Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Partronizing Liberalism

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

As long ago as 1959, the sainted leader of modern Conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. observed that Liberals in his time did not recognize Conservative thought as a competing intellectual perspective or philosophy. Rather, if they even thought at all about Conservatism, it was as a pathology that moderns were growing out of or that people needed to be cured of.

It is, therefore, of some amusement that a recent issue of Social Justice published “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize,” by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, psychologists at the University of Virginia. The plucky thesis of their argument is that it may not be the case that all Conservatives are morally evil. Rather, some (probably a minority) may have a “moral intuitions” that are not entirely shared by Liberals. As a Conservative, perhaps I should offer some thanks for this small gracious concession.

It should be noted that this conclusion emerged from psychologists who, I suppose, are qualified to render a clinical conclusion that Conservatism is not necessarily aberrant behavior. Discussion and debate between Conservatives and Liberals should reside the Politics or Philosophy Departments of universities, but first Conservatives, I suppose, need to be professionally certified as eligible to participate in open discussion.

In fairness, some elements of the paper criticize the presumption of some liberals who assume that their positions can be the only moral ones. We are gently informed, for example, that some scholarly research indicates that “some portion of the conservative [1] opposition to affirmative action is truly based on concerns that affirmative action programs sometimes violate the principle of merit.” Gee, I would like to know when providing opportunities to people on the basis of the race or gender does not violate the principle of merit.

Haidt and Graham write as reasonable people. However, articles in scholarly journals are supposed to represent original ideas. The fact that such an article was necessary indicates just how insular and arrogant Liberals and particularly the Liberal intelligentsia in academia have become.

[1] A lower case “conservative” indicates a conservative temperament. The authors should have capitalized“Conservative” since it is a competing political philosophy or ideology. Their punctuation suggests that the authors, despite their openness, are still treating Conservatism as a mental condition rather than a set of consistent ideas..

Fairness Doctrine

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

The year 1949 marked a time when the hubris in the competency government was near its peak, especially after the successful conclusion one of the largest and most successful government enterprises of all, World War II. At that time the Federal Communications Commission issued the Fairness Doctrine, trusting in the government’s ability to arbitrate fairness. The doctrine required broadcasters to provide all sides of a controversial issues in a manner that the FCC considered fair. The fundamental rationale for the doctrine was that the broadcast spectrum is a limited public resource and should be used for the public good. As a practical matter, with the club of the Fairness Doctrine over their heads and their licenses at risk, most broadcasters simply  avoided political controversy. The risks were too great.

In 1969 Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC case, the Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine based on the limited number of stations, but hinted that if the doctrine were used to suppress speech, the doctrine could be re-evaluated. By 1984, FCC v. League of Women Voters, the Court concluded that the scarcity  argument was loosing its saliency. In this environment, the FCC backed off a the Fairness Doctrine altogether in 1987.

The period since has experienced an explosion in public affairs related broadcasting. For a variety of reasons, Conservatives have been particularly successful on talk radio, while one could easily make the case that broadcast television news is provided from a liberal perspective. Indeed, many political operatives view talk radio as the major source of contemporary Conservative thought.

Any arguments about scarcity have long ago been overwhelmed by modern technology. Not only has there been significant growth in the number of radio stations, but radio information is beamed from satellite increasing available bandwidth. In an age, when one can receive “netcasts” over the cell phone networks on smart phones or assemble one’s own webpage, their is virtually no limit on the space available for political discourse.

The First Amendment is  unequivocal. “Congress shall make no law …  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” It is very likely that the imposition of the Fairness Doctrine with the current state of technology would loose a constitutional challenge.

What is interesting is  the liberal (they would like to say “progressive”) community’s instinctive reaction to wield political power by suppressing inconvenient free speech. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she personally favors the revival of the Fairness Doctrine.  She has blocked votes that would prohibit the FCC from imposing the Fairness Doctrine. So much for the free speech movement of San Francisco. It is hard to reconcile the First Amendment with the ethos of using the government to ration speech. Such an effort would be rightly rejected in the case of newspapers, where scarcity is a graver than in the broadcast media.

To his credit President Barack Obama, through his press secretary Michael Ortiz, has said the he “does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.” Unfortunately, the reasoning provided is not reassuring. Ortiz explained that the Fairness Doctrine debate it distracts from among other things like support for public broadcasting and increasing minority ownership media outlets. It does not seem that opposition to the Fairness Doctrine arises from principle, but from tactical calculation. For now, perhaps the pressure to re-instate the Fairness Doctrine will ease. It would have been more heartening if Obama said he would actively oppose the re-institution of the Fairness Doctrine. The good news is that time is one the side of free speech. As communications technology improves and becomes even more ubiquitous, the Fairness Doctrine becomes not only less justifiable, but far more difficult to implement.

Is It All About Power: Census Moves to the White House

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Successful democracies are not just about elections and voting, they are also about a collective political culture that recognizes institutional limits. The temporary losers in a democracy recognize they will have an opportunity to make their  political case later and need not resort to violence or other illegal means to circumvent election results. Likewise the temporary winners recognize that their time in power is also limited. Winners must show respect for the process and not try to use their position to undermine the very democracy that granted them temporary power.

It is, therefore, unfortunate that the Obama Administration is apparently trying to politicize an important function of government, the dicennial census, that ought to be free from politics, by having it supervised from within the White House.  The US Constitution calls an “actual enumeration” of people for the purpose of apportioning the number of representatives in House of Representatives. Interesting the first nine censuses were conducted by the judicial branch, the least political, not the executive branch as it now. The census clause in the Constitution is included in Article I of the Constitution suggesting a role for the legislative branch. In any case, direction by clearly partisan agents undermines confidence in the census.

The fact that the actual counting is performed by professionals in the Department of Commerce has kept the census free from scandal, but certainly not controversy. Certain groups claim that they are not sufficiently captured by the census, but the Census Department has extended programs to find people who are less likely to be counted.

The Constitution calls for an an “actual enumeration,” but some groups have argued for a statistical sampling to estimate populations. Though the use of sampling for compiling a census has not been tested in court, unless the Supreme Court elects to ignore the actual words of the Constitution, statistical sampling for the purposes of apportionment is clearly unconstitutional.

However, this does not mean the mischief cannot occur in an actual enumeration. Resources can be allocated to find every last person in a certain area with less diligence in devoted in other areas. The current plan is for the census to be supervised from the White House under highly-partisan Rahn Emmanuel, President Barack Obama’s  Chief of Staff. Even if Emmanuel were to act a thoughtful and purely apolitical manner, the prescedent of having leading the census from the White House would set the stage of future politicization. Imagine consternation among Democrats if a future Karl Rove were to be charging of supervising a future census from the White House.

If the White House cannot recognize the precedent it is setting in politicizing the census, it is unfaithful to democratic ethos and conceding that for them it is just about power.  Moving the census to the White Hous is the moral equivalent to using the IRS or the Justice Department to go after political adversaries.

Whacking Nonlinear Systems: The Stimulus Package

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

It is easy to secure agreement that national and world economies are strongly nonlinear systems. We can probably make reasonable predictions about the net effect of small policy shifts. But when we whack the system with large perturbations like the current stimulus pack, there are undoubtedly effects that are essentially unpredictable. It is for this reason it is a prideful and unjustifiably arrogant to exhibit too much confidence in asserting what the cumulative effect of the current stimulus package. That’s is what why making policy is so difficult.

Should we emphasize tax cuts or spending increases to stimulate the economy?  The current stimulus package is weighted toward spending increases. Should we emphasize policies that will have an immediate effect or spread the stimulus over a long period of time? These are all good questions that have not yet received sufficient attention.

There are were many on Left who argued that we did not devote sufficient deliberation or time to consider the liberation of Iraq and that the president was fear mongering to force an ill-considered decision. However, the Iraq decision was spread over many months and included long debates in Congress supported hearings and has until this point cost about $630 billion over nearly six years.

We are now about to decide whether to spend over $800 billion over a shorter period of time with little Congressional deliberation and no hearings in less than a month with President Obama warning of economic “catastrophe” if we do not act immediately.

Let it be respectfully suggested that we are acting too hastily. There is no reason we cannot provide an immediate and more modest stimulus to the economy with tax cuts that can be implemented immediately coupled with increasing unemployment benefits to put money quickly in the economy. The remainder of the package can be considered deliberately with hearings over the next few months. Regardless of the particular stimulus we end up choosing, we should try to achieve the greatest effect for the cost.

One question of particular interest is should a stimulus focus more on tax decreases or spending increases. It is certainly the case the that the question is more complex that this. Surely all spending increases do not have equal stimulative impact and all tax decreases do not have an equal salutary effect on the economy. Nonetheless, can some relative weight of the effects between spending increases and tax decreases be estimated?

Economists often speak of the the “multiplier effect.” If the government spends an amount equal to x% of the Gross National Product (GDP) and net GDP increases y% then y/x is the multiplier. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Krugman explained:

“Consider an increase in government spending; assume that the interest rate is fixed (a good assumption right now, because interest rates are up against the zero lower bound). Then textbook analysis says that if the stimulus is dG, the increase in GDP is 1/(1 – c(1-t)) where c is the marginal propensity to consume out of income and t is the marginal tax rate. Suppose c is 0.5 and t is 1/3; then the multiplier is 1.5, which is more or less the conventional wisdom right now.”

So Krugman claims the conventional wisdom is that spending multiplier is 1.5. However, there is some suggestion that the multiplier for tax decreases is larger. Christina Romer, Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley, was recently selected by Obama as  Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. She and David Romer have recently published an analysis that suggests that the multiplier for taxes is from 2 to 3. This would argue strongly  in favor of tax cuts for stimulation.

This is not to argue that the above analysis is conclusive, but it does argue for more careful consideration because these are non-trivial differences. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the current stimulus package and found that in the long run it will reduced GDP. Decade-long predictions from any economic analysis have to be consider extremely provisional. But it does suggestion that we should do what is necessary in the short term and tread carefully in with such a large package.

Make Them Do Math Problems

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Google has launched new application associated with its e-mail service called “Mail Goggles.” If you have a Gmail account, you can use the Mail Goggles application set it up e-mail so that between certain hours you can  only send an e-mail if you are able to solve four math problems within a specified period of time. The idea is prevent the user from mailing stupid or embarrassing e-mails when they are very tired, very intoxicated, or both. The difficulty of the math problems can be adjusted because frankly there are some people who find math hard even when they are stone sober. The basic idea of keeping people from acting hastily before they have the time and disposition to consider their actions. perhaps ought to be applied to Congress. We need slow them up just enough to think before they act.

In October 2008, the government acted quickly and in good faith to prop up the banking system with a $700 billion dollar intervention as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. There is certainly no consensus now, months later that the intervention was salutary and certainly a consensus that it could have been more thoughtfully considered, better written, and better implemented. That legislation was the product of passion rather than thought, fear rather than reason. It was an interesting alliance between Democrats in Congress and a Republican president.

We are now is a similar situation with regard to the present “stimulus” bill. At present, the House has passed a $800 billion plus bill supposedly directed to stimulus without securing a a single Republican vote and loosing several Democratic ones along the way. The bill is now under consideration by the Senate.

There are certainly some stimulus elements to the bill, but the majority of the spending will occur in future years. Immediate stimulus is very limited and inconsistent with the rhetoric of bill supporters. Moreover, there are elements of the bill that are clearly payoffs to Democratic constituencies with little or no  association with economic stimulus, yet included in this rush bill to avoid the scrutiny of fuller deliberation.

It is funny (or embarrassing) to hear Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi argue that family planning is an economic stimulus. While one could argue that any government spending would add stimulus, a thoughtful person realizes that certain types of spending have a greater stimulus effect that others. It would seem self-evident that the government should prioritize spending in terms of stimulus for a “stimulus” bill.

Some elements of the bill may have their merits. Increased funding for climate research or additional infrastructure spending are important. They should be considered in due course upon their relative values, but they do not legitimately qualify as stimulus.

If the bill is being rushed because we need immediate action, it seems that we should consider primarily those actions that have immediate effects. Building a bridge in 2010 may provide valuable infrastructure or increased spending on schools may contribute long-term economic growth, but they are not immediate stimulus and need not be implemented in a rush without careful consideration.

The Great Depression of the 1930’s is the model of the worst economic period in US history and people often refer to it to determine what to do in our present crisis. Many follow the thinking of John Maynard Keynes  and suggest aggressive fiscal policy could alleviate the problem. The enormous spending associated with World War II  brought us out of the Great Depression. Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman in the Monetary History of the United States argued that Depression could have been largely adverted if the Federal Reserve had not instituted tight monetary policy.

In our current situation, we have certainly exercised the option of loose monetary policy with interest rates at historic lows. Since, there is always a lag time between rate reductions and increased economic output, perhaps we all we need to do is wait.

However, prudence suggests that we apply some fiscal stimulus as well. Liberals need to remember that fiscal stimulus includes reduced taxes as well as increased government spending. If Congress instituted a tax (income and/or payroll) holiday for a short time we could give an immediate stimulus to the economy. The effects could be evaluated and the tax reductions extended or ended depending on the results. There would less chance of over stimulation inducing a bout of inflation. Such an approach would not mean that additional spending on important programs could not be implemented. However, we should do so in a measured, thoughtful, and deliberate way.

Perhaps if we made legislators solve math problems before voting we could slow them up enough to think through there actions. They certainly aren’t providing due diligence now.

Obama is No Jefferson

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

In his first inaugural address in 1801 Thomas Jefferson bespoke a compelling confidence in open dialogue when he said:

“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Indeed, the confidence we have in an idea is proportional to exposure to different ideas. As John Stewart Mill expressed it in  On Liberty “…the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion.”

Perhaps in revealing moment, Obama was supposed reaching out to Republicans when warned them , “you can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” It would seem to me that if Limbaugh’s were so clearly wrong we could let him  “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Limbaugh has 20 million listeners everyday and it would seem that someone who wants to transcend politics  would reach out through Limbaugh TO these people. Obama’s partisanship was showing. If he was trying to circumvent extreme voices, he would have been critical of the Daily Kos and Keith Olbermann.

Necessary Due Diligence on Nominations

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

In 1989, Senator John Tower was President George H. B. Bush’s first choice for Secretary of Defense. President’s almost invariably get their choices for cabinet positions confirmed by the Senate. According to King and Riddlesperber [1] in the post-War era from 1945 to 1988, opposition to the nomination of cabinet officials was dominantly based on policy differences, but still are very rare.  On paper,  it looked like Tower had the necessary qualifications including Chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Moreover, Senators are generally loathe to embarrass their own.

However, Senators perhaps knew Tower too well. Although, he served competently in the Senate he was reputed to have a drinking and womanizing problem. Part of the ultimate rejection of Tower was a little political payback to Bush winning the previous election, but Tower would have survived the nomination process had there not been very real and serious  issues with Tower’s character.

In retrospect, the Senate did President Bush an important and historic favor. Ultimately, Dick Cheney was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate for Secretary of Defense. Whatever present reservations there are about Cheney’s recent performance as vice president, there remains consensus that he was a key element of the successful effort to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the first  Gulf War.

The Senate, particularly, the Republicans, as the opposition party now have an obligation to exercise due diligence and put up a substantial fight against at two of the remaining  nominations of President Barack Obama. The opposition should not be based upon political or policy differences but on the simple question of character.

Eric Holder, Jr. the nominee for Attorney General, should be opposed based on the role he played in the Mark Rich pardon and the pardons of the Puerto Rican terrorists — pardons that were clearly made for political expediency under President Clinton. As Deputy Attorney General, he had a obligation as a presidential legal adviser to stand up to President Clinton’s ill-advised pardons. The president would have probably still issued the pardons, but at least he would have been ignoring the proper legal advice.  There may come a time when a  sensitive legal issue comes before President Obama. He deserves an Attorney General whose legal advice is  not hostage to cynical political calculations.

There is no informed and intellectually  honest person who believes the nominee for Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner,  did not deliberately cheat on his income taxes. He is just too smart and informed about his tax obligations to have committed an inadvertent over sight. There is no doubt as to Geither’s credentials or that he would try to implement Obama’s policies with competence. However, he lacks the character to be granted the fiducial  responsibility of Treasury Secretary. Just as yourself if you would hire a brilliant financial analyst to handle your finances if you knew that he cheated on his own taxes. We are told that  Geithner is so brilliant that we have to overlook his character. Is that the moral message the Obama wishes to endorse?

The Democrats, perhaps not for the most altruistic motives, helped President Bush (41) by forcing the selection of Dick Cheney over John Tower for Secretary of Defense. It is time that Republicans paid that back favor to President Obama. He would be best served by an Attorney General with character to tell the President what he make not want to hear and a Treasury Secretary worthy of the trust placed in that position.

[1] King, J. D. and J. Riddlesperger, chapter in From Cold War to New World Order, 2002.

The Captain and His Ship: Bush Reduces Global Warming

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

For better or worse, fairly or unfairly, the captain of ship is saddled with the responsibility or lavished with credit for the failures or successes of his term at the helm. If  a ship is struck by a meteor, it’s the captain’s fault. If unexpected fair winds power the sails of a ship it reflects positively on the captain’s command. The same rules applies to a president. If calamity strikes, the president get the blame. If things go well, the president basks in the credit, deserved or not.

As we prepare for the media’s embarrassingly obsequious coronation of Barack Obama as president, it is not too busy to make sure that Bush’s legacy is portrayed as negatively as can be managed. Now that the Iraq is going so well after the application of the surge, it is necessary to focus on  the economy over the last eight years.

The Washington Post on January 12,  2009 ran the headline “Under Bush, Economy Weakest in Decades.” The article broke up time by the different presidential terms since Truman to evaluate whose economies had performed better. Of course, Bush did not look good in the comparison.

Although the principle that the captain is responsible is often applied and the rule of thumb in politics, the Washington Post should be expected to provide a more comprehensive analysis. It is instructive and probably no accident that the list of performance began with Truman. If Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the term of the iconic liberal hero, were included, the unemployment and growth statistics of the Great Depression would have pulled the average for Democratic presidencies way down. However, that would not have served the purpose of the article.

In reality, gross economic performance is far more complex, with good and bad economic policies interwoven with natural business cycles. We will have recessions in the future, no matter how wise our policies. We suspect that the Post knows this but found it convenient to not dwell to much on the complexity.

For example, when a president comes to office, for the first year, two, or even perhaps three, he is saddled with or buoyed by the economy he inherited. Hence, the proper measure of the effects of a president policy should began sometime after he comes to office. It will undoubtedly be true that unemployment after the first year of the Obama presidency will be far greater than the average of the Bush years. The headline, “Obama’s Unemployment Record Worse than Bush’s” appearing after the first year would be unfair and the Post would never print it. However, they allow a similar analysis to affect their measure of Bush’s presidency.

As we know now, Bush inherited a recession from his predecessor which was compounded by tragic events of 9/11. Bush’s economic record improves considerably if you start the clock  in 2003. Similarly, there was a recession that ended in the last year of the first President Bush’s (41) term. The recovery did not really start to improve the unemployment picture until late in 1992, too late to keep President Clinton from winning the Presidency. Yet, Clinton inherited an economy in recovery with a 4.5% growth rate in the last  quarter of 1992.

Moreover, in evaluating a presidency a thoughtful analysis must consider whether a president manages to get his policies enacted and what those policies are. For example, the Post points out that under President Kennedy, the economy grew at a robust 5.3% rate. Yet one of Kennedy’s key policies was decreasing the top marginal income tax rate from 90% to 70%. Does the Post want to concede that reducing tax rates increases economic growth. Even now, Obama has decided to postpone eliminating the Bush tax cuts in a tacit concession, unmentioned during his campaign, that lower tax rates contribute to economic growth.

If we are allowed to sacrifice thoughtful analysis at the altar of partisan goals and scoring political points, allow us to note the following.  NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, whose research is directed by Dr. James Hansen, a vocal critic of the Bush Administration, produces a time series of global temperatures. Measured from 1993 to 2000 (the Clinton Presidency) the global temperature anomaly increased by 0.19C. However, from 2001 to 2008, (the Bush Presidency) the temperature anomaly decreased by 0.04C. Of course, such an analysis is deliberately oversimplified much as the Washington Post’s was. The difference is that we are telling you so.

George Bush – A Literary Man

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

It is always amusing to run across a story that tells us as much about the people commenting on a story as about the immediate subject of the story. The recent Wall Street Journal column by former Bush presidential adviser Karl Rove represents just such a story. In the column, Rove reveals that President George W. Bush is not just voracious reader, but a competitive industrial-strength reader, averaging over a book a week. Apparently, Rove and Bush competed on who could read the most books in a year. Rove was the victor, but Bush was able to find time to read:

“… biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ, Genghis Khan. ” Other nonfiction included “Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower.” Bush’s reading tastes also extended to “eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s Next, Vince Flynn’s Executive Power, Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, among others.”

What is most interesting is how people reacted. Of course, some simply did not believe the column because it ran so counter to the image of Bush in the media and painted by his political enemies. How could such a dolt or disinterested frat boy be so attracted to books? The best way to deal with inconvenient evidence is to ignore it or dismiss it.  Interesting, no one questions whether Rove, also a very busy person, read the number of books he reports reading. But, of course, Rove is an evil genius.

For Bush supporters, the story does provide some evidence of the intellectual capacity of the President. However, their opinion of the President would not have changed if he had read only  a few books while President. A president is a very busy and might be expected to primarily read work-related material. He would have to rely on the well of intellectual capital acquired before reaching office.

For those who dislike Bush — at least the ones who believe Roves’s reports — are compelled to spin the news negatively. On the basis of this evidence, you don’t here anyone saying, “Perhaps I was wrong in my estimation of Bush’s intelligence.” One approach is to criticize Bush for reading too much and not spending enough time actually implementing  policy. Another is to criticize his reading list as not sufficiently introspective or is in some other way inadequate. Yet another is to assert that Bush feigned being a good-old-boy to hide his trues intentions.

The truth is that the Left and the press has always found it rhetorically convenient to paint Bush as an idiot. The problem is that for the most part, Bush politically defeated his opponents, winning the presidency twice. To reconcile this success with the caricature, Bush had to have clever evil henchmen who did his thinking for him. The usual candidates where political adviser Karl Rove or  Vice-President Dick Cheney.

If the same story came out about Barack Obama, with the same list and volume, we would all be amazed at his commitment to pursuit of intellectual enrichment. It would be additional evidence that he is a thinking man.

Anyone who followed Bush carefully with an open mind should have realized how profoundly he is affected by books. Natan Sharansky, was a former Soviet dissident who managed to emigrate to Israel and rose the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. Sharansky advocated a compelling thesis articulated in his book The Case for Democracy. The argument is that many of the world’s political problems were a consequence of the lack of true democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. The lack of these was the source of political disruption that leads to war and terrorism. Democracies do not fight one another.

Hence, one goal of American foreign policy should be to encourage democratic ideals. These arguments are part of the underpinning of Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. One working definition of an intellectual is a person who takes ideas seriously. By this definition, Bush is an intellectual who put into practice ideas he acquired through reading, study, and reflection.

The tactic of painting a political adversary as not just wrong, but stupid, was applied to President Ronald Reagan. Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of defense Clark Clifford once referred to Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” Ironically, Clifford died just  ahead of an indictment in a scandal surrounding Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He whined that in his defense,  “I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal.” Claiming stupidity (not even amiable stupidity) was Clifford’s best defense.  By contrast, after Reagan left office, a compendium of his writings revealed a thoughtful and eloquent person.

Similarly, former President George H. W. Bush (41 to friends) was ridiculed for his mangled verbal expressions while in office. However, it turns out that Bush was an inveterate letter writer. The collection of these letters also reveals a delightful and intelligent writer, not consistent with his public persona.

2008 in Review

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

No one can legitimately deny that 2008 was an interesting year.

Any presidential election year is bound to draw disproportionate attention, but this year particularly so. The US electorate elected its first African-American as president, Senator Barack Obama. Most importantly, the electoral race did not center on the question race. With the exception of a couple of ill chosen remarks about looking like the faces on currency [1], Obama avoided playing the “race card.” No one of any stature suggest that race disqualified Obama as president. There was no so-called “Bradley effect” where Americans would publicly say they would vote for a black candidate, but in the privacy of the voting booth allow a latent racism or fear prevent them from casting a vote for a black person. Americans were nearly as unprejudiced in the private deliberations as in their public statements. Americans clearly deserve more credit than they deserve. It is hard to imagine any other country that would elect a racial minority of that country as its chief executive.

Early in the year, Shelby Steele, was not enthusiastic about chances for a black president. In his view, any black had to be non-threatening to the white majority and not appear to be a candidate whose primary message was race. On the other hand such a candidate would not seem as an authentic black to fellow African-Americans. As it turns out, once it became clear that Obama had a realistic opportunity to win the presidential election, the prospect of a black American president excited African-Americans. There was no litmus test of authenticity.

This was embarrassing year for journalism. The enthusiasm for Obama was  so great that many lost even the appearance of objectivity.  The first victim of this bias was Senator Hillary Clinton who was regularly portrayed negatively by MSNBC. Hillary even began to appreciate Fox News. Actually, the Democratic primary was an amusing battle between the politics of gender and the politics of race with both candidates anxious to claim the mantel of representing a victim class without the weakness of appearing to be victim.

After the election there were media mea cuplas. The ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote:

“The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.”

There were similar self-analysis from other organizations. The real question is why such retrospection and assessments were not forthcoming when they could have improved coverage during the campaign. The behavior of the main-stream-media is not healthy for democracy.

The biggest news of the year may have been news that fell off the front pages: the Iraq War. Largely because of the troop surge and the associated strategy, the War in Iraq is succeeding. Perhaps  the most important measure for Americans, the increased security in Iraq has resulted in dramatic reductions in American lost of life. This month thus far 14 Americans had died and only seven from hostile actions. Of course, any loss is devastating for the soldier’s family, but no one can deny that Iraq is largely now a settled issue — mostly as a consequence of the effectiveness of the American military.

Unfortunately, the victory will be a silent one as American troops are allowed to slowly return home as Iraqis become more and more responsible for their own security. In part because the media does not want to grant President Bush the credit for an important success Americans and troops will not enjoy the satisfaction of victory — just compensation for their sacrifice.

Finally, this is the year that the economy fell into a dramatic recession which has dramatically reduced stock values and real estate prices. Certainly, the business cycle has not been repealed and we can always expect episodic recessions. This particular recession was initiated under a complex interaction between public and private mistakes. The housing market was oversold largely under the encouragement of government to extend loans to people who could not afford them — the “sub-prime” crisis. The increase in oil prices helped trigger some of the defaults.

This crisis was then magnified by credit default swaps where  companies in a non-transparent fashion had traded risk. This radical increase in liability brought down many investment houses. As a consequence, the federal government had to intervene with massive bailouts (with dubious salutary effect) to rescue irresponsible behavior by large Wall Street investment house. We can hope that 2009 with mark the beginning of the recovery.

[1] Barack Obama: “‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills and, and they’re going to send out nasty emails.”