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Audio Update #2
Strategy: Be Extraordinary
Scandalous double-standard?
WALTER RUSSEL MEAD is quite right: the world pays far more attention to Palestinian suffering than the far greater suffering—in both size and intensity—found in Congo, Darfur, Burma and elsewhere. This has infuriated me for a long time, especially when that criticism comes from other countries of the "South". Why single out Israel and ignore the mass slaughter of Arabs or Africans or Asians in Algeria, Darfur or Burma? In one attack on his own population (in Hama, in 1982), Syria's old dictator, Hafiz al-Assad, may have killed more Arabs than the Israelis have killed Palestinians in the 60-year history of the conflict.
But to Mr Mead, criticism of (relatively smaller) Palestinian suffering is proof that anti-Semitism did not die with Hitler. My rejoinder: of course it didn't, but criticism of Israel's human-rights record has less to do with anti-Semitism than it does with the opposite. Western countries hold Israel to a different standard than they do Congo because they see in Israel a rich, Western-like, European-descended country. We in Europe and America judge Israel harshly not because Israelis are the Other, but because they're unusually like us. Does Israel really want to be judged by the same standard we use to judge Omar al-Bashir? Now that would be anti-Semitism.
(Photo credit: AFP)
Diagnosing the problem
YESTERDAY Kathleen Sebelius charged into a meeting with AHIP, the health-insurance industry group, and castigated them, for the second time in as many weeks, for hiking rates and raising profit margins while dropping more and more people from their rolls. She then invited them to be a part of the solution, rather than a part of the problem, by backing health-care reform. AHIP honcho Karen Ignagni responded that the industry acknowledges the difficulties, but that from their perspective the problem continues to be rising medical costs that leave them with few options. And that got me thinking about a conversation I had two months ago with my father.
My father is a physician, and for the last decade or so he's been a member of Physicians for a National Health Program. PNHP backs a single-payer national health-insurance system: insurance is taken over by a single government entity, like Medicare, while care (doctors, hospitals, drug and equipment manufacturers, etc) remains private. Like PNHP, my father thinks the Democratic proposal for health-insurance reform is a huge mess. And one reason he thinks so is that he believes that the American private insurance industry's profits and administrative costs suck up so many of our health-care dollars that if you switched to single-payer, you could easily insure every uninsured American with the money you'd save, and still have a pile left over to cut premiums. That's the argument PNHP makes: insurance profits and administration consume 31% of our health-care spending.
I am more optimistic about the Democratic proposal. That's partly because I've been insured in the Netherlands, where an all-private universal health-insurance system works very well (and costs about 40% less than American insurance). But more importantly, I had read Ezra Klein's explanation of how the health-insurance industry's profits and administrative costs are really not that big a piece of America's overspending on health care. In fact they total just $145 billion, about 7% of health-care spending. Mr Klein isn't the only one making that argument; in fact, it has settled into something of a consensus among progressive health-care bloggers in the wonkosphere that the health-insurance industry's incentives may be perverse, but it isn't a source of much of America's astronomical spending. Matthew Yglesias refers to this graph from a McKinsey Global Institute report:
(You get the same numbers on health insurance from the Congressional Research Service.) You can see here that the really big chunk of spending that's above the "expected" value (based on America's per capita GDP, compared to other OECD countries' health spending) is in outpatient care. The real reason America spends too much is that health care costs too much. Our procedures are too expensive, and we perform too many of them. Hence, cutting our health-care spending is going to involve something doctors (even my father!) don't much like to talk about: lower income for a whole lot of doctors.
Shirin Ebadi on Obama and Tehran
OVER the weekend, I had a chat with Shirin Ebadi (pictured), Iran's Nobel-prize-winning campaigner for women's rights and democracy. I'd met her before, but a few things she said this time round surprised me.
First and foremost, she thinks that America has been focused far too much on nuclear policy. She wouldn't say, or even speculate, whether the West was right to suspect weapon-building. (She said this is impossible to know because of the secretive nature of the regime.) But she doesn't think that that is the key issue; the struggle for democracy is.
She asked me if people in America even cared about human rights in Iran. I'm not usually surprised by questions from interviewees, but this did take me aback. She didn't seem aware that certain news outlets and blogs had covered the greens with near-obsession. I told her so, but said that from the White House's point of view, the dilemma was balancing nuclear discussions with the government you do have against the hope for a new regime you one day might get. She, in reply, was 100% certain that the democratic movement in Iran would eventually succeed—but the trick is that she could not say when. It would depend on the American relationship, the nuclear negotiations, the price of oil, and Russia and China's role, she said. She supports sanctions like those that would deny visas to the Revolutionary Guards and other regime figures, and confiscate their foreign holdings. But she opposes sanctions that would hit the population as a whole (presumably including refined petroleum sanctions, though she did not mention them by name).
Ms Ebadi repeatedly compared the green movement to the struggle for black civil rights in America, and was convinced it would triumph in the same way. I asked if the leaderlessness of the movement (she doesn't consider Mir Hosein Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi its leader) was a strength or a weakness; she thought it a strength, since leaders can be imprisoned or intimidated. I pointed out that the black movement had a world-famous (indeed Nobel-winning) leader; she countered that it continued on without him. I thought the analogy inexact; could the movement have gathered the strength it did without Martin Luther King?
Anti-imperialism as a hand-washing strategy
MY COLLEAGUE Lexington notes that people have been arguing over the role of Western evangelicals in promoting homophobia in Africa, notably in Uganda's proposed law that prescribes the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality". Lexington cites Philip Jenkins, the expert on global Christianity, as arguing that the claim that African homophobia is imported from Western evangelicals is "bunk".
Gay-bashing in Uganda was common long before any American preachers showed up and gave unpleasant speeches. Rivalry between Islam and Christianity for adherents ensures that preachers of both faiths compete to offer the most anti-gay vision, because that is what a lot of Ugandans want. As in many parts of Africa, openly gay people risk being lynched. The idea that Africans are passive puppets waiting to be told what to do by Americans is both wrong and insulting, says Mr Jenkins.
Lexington attended a talk Mr Jenkins gave in Miami on Tuesday, and spoke with him before and afterwards. It sounds as though Mr Jenkins's focus has evolved a bit over the past few years; when he wrote this article in the New Republic, he wasn't exactly saying that Western evangelicals were irrelevant to Ugandan homophobia. It was more that such influence had been over-emphasised. He situated African homophobia in the rising tide of evangelical Christianity in Africa, and noted that first- and second-generation converts to any faith tend to be more literal in their interpretations of its holy texts. He did argue that competition between Christianity and Islam helps drive homophobia, but he did so in a way that highlights how values are shaped dynamically by the discourse generated in religious competition, including missionary discourse. He also placed African antipathy to homosexuality in historical context, recalling a fascinating angle to the history of Uganda's 19th-century Catholic martyrs. (Apparently some of them were Christian pages who refused to take part in the pederasty adopted by the Arab-influenced Muslim king of Buganda.) "For many Africans," Mr Jenkins wrote, "sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive."
Turn off your TV
KEVIN DRUM reminds us that the outsized influence of cable TV news is bizarre, since its ratings are abysmal. Average Americans simply don't watch it. They watch "American Idol". As Matthew Yglesias points out, the only people who do watch cable TV news all the time are political professionals. But what's truly absurd is that those political professionals don't watch it because they think they'll learn something substantive. (It is physically impossible to learn anything substantive by watching cable TV news. It's like trying to grow muscles by drinking Coke.) Rather, they watch it because they think it will keep them in touch with what average Americans are watching.
I heartily applaud the judgment of the great majority of Americans in declining to watch cable TV news. Television is fundamentally a terrible medium for communicating events and public affairs. The demand of keeping a constant narrative flow going in real-time is poorly matched to the way things actually unfold in the world. Back when broadcast TV was the only way to watch documentary video, people put up with the bad narrative-structure fit, because being able to watch people shooting at each other or tsunamis washing away villages is amazing. But now that you can put that video on the internet and make it accessible on demand, either on its own or as part of a well-constructed, coherent story, it's hard to see why anyone should have to put up with anchorpeople, or with "experts" shouting at each other from tiny split-screen boxes.
I have a TV in my office, theoretically so that I can watch one of the cable news channels. But I haven't turned it on in six months. As far as I can tell I haven't missed a thing, so I probably won't turn it on ever again.
The Duke and Dirty Harry
LET'S take a break to think about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I don't need convincing, but for those of you who do, David Denby has a critical assessment of Mr Eastwood's career in the current New Yorker. Mr Wayne and Mr Eastwood are the two great faces of Western movies, and it's impossible to reflect on their oeuvres without sensing a subtle shift in the underlying culture. This is the end of "The Searchers", from John Ford and John Wayne in 1956:
Mr Denby quotes Roland Barthes, who said, "Mass culture is a machine for showing desire". He adds
As [Wayne's biographer] pointed out, Wayne, swinging his bulk down the streets of the Old West, couldn't imagine being challenged by anyone. Eastwood, ever wary, couldn't imagine a world free of challenge. Wayne's confidence, [the biographer said], made him especially popular in a country that had won the Second World War and shouldered the burdens of the Cold War. One could add that Eastwood's guardedness, and his Magnum, offered reassurance to a country that was losing in Vietnam and feared chaos in the streets.
As my colleague notes below, on Sunday, the academy award for best picture went to "The Hurt Locker", an astonishingly crafted Iraq-war drama that edged the multi-billion-dollar half-animated eco-epic "Avatar". (Voting rules aside, I think "The Hurt Locker" was way better than the nonetheless enjoyable "Avatar".) These were the two major movies of the year for America, and interestingly, neither hinged on any major-name actors. Although as our correspondent in Los Angeles noted presciently in 2008, the main character in "The Hurt Locker" is still in line with the older tradition in American movies:
Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, is a wild man addicted to the adrenalin rush of doing the most dangerous job in the world. He is a character who can embody the central myth of American cinema because his job is saving lives, not taking them.
...By making a film about an unpopular war that still gives the audience someone to root for, [the director Kathryn Bigelow] may have struck gold. Perhaps the return of John Wayne is what people have been waiting for.
A good call, although the Hurt Locker guy is more of an Eastwood character than a John Wayne type. He has lots of socially maladaptive traits and although he is the centre of the film, he maintains a curious anonymity (even though the name William James is famous for other reasons, it would be easy to come out of the movie having no idea what the character or for that matter the actor is called.)
On a similar note, has America moved past its iconic actors? In the 1990s we would have pointed to Tom Hanks as the quintessential American actor, with "Forrest Gump" as his biggest cultural moment. For that matter, Mr Hanks is on the current cover of Time, which calls him America's "chronicler-in-chief". Perhaps a tip to Jim Carrey as the foil. In the decade that just passed it didn't come together for any one actor that way. George Clooney had the best track record, but his taste is perhaps too ironic to draw him to one of those major zeitgeist-y productions. (And speaking of Mr Carrey, if you want to think about his work in an entirely new and totally convincing way, this excellent article is your chance.)
Sacralising politics
I LARGELY agree with my colleague's belief that we would benefit from having fewer "sacred" issues in American public discourse. But I think this part of the analysis is under-supported by the evidence:
This would require discipline on the part of the majority party. It's natural to push for reform by making an emotive appeal on cap-and-trade or charter schools or what have you. But both sides can play at that game.
It was not Republicans who turned Social Security privatisation into a sacred issue in 2005. And it was not Democrats who turned health-care reform into a sacred issue in 2009. Democratic discussion of that issue was technocratic from day one, and Democrats attempted to keep the discussion technical and fact-based all through the year. It is on the right that the discussion began to involve accusations of tyranny, and indeed communism and Nazism, beginning last summer, and this continues to be the case.
Moreover, it has worked. Most commentators recognise that the right has been far more active and effective at mobilising popular political sentiment over health-care reform than the left has. A majority of those who oppose the Obama administration's proposals have false factual beliefs about what those proposals are. This suggests that the issue may have more to do with sacred values for them than with the factual content of the debate. More broadly, I think it's more usually the minority opposition who try to build opposition to majority-party proposals on sacred-values lines, in order to polarise debate and frustrate the majority's ability to govern. It might be more useful to urge both parties to refrain from sacralising politics in this fashion. But it may also simply be naive to believe that values-based debates can be held out of the political sphere, since conflicts over values are extremely effective at mobilising voters to engage in political activity.
Listen Up! (Audio update)
The souk never closes with you people
YOU and I may believe that Israel has spent the past three decades gradually carving out more and more Palestinian land on the West Bank, building more and more settlements, and pushing the Palestinians back further and further into a shrunken version of their initial vision of statehood. But it's useful to realise that many Israelis have convinced themselves that they are the ones who are constantly giving in, while the Palestinians remain adamant and unreasonable. Consider this article by Herb Keinon in the right-wing Jerusalem Post, "Shifting Palestinian red lines":
Wasn’t it Ariel Sharon who said in 2001 that Gush Katif needed to be maintained as a security zone, only to uproot those same settlements in 2005? Didn’t Ehud Olmert, as Jerusalem mayor, call on the government in 1996 to firmly state that it was not prepared to relinquish Jerusalem under any circumstances, only to offer Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 half the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, as well as an Israeli pledge to relinquishing sovereignty over the city’s “holy basin?” And wasn’t it Binyamin Netanyahu who, at a Likud Central Committee meeting in 2002, said, “Dear friends, let me say this once again loud and clear: There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan” – only to have embraced the “two-state vision” in 2009?
There is a pattern here. Israelis say things, but don’t mean them. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have set a track record of saying what they mean.
Another way to phrase this would be that Ariel Sharon, in 2001, tried to pursue a strategically absurd policy of maintaining illegal settlements of a few thousand Israelis surrounded by millions of Palestinians in Gaza, but eventually gave in to reason. Ehud Olmert once supported Israel's unilateral attempt to annex all of East Jerusalem, an annexation no other country in the world has recognised, but proved willing to compromise in exchange for a peace deal. And Binyamin Netanyahu, when he was in the opposition, tried to renege on Israel's binding commitment in the Oslo Accords to allow a Palestinian state, but fortunately decided to honour Israel's promises when he was elected prime minister. Yet another point to make is that when Israelis try to justify to Americans their illegal settlements in the West Bank, or various other aggressive policies, they say such claims are merely bargaining chips to be given away in exchange for a peace deal. Then, when the bargaining chips are cashed in, Israeli right-wingers like Mr Keinon can wail about Israel's lack of resolve and bemoan all the compromises they've had to make.
Yesterday Joe Biden arrived in Israel to pave the way for indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. The talks will involve George Mitchell shuttling between the delegations. The Palestinians had agreed to indirect talks under American pressure despite having earlier said there would be no talks until Israel completely froze construction in its illegal settlements on the West Bank, as Barack Obama demanded this spring. Israel has instead conceded a temporary moratorium on construction of some settlements. But, as Ha'aretz reports, "The Palestinians issued a strongly worded protest Monday after Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, gave permission for the construction of 112 housing units in the settlement of Beitar Ilit, despite the construction freeze in the West Bank settlements." And Mr Biden followed that up with his own laudable, strongly worded condemnation:
I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them.
The most sympathetic interpretation I can construct of why Israel tends to pull these kinds of stunts is that they feel it to be universally accepted normal bargaining behaviour to stake out a maximalist position before entering into a negotiation. As former American negotiator Dennis Ross once said during an earlier round of negotiations (referring to the Palestinian side), "The souk never closes with you people, does it?" But Israelis still, after all these years, don't seem to recognise that what they may think of as staking out a bargaining position is seen by the other side as evidence that negotiations are futile, because they plan to steal everything in the shop.
(Photo credit: AFP)
You don't really want me to answer that
NOTE to would-be writers of political-protest songs: if your anti-government song is called "How Stupid Do They Think I Am", be sure to proofread. (Make sure to spot both mistakes.)
Be the first on your black to own your own genuine audio version of the song that’s sweeping American – and sweeping the Progressive-Liberals out of power!
(Also, I know it's art and all, but I think "How Stupid Do They Think I Am" could use a question-mark.)
Addendum: Of course I make typos too, and some of them even get past editors into The Economist in print. But I thought "be the first on your black" was a particularly cute example of an old internet adage: in lampooning someone else, your chances of making an embarrassing mistake shoot up to nearly 100%. (Two or three mistakes in a couple of sentences, advertising the song "How Stupid Do They Think I Am", is even better.) For that reason, believe me, I proofread this post about five times.
Don't think of a sacred cow
WHY are some subjects so politically divisive (abortion, gun control) while others, which affect just as many people (mining reform, community-college reform) are largely inert? One difference, according to psychologists, may be that the former involve "sacred" values. Adam Waytz explains:
When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a "taboo tradeoff"—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals.
This is interesting and not particularly surprising, even for those of us who are often preoccupied with homo economicus. Morally speaking, it is commendable; people really shouldn't be willing to give up their most sacred values for money. The political problems arise when sacred values come into conflict (as in the abortion case), or when people start extrapolating their sacred values to subjects that were previously governed by pragmatic concerns. Judgment and Decision-Making has a new study on "emerging sacred values", in which they focus Iran's nuclear programme. The Iranian participants were surveyed about disarmament deals: half were told about a deal under which America would reduce aid to Israel in exchange for disarmament; the other half were told about a deal in which America would reduce aid to Israel and give Iran $40 billion. The latter half were angrier.
To move this thinking to the American context, the problem with the health-care reform debate is that health care is an emergent sacred issue. America is in some sense trying to determine the most efficient and equitable way to extend health-care insurance to the largest number of people possible, without sacrificing too much in terms of costs or quality. This is an economic, legal, financial, and administrative question. Yet somehow the question became warped into a moral and philosophical debate, and there goes the neighbourhood.
Arguably this is an appropriate shift—surely there is a moral dimension to health-care coverage—but it does present its challenges. What can be done? This is where messaging comes in. If the idea is that people won't trade abstract values for tangible concessions, the challenge is to present your idea to opponents in a way that allows them to discreetly avoid an open conflict with their values. So if someone's dug themselves into a hole of principle, if I may coin a phrase, better to give them a ladder than to tell them to get on out of there. However, message has its limits. On abortion (always the go-to for an intractable issue) one formulation that has had some success (and is supported by this newspaper) is the idea that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare". This framing acknowledges the values of pro-choice voters (that abortions should be safe for women and legal) while giving some attention to the pro-life ones (rare, ie, that we should try to reduce their number). However, the success has been limited, largely because it doesn't really do that much for pro-life people.
The secondary concern is to tamp down the number of new sacred issues. This would require discipline on the part of the majority party. It's natural to push for reform by making an emotive appeal on cap-and-trade or charter schools or what have you. But both sides can play at that game.
(Photo credit: AFP)
We're all salty old sailors now
ERIC MASSA, who is resigning from Congress over the possibility of a male staffer raising allegations of sexual harassment, has been explaining a series of jokes and misunderstandings over the years involving gay sex. Mr Massa, who served in the Navy, says he's a "salty old sailor". I find this explanation entirely convincing. In fact, I'm surprised that America hasn't already disqualified half of its serving political class for similar gags. America has an extraordinarily prurient political culture where essentially anything a politician has ever said or done involving sex with anyone other than their spouse is potential resignation fodder. At the same time, wisecracks about what Rick Santorum, a former senator, used to call "man-on-man" are entirely normal in heterosexual American culture; in some circles they're practically obligatory. One such circle is the military.
Another is stand-up and television comedy. As anyone who has seen "The Aristocrats" or "Funny People" knows by now, the world of professional comedy writers is a kind of semi-literate tribal society that speaks an arcane dialect of English. Much as Japanese contains alternative forms of address depending on the gender and social status of the speaker and the addressee, Comedic English employs a separate form of address for other comedians in which failure to include an act of intercourse or defecation in a sentence is considered a sign of linguistic incompetence and low social standing. Given the social interconnectedness of the television world and the gay-sex-joke imperative for male comedians, I think it improbable that more than 10% of the male comics in America have not offered to have sexual intercourse with one another. The really incredible thing is that Al Franken has managed to make it as far as he has in politics.
Then again, it would probably make more sense for male Americans to acknowledge that we've all probably made jokes about doing it with other guys at some point, and to render the fact that politicians make those kinds of jokes too entirely un-newsworthy. And, for that matter, to recognise that if politicians do have sex with others of their own gender, that's none of our business either.
Happy Publication Day!
China builds green facts on the ground
HERE'S something I didn't know yesterday, courtesy of Kate Gordon, Julian L. Wong, and J.T. McLain.
China boasts the most installed renewable electricity capacity of any country in the world. At the end of 2008, its 76 GW of installed capacity of renewable electricity—which excludes large hydropower for environmental impact reasons—was nearly twice the amount installed in the United States.
Also, they have the world's most advanced ultra-high-voltage electric transmission lines; they sank $100 billion of stimulus money last year into high-speed rail and transmission capacity; they beat their 2010 targets for installed wind capacity by 100%; and they already get 16% of their electricity from hydropower and wind, and expect to get 30% by 2020.
Oh, and back in 2001 when Beijing won the bid for the 2008 Olympics they realised they didn't have enough subway capacity, so they built five more subway lines. The system now has nine lines and 228km of track. Today. By the end of 2012 it'll be 420km—after the Olympics they just kept building. By 2020 they're figuring on 19 lines and 561km. I would chalk these kinds of numbers up to Communist statistical exaggeration, except that I was in Beijing in 2004 when those subway lines were all on the drawing boards, and then 2008 rolled around and, hey, there they all were, up and running. By 2015 they expect to have over 2,000km of urban rail in 11 cities, the most in the world.
This is what the Israelis like to call "facts on the ground". As of ten years ago, the idea was that the Chinese would never go along with reducing greenhouse-gas emissions because that would impose unacceptable limits on their growth. They're now building the infrastructure such that reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions would not impose limits on their growth.
Meanwhile, remind me what we did in America over the past ten years (besides building a lot of empty McMansions in Florida)? It's time to get to work.
(Photo credit: AFP)
The right to zealously represent hated clients
PEOPLE have political affiliations, then they have personal interests, and then they have ideological convictions. It's always interesting to see what happens when these things clash. Ben Smith reports a group of conservatives including many supporters of the most aggressive counter-terrorism policies of the Bush administration have released a letter condemning attacks by Liz Cheney's group, "Keep America Safe", on Justice Department lawyers who defended Guantanamo inmates and alleged al-Qaeda members.
The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy. As attorneys, former officials, and policy specialists who have worked on detention issues, we consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.
The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.
Spencer Ackerman notes that the group includes not just veteran GOP lawyers like Ken Starr, but David Rivkin and Lee Casey, "an op-ed-writing team of former GOP legal officials who defend practically every terrorism-related policy pushed by the Bush administration." (He links to their defences of warrantless surveillance, waterboarding, etc.)
But beyond the "even the conservative David Rivkin says" angle, I think the key here is the citation of "the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients." Ken Starr, David Rivkin and Lee Casey are all lawyers who have worked in private practice at major firms. The mighty edifice of American corporate law is built upon the foundational belief that the most unsavoury of clients are entitled to vociferous and expert legal defence, and that no opprobrium may attach to the lawyer who provides them with it. For Liz Cheney and her friends to insinuate that a prominent Washington lawyer should be attacked based on the character of someone he represented presents a challenge to these men's core beliefs and their interests.
For instance, David Rivkin is a partner at Baker & Hostetler. One of that firm's marquee clients is the William J. Clinton Foundation. The idea that Mr Rivkin could become marked by the clients he represents would make it difficult or impossible to move seamlessly between partisan politics and lobbying, or between corporate law and government. And what of lawyers who represent disliked clients like, say, health-insurance companies? In trying to hold high-ranking lawyers responsible for the political images of their clients, Ms Cheney was setting herself up for a clash with some of the most powerful people in politics, on both sides of the aisle.
STV for you and me?
LOOKS as though Hendrik Hertzberg may have been right. The New Yorker's political columnist wrote that the voting system at the Oscars—a new one, for a newly expanded ten-film field for best picture—allows voters to rank their choices, one to ten if there are ten candidates. If no film wins a majority of first-preference votes, the last-place film is eliminated and its second-choice votes tallied. If still no film has a majority, the newly lowest-ranked film is booted and the third-place votes are tallied, and so on. Perhaps, or perhaps not (we'll never see all the ballots) this is how "Avatar", the frajillion-dollar blockbuster by James Cameron, lost out to the smaller but scrappier "The Hurt Locker".
Mr Hertzberg called the voting system the "instant runoff"; political scientists usually call it the "single transferable vote" (STV). It means that a candidate that is loved by many but hated by everyone else will suffer. STV is used in Irish and Maltese national elections and in Australian senate elections, but nowhere else nationwide. Why not? It is one of those slightly over-clever systems beloved of good-government reformers. Maybe it strikes people as too complex. Or maybe, just maybe, it strikes too many party hacks as too likely to unsettle them in their perches. A down-the-line Republican can raise money and win primaries by being the most Republican Republican he can be. Sure, he can then pivot in the general election, but at least in congressional elections, with so few districts competitive, very little pivoting is required.
Now imagine congressional elections with STV, and no primaries. The candidate who appeals to many but not all Republicans, and also appeals to some Democrats, has an advantage over his fire-breathing opponent. And he should, since STV aggregates everyone's preferences, not just that of the plurality. Libertarians and Greens and other third-party candidates could make a difference; neither party could then afford to ignore them entirely. Not so many of them would win that they would unsettle the two-party system overnight. The biggest effect would probably be a healthier political weight for those many Americans who, like The Economist, like small government for both budgets and bedrooms, "fiscally conservative but socially liberal", as it's put here, and classically liberal (or simply "liberal") as it's known in Europe. It would transform American elections quite quickly.
A blogger can dream, anyway.
Is it democracy yet?
TWO elections this weekend in countries transitioning to democracy went off reasonably well, all things considered, but in different ways. The better-known was in Iraq, where at least 40 people were killed in perhaps 100 bomb and mortar blasts, but the results are expected to be widely accepted as legitimate. The other was in Togo, where there was little violence, but the results are believed by many Togolese to be fraudulent. In both cases, what Americans tend to want to know is: are these countries going to settle down into normal multi-party democracies, or not?
Nir Rosen has been generally right about Iraq all along, and he's optimistic. Why?
[T]he elections will not precipitate a return to the civil war. The state is too strong, and there is no longer a security vacuum in Iraq... Seven years after the disastrous American invasion, the greatest irony in Iraq is that, in a way, the neoconservative dream of creating a moderate ally in the region to counterbalance Iran and Saudi Arabia may finally be coming to fruition.
On the other hand, Tom Ricks has been generally right about Iraq all along, too, and he's pessimistic. Why?
Because I think a lot of Iraqis are just waiting for the Americans to get out of the way so they can start fighting again. And because I think the incentives that have led to violence in the past are still there. That is, none of the basic questions facing Iraq have been answered.
Elections are supposed to present a way for countries to balance demands between constituencies and governments without resorting to violence. You'd think any population and any government would want to take that deal, and the assumption when the world's current round of democratic transitions began in the mid-1980s was that, while the initial phase might be bumpy, these countries would eventually wind up with legitimate elected governments. But it hasn't always worked out that way, particularly in countries with pervasive clan-based ethnic divisions, resource curses, or other classic impediments to democracy.
Take Togo. When I lived there from 2000-2002, it had been stuck in the middle of its transition to democracy for a decade. General Gnassingbe Eyadema, who had seized power after murdering the democratically-elected Sylvanus Olympio in 1963, was still running the place; he was then the world's longest-serving military dictator. The country is splintered by dozens of tribal divisions. But to oversimplify egregiously, the main one runs between Mr Eyadema's northern Kabye tribe, which controls the army, and the southern tribes, mainly the Ewe, who traditionally dominate commerce and many of whom are of mixed ancestry (and may sport Portuguese or English last names, as the Olympios do). In 1991, with dictatorships falling from Moscow to Kinshasa, a national conference of political players was held in Togo, including Mr Olympio's son Gilchrist, and a roadmap towards a democratic transition sketched out. It never happened. Ballot boxes were stuffed; peaceful rallies were fired on; political opponents of Mr Eyadema's regime were assassinated or fled into exile. The political field became impossibly complex, with players staging byzantine intrigues against each other that never materialised into anything significant. Elections, seemingly always scheduled for next year, were perennially delayed due to arguments about the composition of the independent elections commission.
In 2005 Mr Eyadema finally died, and elections were held. They were stolen by the old man's son, Faure Gnassingbe, a reasonably well-educated consensus candidate backed by the Kabye, the army, and the rest of Mr Eyadema's erstwhile political party and entourage. After the elections, the government allegedly murdered hundreds of political opponents. This year the aftermath looks set to be less bloody, but it's impossible to determine whether the election was any freer or fairer. Togo is still limping along, throwing up a shambling and comical impression of democracy every few years while the real government is one of clan-based fiefdoms.
When will it end? It's not clear that it ever will. And this is something an impatient American public needs to bear in mind in Iraq. With luck, Iraq's political divisions may gradually resolve, and the country may get a fairly decent and increasingly stable democratic government. But it could also continue to limp along, like Togo, indefinitely. Americans like stories with neat endings. But some stories just keep stumbling on irresolutely, forever.
(We have more on Iraq's modestly hopeful elections here. Photo credit: AFP)
Judge Joe Biden
ONE of the more interesting things I've learned recently about the use of reconciliation in the health-care debate is that it all may come down to Joe Biden. The vice-president holds the title of president of the Senate, and is therefore responsible for breaking any ties should the body split 50-50 on a measure. (Quick quiz: Which vice-president cast the most tie-breaking votes?) But that is not what I'm talking about here. What I am referring to is the power of the vice-president to overrule the Senate parliamentarian. That may come into play, as it is the parliamentarian's job to rule on whether the Democrats' reconciliation gambit falls within the rules—it may not if the changes to the bill deal more with policy than pure budgeting. The current parliamentarian is Alan Frumin, who took over the job after his predecessor, Robert Dove, was pushed out by Trent Lott following some unfavourable rulings. So the office is not devoid of drama.
Over on our new US page we're holding a debate on whether the Democrats are fighting fair in the battle over health-care reform. Head on over and share your opinion. For those of you wanting a little more background on the procedure, here is an interesting interview with Mr Dove, who explains how things might play out.
