Eric The Blue

Blithering illogic

Since Twins baseball games are broadcast here in the Twin Cities by KSTP radio, I am sometimes obliged to hear between-inning ads for the station's other programs--mostly conservative talk.  A spot for Joe Soucheray's "Garage Logic" is nothing more than a snippet from a recent show.  Joe [Soucheray] goes on a riff concerning Joe [Biden's] remark that it's time for the richest Americans to step up to the plate and do the patriotic thing: pay more tax.  Joe [Soucheray] apostrophized on how the top ten per cent of income earners pay about 65 per cent of all federal income tax and concluded that Biden is "a blithering idiot."

Which raises a question that, at least in the advertising spot, Soucheray did not take up:  what part of federal income tax should be paid by the top earners?  Evidently it is ridiculous that the top ten per cent pay almost two-thirds.  So what would be apt?  According to the Tax Foundation, the top ten per cent of earners take in 47 per cent of all income.  So, under a flat tax, they would pay 47 per cent of the tax, right?  The difference between 47 and 65 represents the degree of progressivity in the tax code.  Is that really so outrageous?

I'm with Biden, though there are better things for him to be saying while out on the campaign trail.

And if Biden is a "blithering idiot," what is Sarah Palin?

In re the debate

Watching the presidential candidates debate last night, I found myself wondering whether anyone would object if the baseball scores were posted in a slow crawl across the bottom of the screen.  Maybe that is because the Twins, in first place by a half game with three to play, were in action against the Kansas City Royals around four miles north of our TV.  Maybe, too, it was because the debate was kind of slow and disappointing for those of us hoping for some pyrotechnical knife-thrusting from Barack Obama.  "When you got the other guy down, put the fork in," advised the football coach at Columbia Heights High School.  Obama did not, and, of the reactions to the debate that I've read online this morning, the one that comes closest to mine is from Thomas Schaller, who at Salon's War Room writes:

What I do know is that Obama did not come up with the caustic, repeatable sound bite. Can somebody explain to me why Obama didn't interrupt just once to say, "You know, Senator McCain keeps saying I don't understand this or that, but on the biggest foreign policy and military decision of the past 40 years -- the Iraq invasion -- the senator got it wrong. Repeat: Wrong. So he ought to save all his condescending lectures about who understands what, because he didn't understand what was at stake in Iraq, and that misunderstanding cost us 4,000 lives and a trillion dollars."

The rhetorical request for an explanation is supplied by James Fallows:

Obama would have pleased his base better if he had fought back more harshly in those 90 minutes -- cutting McCain off, delivering a similarly harsh closing judgment, using comparably hostile body language, and in general acting more like a combative House of Commons debater. Those would have been effective tactics minute by minute.

But Obama either figured out, or instinctively understood, that the real battle was to make himself seem comfortable, reasonable, responsible, well-versed, and in all ways "safe" and non-outsiderish to the audience just making up its mind about him. (And yes, of course, his being a young black man challenging an older white man complicated everything he did and said, which is why his most wittily aggressive debate performance was against another black man, Alan Keyes, in his 2004 Senate race.) The evidence of the polls suggests that he achieved exactly this strategic goal. He was the more "likeable," the more knowledgeable, the more temperate, etc.

Schaller and I are perhaps hotheads, like McCain.  Fallows is cool as Obama.  Here's hoping he's right.

Unfit for high office

McCain is all over the lot.  Calculation, political and panicked, is palpable in his every move.

In the Senate, he voted against the Bush tax cuts, and gave as his reasons the same ones the Democrats did:  not in a time of war, and, besides, too tilted in favor of the rich.  Now he wants to make permanent the cuts he opposed.

As recently as last year, he co-sponsored with Senator Kennedy a comprehensive immigration reform bill that, because it offered illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, was angrily rejected by the Republican rank and file.  As a candidate for president, McCain has disowned his own bill.

His campaign slogan is "putting country first," but, by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, he proved to anyone paying attention that he puts his own ambition before every other consideration.

Was it three days ago, or four, that he pronounced the domestic economy "fundamentally strong"?  Now he has to suspend his campaign and propose that the debate set for Friday night be postponed, so that he can devote all his attention to the crisis.  

The crisis doesn't need his attention.  His public pronouncements are overheated and crazy.  He will fire the chairman of the SEC, though the president does not have that power.  His twenty-year record as a deregulator--gone in a campaign pivot.  Upon taking office, he promises to extirpate greed on Wall Street.  Which of the remaining six deadly sins will he then turn his attention to?

Gentle reader, when George Will and I agree, consider the possibility that the matter at hand is of the nature of a self-evident truth.  McCain is proving that he is unfit to be president. 

Epilogue: the Bradley effect

After writing the last post, on the Bradley effect, I came across this in Andrew Sullivan's blog.  Follow the link to an an article, by Nate Silver, arguing that the Bradley effect cannot be detected in this year's Democratic primary balloting.  I wish I was reassured, but at least the notion of a reverse Bradley effect is encouraging to contemplate.  Maybe there are rednecks who haven't yet admitted to themselves that the black guy with the funny name is the better choice.

While at Sullivan's blog, noodle around awhile.  No one is better on the subject of Sarah Palin.

Worrying about the Bradley effect

Whew!  With Obama back ahead, however narrowly, in the daily tracking polls, and hitting McCain hard for his incoherent utterances regarding the collapse on Wall Street, I am free to move on to new worries.  For example, the following observation of Larry Sabato, who, having just tipped his cap to the "pro-Democratic electoral conditions," blithely continues:

On the other hand, with the first African-American presidential nominee, [the Obama campaign] must worry about racial leakage on Election Day. There isn't a person in the country who can truly measure that effect in advance.

The phenomenon referred to here is the Bradley effect, so-called on account of the California gubernatorial race of 1982, in which Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost to George Deukmejian by around 100,000 votes, or 1.2 percent. 

The result was a considerable surprise, because Bradley held what appeared to be a safe lead in all major polls conducted over the closing days of the campaign, and exit polling on election day tended to confirm that he would win.  It developed, however, that (in the artful words of a Wikipedian) "a smaller percentage of white voters actually voted for Bradley than polls had predicted, and that previously 'undecided' voters had voted for Deukmejian in statistically anomalous numbers."  White voters tell interviewers that they intend to vote--or even did vote--for the African-American candidate, but, in the privacy of the voting booth, they do not.

The tendency has been observed in other contests.  Andrew Hacker, writing in the current New York Review, reminds us that in 1989 David Dinkins, an African-American candidate for mayor of New York, won election by 2 percent of the vote after leading his opponent by 18 percent in polls.  The same year, in Virginia, another African-American, Doug Wilder, was elected governor by about a half of one percent of all ballots cast after enjoying a 9-point lead in the latest polls.  Both their opponents were white.  Moreover, when affirmative action has been on a statewide ballot, the percentage of voters who actually vote to outlaw affirmative action programs has consistently been 6 to 10 points higher than the percentage who tell public opinion surveys that they will vote that way.  Hacker suggests that the Obama campaign, when weighing strategies with an eye on polling results, should adopt as a rule, "ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT!"

The Bradley effect has reared its ugly head in this year's primary season--for example, in the New Hampshire primary, when Clinton defeated Obama after trailing him by a significant margin in the last batch of public polls released before the balloting.  In general, the Bradley effect could account for the fact that Obama tended to win caucus states, where one's vote is public, while Clinton did better in primaries, where one's ballot is marked in private.  The notion that the New Hampshire result can be attributed to the Bradley effect is rebutted, I think convincingly, In a New Republic piece by John Judis that is available online.  Still, I worry.  Sabato, who knows more than I do, thinks it is a factor that cannot be measured in advance.  Hacker demurs--not because he disputes that in 2008 the Bradley effect is still in force but, it seems, because he thinks it can be estimated beforehand: seven percent.

So if, on November 1, Real Clear Politics is showing Obama with a 7-point advantage in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and slightly smaller leads in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Wisconsin, I'm still going to be among the nervous handwringing bedwetters referred to in Sabato's article.

LOL

Go here.  Swallow your coffee first, or risk damage to your keyboard. 

Schadenfreude

W.C. Fields is supposed to have said that he dealt with temptation by giving in immediately.  You save a lot of time that way.  In the same spirit, I am not going to delay taking pleasure in the misfortune of Gabriel Schwartz, a Colorado delegate to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.  On the night of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech, the 29-year-old personal injury lawyer from Denver met a hot babe in a Minneapolis bar.  They repaired to a room at a nearby luxury hotel, where she mixed drinks.  That is pretty much the last thing Mr. Schwartz remembers.  He woke up alone several hours later and discovered that he was missing

• his $30,000 watch
• his $20,000 ring
• his $5,000 necklace
• his $4,000 earrings
• his $1,000 belt
• his $1,000 wallet
• his $1,500 cell phone
• $500 cash

The well accessorized Mr. Schwartz had earlier been interviewed by Link TV on the convention floor.  You can view it by following the link in this post  from Talking Points Memo.  Warning: the Republican delegate and personal injury lawyer is probably even more repulsive than you anticipate.  The account of the St. Paul Pioneer Press is here.   I checked out the website of Mr. Schwartz's firm and learned that he is "moderately fluent" in Russian and Spanish and that he "graduated in the top 33 percent" of his law school class. 

I am going to make a call on Mr. Schwartz:  there is no chance he graduated in the top 30 percent of his class, and a considerable one that he was not in the top half. 

Krauthammer pinch hits for Palin, whiffs

Charles Krauthammer goes to bat for Sarah Palin.  Or, maybe, he's just bragging.  The column is such a jumble you can't really tell. 

The point seems to be that, in one of Palin's supposed worst moments during her "sessions" with Charles Gibson, the chief executive of Alaska was actually justified in her confusion about the meaning of "the Bush Doctrine."  That is because it refers to four different things.  He should know, since he was the first to use the term, and no one is better qualified to take us on a four-stop tour of Bushland.  To start, there was the unilateral withdrawal from international agreements.  Then, after 9/11, there was the with-us-or-against-us Manichaeism.  And, later, as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, the doctrine of pre-emptive attack.  Finally, "the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine," is the notion that "the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world."

So, when Gibson sprung the Bush Doctrine question on the tireless Alaskan reformer, she "quite sensibly" asked, "In what respect, Charlie?"  The back-and-forth went like this:

Gibson:  Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

Palin:  In what respect, Charlie?

Gibson:  The Bush--well, what do you--what do you interpret it to be?

Palin:  His world view.

Gibson:  No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war. 

Palin:  I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid the world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation.  There have been blunders along the way, though.  There have been mistakes made.  And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

Are we seriously to believe that the Governor of Alaska was confused about which of four formulations of the Bush Doctrine Gibson might be referring to?  Plainly she was canoeing on the Bering Sea.  It's not that the term meant more than one thing to her; it's that it meant nothing to her.  Consequently she had no choice but to go for the big, blurry picture, which she did in a pathetic half question--"His world view?"--before launching into the speech she had prepared for any question concerning the current occupant.

Turns out that we aren't seriously to believe it.  Here is the last paragraph of Krauthammer's column:

Yes, Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.

Having opened with the suggestion that Palin was "sensibly" confused by an ambiguous question, Krauthammer at the end quietly withdraws his first argument and allows that "Palin didn't know what it is." Happily, it doesn't really matter.  Gibson is a journalist, so he should be familiar with all the flavors of the Bush Doctrine, but Palin is a phenom running for vice-president of the United States.  Only a condescending snob would expect her to know stuff.

Readings I

The last New York Review to arrive in my mailbox includes an essay, "Without God" (subscription required), by the physicist Steven Weinberg, whose book Facing Up I admire.  He sets out four sources of conflict between science and religion.

(1) As time goes on, and science keeps accounting in convincing fashion for previously mysterious phenomena that were generally regarded as supernatural events, organized religion retreats and gathers up its defenses at a more remote location.  By now it has retreated a long way and inhabits quite a remote outpost.  The tendency is to begin suspecting that religion explains nothing.

(2) Science gives a different answer than does religion to the question, "What is a human being?"  The idea of religion is that we are at the center of things, the "crown of creation" and the focus of God's interest in his world.  But in fact we are not at the center of things.  Why such a vast auditorium in order to stage, in one inconsequential corner, a human drama that appears, against the backdrop of geologic time, measly and fleeting?  Not to mention that we are continuous with all the other creatures.

(3) Much religion denies the very concept of laws of nature, which are regarded as incompatible with God's sovereignty.  In this view, the object of scientific inquiry is chimerical.  What scientists call "nature" is just decisions God has made. 

(4) Religion relies on authority.  The basis of science is inquiry and evidence.  Religion says, "This is true, for it is written" and "Thus and so, as the Church teaches."  Science says, "Let us test it and see what we can find out."  We are now back at (1) above, since, in the effort to understand, the scientific approach works better.  It actually does find things out.

I'm on his side but Weinberg strikes some notes that to me seem too gravely portentous.  "Living without God isn't easy," he concludes.  He recommends, among other things, a sense of humor--though his essay betrays no sign of one.  In that regard, at least, you might say he exhibits a Christian sensibility.  You don't laugh your way through the New Testament, either.  It's all very portentous.  "I set before you life and death: choose life," says Jesus, who, though by doctrine "truly human," never laughs. 

Righteous victims

The publisher's advertising on the back of my soft cover edition of Benny Morris's Righteous Victims says the book demolishes "myths cherished by both sides."  The antagonists are identified in Morris's subtitle--"A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001"--and, in the opinion of this reader, it is the myths of the Zionists that take the harder hit in the first hundred or so pages. 

"A land without people for a people without a land"--we learn on page 42 of Morris's sober narrative that this, the most famous of the Zionist slogans, made its first appearance in 1854, six years before the birth of Herzl, in a memoir of the British politician Lord Shaftesbury.  Morris juxtaposes this factoid with the assessment of two Jewish writers, Ahad Ha' Am and Moshe Smilansky.  The former wrote, after visiting Palestine in 1891, "We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed. . . .  But in truth this is not the case.  Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed."  Years later, misperception takes on the aspect of a deliberate lie, and the latter writes:  "From the inception of the Zionist idea, Zionist propaganda described the country for which we were headed as a desolate and largely neglected land, waiting eagerly for its redeemers."

Herzl, more than anyone responsible for making Zionism an international political movement, wrote in his diary, in 1895, "We must expropriate gently. . . .  We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. . . .  Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly" (pp. 21-22).  The current euphemism for this strategy is "removal."  Moshe Shertok, the first foreign minister of Israel, was impatient with countrymen reluctant to face essential facts:

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture. . . .  Recently, there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about "the mutual misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common intersts" [and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples." . . .  [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes . . . for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate--all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise (p. 91).

The accruing evidence is assembled and set before the reader in a prose notable for its cold monochrome.  Only once so far have I detected a trace of emotion.  Having just quoted Lord Balfour on the "present needs" of Zionism being "of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," Morris on page 76 comments, "This was to be the Palestinian Arabs' tragedy:  They were seen as insignificant 'natives' and usurpers, whereas the incoming Jews were viewed both as Europeans and as the rightful owners of Palestine."

Recreational mathematics

Being a big geek who works at math problems for recreation, I was excited when my wife enrolled in a math class at a local college.  My plan was to read up the material and work the same exercises as she was assigned.  It would be fun for both of us and I'd learn something, too.  So far, though, it hasn't been working.  I have a job, two kids, something resembling an obsession with American politics, an unambiguous obsession with baseball, especially the fortunes of the Minnesota Twins, and, lately, in my spare time, I've been progressing, at the rate of about ten pages a day, through Benny Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001.  No time for my wife's math.

Still, I'm dimly aware that the first lessons of the class involve the Gaussian elimination and the solution for systems of linear equations.  The name comes from the inventor, or discoverer, of the method, Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the great mathematicians of all time and a child prodigy.  Once, a math instructor related to a class in which I was enrolled the following anecdote.  In what we call elementary school, the very young Gauss, bored during an arithmetic lesson, was raising a disruptive ruckus.  Finally the exasperated teacher said, "Carl, I don't want to hear another peep until you've summed the first hundred integers and given me the answer."  Gauss, who had been loudly tapping his pencil on his desk, kept it up.  "Carl, I mean it!"  The boy answered loudly above the sound of his thumping pencil, "Five thousand and fifty!"

The teacher of course thought the boy would have to do 1 + 2, then add 3 to 3, then 4 to 6, then 5 to 10, which gets tedious fast.  Plus you'll probably get confused and make a mistake before you make it into the thirties.  But the young Gauss must have realized that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 99 + 100 may more simply be thought of as (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + (3 + 98), etc.--that is, it's the same as a hundred and one fifty times.  A boy clever enough for such an insight is also going to be sufficiently clever to do the multiplication in his head: 101 x 50 = (100 x 50) + 50 = 5050.

Muddled

We now know that Sarah Palin, unlike John McCain, can read a speech off a teleprompter without making you acutely aware that the speech is being read off a teleprompter.

Isn't the Republican ticket's "message" terribly muddled?  They'll bring change to Washington, "shake it up."  Meaning what?  Palin didn't say, because she hasn't a clue, and McCain, in the part of his speech devoted to policy prescriptions, served up the same old Republican same-old. 

That's what brought us to where we are.  That's why change is needed.  And that's why Republicans sound confused about which party has been in power for the last eight years.

What's with the smirk that comes over McCain's face immediately upon uttering an applause line?  It conveys the impression that he is himself reading the speech for the first time.  "Boy, that was a real zinger."  Not really, John.

I feel a little sorry for old John McCain.  The macho war hero "wanted to do Joe or Ridge" but apparently he'd rather win an election than stand up to The Base.  Thus he put in the call to Alaska and soon found himself, in an interview, repeating ludicrous Republican talking points concerning how certain facts of geography confer upon the governor of Alaska presidential credentials--it's "our largest state" and "right next to Russia."   

Plus, she's the commander of the Alaska National Guard!

He didn't want her and now, to defend her, he has to play the fool.  He puts himself forward as an independent-minded maverick but lets those who have drank most deeply of the kool-aid deter him from picking the VP he wants.  He's reversed himself on every position that formerly gave him a plausible claim to being an agent of change, then runs as an agent of change.  Pathetic.

On the merits, McCain's campaign should be done.  But, then, Bush, with a boost from the Supreme Court, defeated Gore and, four years later, his reckless ineptitude established, won "re-election."  Anything can happen.

Eric the Blue does "Palintology"

 

I thought I was done with Governor Palin, but she is the gift that keeps on giving.  Herewith some gathered-up thoughts.

1. She undermines the main narrative of the McCain campaign, which is that theirs is a straight-talking, stand-up guy who, as the slogan has it, "puts country first"--with the not very subtle suggestion that their opponent, the black guy with the funny name, is something less than a true-blue American.  For in selecting Palin, McCain manifestly did not put America first.  She was picked on account of what she could do for the campaign:  bring home the base, peel off some Hillary voters.  It wasn't about our country.  It was about helping McCain realize his ambition.  I said it before, here.

2. There's been some chatter about how we members of the reality-based community should resist the urge to indulge in that very human emotion the Germans denote with the term Schadenfreude.  I'd put up a better fight if, in the event my ox was being gored, there was even a chance the other side would make the same effort.  Can you imagine if the Obamas had a pregnant 17-year-old?  And they tried to put the best face on it by piously intoning that she was going to marry the trash-talking punk with the vulgar MySpace page who knocked her up?  Give me a break.  Bill Bennett would raise his overfed self from his seat at the slots and exit the casino in order to pronounce from on high stentorian jeremiads upon the Democrats.  Yes he would--but his would be just one plangent bass in a mass choir. 

And, regarding the pregnancy of Palin's daughter, I'm sick of the view that "life happens" and "it makes her more like a real person I can relate to."  How come when African-American teens get pregnant the talk is of moral decline, neglectful parents, and the generalized pathology of the culture the Democrats made from their seat on the sidelines? The wingers are so eager to extend to their own the benefit of every doubt while begrudging the same advantage to everyone else.

3. The choice demonstrates that McCain's judgment is horrible.  What could he have been thinking?  He had to know about the pregnant daughter.  "Trooper-gate," too (the report is due just before the election).  What about her taste for pork, otherwise known as "earmarks," which McCain rails against?  The ingredients of this half-baked cake were ambition, haste, sloth, and recklessness.  We've had enough of that.

4. The statement issued by the Palin family emphasized that it was their daughter's "decision" to have the baby.  Perhaps they did not want to deploy "choice," a synonym for "decision," but still it seems to me that in a crisis they sound a lot like the other side.  Isn't it their policy to deny to girls in their daughter's position any "decision" other than the one they prefer?

5. I have to admit that a few wingers are, as James Wolcott puts it, "entertaining reality."  Richard Brookhiser.  David Frum.  Paul Mirengoff, always the Power Line philosopher most apt to come up for air.  Hinderaker, however, is gone, gone, gone.  He thinks that, instead of cutting back on Day 1, the Republicans should have undertaken to demonstrate to America that the Bush administration's pathetic response to Katrina is a lie perpetuated by that all-purpose whipping horse, The Liberal Media.  And if their convention was a day longer they could re-impeach Clinton!  God what a dope.

Hat tip to War Room for inventing the new academic discipline.