Henry

Ezra Klein has a suggestion

Tim Fernholz analyzes the controversy and concludes, “no one knows who Khalidi is outside of the media and high information voters, and an even smaller universe of people cares. The attacks by McCain are reprehensible…but ultimately this is not an election about small stuff. This is a big stuff election.” If you want a one-line summary of why John McCain’s Distract-O-Tron 3000 strategy has failed to connect, you can’t do much better than that. Meanwhile, Khalidi is, as everyone keeps telling you, a well-respected and incisive scholar of the Middle East in general, and the Palestinian struggle for nationhood in particular. …

Presumably, this experience has not been a pleasant one for Khalidi. But it would be nice if some good emerged from it in the form of broader familiarity with his important works. So next time you hear Hannity explain how Rashid Khalidi urinates on a Haggadah during full moons, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Its an important book on its own terms, and its purchase is a worthy counter-statement to this type of anti-Arab fearmongering.

Background here, for those who haven’t been following; it’s worth noting that even Martin bloody Peretz is defending Khalidi. I’ve already bought my copy. Those who want to do likewise at Amazon and, with a bit of luck and solidarity, see his sales ranking increase, can do so here (nb that I am using my own standard Amazon ID here, but if someone can nominate a worthwhile organization with an Amazon ID which is really likely to annoy Sean Hannity, Michael Goldfarb etc, let me know, and I will amend accordingly). Those who prefer to shop at a union-friendly store like Powells can find it here. It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.

As I’ve mentioned before, I organized (a fancy word for inviting a number of people who did all the talking) a panel on Rick Perlstein’s recent book Nixonland for the American Political Science Association in September. The commenters were Paul Krugman, Paul Pierson, Nolan McCarty and Eric Rauchway – Rick provided a response. I’ve now written up the transcript of the panel, editing it lightly for style. The PDF of these transcripts can be found here. The panel’s content is licensed under a Creative Commons license – those who want to roll their own can find the .tex file here.

As I’ve said before, I think that this was a great panel which really shows how both history and political science can speak to contemporary issues. While it’s worth reading in its entirety, these two pieces can give a flavor of its current relevance. First, Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat have been engaged in a debate over whether or not McCain talk of redistribution does or doesn’t have racist undertones. September-2008-Eric-Rauchway steps out of his time machine to say that even political scientists who discount the role of race are really saying that Matt’s side of the argument is right.

Even one of the political science books most associated with the `it’s class not race’ theory – The End of Southern Exceptionalism by my friend and former colleague Byron Shafer and his co-author Richard Johnston points out that although among whites (and you have to leave blacks out of the picture for this class story to make sense) class is the determinant of partisan voting in the post-Nixon era, racial attitudes are also highly correlated with partisan voting in the South. What do Shafer and Johnston mean by racial attitudes? They mean willingness or unwillingness to have the federal government use its authority to help African-Americans. Republican voters – richer voters – are less willing to see the federal government act that way; Democratic voters – poorer voters – are more willing to see the federal government acting that way among blacks. So you look exclusively at income inequality in the South and you say aha! – it’s rational politics. If richer whites are more likely to vote Republican, it’s because they don’t want their taxes raised. They don’t want their money taken away; they’re strictly protecting their economic interest. That’s an incomplete story. You have to say they don’t want their money taken away because they are afraid that it will be given to black people.

Perhaps Republican spinmeisters are unaware of this pattern of attitudes among racist Southern voters when they craft messages about distributing our wealth away, or perhaps they merely don’t think that it’s relevant to their political strategies. Or, perhaps, not.

Second, Paul Pierson makes a really useful distinction between electoral politics and policy regimes, pointing out the former don’t necessarily correlate all that well with the latter, and that the latter are really, really important.

I think that here are two critical things that ought to be integrated in a core vision of what modern politics is about that are pushed to the side here. One is policy, and the other is interest groups. … I think there’s a puzzle for those who see the Sixties as a crucible. If you were to look not at elections, but at what the government was actually doing, the role that government was playing in the lives of Americans, especially with respect to domestic policy, would 1968 or 1972 be seen as a turning point? I think the answer is clear – absolutely not. 1968 and 1972 come right smack in the big bulge of government activism, the rise in government activism that takes place rougly between the early 1960s and the late 1970s; I would say 1964 to 1978. If anything, all this {textit{accelerates} while Nixon is in the White House. Social spending increases more rapidly under Nixon than it does under Johnson; you get a massive expansion in Social Security; you get the nationalization of food stamps; you get the nationalization of old age assistance. There are lots of other examples. …

When does it stop? It doesn’t stop in 1981. Roughly, it stops in 1978. The defeat of key domestic initiatives like industrial relations reform and health care reform; the passage of a completely different kind of tax bill, much more oriented towards business and the affluent than the tax bills that had come previously, but a tax bill that would look very familiar to more recent discussions in American politics. You see also the beginnings of a deregulatory push that would eventually remake government and the connection between government and the economy. And all this comes after the huge Democratic electoral victory of 1974, and the recapture of the White House in 1976.

This makes it quite clear that a Democratic victory on its own, doesn’t mean much, unless there is a consequent or simultaneous shift in basic assumptions about government and the role of policy. It also presents an interesting way of thinking about the questions that Chris raises below. The ‘circumstances’ that politicians and policy makers face aren’t set in stone – they are the result of politicians’ beliefs and expectations. If Obama wins, as seems very likely, do we (as some libertarians, such as Ilya Somin fear) face a substantial increase in the role of the state, and in the willingness of politicians to use political power to redress economic and social inequalities? Or should we expect a more cautious managerialism? The kinds of factors that Paul highlights suggest that the answer will depend both on the willingness of external groups to push for serious ideological changes, and on the willingness (or lack of same) of Obama and the people around him to use the current crisis as a way to remake basic understandings about the role of government in American society.

(1) When I heard the kerfuffle about Obama’s radio discussion on civil rights and the constitution, I went back and listened to it, drawing two major conclusions. First – that anyone who expects him to appoint lots and lots of radical judges, is likely to be very disappointed; he has a small c conservative understanding of what the judiciary can do. Second, I was reminded how much I missed Odyssey – it was the best radio show I have ever been on, and more generally, a really first rate contribution to public discussion. A full audio archive is available here.

(2) Via Josh Cohen, Archon Fung and ABC news have put together MyFairElection, which seems a very useful exercise for those of you who are (unlike me) eligible to vote next week. It combines Google maps with data on polling stations, allowing people to report problems such as long lines etc, and (if it works according to plan), provide a ‘weather map’ of voting conditions across the country.

(3) I did a Campaign Free edition bloggingheads with Dan Drezner yesterday on changes in the global economy. The dialogue stopped early because Dan had to pick up a sick kid from school, but was pretty interesting for me, at least – in contrast to many of these conversations, which involve battles over set piece positions, I found myself actually rethinking what I understood to be going on and its implications during the process (so, a real conversation, or something like it).

Miriam Burstein provides an annotated and hyperlinked list of the murderers modelled in the Victorian version of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, taken from the 1886 Tussaud’s guidebook.

Reading Maria’s post below reminded me that I’ve meant to write a brief post about two ways in which there is much more information available about the current US elections than previously. The first is the availability of high quality polling information and analysis thereof. Here, somewhat rightwing sites (Real Clear Politics ), who-the-hell-knows sites (Pollster ) and definitely leftwing sites (538 ) provide much much better information (or so it seems to me) than was available to the average politically obsessed punter four years ago, especially through the aggregation of state-level and national polls. And the fact that they lean in different directions and have different models/means of aggregating poll numbers means that you can more easily discount for ideological wishful thinking of the one or the other side than you could previously. This does, at least to some extent, help guard against the kinds of selectivity based on cherry-picked polls that lead many people (including me) to think that John Kerry was going to win in 2004. Second – there is much better information available to an international audience. In particular, there is a lot more good televisual content available via YouTube and the various TV stations’ own websites than there was four years ago. I suspect (but can’t prove of course) that this makes people in different countries feel more directly connected to the current US election than they have to previous ones – they’re able to observe it in a more visceral way, see speeches that would never get reported on their national TV stations etc. I don’t know whether either of these is having a broader political effect – but I do know that they are making US politics more fun for a wider swathe of people across the globe than they were previously.

Arthur Goldhammer (whose blog on French politics is one of the treasures of the blogosphere).

Sarkozy has announced the creation of a French investment fund with a capital of $200 billion. He is also temporarily suspending the taxe professionnelle. Call it an investment fund or sovereign wealth fund. Call Sarkozy a socialist in wolf’s clothing (as one MEP did the other day). Mock his inconsistency or praise his political versatility. In fact he’s merely doing what leaders of all the advanced industrial countries will be doing shortly, if they are not doing it already: trying to minimize the damage of the recession by turning on massive government investment. This can do a lot of good, especially if it is seen not solely as countercyclical spending but as a chance to do something about decaying infrastructure and make foundational changes with a chance for long-term impact. In France it’s hardly unprecedented for major capital spending to be directed by the state, whether under the Commissariat au Plan, through state-controlled-or-influenced enterprises, or directly by the Ministry of Finance. Sarkozy always danced nimbly between the neoliberal and state-capitalist camps. If the last two decades were the neoliberal decades, the coming two are likely to consecrate the hegemony of state capitalism. Sarkozy has been quicker than most to draw that conclusion and try to get ahead of the tsunami. Let’s see what happens next.

Charles Doriean has written a new and topical paper with Scott Page seeking to measure the maverickyness of John McCain as a senator. They’ve asked me to publish it on CT - the PDF version is here and a Flash embedded version is beneath the fold. In the authors’ description:

A maverick, … can be defined as someone who surprises us by voting against their party as often as they do, given their ideology. To determine whether a senator is a maverick (and how much of a maverick they are,) all we need to do is figure out how often we expect that senator to support their party, and then see how often they actually do support their party. The difference between the expectation and the reality can be called a “maverick measure.”

Under this definition, John McCain is very definitely a maverick. Indeed, he’s the seventh most mavericky Senator since 1877. However, he isn’t the most mavericky Senator in recent history; that honour goes to Lincoln Chafee, who comes in at number three. Also, McCain-ites who want to embrace this result should note that it is based on the same kind of measures of ideology (DW-Nominate scores) that have been used to show that Barack Obama, contra the National Journal and Republican mythology, is not (for better or worse) the most liberal Senator by a significant stretch.

Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage
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From a short NYT piece on the shrinking McCain advertising budget in swing states.

But the McCain campaign also needs the extra money to keep up with its current plans, due to a quiet decision it has made that most voters will hardly notice. Until now, the campaign has been teaming up with the Republican National Committee to jointly produce a large percentage of its advertisements. By sharing the costs down the middle, Team McCain has been able to basically double the amount of advertisements it can run for its money. This is all legal: campaigns are allowed to split the costs of their ads with their affiliated parties. But there’s a catch: The spots must serve not only their campaigns but also the collective agendas of their congressional colleagues.

Such advertisements – known in the political business as “hybrids” – tend to garble a presidential candidate’s message. So, for instance, a spot attacking Mr. Obama also has included references to “liberals in Congress’’ and figures like Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, who is not as well known to everyday voters.

The campaign has started to phase out those ads in these final days, deciding to stick to advertisements it can devote fully to Mr. McCain’s campaign message. That will greatly disadvantage Mr. McCain as he struggles to keep up with the far better funded Mr. Obama. But Mr. McCain’s aides have clearly decided a trade of volume for greater clarity is worth it.

Now this is one possible interpretation of what is going on. But while mixed messages are a significant problem, I (as an admitted naif on these issues) would have thought that getting completely swamped by your opponent’s advertising is a rather bigger one. Isn’t a more plausible interpretation of this decision that the RNC are finally pulling the plug on their subsidization of the McCain campaign, and the McCain folks are trying to put the best face that they can on it?

Some unkind lefties (including one of my co-bloggers) were a little dismissive towards this post by ‘Dr. Helen,’ blogger and Instaspouse of Professor Glenn Reynolds.

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn’t the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people’s number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won’t be the first time.

But now Barbara Ehrenreich (via Cosma ) has let the cat out of the bag and it’s even worse than Dr. Helen suspected.
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Michael Froomkin has a tale of terror.

Recently, the system has been a bi[t] weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised … First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. … But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don’t back up my files enough. … When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. …at which point the disk wouldn’t boot any more. But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. … But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. … But the 750GB version worked. So that’s good. But now I’m nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them. … Now, time extra backups. I’m a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I’m a little dyslexic. … So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. … I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won’t boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights. … I’ve lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. . My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that’s OK. My personal financial info, which isn’t backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate

Some life lessons here – the most obvious being the frequently repeated one of backup, backup, backup and keep non-local copies of your data in case of massive system breakdown/fire/nuclear war etc. If it can happen to Michael Froomkin, who is much more technically adept and conscientious about backing up than you are (for most local values of ‘you’) it can happen to anyone. Happily, Michael appears to have lost nothing more than some easily recreatable data (and a lot of time, assuming he can get refunds for non-functioning hardware). If he were someone who didn’t religiously back up his material, he’d be in far worse shape. Non-local file backup is pretty easy to do these days, and relatively cheap. I use Sugarsync which synchronizes my three Windows machines very nicely ¹ and as a side-benefit provides me with backups against local hardware errors. Kieran discusses a couple of alternatives here (PDF), but whatever system you use, I really recommend that you institute some system for doing this and that you do it today rather than putting it on the long finger (which will most likely mean, given most people’s heuristics for this kind of stuff, that you won’t do it until you REALLY NEED TO, at which point it will sadly be too late).

¹ I understand that it doesn’t work as well for Macs, which to my deep and everlasting regret isn’t a problem for me. The week before last, my university unexpectedly delivered me a lovely new MacBook Pro, which I had some eight hours to fall in love with before I discovered that it had been sent to me thanks to an administrative error, and that it in fact belonged to one of my colleagues. I’m still bitter, as you can tell (but in the unlikely event that an Apple executive is reading this post, and wants to reach out to the crucial academic-blogger constituency by handing out one of their new machines, they can find an enthusiastic evangelist for their product at this address …) More generally (and to get back from the griping), be aware that Sugarsync is not designed as a back-up product as such, and will do nothing to save you from user generated errors (indeed it may make them more devastating). If you delete the one and only copy of your dissertation datafile from a synchronized folder, you will find of course that it is deleted from the copies of this folder on your other machines too. So caveat emptor.

I’ve done the tallying and the results are below the fold, in reverse order.
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