Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Today Ezra Klein writes about something I have discussed before: the problem with allowing politicians to get away with blatantly prioritizing their reelection over all other considerations. But first, a little attempt at sympathy for the plight of the lowly national politician:

I can’t think of a job in the real world that is anything near an analogue to being a national elected official. You are hired, usually just barely, by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, all of whom have disparate interests, needs, concerns, and demands. These people are at once your peers, your charges (legislatively-speaking), and most important, your bosses. You are then constitutionally mandated to exercise your "just powers" over these bosses in a way that will necessarily alienate large swaths of them. Many of the them are perpetually trying to bribe you to perform to their advantage rather than to the advantage of some other group of bosses; and even though theoretically, all bosses have equal weight in hiring and firing decisions, you know that some bosses are more equal than others. All the while, from the moment you are hired, many other of these bosses are working tirelessly to get you fired as soon as possible.

Politicians usually deal with this absurd gauntlet by trying to discern what most of their bosses want most of the time, and trusting that if they can deliver more times than not, enough of the bosses will want to rehire them for another short probationary period. But often they cannot just count on their performance speaking for itself, and instead have to raise millions of dollars to tell people, in terms at once boastful and humble, about the worthiness of their performance, and also to combat the hostilities of the bosses who want desperately to fire them.

Nonetheless, this seems to work all right for them, as the incumbency rate in Congress is forever well above 90%.

I think the problem that we run into is that we too easily empathize with politicians’ desire to keep their jobs. This is in part simple projection: we know that we want to keep our job, and we go about it much the same way: trying to convince our bosses, through our performance, that we deserve to stay on. We will make all sorts of petty compromises along the way. Most of these compromises are short-lived, and only result in limited personal deprivation: more hours worked, less sleep, swallowing pride once in a while. These compromises don’t really affect anyone outside of our family, and they do not often clash with deeply held moral convictions. All in all, a small price to pay for a steady income; everyone wins.

But for politicians, their decisions and compromises can affect not only some or all of their constituents, but often, hundreds of millions of people who are not their constituents. And there’s little political incentive to care what these non-constituents think, and it’s easy to ignore the opinions of those constituents that don’t vote and don’t try to bribe you.

Yet, much of the time in politics there are huge moral questions involved, and making decisions just on a simple reelection calculus means you are necessarily failing to properly grapple with collective national problems, long-term institutional or economic problems, and more esoteric but highly-consequential problems like social justice.

Yet since our own jobs have none of these larger moral and societal implications, allowing us to act self-interestedly with little or no consequence, we are similarly eager to excuse self-interested behavior from our politicans. If a politician all of a sudden starts tacking far to the left or the right, we don’t wonder if he’s had a dramatic reversal in ideological conviction, but rather we look for a simple selfish political explanation: ahh, yes, I see he’s got a tough primary challenge coming up, no wonder he’s positioning himself this way.

But we should stop excusing, or cynically accepting, all this "positioning". Politicans losing reelection is not the same as you losing your job. Despite the high incumbency rate, politicans do get fired all the time. And we shouldn’t really care. Ezra:

Watching congressmen kick and scrape and claw their way to reelection, you’d think something really terrible happens to them if they lose. Maybe they’re deported. Or executed. Or maybe their family has to bear the winner’s campaign debts. Whatever it is, they sure act like it’s awful.

But it’s not awful. Politicians are disproportionately wealthy, old, and educated. The average age in the House is 57 years old, in the Senate it’s 63. The average House member has served 11 years; Senate, 13 years. Congress also has a pretty generous pension system which starts vesting after 5 years. As Ezra notes, politicans are also particularly well-connected, and have a slew of employment opportunities available to them once they leave office.

I’ve no doubt that the U.S. Congress is a pleasant place of employment. But we should make it very clear that politicians trying to extend their stay by any means necessary is NOT a proper use of their "just powers". And it ought to be a fireable offense. 

I was going to respond quite snarkily to today’s David Brooks column, but saw that Jon Chait already has that ground very well covered:

Today David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column. It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.

As Chait notes, the Brooks method starts with an edifying social-philosophical tidbit; then, using fabulous acrobatics of induction, Brooks brings the high-minded principle down into the fray and tells us why this or that topical social trend or political debate conforms perfectly to his erudite preamble.

As usual, I’m much more interested in the front philosophical bit than the inductive, teachable-moment conclusion. Here’s today’s interesting setup:

To help us bond and commit, we have been equipped with a suite of moral sentiments. We have an innate sense of fairness. Children from an early age have a sense that everybody should be treated fairly. We have an innate sense of duty. We admire people who sacrifice for the group. We are naturally embarrassed when we’ve been caught violating some social code. We blush uncontrollably.

As a result of this sympathy and these sentiments, people are usually pretty decent to one another when they relate person to person. The odd thing is that when people relate group to group, none of this applies. When a group or a nation thinks about another group or nation, there doesn’t seem to be much natural sympathy, natural mimicry or a natural desire for attachment. It’s as if an entirely different part of the brain has been activated, utilizing a different mode of thinking.

Brooks’ observation is aped from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr argues that the same magnanimity of spirit that allows us to act morally toward one another at the individual level, leads us to selflessly identify with larger collectives, which expand out in concentric circles of sympathy (ie, family, town, state, country, sect). Once we have generously subordinated our individual desires to some national collective, we allow that collective to do unspeakably immoral things on our behalf.

So the moral instinct that keeps us in line day-to-day morphs in very strange ways when subsumed by a larger social identification, be it political nationality or ethnicity or sports affiliation. This larger identification is inevitable, and the trick has always been to get people to look to greater and greater concentric circles so as to dampen their instinct for out-group demonization. But as E.H. Carr wrote, that’ll only happen when the Martians invade.

This struck me as pretty important news: A panel convened by the nation’s governors and superintendents have just come out with a set of uniform education standards, proposing for the first time a common national curriculum, year by year, for K-12:

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state….

…The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely.

It’s important to note that the establishment of national standards was deemed necessary by the states, following years of declining standards wrought by No Child Left Behind.

The White House has embraced the panel and its recommendations, and signalled its approval by setting aside over $4 billion of stimulus money to fund the Race to the Top initiative, a competitive prize that will be awarded to states based on a wide variety of reform and innovation and teacher quality metrics. From the executive summary:

Race to the Top will reward States that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement and have the best plans to accelerate their reforms in the future. These States will offer models for others to follow and will spread the best reform ideas across their States, and across the country.

Forty states, plus D.C., submitted applications for the prize. The sixteen finalists were announced last week.

You may have guessed, but a couple of states aren’t very excited about any of this. Texas and Alaska, alas, have decided to continue their heated race to the bottom. Both refused to participate in drafting or adopting the new national standards, with Texas governor Rick Perry arguing that doggonit, only Texas will decide what kids in Texas learn (or don’t learn):

We would be foolish and irresponsible,” Mr. Perry said, “to place our children’s future in
the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special-interest groups thousands of miles away in
Washington.

What Gov. Perry doesn’t mention is that the Texas education system is a wonderful example of how elected bureaucrats and special-interest groups very close to home often do no better, and sometimes far worse, than their unelected, far-away-in-Washington cohort. Indeed, in Texas it has led to some exceedingly bizarre and crappy results.

And though Texas applied for the Race to the Top prize (it didn’t make the finals) (and did Perry know that the program is part of the dreaded Marxist Maoist Mussolinist stimulus bill?), Perry’s state education commissioner didn’t seem to care whether they won the money or not:

"Even if we won the full amount, it would only run our schools for two days…." Mr. Scott said.

Take that, Washington bureaucrats! We didn’t even need the stupid money!

However, Terry Grier, superintendent of Houston schools, disagreed. Mr. Grier didn’t seem as interested in pushing mindless talking points about "unelected bureaucrats in Washington":

“I’m disappointed,” Mr. Grier said. “It was potentially a lot of money for our state. I’m not
one to sell my soul for money, but I have 100,000 kids in Houston who don’t read at grade
level, and I don’t agree with people who say resources don’t make a difference.”

Governor Rick Perry just won the Republican primary in his reelection bid. Of course, those 100,000 kids couldn’t vote, but then again they wouldn’t be able to read the ballots anyway.

Marc Lynch on the Iraqi elections:

Iraq’s election day went off remarkably well. Despite some scattered and tragic violence, there was nothing like the kind of devastating violence threatened by a few insurgent groups and only scattered reports of problems in the electoral process….The relatively calm election day was overseen, it’s worth emphasizing, by Iraqi security forces and not by U.S. troops — something which I was often informed, over the last year, couldn’t possibly happen. It did. This is simply excellent news, and a credit to the emerging capability of the Iraqi state….

The other main headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process. The election campaign (as opposed to the results, which we still don’t know) showed clearly that Iraqis are determined to seize control of their own future and make their own decisions.

But if one thinks the Iraq war was a moral outrage, is it morally outrageous to celebrate seemingly positive developments? Will Wilkinson and Daniel Larison think so. Will links approvingly to this Larison post. Larison:

One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world. Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started. It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile.

I think Larison is trying to have it both ways here. Essentially he argues that there are no outcomes that could follow from a war of aggression that would serve to countenance or vindicate the initial moral crime of invasion. So if the 2003 intervention was a moral crime, then it’s a moral crime whether Iraq turns into Switzerland or Somalia.

But then he immediately launches into a litany of bad results, which makes it seem like the results do matter when he makes his moral calculations. Presumably he is against celebrating wars of aggression regardless of their attendant casualty count or the level of civilian suffering, or the success or failure of this or that war tactic. But he seems intent on resting his moral argument on such statistics and tactical assessments. In his post he even devotes two full paragraphs to arguing that the "surge" didn’t work as intended. But why should he care? If it had worked as intended, would it have made the surge more ‘celebratable’ in Larison’s eyes, or the war more moral? Would Larison have devoted two full paragraphs to describing its success, only to then point out that its success is irrelevant to his moral argument?

I also don’t like when people act as if our engagement and involvement with Iraq began suddenly in 2003. For the previous thirteen years Saddam Hussein’s regime was under a near-complete UN economic and trade embargo, instituted in 1990 after Saddam launched his own "war of aggression" by invading and annexing Kuwait. The U.S. was militarily enforcing a safe haven and no-fly zone in the top third of the country. And the Oil-for-Food program—which allowed Iraq to trade some of its oil for food and medicine—was turned by Saddam into an international corruption ring, allowing him to continue depriving his malnourished and enfeebled citizenry and instead further enrich himself and his ruling crime family. Speaking of whom, prior to the invasion Saddam was also no doubt tidying up plans for the eventual succession of his psychopathic sons Uday and Qusay, who both shared their father’s affinity for genocide and rape and torture. 

The point is, this status quo ante in Iraq was thoroughly untenable and unsustainable. The sanctions were impoverishing the Iraqi people, and the only thing keeping Saddam from revisiting his addiction to committing genocide against his people and/or invading his neighbors was a heavy UN-sanctioned U.S. military presence in northern Iraq. This is not to argue that full-scale war was the only available alternative; but simply that Iraq’s sovereignty, such as it existed, was deeply compromised already as a result of Saddam’s war crimes and seemingly pathological interest in violating international law. And the U.S. was already so thoroughly entangled and embroiled in Iraq’s internal affairs that it might perhaps be a more useful framework to consider the events of 2003 as a continuation of the unfinished business of 1991.

It’s also to say that if we should try, as Larison and Wilkinson suggest, to temper our hyperbolic declarations of victory in Iraq, well then we should also never, never make the mistake of pretending that pre-2003 Iraq is something we ought to be nostalgic for. 

Via John Chait, Howard Dean has come out strongly against passage of the health care reform bills currently before Congress. Interesting. Is he against expanding coverage to 30 million uninsured? Nope. Is he somehow opposed to increased regulations on rapacious insurance company practices? Nah. Is the bill just too expensive, or just too cheap, or something? No, no, and no.

See, Howard Dean occupies a reality in which political fallout for his friends is a far more harrowing prospect than the perpetuation of the health care status quo:

Passing the healthcare proposals before Congress will “hang out to dry” every Democratic incumbent running for reelection this fall, Howard Dean said Thursday.

Dean, a physician by training who’s a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said that Democrats in Congress — and President Barack Obama — would do themselves more harm than good by passing the current healthcare bill.

“The plan, as it comes from the Senate, hangs out every Democrat who’s running for office to dry — including the president, in 2012, because it makes him defend a plan that isn’t in effect essentially yet,” Dean said….

“And if it passes next week and get’s signed into law the week after, we’re not going to be able to explain it to people over the din of Fox News and the Republicans…”

“The president needs a win here,” Dean said.

“Not going to be able to explain it”? My god, try harder! The “din” at Fox News will just be too overwhelming? Make your own din! This is such fearful, myopic nonsense, it’s no wonder the Democrats are looking to be decimated at the polls in November. They heartily deserve it if this is the sort of self-defeating cowardice they think passes for leadership.

Whatever you think of his politics, Howard Dean has been at the forefront of health care reform efforts for many years now. And at the culmination of this interminable struggle, a struggle which Dean and his ilk have defined as a moral imperative, he concludes that it is not the 30 million uninsured who “need a win”, nor do the millions of people whose coverage has been rescinded or whose premiums are now out of reach “need a win”; but rather, the president, who last I checked was a multi-millionaire with fine health insurance, “needs a win”.  Similarly, Dean would rather scuttle a central plank of the Democratic Party for the last half-century rather than make the reelection campaigns of Democratic congressmen marginally (and very arguably) more difficult by forcing them to “explain it to people”.

The idea that the height of political courage is taking a somewhat risky vote in Congress is insane. Matt Yglesias writes about this a lot. It turns out that congressmen and presidents who lose their jobs tend to do just fine for themselves. Here’s Matt putting it very well:

Sometimes political change really does take courage. To march in Selma, Alabama and have state troopers beat you up takes courage. To take to the streets in Iran and risk beatings or sniper fire takes courage. What happens if you take risky congressional votes? Well, you might lose….

…People tend to act as if the nation’s homeless shelters are littered with congressmen who lost their elections, but it just isn’t so. Win or lose these people have fine lives. Better lives than, say, those who are forced into bankruptcy by a loved one’s illness.

It is evidence of staggering tone-deafness and egomania that Howard Dean thinks he’s being prudent by prioritizing the electoral fate of Democratic politicians over the palpable, undeniable good this reform would do for tens of millions of their constituents.

That’s David Petraeus’s term for the uniquely beguiling and bewildering political culture that prevails in today’s Iraq. Indeed, in the runup to Sunday’s national election, we’re certainly seeing a capricious mix of best and worst democratic practices, and it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Good: Last week I wrote about Prime Minister Maliki’s decision to reinstate 20,000 former Saddam-era army officers. The move seemed to me to be both good politics and good policy. Bad: But of course, it comes on the heels of ongoing allegations of Maliki-orchestrated fraud and manipulation, accompanied by a widespread belief on the streets that the election will be nothing close to free and fair. And Juan Cole notes that Maliki’s political rivals have an interesting tendency to suddenly find themselves in legal trouble.

Good: Candidates are very responsive to voters’ needs and concerns. Bad: It usually takes the form of outright bribery, which has been ubiquitous and uncontroversial:

Across the country, voters are reaping a windfall as candidates in Sunday’s parliamentary elections offer gifts like heating oil and rice….

…In Babil Province, local candidates have imported sports equipment and thousands of running shoes from China for their constituents. In the southern marshes, politicians travel for hours to pass out toys to children, phone cards to adults and blankets to the poor.

Candidates have hosted so many feasts for potential voters that the price of meat has risen in local butcheries.

Good: It has been a lively and robust campaign season, and turnout is expected to be very high. Candidates for office come from all walks of life. Bad: Some of those walks of life include “officials accused of large-scale corruption, fielding death squads, and spying for Iran.”

Good: Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, has studiously refused to endorse any candidate or enter the political fray in any fashion. Other senior Iraqi clerics have followed his lead. This is part of Sistani’s long-standing belief that clerics should play no direct role in government. Bad: The clerics who run Iran have the exact opposite belief. Iran is conducting a broad covert campaign to unduly influence the elections. They’re funnelling millions of dollars a month to preferred candidate lists and helping to eliminate candidates and officials who are hostile to Iran’s agenda.

Trying to draw conclusions or predictions from such an inscrutable political landscape is less than useless. We shall see….