"So?" - So This

By Cernig

Mickey Edwards, 16-year Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation and Princeton scholar, has found his contrary voice to the Bush?Cheney GOP late in life - but, oh boy, is it a clear one.

The decision to go to war...to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die -- is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation's Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America's constitutional system.

In Europe, before America's founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America's "head of state," but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it's not the branch that decides on war and peace.

When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple "So?" he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.

It's been obvious to many of us for a very long time that the GOP had been taken over by people who would prefer that the people not rule. I'm glad to see more and more conservatives figuring that out for themselves in the last year of the Bush presidency. It might just help prevent a McSame presidency continuing Bush and Cheney's work.

Certainly McCain should be seen as going into the elections with all of his policies, along with his candidacy, already the lamest kind of ducks.

Socialists Win In France, Spain

By Cernig

Remember how French President Sarozy's triumph in last years election was hailed (in the U.S. and by rightwing pundits) as a turning point for the Right in Europe, who would now proudly march forward into a European fatherland of the future?

Not so much.

Spain's socialist majority party have not just increased the size of their majority, but seem to be preferred by big business over their conservative rivals. That's something we've seen elsewhere in Europe and in the UK too - even big corporations prefer some rules and government oversight to temper their opposition's dirty tricks and democratic socialist governments provide that where conservative's don't.

Spain's governing Socialist Party won Sunday's election and may have secured enough extra seats for an absolute majority, exit polls indicated.

With both parties' policies broadly similar for tackling a sharp slowdown in economic growth, financial markets would be likely to welcome a clear outcome as a sign of stability.

An exit poll published by Spanish state television gave Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's party 172-176 seats in the 350-seat lower house, and the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP) 148-152 seats.

Three other polls for private media gave the Socialists between 163 and 178 seats, with the PP on 142-152. In the 2004 elections, which Zapatero won in a last-minute turnaround, the Socialists won 164 seats and the PP 148.

An absolute majority requires 176 seats so if the Socialists manage to keep at the top of the exit poll ranges, Zapatero may not need to court smaller parties to pass laws over the next four years, as he did in the last legislature.

"All the exit polls agree the Socialists have won. It is the leading party in terms of votes and seats," Socialist party organisation secretary Jose Blanco told reporters.

Meanwhile, in France, Sarkozy's party and the playboy president himself have a few problems.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right UMP party faced big losses after the first round of French local elections on Sunday in a vote that could dent his political standing less than a year after he took office.

An initial projection by the CSA pollsters showed the opposition Socialists and other left wing parties heading for 47.5 percent of the overall vote, with the UMP and other right wing parties heading for just 40 percent.

"These are naturally not good results," said Patrick Devedjian, secretary general of the UMP party.

...Sarkozy, elected triumphantly last May on a pledge to reform the French economy and modernize its institutions, has seen his popularity plunge as worries about the cost of living and disenchantment with his glitzy personal life have grown.

Latest polls have showed his approval ratings as low as 37 percent against highs of more than 65 percent posted in the aftermath of his convincing election victory last May.

Another American rightwing narrative bites the dust. They've been trying to write off the European Left since Thatcher took office at the very least - each time they've been wrong. That they've been so consistently wrong says more about their own antiquated and McCarthyist notion of what socialism or the left comprises nowadays than it says about Europe. A little broadening of horizons and a little less navel-gazing and echo chamber are most definitely in order.

Bush Dogs innoculation votes fail

There are 39 Bush Dogs --- Democrats in Congress who, on big, partisan issues, vote to trust George W. Bush and his judgment against the rest of the Democratic caucus and 80%+ of the Democratic electorate. The Bush Dogs make up 16.8% of the Democratic House caucus. On national security issues, this group allows for conservative control of the process as Speaker Pelosi is operating under a majority of the whole instead of a majority of the majority rule set.

Most Bush Dogs are either Blue Dogs or New Dems, and they have formal internal party caucuses. The first purpose of a caucus is to have members help each other out. This often means electoral assistance with the goal of winning re-election. I have no problem with this, as the CBC, the Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus attempt to do the same thing with varying levels of effectiveness. People join caucuses on the basis of common identity and goals. So these two groups that vote against Dems believe that this is useful behavior to their own goals.

Why do they vote this way? It can be either that they personally believe in George W. Bush's judgment and vision for a cowering America, which is a harsh indictment of their own judgment. Or they believe that they are in districts which demand these reactionary votes, either from the point of view of voters, or more likely from their probable donor base. In this projected political calculation, a Bush Dog calculates that voting with the rest of the Democratic Party is very dangerous to their future political careers, so voting for Bush is a political innoculation to prevent a strong reactionary Republican challenge.

Yet this strategy is not working. One would expect that if Bush Dogs are voting their districts in voting for George W. Bush's policies and contortions of the Constitution, they would be on average, no more vulnerable to a challenge than most non-packed and stacked district Democrats. The National Republican Congressional Committee has released its initial target list of twenty four Democratically held seats it wants to field first string challengers against.

If the innoculation strategy works, one would expect roughly four Bush Dogs to be challenged, as that is the proportion of the Democratic Caucus that they compose. Instead a third of all of these 'first tier' challengers will be against Bush Dogs, for a relative risk of 2.0 for a Bush Dog compared to a generic House Democrat. That is a signifcant increase in risk if we assume that first tier challengers have a substantially higher probability of knocking off an incumbent than non-first tier challengers.

For the innoculation strategy to still be a viable strategy, one must assume that there are more Bush Dogs who the NRCC looked at and said 'Hmm, he is an entrenched incumbent with great constituent support, amazing fundraising and if only he had voted against telecom immunity we could beat him this year instead of the past eight attempts in a very favorable district....'

I don't think there are that many marginal Bush Dogs where one or two votes matter. So either the political calculation for innoculation is wrong, or their judgement is wrong as exhibited by supporting George W. Bush on a couple of crucial partisan matters.

Pivoting away from personalization of foreign policy

We need to get rid of Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il, or Moqutada Sadr, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milošević, or Guy Philippe of Haiti to solve a significant structural foreign policy problem. This has been a common, bi-partisan refrain for my entire politically aware life, and it is a trait within American politics that traces back much further than that. It is both a simple proxy of significance of a problem, and a massive and willful oversimplification of reality. It often becomes a mantra to ignore underlying structural incentives, concerns, strengths and weaknesses while allowing the formation of an irrational two minute hate to be formed and wielded as a club. And once the leader is removed through either active action, or passive luck, significant problems still remain as the situation is more complex than what can be simply explained by an evil genius dictator/autocrat/politician, even if that is the individual's case.

When I first heard the news that Fidel Castro is stepping down due to ill-health, my thoughts were on a potential US policy pivot as Fidel Castro has taken on the appearance of a domestic political bogeyman far out of proportion to his actual influence and power in so far as it impacts the United States excluding the Cuban exile community who wants to be compensated for the losses they took between 1959 and 1965 or so.

The sanctions and restriction regime against Castro were a known failure by the mid-70s but the combination of a Republican Party gaining significant strength in South Florida from the Cuban exile community, and Democrats not wanting to have a reputational cost of being 'soft on communism.' That was the basic dynamic for a good twenty five years of sustained policy failure as the sanctions allowed Castro and his leadership cadre to blame the United States for their own failings, while still receiving significant economic support from the Soviets. After the Soviets imploded and Russia economically retrenched, the rest of the West bought up the nice resort areas in Cuba and are sending thong clad vacationeers to the country to scare the locals, and provide hard currency [truly nothing is scarier than a Quebecois in a too tight thong]. During the 90s, Cuban policy was not realigned with US policy to China or Vietnam because of domestic political concerns, and Bush has had no interest or incentive to change. This is a multi-generational, bipartisan collective action failure.

However since the United States frequently demonized Castro and not the entire regime support apparatus as the problem in Cuba, his stepping aside in favor of his brother provides a safe and convienent pivot point where it is safe for politicians of either party to advance a more sensible policy regime while also pandering to the Midwestern farmers. I don't think this will happen during this election cycle, but the space has been created for a future pivot.

Is Zeal For Interventionism Right Or Wrong?

By Cernig

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today argues that "This zeal for intervention is imperialism in new clothes" championed by those, like UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband, who are "part of a political generation with no experience of war and little sense of history". He argues that democracy, while a superior method of governance, can only be shown and not imposed and his comments are at least as relevant to the current American political debate as they are to Britain's foreign policy.

David Miliband loves democracy. We all love democracy. We also love capitalism, social welfare, child health, book learning and leatherback turtles. We would like the whole world to love them too, and we stand ready to persuade it so. But do we shoot anyone who refuses?

It is hardly credible that two centuries since Immanuel Kant wrestled with this oldest of ethical conundrums, a British government still cannot tell the difference between espousing a moral imperative and enforcing one.

Yesterday in Oxford the foreign secretary decided to update the 1998 Chicago speech of his then mentor, Tony Blair, in which Blair tore up the UN's sovereignty provisions in favour of the new "liberal interventionism". He proposed a doctrine of international community, which he claimed, like St Teresa, to have "witnessed". This required Britain to attack sovereign states unprovoked if this would end a violation of human rights.

...Miliband brushes aside the blundering into Iraq and Afghanistan as errors of implementation rather than principle and takes the Blair doctrine into new territory. He wants his pan-democratic world to be achieved by peaceful means, by trade, multilateral action and - his new soundbite - a "civilian surge".

Should soft power fail, Miliband wants to use sanctions and send in troops, for instance through offering security guarantees to regimes that "abide by democratic rules". Such measures would need to embrace internal and external security, and be of universal application if, as Kant warned, they are to go beyond opportunism and carry moral force. They would have guaranteed Dubcek's Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, and Allende's Chile against America. The regimes in Baghdad and Kabul would need guarantees indefinitely, as would an elected regime in Pakistan - guaranteeing it against insurgent Taliban and lurking generals.

...There is no text in international law that justifies ramming a system of government down the throats of others. Self-determination, warts and all, has been the defining essence of the nation-state throughout history, which is why the UN charter qualified it only in cases of cross-border aggression and humanitarian relief. The robustness of this doctrine is shown in half a century of relative peace worldwide. Collapsing it has been disastrous.

Democracy everywhere has emerged when individuals give or withhold consent and rulers are confident enough to accept their verdict. Besides western Europe in 1945 (when democracy was not created but restored), there is almost no example of democracy imposed by external force. Russia, with no experience of it, appears to be rejecting it. The concept of consent in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Iran is hesitant, but western pressure, soft or hard, aids the reactionaries.

...The west can invite the world to witness the virtues of democracy. It can deploy the soft power of education, exchange, publicity and aid. But a true democrat cannot abandon Voltaire's respect for the autonomy of disagreement, let alone seek to crush it. Britain can shine its beacon abroad but it cannot impose its values on the world. It has tried too often, and has failed. This is not isolationism. It is fact.

Milliband would call Jenkin's argument a "retreat into realpolitik", and perhaps it is. There's certainly a powerful body of argument to say that standing by and watching a crime makes one a complicit accessory to that crime, and guilty of a crime thereby. Much of Western law is built on that precept.

Yet over the past seven years we've seen where a lack of real-world connection and an ideologically driven interventionist policy can turn what appears moral into a worse crime. If someone tries to fight fire with fire, they better know exactly what they are doing or the conflagration will blow up out of their control. Surely, those who lose their loved ones or livelihoods in that wider fire would have only the misguided or incompetent interventionist to blame for their woes.

In a purely utilitarian sense, the question is a variant of "who watches the watchers". Who checks the interventionists if their intervention is already doing or will do more harm than good? Unfortunately, if international law and international bodies are sidestepped and sidelined then in the case of powerful Western nations the answer is "no-one". That's why the UN and international agreements which set out the limits of interventionist policy were drawn up in the first place. It is itself a flawed system plagued by competing national interests and maybe would have been better if Churchill's ideas hadn't been watered down by American and Soviet leaders intent on preserving their own power, but it's the best system we have.

So what do Newshoggers readers think? Is interventionism always right, always wrong or a bit of both? And if the latter, what's the best way to ensure we select for the good but leave out the bad?

Castro Quits

By Cernig

Fidel Casto has announced his resignation as president of Cuba and commander-in-chief of Cuba's military in a late-night letter to a Cuban state newspaper. That's a good thing to me, as it will be to all modern socialists - both democratic socialists and social democrats. (I'm the latter flavour, by the way.)

I've never been utterly sure of why Fidel Castro inspired such an overabundance of hate in America when other, rightwing, dictators attracted so little. To me, it's the dictatorship that's the problem, not the ideology used to excuse it. Obviously, the Spanish socialist government feels the same way, and is hoping for peaceful change.

Spain's governing Socialist Party on Tuesday described the resignation of Cuban leader Fidel Castro as "great news" if it led to a "democratic opening.""From Spain, we will work for that to happen," said Jose Blanco, organizational secretary of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist Party.

Trinidad Jimenez, secretary of state for Ibero-American affairs, said Castro's resignation might help acting president Raul Castro to carry out the reforms he has announced.

One of the ways in which Castro was useful to the American Right - as people like Chavez are now - is in enabling them to muddy the waters of American debate by pretending that modern socialism and dicatorial communism are identical - a meme that has widespread currency in the U.S. How often do you hear rightwingers complain about Tony Blair being a socialist, for instance? Yet the Labour Party which he was head of has always been avowedly a socialist party. Gordon Brown is the current party leader and British PM. How often does his socialism come up in US mainstream reporting? Reforms in Cuba would certainly help to head off that meme, but it won't dissolve it altogether. It's a deep-rooted factor in the American political debate even if it does belong to a bygone era as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Institutional Power and booing at CPAC

Jimmy at the Sundries Shack is a movement conservative and has been liveblogging this afternoon at CPAC. He is confirming that there is booing of McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee

I could definitely hear booing and what appeared to be John McCain hitting the
stage.

I will go beyond my scope of experience and expertise and offer a hypothesis as to why it is smart for hard core conservatives to be booing McCain today at CPAC within an instititional power framework. I may be completely wrong about the relative strength of factions and interest group politics, but I think this could be a smart decision within a certain framework.

But before we go forward, let's take a look at the generic political situation as it stands today.

* Democrats are generically trusted and favored on all issues
* Democrats are highly engaged and motivated
* Democrats are basically happy with either candidate and the preferences are between good and better, as Shamanic noted in her post earlier this afternoon
* Both Democratic candidates are able to fundraise to a ridiculous degree

* President Bush is toxic to anyone outside of the GOP base
* The Republican Party is fractured with multiple white knight saviors falling asleep, mobbing and lawyering up, or running out of their kids' inheritance to spend
* Any GOP nominee will face a party of single interest groups
* Traditional money advantages have dissipated
* Independent and moderate voters are heavily aligning with Democratic leaning groups in both preferences and behavior
* Internal party dynamics are in a short term positive feedback loop that favors party hardliners

Throw in a weakening economy, massive public distrust and disgust about Iraq, and you have to conclude that this will be a very tough year for any Republican to win irregardless of who the nominee is. The incentive to be a team player in order to be rewarded with some policy, patronage and pork goodies after a winning campaign is fairly low as the probability of a win is fairly low. A win could happen and at that point the credible threat of complete political marginalization has real costs to anyone outside the tent and pissing in.

But if you concede the probability of a win is fairly low and you believe that successful politics is a multi-iteration game than positioning oneself as not being responsible for the loss as an active player OR being the crucial marginal group whose support was needed but not found is a good way to enhance one's power. Then in 2012 or 2016, everyone will be seeking to kiss your ass and fulfill your policy requirements in order to avoid losing this critical part of a winning coalition.

If this game is played correctly, it is a great way to avoid being the coalitional chump for several electoral cycles. And hell, it is fairly low cost and enjoyable at the same time.

Super Tuesday: Choosing Between Spinach and Broccoli

By Cernig

Newshogger researcher Kat writes that she ran across an interesting scientific article on the psychology of decision-making - DiscoveryChannel.ca - A scientist's guide to 'Super Tuesday'

"The article doesn't phrase it this way, but one part of it explains why our frequent forced-choice between least-worst candidates (though hopefully not this year) tends to result in fewer and fewer people bothering to vote," says Kat.

"If both the alternatives are attractive, then both provide reasons to choose," explain Anish Nagpal of the University of Melbourne and Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy of the University of Houston. "If both the alternatives are unattractive, neither one provides reasons to choose."

Put more simply, there is no incentive to make a choice between two options to which you see no perceived benefit. (Say, having to choose between spinach and broccoli when you really want a triple-fudge brownie sundae.)

But the study also emphasizes that if a choice is difficult, it might not be the options that are causing the indecisiveness, but rather, the way in which the decision is framed. (Of the two vegetables, which do I like least?)

Previous research has indicated that asking people to actively choose among undesirable options leads to greater experienced conflict and greater decision difficulty, possibly leading to longer decision times.

The latest study found that people tend to have an easier time choosing among things they like than among things they hate.

The reverse held true when participants of the study were asked to reject an option; the decision time was quicker when researchers asked people to reject an option involving unattractive alternatives, than attractive alternatives.

Which has Kat thinking - "At this early hour of the morning on Super Tuesday, I still theoretically will have a choice this coming Nov. between some combination of Romney, McCain, Clinton, and Obama. Of those four, there's only one I'm willing to vote for. And I'm still not convinced that Obama even vaguely resembles a sundae."

Fungibility, food stamps and second best choices

While discussing the counter-cyclical empircal nature of the disability and early retirement systems with Gary Farber a couple of months ago, he discussed the road blocaks that are in the way of successfully navigating SSI disability. One of those road blocks is a very high initial claim rejection rate followed by a lengthy and potentially expensive appeals process that overwhelmingly produces approval for claims. He posited that this is a feature, and not a bug of the system:

"It seems to me a system set up for failure."

It's the basic model for most American welfare/aid systems: the goal is to be dysfunctional and inadequate enough to keep out/drive out most of the people who need it, so as to bring/keep down costs and juke the stats,

Poorly designed, difficult to navigate and unpredictable are a common complaint of the American social safety net. Private charity providers have the right to turn anyone away, providers funded by local governments are pro-cyclical in that they have money when the need is below trend and are making cuts when needs are above trend, and the federal system has been under a sustained thirty year ideological and management assault.

Programs very seldom are designed in first best manners. They are political compromises and reflections of values and beliefs that do not hold operational effectiveness or efficiency as an ultimate objective. American social welfare policy has long been colored by the dichotomy of the 'deserving or undeserving poor'. The deserving poor within this framework are those who are poor due to non-moral failure of their own; the crippled, the elderly, the young, the infirm, the cyclically or short term structurally unemployed. The undeserving poor are those who 'choose' to be poor through a moral or practical personal failing and thus do not deserve aid.

I agree in a Policy 101 manner with Megan McCardle that the most economically efficient anti-poverty program is cash straight up. Cash is fungible, it is widely accepted at a predictable par value, and it can be spent on almost anything. As Mona at Unqualified Offerings noted, non-cash offerings that are restricted stores of value and exchange such as food stamps can not be universally used; " I was forbidden by law from trading any of that value for things I required much more, like blood pressure meds, or gas money." Yes, there is definately a black market that is accessible to those who have good social connections within this mileau that can transform a given value of food stamps into a lesser value of cash, but food stamps are restricted money substitutes.

But let's go back to the American obsession with the deserving and undeserving poor for a moment and see if there is any plausible political demogaugic point that could be used against a pure cash outlay to the poor. Why we only have to go back to 1996 and see the effective railings against AFDC and its cash payment system to what a majority of the American political universe saw as too many 'undeserving poor.' Ronald Reagan ran successfuly on 'welfare queens in Cadillacs' who supposedly took cash payments through fraud and misused them. Cash payments of any sort to the poor are very prone to political risk.

So we enter the universe of second best choices if the intent of a program is to alleviate some of the effects of poverty and deal with a constrained choice that has a chance to gather significant political support. There are two basic options; the first is similiar to the stimulas option that is going through the House right now, make any program that aids the poor overwhelmingly aid the middle class and median voter. The cash rebates that are being debated will not be targeted to cash, credit and liquidity constrained individuals where there would be actual stimulas, but towards the middle class, and they are coming out of income tax base amounts and not the FICA tax base amounts. This is popular, but extremely expensive with minimal effectiveness in achieving the desired policy end on the basis of dollars spent or foregone. The other option is to restrict the fungibility of a near cash grant and target those benefits to the people who need them. And thus we have the idea behind food stamps and Section 8 vouchers.

We live in a constrained world where Pareto efficiencies, Pareto improvements, explict program outcomes, effectiveness and efficiencies are not the ultimate values that guide our decision making. Yes, Policy 101 is a useful tool set of basic bullshit detection, but we live in a complicated world where first best alternatives seldom present itself as the restricting assumptions that we make in Policy 101 do not hold in reality. Second best choices are often the best choices that we can make.

Social bi-partianship

By Libby

I've made several unsuccessful attempts now at articulating the benefits of bi-partisanship and I think I've finally figured out where the communication is breaking down. People assume I'm talking about the Beltway when I use the dreaded word but I'm not talking about politicians when I speak of consensus. Digby flags a profile on Rick Perlstein and posts this quote that speaks to what I'm trying to get across.

“My fantasy for the blog,” he says, “was that readers would send posts to Aunt Millie—that it would be a way to get people talking. But people aren’t forwarding them to conservative relatives and friends. They aren’t talking to them.” Perlstein, on the other hand, is. “I have a group of four very different conservatives I’ve been e-mailing back and forth [as a group] since 2003. I can’t imagine living my life, intellectually and politically, without keeping these lines of communication open to people I disagree with.”

Communication is the key. For myself, I've always cut a wide swath through many social circles and I embarked on a specific quest to befriend my political opponents some years ago. It's been rather a success. We discovered when we put our politics aside, we like each other -- as people. These same guys who constantly rail about "Dimocrats" in general manage to treat me with respect and kindness, as I do them.

Political bi-partisanship may well be dead, may it rest in peace. I have no hope that most of our Congresslizards on either side of the fence are ever going to work together again to advance the common good over corporate interests. But that is precisely why I think social bi-partisanship is so important. It's about breaking through the stereotypes to realize in the end we're mostly all basically good people doing the best we can with what we have to work with and if we're going to take the government back from the professional pols, we stand a lot better chance of winning if we find a way to work together on common goals. [via]

Practical tactics - Updated

By Libby

A while back I wrote a couple of posts suggesting that bi-partisanship shouldn't necessarily be a dirty word and that democracy benefits from finding common ground with our political opponents. They were met with some amount of indignation in the comment sections. It seems we've become so angry with conservatism and those who have so successfully promoted its disastrous policies that most of us can't imagine working together when we find common cause.

It's not that I don't understand the anger, or the distrust, particularly after the last seven years. Bi-partisan has become a code word for capitulation, a weasel term used by lizards like Lieberman to cover up their traitorous betrayals in advancing their personal power. However, just because the word has been twisted beyond recognition doesn't mean we should reject the original concept.

Via Avedon, I see Hilzoy made a similar point recently in a post about Hillary and was also criticized for it. She explains the point more eloquently than I do.

I would have thought it obvious that, other things equal, it's better to work with people from the other party than not. Your bills are likely to attract broader support. You can build actual working relationships that might come in handy later. And so on, and so forth. The question always has to be: what price do you pay for this? Do you have to compromise your principles? If so, then the price is obviously too high. Do you have to be imaginative and open-minded enough to recognize in a Senator from the other party with whom you disagree about almost everything, someone who agrees with you on some particular issue, and with whom you can therefore work on that issue? That, I would have thought, is a price well worth paying.

I wouldn't even couch it as a cost so much as it is a pragmatic choice. It's useful to remember that Nixon's impeachment hearings began by bi-partisan agreement and the two parties disagreed just as bitterly then as they do now on most issues. Indeed, if one thinks of it in terms of simple warfare in the times when battles were fought eye to eye and hand to hand, it wasn't uncommon for two opposing groups to unite against a common enemy and then resume their own battles when the greater foe was defeated.

Yes, there's a wide rift between conservatives and progressives, or however you want to define the sides, but it seems to me we only hurt ourselves if we reject outright the notion that we could, and should, work together in those rare instances when we have common ground to defend. In the end, the real battle is between all of us and the professional politicians in both parties that have corrupted the system. If we insist on always fighting each other, those pols win and we all lose.

Update: To clarify my position, in response to comments, I'm not suggesting we hold out olive branches and embrace the conservatives into our cause as our new blood brothers, nor that we should we trust the IOKIYAR crowd. What I'm saying is its not impossible for opponents to form temporary alliances when they face a stronger common enemy that can defeat them separately, but whom they could defeat if they combine forces. I certainly don't think it's productive to discount the idea entirely, because we're angry and we want to teach the other side a lesson.

Screw the losers, or Pareto non-pay-offs.

The gold standard for a public policy is to improve aggregate utility and happiness/wealth/income by improving at least some people's utility while hurting no one's present position. This is called a Pareto Optimal solution. And while it is the gold standard, there are very few single dimensional policies will be Pareto optimal. It is not unusual for policies to be Pareto improvements where some people are better off, and no one is worse off but there are theoretically better solutions out there.

The silver standard for policy analysis is the second best weak Pareto improvement --- find the winners of a policy change and have them compensate the losers in one way or another. National healthcare is one such policy pay-off to people who have borne increased volatility, competition and minimal real wage changes for the past thirty years despite overall net growth. We don't seek this standard for everything; for instance pimps are not compensated for loss income if social services and criminal justice services reduce the number of prostitutes in an area. Also, breaking a monopoly will harm the holders of the rights to monopoly revenue and profit streams while producing significant society wide gains. These are standard policy analysis questions and techniques.

Prof. Landesburg in the New York Times says 'screw Pareto' in regards to free trade. Workers in impacted professions should be thankful that despite the significant losses in income through the combination of job loss AND the cost of not having perfectly substitutable skills to find a new job without retraining, they can get cheaper goods at Wal-Mart.

What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

He is making a fairly weak analogy ridden 'moral' case that has at its core assumption that the overarching goal in life is slightly more than mere subsistence and that the games and rules of society are single iterations. Furthermore, the cost of unemployment due to structural outsourcing from the combination of direct wage losses, direct re-training/job seeking expenses and indirect future losses due to the combination of a lower base wage and lower future trend growth is borne either universally, or if it is not borne universally, the losers are implicitly and quickly compensated by lower prices. This is empirically absurd for structural shifts within the labor market.

Some people are significant winners in trade, some people are general winners via lower prices, and others are significant losers as their positions with attendant human capital accumulation is destroyed. He admits that the winners are in aggregate better off than the losers, and in almost all cases I will agree with him. However if you assume that policy and politics are multi-iteration games and people in pain will scream louder than people in mild, background contentment, then compensating people who are losers through no fault of their own of a specific policy regime is the smart, and economically efficient thing to do. People in pain that is not mitigated will organize to prevent more pain from being inflicted upon themselves or others like them, which means aggregate gains are being left on the table. If you take a utilitarian approach and seek the greatest aggregate gain for the relevant analytical unit, then not compensating people who have lost for previous, similiar policy changes is immoral, and dumb at the same time.

America's Nuclear Policy

By Cernig

Just before Christmas, Cheryl Rofer of WhirledView proposed a "blog-tank" approach to discussing what U.S. policy on nuclear weapons should be. It's a pressing issue which hasn't been given much attention in the mainstream media - despite having the largest effective nuclear arsenal on the planet by a long chalk the U.S. doesn't actually have a policy on their employment. (Post Cold War, it was discovered that up to 80% of Soviet missiles and warheads were unuseable at a given time due to design flaws and maintenance failures, while the U.S. force ran at around 80% readiness - it's unlikley the intervening years of Russian paucity have improved matters any for their force.) It was that lack that stalled and has perhaps killed the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Cheryl is keeping a summary of the ongoing discussion here.

I've been meaning to do a post on this for days now, but the Bhutto assassination broke and took up a lot of my free blogging time. My apologies to Cheryl.

However, Jason Steck set out a nuclear policy position which is not a million miles away from mine the other day. In a must-read post, Jason points out that nuclear doctrine as it presently exists turns on the faulty notion that nukes are at all useful. Indeed, Jason says, "Nuclear weapons in actuality provide very limited contributions to U.S. national security. The reason is that nuclear weapons are politically and militarily virtually unusable." He argues that this means the US should stop treating nuclear weapons as a security blanket, since the only way in which the US could use nukes would be in retaliation against an attack by another WMD-equipped state (not, you will note, state-less terrorists).

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I've written before that trying to apply the Cold War assumptions of nuclear retaliation to assymetrical stateless actors is like running with nuclear scissors. it's far more likely that you'll fall and injure yourself or some innocent in a messy way than accidentally stab the one murderer in a crowd.

Jason suggests a posture based around a minimum deterrent force, I assume involving only a couple of hundred warheads, "prioritizing deployment on submarines which are impervious to any comprehensive first strike or pre-emptive attack." I think that's a good first step but would then move on to a "Virtual Swords" concept as explained by Jeffrey Lewis. Dr Lewis quotes an article from a friend of his which notes this isn't a new idea:

In January 1990, as the Soviet Union collapsed, a pair of defense industry consultants wrote a paper outlining a new approach to meeting military needs in the post-Cold War world.

Rather than a pipeline constantly churning out new weapons, Ted Gold and Rich Wagner wrote, the United States should develop the industrial research and manufacturing capability to build weapons if needed.

We do not need a huge arsenal, they argued. Instead, we could deter future enemies merely by showing that we have the capability to build new weapons when we need them. The essay was titled “Long Shadows and Virtual Swords.”

Fast-forward to Dec. 18.

In a Washington, D.C., news conference, the man in charge of the U.S. nuclear weapons design and manufacturing process seemed to be echoing Gold and Wagner.

“Because our nuclear weapons stockpile is decreasing, the United States’ future deterrent cannot be based on the old Cold War model of the number of weapons,” said Thomas D’Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. “Rather, it must be based on the capability to respond to any national security situation, and make weapons only if necessary.”

And adds:

it seems to me that, at some point, we need a bipartisan consensus on what the labs are supposed to do in post-arms race world. And that requires a vision of what it is that nuclear weapons do in that world.

Now, don’t get me wrong — a “virtual swords” concept should not be an excuse to fund an infrastructure better sized to a nuclear weapons stockpile of 10,000 than 1,000 (see the Modern Pit Facility). And my politics are not those of Gold and Wagner. But I can see how prudent investments in our defense industrial base, most importantly the people, can provide a hedge that enables deep reductions in our bloated nuclear stockpile that could safely number in the hundreds, rather than thousands, of weapons.

I would argue that NNSA officials failed to secure Congressional support for a variety of multi-billion dollar initiatives — including funding for the Modern Pit Facility, Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and Reliable Replacement Warhead — precisely because these programs were conceived, articulated and implemented as part of a stockpile that looks liked a smaller version of the Cold War stockpile, instead of a stockpile based on the reality that much of the deterrent benefit from our nuclear stockpile is existential in nature.

It seems to me that even the Russian Bear would find it impossible to eradicate America's ability to build weapons to respond in kind to a strike - especially if the technology, expertise and facilities to do so were well distributed instead of centralised. It isn't an instant response that deters - it's the certainty of one coming eventually. In that respect, keeping a stockpile of actual weapons is unnecessay and even counter-productive since it means a belligerent "ready alert ad infinatum" posture.

Jason, again, explains succinctly why such a posture is a bad thing.

Because the U.S. is by far the most powerful country in the world, it tends (whether it wants to or not) to provide the very definition of what constitutes a “powerful” or “developed” country. Other countries seeking to obtain so-called “great power status” tend to imitate the “great powers” that already exist. After all, what better way to achieve the global status and respect accorded to a “great power” than to share in all of the same characteristics that others granted that status have? And as long as the United States continues to define it power in nuclear terms, it is unsurprising that imitators will try to do the same. Such considerations were certainly present in India’s drive to make its nuclear weapons capability real. Furthermore, the weapons thus produced are often not secured as safely as the U.S. nuclear force. The U.S. already must contend with grave scenarios of “loose nukes” emanating from the former Soviet Union or from a future jihadist Pakistan and falling into the hands of terrorist groups that would be impossible to deter in the traditional sense. It simply makes no sense to provide an unintentional encouragement for other states seeking a quick road to “great power” status with a route that ultimately just produces new threats to the U.S. This is not to say that all nuclear proliferation is driven by imitation of the United States, but it is foolhardy to produce even a limited incentive towards nuclear proliferation unless it is absolutely necessary to do so.

The much-touted Missile Defense Shield, which the neocon think-tanks pushing it readily admit is only a first step to a space-based and far larger network, should be seen not as a defense but as a provocation. Post Cold War, we discovered that the Soviets never wanted to attack America and always thought the American encirclement of the USSR was a clear threat of an attack on the Motherland. Russia - the only nation against which the current massive U.S. arsenal is conceivably deployed, now finds itself in the same position, and to them such a missile defense shield looks like a hedge against retaliation for an American first-strike. The Russians want any such shield to be an international co-operative venture, which is the only way to ensure it doesn't undermine rather than enhance deterrence. Failing that, it should be scrapped too.

All of which would leave plenty of money free for the real challenge - cleaning up and securing loose nuclear material and weapons which could be stolen or bought be a stateless actor. To that end, I would greatly increase the size and scope of the IAEA to include clean-up and policing of nuclear sites under an international peacekeeper remit, stop withdrawing from arms control treaties such as START, and hand various plans for nuclear fuel cartels to the international community to run for the benefit of all.

A Scottish Lesson For U.S. Progressives

By Cernig

Over at The Left Coaster, paradox is making a case for staying with the Dems (who are now supping more juice from the military/industrial complex than Republicans). He writes:

I have looked high and low, near and far, with microscopes and telescopes, I talked to Jesus and the Gypsies, I read history and political science, and there is no other way. Believe you me after this last year if there were another alternative I’d be freaking taking it, yeah.

We are the party, the party is us, it’s our duty to change it, and there is no other alternative.

As I read, it struck me that the Democratic party at the moment is not unlike Scotland a year back - ruled by an entrenched elite who had become corrupted by corporate back-rubs and a belief in their entitlement to power. Think of the Scottish Labour Party as the current spineless and triangulating Dem leadership who will do or say anything to keep power but have few actual principles.

Then, along came Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party and a split in the democratic socialist consensus which had kept Labour in power in Scotland for decades. The SNP won over Labour by only one seat in the general election and were expected to lose out to the previous status-quo of a Labour/Liberal coalition. But through sheer determination and by ensuring none of the Labour party's more far Right rivals would support the status quo, they are now the party of government. Think of the SNP as the progressive almost-majority inside the Democratic party's broad-ish tent.

How are progressives going to turn around the Democratic Party? The same way Salmond turned around Scotland's political scene.

The Scottish Herald's veteran political reporter, Iain Macwhirter, takes up the story:

Salmond has created a new form of progressive nationalism, unlike anything seen in Europe in the past three decades. The image of nationalism as a backward and narrow-minded political force, preoccupied with ethnicity and hostile to foreigners, has finally been dispelled. The SNP has made a reverse takeover of the Scottish social democratic consensus that Labour has presided over for the past half-century.

Instead of the SNP being blown away by the unionist majority, Labour were almost blown away by the sheer verve of Salmond's hyperactive administration. Labour end this annus horribilis in a terrible state, with a leadership crisis and a donations scandal. The new Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, has failed to offer any intellectual challenge to Alex Salmond's populist nationalism, and the party organisation is disintegrating.

Labour have feigned opposition to SNP initiatives on issues such as bridge tolls, prescription charges, graduate endowment, and then ended up supporting them. In fact, it is hard to find much that the nationalists have done in the past nine months that Labour really oppose as a matter of principle. They even support Donald Trump's blessed golf course. The truth is that the SNP were doing a lot of things that Labour MSPs would have liked to do, but couldn't because of the London connection.

Despite being only one seat behind the SNP, Labour have yet to mount any coherent opposition in Holyrood, and have ceded the initiative on many key issues - such as police numbers, trams, class sizes - to the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Even on the constitution, the Labour Party has now joined with the SNP and the Liberal Democrats and - incredibly - the Tories to campaign via a constitutional convention for more powers for Holyrood.

For the first time, all the parties in the Scottish parliament are committed to further constitutional change, including taxation. Nothing could better demonstrate just how much things have changed in Scotland in the past year than the fact that there is now no-one arguing for the constitutional status quo.

And who could possibly have forecast, 12 months ago, that nationalists would not only be in power in Scotland, but also in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Progressive nationalism is now the most potent political force in Britain.

Alex Salmond may have been radical in office, but in one sense he has been profoundly conservative. He has become a Privy Councillor and insisted that Queen Elizabeth II will remain head of state of an independent Scotland. The SNP are now talking about the "social union" with England remaining, even when Scotland wins political independence. This is a recognition, I believe, that the UK still has a future, and that the SNP has come to terms with the modern world. Whether the modern world has come to terms with Alex Salmond remains to be seen.

Or, as Napoleon would have it "l'audace, toujours l'audace."

Progressives keep observing how supine the Democratic elite is in opposition to Republicans but then seem to believe that they are far more active in opposition to progressivism in their own party. Somehow I doubt that's true - it's far more likely to be reflexive and just as likely to buckle if progressives stop being scared of the elite's money and safe sinecure seats to instead seize policy initiatives. I believe Reid's punt on the telecom immunity was just such a show of weakness in the face of progressive policy with a popular push behind it, but the elite should be given no chance to catch its collective breath. Sure, a charismatic leader who can push progressive policy without talking about UFOs would be handy - but in the absence of such a leader (check where the candidates get their campaign money) hundreds or thousands can do the work of one.

America - Constitution Optional

By Cernig

What would the destroyed CIA tapes of interrogations have shown? Kevin Drum knows, in at least one case - that of an al-Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. Both James Risen's State of War and Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine make mention of him. The upshot, Kevin writes, is that:

here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

Read the whole post for the background to Kevin's conclusions. You can see why they were destroyed.

Andrew Sullivan, in another must-read post, notes that the extreme Right are just fine with leaving the rule of law and American decency bleeding in a ditch.

It's refreshing, actually. I just listened to Charles say that the torture of terror suspects in 2002 was justified because the United States was flying blind and had no knowledge of what al Qaeda was planning. He won't say "torture", of course, although the law is clear that it is torture. (He and Fox News keep referring to the notion of "harsh interrogation techniques". I think they realized that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" was a little too close to the Gestapo's euphemism for comfort.) And he then said that destroying the tapes was justified because you don't want them coming up on YouTube, do you? So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States. Again, I keep pinching myself that I am actually hearing these things on the television.

I realize, of course, that that's the actual argument that Bush and Cheney make to themselves behind closed doors. I guess it's refreshing, if a little chilling, to hear a proud defense of lawlessness and violence at the heart of a constitutional republic on national television. But there are several critical and revealing premises behind it. The first is that the United States has effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. To say that the president can waive them at any time if he sees fit is to say that the United States is not bound by its treaty obligations. The second is that the president is not bound by any law or treaty governing the laws of warfare. Bush and Cheney won't say this because if they did, the jig would be up. The Constitution is extremely clear that the laws of warfare are determined by the Congress, not the president. So it's up to the Beltway Boys to defend the suspension of the rule of law and the legalization of torture as executive prerogatives, in violation of the Constitution. Hey: we're at war. The Constitution is now optional.

This, folks, is your country. Not a single one of the Republican frontrunners would change it (and some would say it's doubtful that the Democratic frontrunners would either). What are you going to do about it? It's your responsibility, after all.

Perverse Structural Incentives

James Joyner looks at the Huckabee flap of not knowing that a new National Intelligence Estimate has been released that basically undercuts the Iranian policy and rhetoric coming out of the Bush Administration and notes a very strong structural reason for this d'oh moment:

the reality of the type of retail politics that is necessary to win in Iowa and New Hampshire is long days going from pancake breakfast to coffee club to fundraiser to Rotary Club to luncheon and so on. Most of these guys are lucky to remember what state they’re in at the moment without handlers reminding them.

I think Bryan York's theory of explanation makes immediate proximate sense --- Huckabee has been running a dirt cheap campaign with minimal advisors and organizational growth capacity because until recently he has been an astrick is correct in the short term. But I think James Joyner explanation is more illuminating.

People respond to incentives and seek rewards. Right now the selection process for the Presidency massively overvalues very concentrated face time with a miniscule number of local opinion shapers, leaders, and blowhards and strongly devalues almost everything else including awareness, or at least the expression of policy costs as well as benefits on a wide frame of analysis.

This is one of the reasons why I want Iowa and New Hampshire to be de-emphasized. These are not locations which act as reliable proxies of candidates' general election political competencies or even more importantly, probable performance as President. Huckabee, working with constrained resources, was just responding as any other candidate should, to the incentives that are in front of him, and the incentives have been very clear that winning in Iowa via praising ethanol subsidies, eating corndogs at the 98th county fair you have attended this year, and dishing out pancakes to the Chamber of Commerce matters way more than having a clue.

The Problem With Liberal Dictators

By Cernig

Robert Kagan accurately nails the problem with the American love of installing autocrats who promise to bring democracy - they never, ever do.

There always seems to be a good reason to support a dictator. In the late 1970s, Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that it was better to support a "right-wing" dictator lest he be replaced by communists. Right-wing dictatorship -- today some call it "liberal autocracy" -- was in any case a necessary way station on the road to democracy. Communist totalitarians would never give up power and stifled any hope for freedom, but our friendly dictators would eventually give way to liberal politics.

The Reagan administration, and history, actually repudiated both sides of this doctrine. It turned out that right-wing dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos and the South Korean military junta, as other dictators before them, would only leave power if forced. Ironically, a communist leader in the Soviet Union was actually willing to take the steps that ultimately proved his system's undoing.

During the Cold War, Kirkpatrick and many others, including most leading neoconservatives and many in the American foreign policy establishment, bought the dictator's self-serving sales pitch. The dictator always argued that the choice was to support him or give the country to the communists. And he always made sure that this was the choice.

...Today, Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf is playing the old game, as is Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, and it appears to be working. Substitute radical Islamists for communists, and the pitch is the same: Apres moi, le deluge. If you force me out, the radical Islamists will win. And Musharraf is busily trying to ensure that this is the only option. He cracks down on moderates with good democratic credentials, and with far greater zeal than he has cracked down on al-Qaeda. If he can hold on long enough, he may so radicalize the opposition that no reasonably moderate alternative will be available.

It's archetypal Cold War thinking, something Cheney must be very comfortable with. Kagan argues that if America cannot ditch the Bush administration's fondness for dictators (and, recall, the original plan was to install one in Iraq too - a plan that was over-ruled by Iraqi pressure but is still resurrected from time to time by neocon pundits) then it must get used to a greater Middle East where "there are only two types of regimes: radical Islamists and stubborn dictatorships." Of course, it makes nonsense of rhetoric about loving democracy and freedom but then again most of the world has seen that rhetoric as transparently self-serving rubbish intended mainly for American domestic consumption for some time now. Certainly longer than Bush has been in power. Reagan ditched it because it served his interests to do so in certain situations, not from some ideological imperative.

However, what's good for the goose is also good for the gander. Left wing populist rulers like Chavez of Venezuela are no more helping their people by riding that popularity into a lifetime dicatorial sinecure than right-wing dictators help their people by promising democracy yet never delivering. Gorbachev was a one-in-a-million visionary and Chavez is no Gorby. It may well be that Chavez can, by dint of his popularity with the people up to now, get a vote proclaiming him president for life. But he shouldn't, and if he does then his motives cannot be unselfish. While he may be popular and helping his people with his policies now, there is no guarantee that he will always do so or that his people will always wish to have him as their lifelong ruler - even if they say they do right now.

In the end, that's the epiphany that European socialism came to several decades ago - the interests of the people will always be better served by the ballot box than by rulers-for-life. Thus the rise of democratic socialism and its close cousin social democracy, which are now the predominant European political currents even if pundits in the U.S. and dictators in South America are still living in socialism's past. For this reason, I reject any attempt to associate Chavez with my kind of "lefty" and respectfully disagree with my colleague Libby. Chavez may well have massive popular support for what he wishes to do, but the responsibilities of a progressive socialist nation go both ways. If his motives were pure, he would know that he is as fallible as any human being and never ask the Venezualan people to do what he is asking them to do - gamble that he will always be as popular, as good for them, as he is now and bet their own political voice on that gamble.

The trouble with Libertarians

By Libby

I consider myself to be libertarianish, but I could never fully embrace the whole Libertarian ideology because of their blind faith in the 'free market.' Ezra nails the problem in a must read post, including the link to John Rogers' post, who says:

Six. Six companies control almost all mass media in America. They control all, and I mean all, the standard distribution channels in America. They are also negotiating as a single entity, the AMPTP. ...

Ezra elaborates.

One of the real problems with the simplified neoclassical framework some of my libertarian pals use is that rational economic actors do not long abide the state of perfect competition. ...

In the perfect neoclassical model, what you'd have here would be six, or 40, or 200, media companies competing among each other and snapping up the best writers by offering the best deals, which would include online residuals. What you have, instead, is the whole industry acting essentially like a monopoly and laying down a blanket refusal to offer online residuals. So don't talk to me of your free markets. As is so often the case, this is superficially a question of economics, but it's actually a question of power.

They're talking about Hollywood but this could be said for any major industry in America today. You have your idyllic 'free market' and then there's the real world, dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths who rig the game so nobody else can compete, much less win. [h/t Jcricket]

If You Don't Consume, You Don't Count

By Cernig

Hows this for a revealing statement?

So far, the subprime mess is more of a human tragedy than a stopper for the economy. It's being felt most by the lower middle class, which isn't the driving force in economic growth. The bottom 40% of the population by income accounts for just 21% of consumer expenditures. Julia L. Coronado, a senior U.S. economist at Barclays Capital (BCS ), says that in terms of spending power, and taking into account stock market gains, "Consumers haven't lost any wealth at all. In fact, consumers are better off than they were a year ago."

What a telling passage - it explains entirely how those who care about people think the economy is in the dump and those who only care about money don't. If you're too poor to spend lots or if you've stopped spending - stopped being a consumer - then you don't count any more for the latter group.

(H/T Kat)

Better Coffee, Better Parking Spots, and screw everything else

I was extraordinarily frustrated that any Democratic Congresscritter not from a tobacco producing state had to be aggressively lobbied to vote for SCHIP or the veto override. The individuals who had to be lobbied are typical members of the House's marginal and swing voting bloc. Being the marginal vote/bloc is an extraordinarily powerful position for an individual to be in, as Sen. Lieberman has so aptly demonstrated in his do-nothingness on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee chairmanship. Being a consistent and willing defector weakens the Democratic Party brand and its effectiveness but significantly improves the relative position and power of credible defectors.

Fortunately, this short sighted, self-seeking behavior is not confined to the Democratic Party or liberals in general. Dr. Taylor at Poliblogger is passing along the Virginia GOP's decision to hold a Senate nominating convention.

The article indicates that the convention route is being sought as a way of better ensuring that former governor James Gilmore is nominated. The part of that logic that I find confusing is that if it takes a smaller, more elite-level process (as opposed to going to the rank-and-file Republican voter) to nominate Gilmore, would that not indicate a lack of broad support for the candidate, suggesting that perhaps he isn’t the party’s best choice in terms of fielding a candidate who can win the general election?

I think the same type of self-serving behavior that is self-crippling the Democratic House's ability to effectively and systemically differentiate itself from the Republican Party while alienating the liberal base is in play for the Virginia GOP leadership. Choosing group sub-optimal results maintains or increases individual relative power over the counterfactual power redistribution derived from choosing group optimal choices.

The Republican Party in Virginia knows that no matter what candidate they nominate for Senate in 2008 faces a very tough race with a very low probability of winning. They also know that the Virginia Democratic Party has found a fairly effective strategy for winning state wide elections in Virginia with Warner, Kaine and Webb being the exemplar examples. Some of this is pure demographics as the NOVA region is gaining in both population share and partisan directed behavior, and some is more effective outreach into Republican strong holds to either eke out narrow wins or more often to whittle away at the margin of defeat. Throw in a very popular candidate and probably a decent Democratic tail wind, and this is a tough seat to defend.

In this case, nominating a 'true' conservative and losing in a safe, predictable manner with a familiar but shrinking coalition threatens far fewer pre-exisiting power centers than taking the low probability of success risk of competing in a new manner with certain Democratically leaning demographic groups that Rep. Davis (R-VA) would at least attempt to contest. A different campaign with a 'moderate' candidate would bring in a different flow of volunteers, coalition rejiggering, and the identification of a new 'chump.'