Whitewater and Vince Foster and on and on. I think that more informed voters would likely be in the "not this shit again" camp, but the majority of voters are pretty low information.
Also I endorse all of 133, including ponies.
I'll be fairly central. The conference and my hotel is in the 2nd arrondissement. Most of Tuesday is free, possibly a bit of Friday, and evenings.
145: I'm pretty sure HRC would have gone after Iran. So far, so good, Barry!
You know what I would like to see? Some serious thought given to how the Dems are going to reverse the post-2010 gerrymandering after the 2020 census.
Yes.
I loved the Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, if you're into that sort of thing. The smallness of the building compared to the number of specimens is quite remarkable.
143: They've followed two lines. One is that, when you look at places with more racist Google searches, you see Obama underperforming relative to Kerry and Gore, while places with fewer racist Google searches, he performed comparably to those two. The other is that, according to a lot of models, Obama should have done much better according to the fundamentals (I think this is especially true in 2008).
I don't think these are dispositive, but they're suggestive and certainly make intuitive sense - every liberal I've ever met has always said that the first black president would have to be a Republican, because "America would never vote for a liberal African-American". People's intuitive sense for these things isn't always correct, but, since we're talking about human behavior, I'm not sure we should dismiss what people think.
133: "Gerrymandering is stealing your vote!" Repeat 50 quadrillion times.
149: Really? Just on a general idea that she's a warmonger?
149 -- I doubt it. Hilary, like Obama is now, was pretty much a mainstream centrist Democrat on foreign policy, not a PNAC nutjob.
151 -- strongly agree.
I think we should just elect George Clinton and get the common-name issue done with.
You think he wouldn't have problems with partisan deadlock?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-funk-congress-deadlocked-on-get-upget-dow,625/
One is that, when you look at places with more racist Google searches, you see Obama underperforming relative to Kerry and Gore, while places with fewer racist Google searches, he performed comparably to those two.
I feel like I'm being dense here. How do you - at best - perform comparably to someone who lost, and yet win?
re: 151
Ooh, that sounds interesting. Looks walkable from the hotel via a nice stroll past the Louvre and Île de la Cité.
Since we have lots of data points of separate districts, it shouldn't be too hard to factor out the overall swing.
"America would never vote for a liberal African-American"
Still not proven false.
Actually I guess it has been proven false to the extent that candidate Obama presented himself as a liberal, in contrast to President Obama.
I feel like I'm being dense here. How do you - at best - perform comparably to someone who lost, and yet win?
Like this:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sstephen/papers/RacialAnimusAndVotingSethStephensDavidowitz.pdf
"I suggest a new proxy for an area's racial animus from a non-survey source: the percent of Google search queries
that include racially charged language. I compare the proxy to Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 vote shares, controlling for the vote share of the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. Previous research using a similar specification but survey proxies for racial attitudes yielded little evidence that racial attitudes affected Obama.
An area's racially charged search rate, in contrast, is a robust negative predictor of Obama's vote share. Continuing racial animus in the United States appears to have cost Obama roughly four percentage points of the national popular vote in both 2008 and 2012, giving his opponent the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally."
It's not comparable to the really great natural history museums, but it's delightfully old school, and the density really is unusual.
156: Partisan dreadlock, you mean.
Oh, and I completely agree with 145.
And I think 142 really underplays how bad a lot (most?) of BHO's appointees have been, many predictably so - Salazar, Friend Of Extractive Industry, what a natural for Interior! Let's pick lots of red state senators and governors who will be succeeded by Republicans! Put Geithner in charge and, when Sumner and Romer tell you he's full of shit, ignore them! Nominate judges? Why?!
Does anyone think Holder's been better than Generic Democratic Appointee?
re: 163
Sounds a bit like the one in Oxford, I suppose. Very small, very cluttered and Victorian.
Judges are another area where it would have been very hard for Hillary to have been worse than BHO (his picks are very good, but holy molasses is he leisurely about them).
166: and I think you have to see the Musee des arts et Metiers, just because it was in "Foucault's Pendulum".
165 -- What about HRC's tenure at State, or presidential campaign, says to you that she'd be any better at all at appointments? Or on the economy?
168: I looove that museum. Look at all these fabulous bridges we've built. (Why yes, they are all in Vietnam. What's your point?)
All these studies seem to be saying is that Obama underperformed relative to a white Obama, not a white typical Democratic candidate. I still don't see how he underperformed relative to candidates who actually lost.
Oxford's a solid comparison point. Imagine you took the subject material of the bones half, but presented it like the Pitt-Rivers half.
168 - Yes, but since judicial nominees take (forever + 6 months) to make it through the Senate confirmation process, if they make it through at all, is there any reason to be less leisurely? (Oh, and Fuck You, Harry Reid, for believing Lucy would actually let you kick the football this time.)
I feel like I'm being dense here. How do you - at best - perform comparably to someone who lost, and yet win?
Relative to national vote share. IOW, in Denver, where racist searches are fewest, Obama outperformed his national vote share by (I dunno) 10 points, as did Kerry and Gore. In WV (most racist), Obama underperformed his national vote share by 15 points, while Gore and Kerry underperformed by 5 points (or whatever).
As for turnout changes, I think HRC does at least as well in 2008*, because I think that there's a chance that women would be energized to vote for her. In 2012, I don't know, since BHO inspired blacks to vote at higher rates than whites for the first time ever, and I'm not sure if HRC activates that same dynamic among any parts of her base.
I also think that 2010 is probably not as ugly, since I think it's pretty obvious that the tremendous wave was driven by racist white resentment, which would presumably be at least somewhat less against HRC (there would be misogynist resentment, but there are probably fewer misogynistic white women than there are racist white women).
*unless her ground operation sucked, a real possibility, but I'm focusing on demographics
but there are probably fewer misogynistic white women than there are racist white women
This is not obvious to me at all. Internalized misogyny is stealthy.
169: I'm not arguing she'd have been better, but 142 seems strongly to suggest that she'd have been worse, as if BHO has been anything but sucky on those fronts. I don't think it would be possible to be worse on judicial appointments, short of literally making none. And the red state appointees was a specifically dumb move that no one else would have any reason to make. She would have made her own mistakes, of course, but that's a particular one that she'd likely have avoided (because there's no constituency or political pressure to make it; it was just a weird, unforced error with little precedent).
The Democrats have addressed gerrymandering with the same complacency they do all Republican power grabs, no? Did they ever do anything about the partisan appointees in the Attorney General's office? (Serious question; I never heard anything about this after the initial stories.) I don't remember any mass firings in other departments, either.
In 2012, I don't know, since BHO inspired blacks to vote at higher rates than whites for the first time ever
But, according to the link in 162," Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest Obama gained at most only about one percentage point of the popular vote from increased African-American support. The effect was limited by African-Americans constituting less than 13 percent of the population and overwhelmingly supporting every Democratic candidate."
167 -- What I don't understand about that is why the people whose patronage this is are not screaming bloody murder. There are 7 vacancies on the ED Pa -- why isn't Bob Casey getting ready to burn shit down (assuming he's sent over the names of people who are in his orbit)? 3 in the N D Cal and one in the E.D. -- where in Feinstein?
(Baucus has sent over names for our two vacancies, and everyone expects that we'll see nominations this year. It was a fairly public process, and everyone I know has an opinion.)
165.last - Yes, particularly on voting rights. He strikes me as a better AG than Janet Reno was, e.g.
So being black cost Obama about 4 points, and he still handily won two elections. I think that qualifies him as being amazingly popular.
I have no idea why everyone here has turned on Yglesias. I've been reading him since his yglesias.typepad days and I think he's exactly as awesome as he's always been.
His apology to the Bangladesh thing seemed genuine - "at a certain point as a writer, if you feel like everyone's misreading you, you have to consider the possibility that you've miswritten". He acknowledged that he hadn't understood the situation when he wrote the post (specifically, that what had happened was against the law), and acknowledged that he had insensitively timed the publication of the previous post. His main substantive point - that everyone everywhere shouldn't necessarily have the same workplace standards - I think is totally correct.
That said, LizardBreath is probably tied with Neil the Ethical Werewolf as my second-favorite internet person after Yglesias so if she thinks something's changed about him that does give me pause.
176: Totally understood, but we're talking about motivation. I'm skeptical that there are as many GOP women who are driven to hate women as there are GOP women who are driven to hate blacks. I bet that nearly all of the Tea Party voters in 2010 were just as unlikely to vote for Hillary as they were for Obama, but less likely to get off their asses in an off-year election to vote for some insane Tea Party candidate just for spite.
I guess I'd point to what happened to Akin and that jerk in Indiana as evidence - the only reason those guys lost was that they pissed off enough women that the Dems were able to win - that means motivating Dem women to come out and demotivating GOP women not to.
180: Yeah, I find the judicial appointments thing impossibly frustrating and inexplicable. Republicans aren't helping, but there's no excuse for not having a full slate of nominees waiting for approval.
And 174 strikes me as (no offense, JRoth) totally insane. Racial resentment surely didn't help, but surely the horrible results Democrats experienced an unemployment rate of 10%. Notional President Whitey McPaleface could have been harrumphing about young bucks buying steaks with their welfare checks on national television, and the McPaleface administration would have gotten shellacked.
182: What a weird way of looking at things. I mean, kind of, yes. But 2008 and 2012 would have been massive landslides for, say, Joe Biden. Would that have made Biden super-amazingly popular?
Having done a decent amount of pro-Yglesias pushback here over the past year or so, I'm about to give up. He really has declined a lot since taking the Slate job. Though I do wonder a little whether part of it might be that his good snark has moved to twitter (which I don't use).
You know what I would like to see? Some serious thought given to how the Dems are going to reverse the post-2010 gerrymandering after the 2020 census.
This.
Do people just want him to be more partisan? The best thing about Yglesias has always been that he's more interested in understanding things clearly than in pushing an agenda. That, and how he willingly admits ignorance and uncertainty. Which maybe makes him less effective than Glenn Greenwald or whoever at changing the world, since most people respond better to certainty than to uncertainty, but makes him way more interesting to read.
What a weird way of looking at things. I mean, kind of, yes. But 2008 and 2012 would have been massive landslides for, say, Joe Biden.
I don't see how the studies predict this whatsoever. All they do is compare a given candidate to their own baseline. So it just compares black Obama to white Obama. Why would Biden have done as well as white Obama?
Fuck You, Harry Reid, for believing Lucy would actually let you kick the football this time.
Also this.
Yes, but since judicial nominees take (forever + 6 months) to make it through the Senate confirmation process, if they make it through at all, is there any reason to be less leisurely?
First of all, he hardly nominated any during the period when they had a filibuster-proof majority. Second of all, some percentage of nominees will move through regardless. So you need to max out the denominator. Third of all, my understanding is that he's been MIA on filibuster reform, which is a bit of a side issue, but if he cared about judicial nominations, it's an area where he could assert some pressure on his own party members - he only needs 50 Dems on that issue, and he could probably persuade enough to at least streamline the process for judicial nominees (IOW, say, "if you must, leave the filibuster in place for legislation, but let's guarantee every judge a vote under regular order without holds and all that crap"). No guarantee, of course, but again, he's been MIA. And the result is that the entire court system is incredibly right-tilted, and will be even after 8 years of a Dem in the White House.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "candidate's baseline." Obama ran in 2008 and 2012 and had wildly different results (7% vs 3%).
I thought "baseline" meant their national average performance. So that you can see if they overperformed or underperformed by region. And that the studies show that regional racism correlates strongly with Obama underperforming, and so they can estimate that racism cost him 4 points.
(Therefore I don't see any comparison of Obama vs. Biden.)
The best thing about Yglesias has always been that he's more interested in understanding things clearly than in pushing an agenda.
Clearly you never paid much attention to his writing about the NBA . . .
(More seriously, I think of Yglesias as smart and curious, but also lazy in an unfogged sort of way -- perfectly willing to stop at a second approximation, which is good enough for most purposes, but not more than that.)
(And compared to how Kerry and Gore underperformed in those same racist regions.) I still don't get how that means that Obama did worse than they did.
193 - You're not even mentioning Obama's bizarre indifference to making Federal Reserve appointments in a timely fashion.
191: What do you think "white Obama" is? He's a centrist Democrat in a suit. Remember, any (Dem, at least) who's a plausible Presidential candidate is a very skilled politician. It's not as if, failing Obama, we would have nominated Dennis Kucinich. All of political science says that, given competent candidates, the fundamentals determine national elections. And the fundamentals say that Joe Biden (or whoever) wins 2008 by 57-43. Obama did worse, because a lot of white people will vote for a Dem, but not for a black Dem.
But you're right on the general point that this particular study says nothing about whether Obama's performance in non-racist districts overperformed a generic democratic candidate. For that you'd need to look at different data. But you also can't jump to the conclusion in 182. Structural effects are a huge part of election results!
I still don't get how that means that Obama did worse than they did.
He did better because he was in a more favorable environment. Every plausible Dem wins in 2008. The white males (who run professional campaigns) win by more than Obama did.
Do you think that "white Obama" is this miraculous figure who wins by sheer charisma? No, he wins because people hated Bush and were ready to vote for a Dem. And in 2012, he wins because the economy was slowly improving, and the war in Iraq was over, and, to an extent, because the GOP was not speaking to the median voter.
What do you think "white Obama" is? He's a centrist Democrat in a suit.
Who has a knack for extremely pursuasive campaign speeches, an unprecedented ground game, and a massively brilliant campaign staff raising shit-tons of money. Sure, if you're imputing all that to all other centrist Democrats.
190: His posts that are about understanding things in general seem oversimplified lately -- the Bangladesh thing wasn't only insensitive, it was kind of dumb, warning against an error that is theoretically possible, but that was not only inapplicable to the news hook, but that it's really hard to find any realworld examples of (that is, name a time and a place where a country did itself economic damage by raising safety regs to a level they couldn't afford. I can't think of any, which doesn't mean there are none, but it's at least not a common problem).
I think 202 is overplaying your hand. Yes any plausible democrat would have won in 2008, but we don't know a priori that Biden would have won by more than Obama. You need some evidence to separate out the structural aspect from the candidate aspect. Heebie's right that without more data you don't know how Obama would have compared to Biden. (That said, my understanding is that candidate-level affects on general elections are usually smaller than the 3% we're talking about here. So I think JRoth is probably right on the merits, but it's not obvious.)
186: I just think it would have changed at the margins. As people noted, it was maybe the biggest shellacking of all time - but it wasn't the worst economy of all time, was it?
I just look at the GOP winning women voters for the first time in 38 years - through all sorts of economic and military situations - and can't help but think that there was more to it than the fundamentals (and, indeed, the political scientists did NOT forecast the shellacking, again suggesting factors beyond 10% unemployment).
FWIW, I think that taking a harder line on the banks would have made a bigger difference than who was in the WH. IN 2010, only one party was railing against bailouts, even though they elided the term to include lots of victims and out groups. But the Tea Party really did appeal to people who were (rightly) aggrieved at how the banks were treated, and it was a BHO decision how to handle them. I get why he did what he did, but it was terrible politics and probably bad policy as well.
Also, "national average" works against Obama, whose supreme strength is his campaigning staff and campaign skill (minus one debate). They optimized electoral votes, not national average.
This isn't a particularly relevant insight.
Also economics is mostly boring, and he's trying to write longer posts which has never been his strength. Of his posts in the past two days, the most recent one (on how no one cares about health costs) is the only one I think is actually good. (Though I share his interest in foreign election details, so personally I also liked the German election one, and the GM stock post is pretty good.)
(and, indeed, the political scientists did NOT forecast the shellacking, again suggesting factors beyond 10% unemployment).
How did the statisticians do, though? I remember feeling pretty dismal heading into the 2010 elections.
204: The economic damage of safety regulations is hard to measure without the ability to rerun history without the safety measures, so I don't think anyone could point to a specific time, place, and country, but isn't it totally plausible that you can make more stuff faster by cutting corners on safety, and that different countries might be served by choosing different places on the curve?
I totally agree that his point didn't apply in that specific instance, a fact which he later acknowledged. Although if your point is that he should have researched that before writing the post, that's fair. I personally am fine with it as long as he realizes his mistake afterwards.
210: I think the forecasts in question are pretty much statistical. They predicted a huge blowout, but not as huge as the one we got.
Research suggests that the health care act cost the Democrats a few (several?) seats. Even if true, that's a trade I'm happy to make.
211: Sure, the general point is a reasonable one. But picking the wrong point on the curve by buying too much safety isn't an error that, even in hindsight, I've ever heard of actually happening in an identifiable way (that is, there's no case-study of Decentstan, which instituted modern safety regulations very early on, and then economically stagnated in comparison to the neighboring powerhouse Exploitativestan), which suggests that it's not an important error to warn against; developing countries are good at avoiding that one on their own.
210 - Heebie, here's Nate Silver's final prediction for the House in 2010 (a 54 or 55 seat loss by the Dems, with a 1/3 chance of a 60+ loss). But that's polling aggregation rather than a priori models based on the economy and other factors.
I'm actually quite curious what economy based models said about 1994, given that GDP growth was quite strong and unemployment continued to decrease after the short recession of 1991.
isn't it totally plausible that you can make more stuff faster by cutting corners on safety, and that different countries might be served by choosing different places on the curve?
And what you have there is a belief which is correct as a first approximation, but which would require some empirical work to determine the circumstances under which it was true in real life*.
There's nothing wrong with first approximations, they're useful, but I do think that's part of why there are disagreements about whether it makes sense to describe Yglesias as someone, "interested in understanding things clearly."
It depends on what you mean by "understanding things."
* Random historical example: I remember reading somewhere that in the 19th Century railroad bridges in the US tended to be made out of wood, while European bridges were made out of steel. The US bridges were much cheaper to build (particularly because the US had lots of high quality forest) but slightly more likely to collapse.
more interested in understanding things clearly
Disagree. Understanding things clearly requires work: deep reading, depth over breadth. This phrase in my mind describes Drum among bloggy journalists, the Industrial Slaughterhouse article in this month's Harpers. It's at odds with rapidfire short-form writing. Not evident in MY at Slate.
But MY has never had depth, but he used to be more fun to read.
a belief which is correct as a first approximation
Unless by this you mean "possible, subject to empirical verification" this seems to give this idea too much credit. Economics has a nasty habit of assuming counterfactual axioms and papering over the gap with reality with talk of approximations.
There's nothing wrong with first approximations, they're useful
Politically useful, in this case. Not necessarily scientifically useful without some sense of how close an approximation it is.
218. Sure, I think that as others have said above, pointing out idiotic lies used to be a productive way to write short takes on US politics, less so now.
Alex at Fistful of Euros is pretty good at doing this now.
There's nothing wrong with first approximations, they're useful, but I do think that's part of why there are disagreements about whether it makes sense to describe Yglesias as someone, "interested in understanding things clearly."
The other side of this is the impact it has on what is now a mandatory regular feature of his blogging, his business news posts. They are awful. It's a bit painful to hear some major piece of business news announced (a merger, an unexpected stock dive or dramatic report, what-have-you) and know that it will be Yglesias's duty to come up with a couple of paragraphs on the topic. Good business reporting and analysis can be great fun to read; it's not his strength.
That said, despite the fact that I don't like his blogging nearly as much as I used to, I try not to blame people too much for trying something different that they turn out not to be much good at.
217, 219 -- fist bump, bro hug. The truth is that MY is not that good, generally, at writing about policy, which actually requires work. He's OK (but getting worse) at finding overarching themes that allow him to say things that superficially don't seem dumb on a wide range of issues, but range from "not wrong but not the whole story" to "wrong" when you know more about the specifics. He was really great at quickly knocking down Bush era stupidities quickly but that was a "smart undergrad" skill that doesn't really translate to policy discussions, though he sees himself as a policy (or even more ridiculously, a business) blogger.
I totally agree that his point didn't apply in that specific instance, a fact which he later acknowledged.
Problem is, he completely misunderstood why his point didn't apply (as do you, I think). His apology reiterated the original offense. Take the byline off, and a reasonable person would have attributed those posts to McMegan.
Yglesias (as you note) indicated that he wasn't aware that the Bangladesh situation was in violation of the law. So what? Had the factory-owner's behavior been legal, that would done absolutely nothing to support Yglesias' fucked-up analysis.
Yglesias was saying, in his original post, that pretty much any barbarism is at least potentially acceptable if it's market-dictated barbarism. He modified that in his apology to say that any barbarism is at least potentially acceptable if it's market-dictated and legal and people weren't forced - by anything other than economics of the situation - to re-enter the building. That's some pretty hideous shit.
But his moment of crowning McArdleism was when, in his "apology," he expressed how personally offended he was by readers' response, then blamed them for tying his original post to Bangladesh, to wit:
I wanted to write about something I know about (the sound basis for globally differentiated regulatory regimes), and people wanted to read about the news
Fucker. There's no excuse for this shit even if, as alameida says, there is an explanation for it.
This isn't a minor point, either. The beliefs that human rights are best left to the free market and that the free market is best approximated by minimal government intervention are the fundamental basis for neoliberal economic policy.
I was one of the first people to tell Digby to get his/her own blog back in the early Atrios period when we were both commenters there. Fact. Atrios still links her, but she hasn't been promoted even to the middle media (Slate).
Yglesias and Klein are the best of the promotions, but that's just sad, and you can see both of them trimming all the time. Yglesias was politically horrible as an undergrad, improved quite a lot under the influence of his blogosphere buddies during the outlaw era, and gradually found that being good didn't pay. If he were even more opportunistic he'd be major-media by now.
Jonah Goldberg, McMegan, Erick Erickson .... the promotions there have been have often been horrifying. The original Wonkette was fun but fluffy, and as Cox she's not all that bad, but still a bit fluffy.
I always said that McManus was right about a lot of things, but I ended up hating his prformance art, and the feeling became mutual.
Hi Alameida. I won't nag you any more, I feel so guilty.
I'm sure he'd never accept the gig, but I'd love to see a bob mcmanus column running on Slate. It would be like the Bizzaro Yglesias.
226: this contrarian goes to 11.
I'm not completely sure whether Digby's gender kept her from big-media promotion, but to me that's not the main point. Neither she nor anyone else with as strong a point of view as she has could have been promoted. Matt and Ezra represent the far leftward limit of the possible, and I think that the reason they are where they are, career-wise and ideologically, as that they knew how to find that far limit. Digby wasn't even trying to.
It's all market. Media are controlled by advertisers, and viewers / readers are the product sold, not the buyers sold to. We think that our media is freer than the Czarist media, but is it? A powerless 10% has pretty good information, but 80% are deliberated un- and mis-informed, and another 10% are distracted by Alex Jones types.
228: Krugman has been to the left of Klein and Yglesias for the last few years.
Maddow is also to the left of Klein and Yglesias, no?
There's a substantial consumer army of liberals, particularly cultural liberals. San Francisco and Santa Monica have a lot of shopping, and advertisers are happy to sell to those people.Many readers (especially DC residents) of the WaPo and the NYT are liberals. It's true that there's basically no constituency in either the media or the political class for policies focused on the poor, in particular, and its absolutely true that at the end of the day there are limits to the kind of economic leftism a corporate based media will support, but I think the centrist-think of the elite media class is mostly driven by (a) their own personal class situation and (b) assimilation to the people they cover, who are mostly centrist politicians and/or the wealthy and powerful, rather than careful consideration of consumer or advertiser demand.
Yglesias' point about safety is one of those things that sound sophisticated, which makes it tempting to believe without evidence it applies to the case at hand. If the choices for Bangladesh are no safety, or no access to world markets, then it's probably better off with no safety, but there's no reason to think that a straightforward cost-benefit analysis uncontaminated by considerations of raw power would leads to anything resembling the status quo.
Bangladesh is poor, which means labor is cheap. To the extent that safety standards are labor-intensive, they could be substantially cheaper to implement there. No one would be surprised to find out that haircuts are cheaper there than they are here. Why couldn't the same thing be true of safety? But the question would require actual careful analysis to answer.
But I should make clear that almost no advertising-based publication is ever going to be truly left on economic issues. But even at his best MY was nowhere even in the same room as being truly left on economic issues.
Krugman was a hiring error. He was so viciously pro-NAFTA that they thought he was OK. There won't be any more.
Maddow, OK.
Unless by [first approximation] you mean "possible, subject to empirical verification" this seems to give this idea too much credit.
That is indeed what I mean -- which I thought was clear from context.
To a first approximation scoring in college basketball is a predictor of success in the NBA, but you'd still have to know a lot more about an individual player to evaluate their chance of playing in the NBA.
Equifinality and overdetermination. But don't tell me that advertisers don't throw their weight around, or that publishers and editors don't hire to advertisers preferences. And advertisers don't necessarily only care about what they can sell with advertising. They also have their own political agendas. Health foods is an example. A lot of those companies have far-right politics even though they sell to a lot of hippie liberals.
Liberals have been rather poor about throwing their weight around and about supporting better media/
Scoring in college basketball tells you quite a bit about NBA success. There's no reason to think Yglesias-style economic arguments are at all informative about reality.
Scoring in college basketball tells you quite a bit about NBA success.
By itself, I don't think that's true. If you look at the scoring leaders 4 of the top 10 are ranked in the 30s by draft express (meaning that they are likely to play between 0 and a couple thousand minutes in the NBA), 2 are ranked much lower than that, and 4 don't even have a draft express profile.
I'd say that if you know scoring, age, and conference for a player you have some useful (but notably incomplete) information. But scoring, by itself, is mostly overrated as a piece of information.
I think we mostly agree, really. I'm just nit-picking. But I do think of Econ 101 arguments as useful, it's just they're useful in cases which are relatively non-controversial. I do think that cases in which Econ 101 arguments lead to a contrarian position should be a sign to be very cautious.
236 -- sure, absolutely. Another issue is that most of the corporate media is a fairly tiny slice of much much bigger media corporations. While no one really sticks to the old idea of the news organization as a loss leader anymore (eg cable news is supposed to make a profit) it's a tiny and weird enough world that it's largely left to run on its own devices, which happens to be part of a culture of bizarrely obsessive centrism and Washington parties.
At this point I think that (some) media would be more left than it is if news organizations were relentlessly focused on producing advertising dollars -- e.g. you can't ask for better demographics than Colbert or John Stewart get -- but the news people kind of play by their own, deeply stupid, rules, which are mostly driven by wanting to enhance their degree of access to assholes.
By the way (a) nice to see you back, Emerson and (b) NickS and UPETGI, it's you that I owe, right, for my super well-advised Lakers bet? How much do I owe?
232: I'd propose, additionally, that various forms of intimidation play a role. Alameida may feel guilty for holding Yglesias up to public ridicule, but public ridicule is a useful corrective. Granted, Yglesias more-or-less doubled down on his idiocy when he apologized, but I bet the response to that piece will make him think twice the next time he gets an itch to promote nitwit libertarianism. (And yes, he'll probably do it anyway, but still ...)
Likewise, if you know that calling people "anti-abortion" means that you - and your boss - are going to spend the rest of the day on the phone with pissed-off idiots, you learn to measure your words.
And then there are more straightforward forms of intimidation: journalists get direct physical threats, too.
This isn't the only factor explaining the rightward lurch of the media, but I think its impact is generally underestimated, and the bulk of the impact for many years pushed the media only in one direction.
By the way (a) nice to see you back, Emerson and (b) NickS and UPETGI, it's you that I owe, right, for my super well-advised Lakers bet?
Indeed: Emerson!
I was a Laker skeptic, but I don't think we ever made a bet, I just remember this exchange from the New Year's prediction thread.
I never took you up on the bet. Also I was wrong in thinking Minnesota was the sleeper instead of Denver (though injuries played a huge role there).
But had I gone with a bet, it would have been the Clippers, and I think I would have won because you were giving away ties (both eliminated in round 1).
I predict that next year's Timberwolves will be like this year's Warriors: a team that looked like they should be good but took a year longer than was fashionable predicted due to injuries.
I'm still frustrated about not being able to watch most of the NBA playoffs. It's not worth $500 to me to get cable for the whole year, but I'd happily drop $100-$200. I think buying cable and then canceling it probably ends up with more fees than is worth it.
Ah, here we go. I got bored reading through this but it looks like (thankfully) the only person who accepted my relentless betting offers was PGD, and we had a $50 Lakers/Spurs charity bet. So, $50 to the charity of PGD's choice whenever he names it.
Also I think under the terms of the bet I was stupidly offering UPETGI we would have pushed on a Clippers bet and I would have won on Minnesota so woohoo I'm awesome.
208: ITYM "stop motion to Ray Harryhausen".
Digby remains correct on almost everything.
This picture should be the last word of McMegan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10493845@N08/2148613976/in/photostream
Contrarianism in a publication with a liberal audience is an agenda. An agenda that I find too annoying for the limited time I have to spend reading online.
Didn't we all know digby was female long before we knew which woman she was? Am I wrong in thinking that the revelation long predated the drop in linkage, which was quite general as blogging matured in the 2006-07 period?
Could the WaPo be more liberal? In terms of maintaining the general readership, and the readership demographic, probably yes. In terms of reaching people with power, I think there might still be a way to go, but not so much that I'd start reading it again. Someone not only wants to read Richard Cohen, and considers him out on the edge. A whole lot of someones, apparently.
252: Who is the keeper of the Flickr password? It's probably about time that I requested access.
234 - Yeah, like Emerson said. If you read through Krugman's (quite good!) Slate columns from the late '90s, they're mostly him writing clearly about macro-economics. The last 13 years have (rightly) turned him into Krugthulhu, but that's not where he was when the Times hired him.
Looking at who Slate has had writing about economics since Krugman stopped is an exercise in... something.
253.2: No -- her gender was revealed with her identity. I 'knew' she was a woman all along from reading her, and possibly you did too, but people were arguing about it up until the day she came out. (And there wasn't any kind of consensus, or I think even majority belief, that she was a woman.)
250: Ah, I remember that thread. If anything I was too easy on the Lakers. Very infuriating now to realize I could have bet against them at the Vegas odds cited there...it's rare but every so often you *know* a sports outcome.
Have to put some thought into the charity. Was thinking about Ron Paul's 'Campaign for Liberty' but after visiting the web site I just couldn't do it.
Not gonna donate to anything with Ron Paul or libertarianism involved. I don't welch on bets but just no fucking way.
I personally tend to suspect that bob is right most of the time - at least in broad outline - because things seem to be getting pretty fucking dire in a lot of ways and that's basically always been bob's line on any given thing, that it will get pretty fucking dire and that the optimistic/liberal narrative about good intentions, etc, is just a smokescreen for power.
This captures some of my feeling about Bob. Real radicalism makes you smart about the big lies of liberalism and he holds down that end of things, we don't have many others who do.
His reflection on the Bangladesh clothing factory - and his subsequent apology - were McMegan-like in their fraudulence and bullshittiness.
That was certainly Yggles at his worst, but I suspect that you haven't read much McMegan lately (not that I blame you!). I got a refresher in her style at Andrew Gelman's blog (astoundingly he complimented her, even though he is normally pretty good). She has this whole technique worked out where she recycles libertarian talking points through a pretension of sophistication to make an unsupported assertion, all in a tone of judicious, slightly regretful reasonableness. She's really good at that tone, she's got a whole shtick. It's goes beyond just your ordinary sophomoric contrarian streak, annoying as that can be.
For Bob: Felix Salmon writing about Europe has a surprisingly apocalyptic tone:
The conclusion from them both [George Soros and Hans-Werner Sinn], then, would seem to be that Europe as a whole is doomed to misery for as far as the eye can see, and that things are going to get worse before they get worse. I really hope they're wrong. But so long as Europe's future generations remain jobless, it's hard to see a silver lining to this cloud.
259: I saw the Gelman piece and the McMegan item to which it referred, and I agree that McMegan remains the master.
But Yglesias is an able student, and I wasn't using the phrase "McMegan-like" without reflection.
If you take the original Yglesias post together with the apology, you end up with something that could be reasonably described as "recycl[ing] libertarian talking points through a pretension of sophistication to make an unsupported assertion, all in a tone of judicious, slightly regretful reasonableness."
Speaking of meeting bloggers in DC, do you still have a room available that Saturday, PGD?
As far as I am concerned Yggles
What I don't get into in the column is that compared to most contemporary economists, Keynes was an extremely deep thinker about the question of probability. A point he makes elsewhere about the long term is that, if you try to plan decades in advance, you'll find that unquantifiable uncertainty dominates quantifiable risk. How was a Russian entrepreneur in 1900 supposed to weigh the possibility that within 20 years the then-nonexistent Bolshevik Party would seize power?
"gets" Keynes much better than
Where Keynes did go wrong -- in a way that does little to undermine his policy relevance -- was in suggesting that this state would not return, that slowing population growth and innovation would mean a quasi-permanent liquidity trap; it's pretty clear that he was a "secular stagnation" type, to use a term that came into vogue a bit later. It didn't turn out that way, of course, and it was 60 years before the liquidity trap resurfaced as an important issue.But when it did, Keynesian economics was ready; too bad the economists and politicians weren't.
No Krug, it is not just about "secular stagnation*" and Keynes was not about fixing the catastrophes when they happen but about preventing the catastrophes from happening, or keeping them from being human tragedies. Krugman remains a neo-classicist at heart, believing the economies tend toward equilibrium. Read the Krug again, it is horrible.
*also about wars, depressions, bad politicians...
258: If anyone tries to get you to donate to RP or similar, just donate double to Planned Parenthood and call it even.
I just used the term "Yglesias discount". The Bangla Deshi woman discount is probably the highest of them all, along with the Haitian woman discount and a few others. Judging by the media attention, one Bostonian is worth about 5,000 Bangla Deshi women.
Krugman is wonderful only in the context of the American political media. Yglesias isn't exactly a genius, but he's a very quick study who reads fairly widely.
Nothing Yglesias said about Bangla Deshi safety standards couldn't be said about Pennsylvania mining safety standards or Texas explosive factory safety standards. How much is an easily-replaceable worker worth, anyway?
It doesn't take a crazy with placards to worry about the Dow setting upside records every fucking day (with the Nikkei shooting the moon) in economies with predicted piss-poor growth; it takes the crazy to get excited over R & R fudging their math while ignoring the mania in capital markets.
Months, not years. Months.
Having not read the whole of the thread:
24: I genuinely don't get the mad on people have for Ezra Klein, who I think is doing a pretty amazing job within the constraints of working at the Washington Post.
He is. This, for example, a long-form column on a Medicare program that improves health outcomes significantly, but is being shut down, is damn fine work. Actual reporting being done.
225: Yglesias and Klein are the best of the promotions, but that's just sad, and you can see both of them trimming all the time.
Klein is "trimming" less and less frequently -- and really, he guest hosts for Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC often enough, and just plugged Chris Hayes' new MSNBC 8 p.m. show in a post today, or maybe it was yesterday.
I don't see any way in hell Klein is gunning for David Brooks's position. If Bob McManus made that claim, he's turned out to be wrong.
(Hi Emerson!)
"I wanted to write about something I know about (the sound basis for globally differentiated regulatory regimes), and people wanted to read about the news".
As I said, this could have been written by a mining company spokesman. It's not an international question. It's not that the Bangla Deshi government independently decided to loosen safety standards after making some kind of cost-benefit calculations. American and European businesses, encouraged and helped by the American State Department, went here, there, and everywhere looking for cheap, unorganized labor, weak regulatory regimes, and compliant governments, playing the various nations off against one another, bribing whoever they had to bribe, and threatening or killing whoever they had to threaten or kill.
It's not far from the rationality of saying that someone who owns the cops and cansteal with impunity would be stupid to ever buy anything.
I forgot about Maddow, OK. But MSNBC all told isn't that far left, and how high does it rank in the major media?
The rightmost 20% of the American population is much crazier than the leftmost 20%, and its media presence is far greater.
I don't know about the media, but the right-ish people on my Facebook are nuts.
Actually, it's mostly one guy, but he puts up 20% of the statuses.
271: MSNBC all told isn't that far left, and how high does it rank in the major media?
I don't know. I'd have to check. How are we measuring major medianess?
There was some stuff a while ago about Fox and MSNBC being equal and opposite poles of extremism, which seemed odd, since I thought the viewership of Fox's various channels far exceeded MSNBC. I tend to think that MSNBC is pretty fringy, in terms of viewership, but I honestly don't know.
I sometimes think the 27% needs to be freaked out about something, and there's no changing that. But if only we could get them to freak out about something amusing for a while, like UFOs or something, they might be slightly less tiresome.
Also recall that President Obama! name-checked Ezra Klein recently.
Looking back, I don't regret my vote. I think of Lanny Davis, Howard Wolfson, Terry McAuliffe (who might find a way to lose the VA gubernatorial election to Ken Cuccinelli) and, of course, the totally awesome Mark Penn. Obama has been (predictably) disappointing, especially his failure to create anything like a national, grassroots network of Democratic activists, but at least he never hired Mark Penn.
Terry McAuliffe (who might find a way to lose the VA gubernatorial election to Ken Cuccinelli
Currently down by ten, in fact.
Obama's also been disappointing for a gazillion other reasons, many of which have been mentioned in this thread. Still, Mark Penn. Ick. I mean, really, loyalty be damned, he's just a very icky man.
274: Only in America could a television station named for and created by two of the largest and most influential corporations in the military-industrial complex be considered leftist.
278: I'm sure it will tighten. And demographics suggest TM might even win in the end. But he's just about the least inspiring (and trustworthy) candidate I can imagine -- and given VA's recent Democratic candidates for high office, that's saying something.
For a long time I maintained that Klein's doing actual reporting would make it possible to hold out better against mindless centrism and centrist contrarianism and then I think at some point I got really angry at something he wrote and said the people who predicted his decline were right. But actually now I'm back to my earlier view.
Not that I read much political stuff anymore.
The new wing of the Sacramento airport is really very, very nice. If only planes didn't fly into and out of here, it would be a great place to spend a few hours killing time on the internet.
Sort-of OT: Mark Sanford has won the special election in South Carolina.
284:It always was a Brutally Tough District for a Democrat.
Cook PVI of R+11, Romney by 18 I think. Pelosi approval/disapproval 24/61.
277: "Get disappointed by someone new" was always Obama's most compelling slogan.
the especially idiotic thing about the bangladesh fire post (and mcmegan apologyTM) was that it's not meant to be remotely risky to one's life to sew garments! we're not talking about wages, which vary nation by nation in a sometimes sensible way, or even, say, long-haul truck-driving safety regulation, where one might say, OK, bangladesh has crappy regs now for this risky yet crucial job, but as it gets richer it will get better. all you need is to 1) make buildings that don't fall right down on people (yes, you have to buy a little more concrete and rebar, you embezzeling shithead.) 2) have some fucking fire doors, motherfucker! and you know what? those two things are cheap! for as many workers as were crammed in that building I've seen it estimated that it was less than a dollar per worker to have done that--and then it would be done. finally, there are some rational economic actor theories of choice that center around the individual, in this case, the workers who didn't want to enter the building that day but were told they would be fired if they did not. secondly, there are rational actor theories that are broadly about nations acting, like the nation of bangladesh choosing to have a comparative advantage in trade by letting its workers die in fires. do they both make sense? can the latter reasonably be said to allow for the former? even in the glibertarian "I was right all along" version of his point, matt was still wrong. and you too, dz, sorry.
Mark Penn sucked, but sucked worse than Tim Geithner or, say, Ken Salazar at interior?
285 -- right, who cares. Best case scenario was a meaningless seat rental followed by inevitable defeat in 2014.
286: I'm pretty sure that was Cala's coinage (I wish I remembered the conversation a bit more clearly); we just produced the stickers. But yeah, it wasn't like even the most whirly-eyed supporters didn't anticipate that he would mostly suck. Thinking about it, he's actually been a slightly better president than I expected/feared, though nowhere near as good as I hoped. Again, the failure to invest heavily in creating a national network of activists, especially given the groundswell of support he enjoyed after his first victory, is pretty maddening. Still, Mark Penn is in the private sector, and that's not nothing!
288: it's a different kind of sucking, I think. Mark Penn was absolutely terrible at his job and punched hippies/busted unions for kicks. Ken Salazar, by contrast, has been about as good/bad at his job as anyone who knew Colorado politics would have guessed. The same, adjusted for region, is true of Tim Geithner. Put another way, they suck by design rather than default. Maybe that's worse? I don't know.
288 - Geithner and Salazar represent a crappy approach to their fields; Penn represent a crappy approach to the entire field of politics and governance.
I tend to think that, if one employs the competence/gratuitous dickhead scale I've used above, the most damning Obama appointment/association is Rahm Emanuel. But that's because I'm an antisemite.
277: Obama has been (predictably) disappointing, especially his failure to create anything like a national, grassroots network of Democratic activists
Is this true? I think Obama for America has now become Organizing for Action (both known as OFA) -- is that totally lame?
Kidding aside, as k-sky intimates in 292, hiring Mark Penn to run a campaign should be disqualifying. And there's an argument to be made that having Penn on the payroll cost Hillary Clinton the nomination and maybe the presidency. Forget the race-baiting, as Charley said way upthread, it's worth remembering that the Clinton campaign really didn't understand how the fucking primaries worked. Still and all, she'll almost certainly have my full-throated support in 3.5 years. Being a Democrat really does suck.
293: And he would have been in either administration.
296: yeah, that's what I meant to imply. I'm just too subtle for this benighted medium!
I continue to be miffed -- to put that in the mildest possible way -- by Obama's nomination of Penny Pritzker for Commerce Secretary. This is one case in which I'd not mind if Republicans block her (not that anyone they would approve would likely be better).
I'd have thought by now that if anyone would have disabused you all of the notion that there's much connection between competent, progressive campaigning and competent, progressive government, it's Barack Obama. I liked the Obama campaign better at the time and now. But Penn was a dumb hack, not the guy who'd be running things in office. My (mild) regret at not voting for Hillary is that I think there's a decent chance she would have governed better domestically (which I could be totally wrong about, and we'll never know). I don't think she'd have been at huge risk of losing in 2008.
Unless I missed it, how can we have gotten to 300 comments without anyone complimenting A. on her wonderful post-postscript?
299: Mark Penn ran Hillary Clinton's campaign. In addition to having spent a decent number of years busting unions and hating on other parts of the progressive coalition (if such a thing existed or exists), he didn't understand the primary system. That made me skeptical of the campaign, full stop. In retrospect, given that she lost to a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, a man who had less than a full term in the US Senate to his credit, it doesn't seem like my concerns were wildly off base.
As to whether she would have been a better president, maybe?
That said, as I think you know, I completely agree with you about the issue of direct aid to states, the absence of which in Obama's response to the Great Recession still infuriates me.
But the thing is, I'm not sure there's any reason to believe that President Clinton's economic team would have been any different from President Obama's. Again, who the hell knows?
Do I remember correctly that the theory that free trade would inevitably encourage democratization and liberalization, and discourage corruption, was a big part of the effort to sell free trade by the neoliberals in the '90s? My memories are a bit hazy.
In retrospect, given that she lost to a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, a man who had less than a full term in the US Senate to his credit, it doesn't seem like my concerns were wildly off base.
I'll be honest: it never occurred to me that Clinton lost the primary to Obama because of an inferior campaign strategy on Mark Penn's part.
I think I thought it was because Clinton, though female, was nonetheless a party to established power, and a lot of black people (and non-black people) didn't find that especially compelling.
I had forgotten that Alaska Airlines is somewhat less horrible than its competition. Now, as long as the person in front of me doesn't recline, we're all set! (Though, I'm feeling horrible for the woman across the aisle from me. She's single-parenting two kids, and this is the second leg of her journey, which originated in Hawaii. Her kids are understandably crabby, and the guy in front of her keeps turning around to stare daggers at them. A better superhero than I would karate chop him into unconsciousness, allowing him to sleep for the duration of the flight but leaving him otherwise unharmed.)
Now he's making loud and pointed comments about "annoying brats" and "terrible parenting" to his next-door neighbor. Maybe I'll karate chop him, Miss-Piggy-style (HI-YAH!), into a mild concussion.
302 -- yeah. The reality is that I'm a single issue hypothetical time-traveling into the past voter on that issue.
Now he's making loud and pointed comments about "annoying brats" and "terrible parenting" to his next-door neighbor. Maybe I'll karate chop him, Miss-Piggy-style (HI-YAH!), into a mild concussion.
Oh, please do.
Is he on the aisle? You can pull the "accidental" stumble elbow or drink spill. I've done the former but not the latter.
Seconding 309.
(Seriously, say something nice to the mom. Very loudly.)
307: Why don't you just tell the flight attendant that he said "bomb" in Arabic and spent a long time in the restroom?
Clinton was competitive or winning in large primaries throughout the race, but got clobbered in caucuses. Furthermore there were many states where Clinton "won" the primary, but ended up with fewer delegates. Without Mark Penn being an idiot the election would've been very close (well within the superdelegate margin), and it's hard to know what would have happened.
After he turned around and said something obnoxious to the mom, I crossed the aisle and said, very politely and in a very low voice, that I found his antics far more annoying than the screaming of children. I asked him if he could please behave like an adult. And I told him that if he couldn't manage that, I'd have to call the flight attendant, who's got to be incredibly tired from the trip over the Pacific, and ask her to get the captain involved. He looked really, really pissed but settled down. Truth be told, I think he's pretty drunk. Anyway, we're airborne now, and Alaska has in-flight wifi! And there's an empty seat next to me, so one of the mom's kids is asleep with her head in my lap!* Best flight ever! (I really miss having little kids.)
* I will take her and raise her as my own in one of my derelict houses in East Cleveland.
In-flight wifi! I know we're an empire in decline, but civilization is on the march! Ironies abound!
314 makes me extremely happy. Come play with my little kid soon!
If this were facebook, I would "Like" 314 very much.
"Too small to be a republic, too large to be an insane asylum".
I crossed the aisle and said, very politely and in a very low voice, that I found his antics far more annoying than the screaming of children
Excellent.
unfogged is doing that terribly annoying thing where, even though I can see in the sidebar that many new and tantalizing comments have posted, I can not read any of the new comments, which, I say again, have posted (so says the sidebar!), and which are so very tantalizing. Only the old comments appear attached to threads. And the air is doing that thing where it makes the plane bump up and down and then up and down again, a troubling state of affairs whose anxiety-producing effects would be considerably lessened had I taken my usual fistful of pre-flight Valium. This is no longer the best airplane ride ever.
I guess my decision to play Muppet superhero was not karmically correct.
At least the kid is still asleep. As is the drunk. So things could be whole hell of a lot worse.
I wonder if Mrs. Limpy would consider having another kid. I suppose that would require the reversal of a vasectomy, which probably wouldn't be fun. Not to mention, the last birth was rough enough that the doctor told us not to have any more children. So that's probably a no, right? And yet, having a small child sleep with its head in one's lap is pretty much as good as it gets (some Valium would also be nice, yes).
Von Wafer, bravo for speaking and for helping. And bravo for the live blogging! Feeding the blog is important.
(Turns out Alaska Airlines no longer distributes prayer cards.)
Because I'm bored, I figured out that the plane Von Wafer is on originated at a place with airport code OGG, which seems appropriate.
Hope the layover at UNF isn't too long.
Apropos of nothing, I found out today that my first grant application was rejected! Now I really feel like a proper academic.
Holy crap, Mt. Ranier on one side and the Olympics on the other! There is nowhere more beautiful than the Pacific Northwest when it's sunny. Sit back, relax, and fasten your seatbelts, people, I'm going to live-blog this bird onto the ground.
Well with BENGHAZI!!™ we're getting to see the them go after both the black dude and the lady at the same time. Holy crock of shit*! Read some Charles Pierce who gives some proper context unlike the fuckheads at the Times (hint: they both mention the '90s but with a different spin). Or how about this for some context to mention, MSMwads? The number of embassy attacks with fatalities during the GW Bush administration with very little ensuing politicization.
*Alternatively, ... in the words of Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, "If you link Watergate and Iran-contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you're going to get in the zone where Benghazi is."
I see that some of you are commenting. I see that I am commenting. (Sidebar, you are a cruel mistress.) But I can't read any of your/our comments. I have to assume that you'd like me to shut up, which is fair enough, but I'm afraid it's not happening. Instead, I'm here to tell you that I'm seriously considering blowing off my talk tomorrow and the next day and going for a limp in the woods instead.
330: Holy crap, Mt. Ranier on one side and the Olympics on the other! There is nowhere more beautiful than the Pacific Northwest when it's sunny.
Sure until your profligate academic globe-trotting cranks up the CO2 to eleventy zillion and ruins everything. But I hear you were nice to a child. Once.
(Turns out Alaska Airlines no longer distributes prayer cards.)
At the hospital, they prayed over the intercom twice daily. Also the water bottle they sent me home with says "extending the healing ministry of Christ" on it. Just the ordinary local hospital, only one in town.
Or maybe driving up to Vancouver and renting a kayak.
.
.
I would suggest all sorts of problem solving ideas for VW, but he won't see them until he doesn't need them. A conundrum.
336, 337 -> 338
Conundrum solving ideas for md.
328: Hope the layover at UNF isn't too long.
No problem, Obama and the Dems came through on that one!
At the hospital, they prayed over the intercom twice daily.
OK, this is freaky. I've been to Catholic hospitals that don't do anything beyond having a crucifix on the wall.
On the admissions paperwork I always indicate that I am fine with a chaplain coming by but one never does. Why have you forsaken me A.T. Tappman?
JP, using selective quotes from comments as Names would just tantalize the poor man.
I yearn for you tragically.
...
Oh, a chaplain did come through. I didn't get it at first when she said "would you like me to say a few words for you?" I thought those were the words. Like, it was rhetorical and over and I should say "thank you". Then as I was saying "thank you" I replayed the scene in my head and realized I was inviting her to start praying, so I fumbled and declined.
We've landed. And I can read the new comments! All is right with the world, though I wonder if drunky is going to beat me up in the jetway.
I stopped where I did out of kindness.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
I've been to Catholic hospitals that don't do anything beyond having a crucifix on the wall.
Seriously. I gave birth at a Catholic birthing centre attached to a Catholic hospital, and the only mention of Christ that I can recall was my own ("O Christ! and they call this discomfort?! Those bastards: they lied...") utterance.
345. That is so great. Yossarianesque.
At the Dingo Hospital, they will try to steer you toward having your baby eaten, but they don't insist.
"Did my baby just come out to die?"
"No, it came out yester-die."
</recycled bad WWII GI jokes>
345: Heebie thanks everything once.
Alaska Airlines is indeed pretty nice as airlines go. The in-state flights (like the one I took this morning) don't have wifi, though.
I'm almost at your house right now, teo. I can see Russia from my hotel window. The only thing separating us is a chunk of Washington, most of British Columbia, and like a gazillion miles of Alaska. Or wait, would I have to go through part of the Yukon as well? I suppose it depends whether I'm going to kayak or drive. Anyway, I'll be there quite soon.
If you'd relocate to Juneau, this would be much easier. Maybe I'll go see Dave Noon instead of you. No offense.
Ketchikan would be even closer. I'm actually in Fairbanks right now, though, just to make it even harder for you to reach me.
If you were to drive to either Anchorage or Fairbanks, though, you would definitely have to go through part of the Yukon. This isn't true if you were to drive to Juneau, but only trivially because you can't drive to Juneau at all.
I just looked out the window. I can't see Fairbanks.
300: thanks, J, robot!
also, emerson, you can keep hassling me to write a novel, it's cool. you're like the voice of my conscience.
I just looked out the window. I can't see Fairbanks.
Just wait, he'll come swinging in through it any moment now, rapier in hand.
OT: I ain't received no fancy conservatory education, but I think that a professional classical musician ought to be able to identify by name the "Smoke on the Water" riff. Go back to Juilliard, sister!
(No one tell her I said that, please.)
363: And should be able to identify the incident that the song describes. Do they no longer teach music history?
Key question: do they play said riff using the open strings, or not?
I don't welch on bets
Racist. I'ma tell dsquared on you.
I noticed that LGM linked digby today, for whatever that's worth.
Also on topic for the latter part of this discussion, digby's co-blogger discusses how the media can be influenced to support basic human decency.
OK, then, Alameida. Read "Tobacco Road", Jim Thompson's "Pop. 1280", "As I Lay Dying", and maybe something by Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. Then construct a template of cliches and paste in Scott Kaufman's relatives. Easy.
Don't be bothered by cliches! That's what novels are! All of them! Flaubert, Zola, Bellow, Updike, the whole ball of wax. Some of the cliches seem new but let them sit there for ten minutes and they harden.
Try to come up with something like "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." I actually believe that you could do it.
334:
At the hospital, they prayed over the intercom twice daily.
I suppose that's cheaper than repairing it.
363: I think I already linked to this, but this is one of the weirder public performances of "Smoke On The Water". (Performed by a military band, accompanied by flaming torches, at the departure ceremony for the resigning-in-disgrace defense minister, who was found to have plagiarized his dissertation; he picked the song.)
"Smoke On The Water". (Performed by a military band, accompanied by flaming torches,
The helmets! the greatcoats! the flaming torches! You know who else liked smoke on water?