Blogito, Ergo Sum - 8 April 2008

Despite considerable U.S. expenditures on oil and electricity infrastructure, oil exports and the supply of electricity and other services have not risen significantly since 2004. In early April, according to State Department statistics, the electricity supply met 58 percent of demand, compared with 66 percent a year earlier. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month that "millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care."

Why don't you report kilowatt hours instead of percentages? If demand doubled in 2008, then 58% represents more Kwh than 66% did in 2007. Is this the reason Kwh were not mentioned? Likewise, how many FEWER Iraqis this year than last lacked those things? Hasn't the number actually decreased? Is this the reason why numbers are not reported other than "millions"?

A spokesman said the network felt it needed to devote more effort to its "documents creation" division and hadn't really been actually reporting news for some time, anyhow. Dan Rather returns to head new division. Washington Post said to be considering similar action.

Some say that is likely to be the government they get, as a result. Peter Pan reported to be offered high cabinet post as well as ambassadorship to Never-Never Land. Obama said to be cutting down on government expenses by doubling up on cabinet posts and ambassadorial duties. "I'm not at all sure we need a State Department," Obama is reported to have said, "since Nancy Pelosi has been doing such a fine job in only her spare time."

Tom Ricks at the Washington Post is going to live blog the Petraeus hearings:

I think we also should be prepared for surprises in Round Two --both in the hearings and in their effect on the larger debate over Iraq. I have no idea what those surprises might be.

But we can also look for some specifics. First, how will Petraeus and Crocker discuss the recent fighting in Basra and in eastern Baghdad? Will they distance themselves from the actions of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki? Will they discuss the number of Iraqi troops and police who refused to fight or changed sides? It is going to be hard to make this look like good news. Second, how will Petraeus discuss his desire for a "pause" in troop reductions this summer? And will he elaborate on how long he thinks that pause should be? Third, what will he say about the government of Iran, which appeared to arrange the cease-fire that ended most of the fighting? Finally, will he discuss his own future, now that his erstwhile boss at Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, has been defenestrated?

I'll help Ricks out. (1) Maliki cracking down on Sadr was one of the benchmarks which the American congress demanded that Maliki do. So now that he has done it, and Sadr resisted, they're complaining? Oh, silly me...of course the answer is yes. (2) Who reported on the number of troops who refused to fight or changed sides? Oh, I know it's being touted in the MSM, but who was there, reporting on the ground? Were they only Iraqi stringers, or were there actually some American journalists who could be trusted (presuming such exist)? (3) Basra will give Petraeus an excellent reason for pausing troop reductions. (4) It was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, presumably this is going to be your big surprise, Mr. Ricks. (5) No, he won't discuss his own future.

Howard Kurtz talks about the things that you can and can't say during a primary battle, ending up concluding:

Politics has some awfully strange rules, doesn't it? ...

"Why not say what you mean? Two reasons. Neither campaign wants to be accused of giving John McCain any statements that he can use in the general election against the eventual Democratic nominee. Also, in the event that the candidates wind up as each other's running mate or even just campaigning for the other one in November, they don't want to have to eat too many of their own words."

The notion that McCain can't think up all of the things that a fellow Democrat can is laughable on its face. But having to eat too many of one's own words in the even one winds up on the same ticket, or even campaigns for the other, is certainly true.

And Howard says I may have turned out to be right yesterday when I asked how the hospital issuing the denial knew they were the hospital in question, when the hospital had not been named?

The media, including me, have been criticizing Hillary for telling the story of a woman who died after an Ohio hospital denied the account. But now The Washington Post reports:

"The aunt of a young pregnant woman who died after a hospital told her she needed to pay $100 up front for care said in an interview on Monday that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been telling the story accurately on the campaign trail -- following claims by a different Ohio hospital that it did not turn the patient away."

The woman "said her niece had previously been in debt to a local hospital that later sent her a letter informing her that she could only be treated there in the future if she gave them a $100 deposit."

Did the hospital issuing the hasty denial have a guilty conscience? Hillary says some unnamed hospital turned someone away and Hospital 'A' jumps up and calls her a liar, because they didn't do that? Hmmm. Not only that, but it wasn't a young, pregnant woman, it was an elderly man?

At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait says Hillary has a tissue-thin rationale for not getting out:

"Last week, Senator Pat Leahy suggested that Hillary Clinton ought to quit the presidential race. How insensitive! How boorish! Pundits gasped, Clinton took umbrage, and even Barack Obama was forced to concede that Clinton has the right to run for as long as she desires.

"The persistent weakness of American liberalism is its fixation with rights and procedures at any cost to efficiency and common sense. Democrats' reluctance to push Clinton out of the race is the perfect expression of that delicate sensibility.

"There is some point at which a candidate's chance of winning becomes so low that her right to continue is outweighed by the party's interest in preparing for the general election. Does Clinton have a chance to become president? Sure. So does Ralph Nader. Clinton's chances are far closer to Nader's than to either Obama's or John McCain's."

If this argument sounds logical to you, then you might ask Chait why Biden and the majority of the other Democrat candidates showed up in the first place? Did the DNC really...really...ever believe that they had a prayer of a chance?

Wasn't it all so they could raise money for their own purposes? You could eliminate these flaky candidates by making a rule that all money raised for the primary campaign would be turned over by all of the candidates, except for the actual nominee, to the DNC. Otherwise, doesn't Biden get to keep the millions he raised and use them for his own purposes? I think that he does.

Kos, writing in Newsweek, agrees that Hillary is toast:

"She's already lost. No matter how you define victory, Barack Obama holds an insurmountable lead in the race to earn the Democratic nomination . . .

"It's useless to demand she exit the race. If logic, math, appeals to party unity and the evaporation of undecided superdelegates won't sway her, nothing will . . .

"The superdelegates aren't self-destructive enough to change [the outcome], and the sooner they line up behind Obama, the sooner Democrats can focus their fire on the real target: John McCain. Clinton can stick around, but the rest of the party will move on without her."

So, then, if the issue is definitely not in doubt, explain to me why the superdelegates and the Democrats haven't already focused their fire on the real target, regardless of what Hillary does? Certainly, Hillary may keep her attention aimed towards Obama, but there's no necessity for him or for any other Democrat to aim at her, is there?

If Obama and the supers and Kos are so certain, why don't they simply ignore Hillary from here on out, rather than wasting time, money and energy on her?

If she can't possibly win, what difference will there be if she drops out, since Obama doesn't need to pay her any attention now?

And, from Hillary's point of view, why should she drop out now when she is still collecting millions of dollars every month? She may not use that money to buy a yacht or a penthouse, true, but she still controls how it is spent and where it goes, and in politics money is power. Even if she can't win, the money still adds up.

"One Republican strategist not affiliated with the McCain campaign mused about how an independent advertising effort against Obama might work. 'Barack Obama: He's not who you think he is' would be the theme. The supporting evidence would come from his left-wing voting record in Illinois and Washington, spiced up with fun video clips of Reverend Wright."

I wonder whether "he's not who you think he is" would stray beyond Obama's record and pastor and somehow make him--a black man with a Kenyan father--seem out of the cultural mainstream.

Uh...I know I'm dense, but is a black man with a Kenyan father solidly in the cultural mainstream? Isn't it difficult to be 'different' and yet 'in the mainstream' at the same time?

While they're arguing over the patriotism angle, I wonder why someone hasn't thought to ask Obama at what age, as a child, he first recited the Pledge of Allegiance? No matter whether that matters any more than wearing an American flag lapel pin does, when it comes to "true patriotism" (to use an Obama term), it sure does when compared with American cultural mainstream children who began in kindergarten.

Note that I am very carefully not talking about patriotism here, but what constitutes the cultural mainstream. A newly-arrived Mexican immigrant, here just long enough to qualify for citizenship, may in fact be even more patriotic than some Americans who were born in the country, but they're still not part of the cultural mainstream.

...Obama doesn't have to rely on his legislative résumé to prove he's capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he's run his campaign.

Presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned. Jimmy Carter ran as a moralistic outsider in 1976, and he governed that way as well, refusing to compromise with a Washington establishment that he distrusted (and that distrusted him). Ronald Reagan's campaign looked harsh on paper but warm and fuzzy on TV, as did his presidency. The 1992 Clinton campaign was like the Clinton administration: brilliant and chaotic, with a penchant for near-death experiences. And the 2000 Bush campaign presaged the Bush presidency: disciplined, hierarchical, loyal and ruthless.

Obama's, by contrast, has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer. ... At the top, in fact, the campaign is quite hierarchical. There's no question who's in charge: David Axelrod, a grizzled Chicago street-fighter whom Obama has known since he was 30. Axelrod and his subordinates believe their guy represents a new kind of politics, but they're not above using old-school, hard-ball tactics -- even against his own supporters -- to help him win. Last spring, for example, when the Obama campaign realized it couldn't control a popular Obama page on MySpace, it persuaded the company to shut the page down.

I know Beinart did not intend this, but this item sent a chill down my spine. If you think that Bush is willing to control the flow of information to the American people, what would Obama do to shut things down? Beinart is a liberal, though, so in Obama's case he sees this as a virtue:

Scary. Not that Obama sees the need and desirability to use his powers, but that Beinart sees nothing wrong with it.

Mark Penn's sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. ...

Under the Andean Trade Preference Act, passed by a Democratic Congress is 1991, the United States imposes tariffs on only 8 percent of imports from Colombia. But more than 90 percent of U.S. exports to Colombia are subjected to tariffs, some as high as 35 percent. The trade agreement would make this "one-way free trade," which now primarily serves Colombia's interests, more mutually beneficial.

Nevertheless, U.S. unions oppose the agreement, probably to preserve the moral clarity of their monomania: Damn the details, full speed ahead in opposing more free-trade agreements, anywhere, anytime.

Colombia, America's best South American ally, shares a border with America's most aggressive South American enemy, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has made stunning progress against the drug cartels, right-wing militias and FARC, the 9,000-man Marxist terrorist group that is financed by drug smuggling and kidnapping. But Obama, nimble at the art of enveloping the courtship of interest groups in clouds of high-mindedness, says Colombia has not done enough to protect its trade unionists.

Colombia's unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that "it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year": The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Worse, Obama considers international relations to be one of his many strengths.

I usually try hard to understand my favorite Liberal, Richard Cohen, but this time he loses me early on:

In 1988, I promulgated what I now call Cohen's Law of Racial Politics. It goes like this: In states where there are few African Americans, the liberal candidate can win the white vote. In states where there are many African Americans, the liberal candidate will lose the white vote. I forgot about my rule until Barack Obama came along. More and more, he seems haunted by the political ghost of Michael Dukakis.

I know, I know. Obama is an infinitely more talented politician than Dukakis -- more gifted, more exciting and, if you ask me, more needed. But just as Dukakis won the white vote only in states where there were significantly fewer blacks than the national average of 12.4 percent...

I don't understand his logic even more than he usually baffles me...Dukakis was black?

This is not 1988, and much has changed. For one thing, the GOP nominee is going to be an aging foreign policy hawk with no coattails to run on. But if the upcoming Pennsylvania primary simply echoes earlier racial divisions, Obama has to give yet another speech -- this one directed not at the pundits he so enthralls but at the very people who have so far rejected him on account of race. Will it matter? John Kennedy proved a long time ago that it might.

You should follow the link and read the whole column, but Richard is worrying whether undisclosed racism is hampering Obama's election, just as Kennedy's being Catholic did, and if another speech might cure the problem.

The problem with Obama isn't racism, I don't think, as much as it is his 100% liberalism. Even Democrats, it turns out, don't really want someone pegged at the extreme far left of the scale, and there's a real honest doubt about how far back towards the middle he can even pretend to run.

McCain doesn't need coattails because he has famously rejected right-wing support. He's running down the middle because that's where he's always run. No one has ever mistaken McCain for a right-wing conservative, least of all the right-wing conservatives themselves.

Dukakis lost because he had no charm, no grace to him, and in the end had no qualities to offset being too liberal for most people. Obama is winning at the moment because his charm and grace are obscuring his liberalism. Whether he wins the presidency from McCain, or not, will be in large part whether or not he has continued to cover it up all the way to the election.

I don't see the black-white divide being necessarily racist, although of course that is the easy way to look at it. I think it's more of wondering whether or not the candidate will support the wishes of another group over yours merely because the candidate is a member of the other group. That's not racial, because Democrats tend to vote for the Democrat candidate, whoever it is, not because they necessarily believe he is the best person but because they're afraid a Republican winner will tend not to advance their Democrat interests. And rationally so.

Similarly, if a KKK white supremacist was to run for president, blacks would certainly vote against him overwhelmightly not out of race as much as out of self-interest.

If Obama was winning the "black vote" at a 55-45 rate, there'd be no problem with white voters doing likewise. But when Obama gets up to 90%, whites get uneasy. It would be the same with men, though, if Hillary was getting 90% of the women's vote, and that wouldn't be sexist, either. It would be simply a worry that your own personal group might come in for the short end of the stick, a totally normal concern.

It was the same with Kennedy and Catholicism...non-Catholics worried that the Pope would be giving orders and the Protestants would be cut out of the loop.

It's not race, sex, or religion, it's the ordinary human worry that the group to which you belong isn't going to do as well if the other group wins the top spot. Kennedy, to use Cohen's example, convinced non-Catholics that their group wouldn't suffer because of his religion. Lieberman did the same, essentially, when he was nominated for the vice-presidency, although his severest critics still worried whether he wouldn't support "his group" above theirs...in this case, Israeli interests over American.