…Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder—if you don’t know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, “don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That’s what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it’s a civic culture in which there’s nobody better to send you than your parents.
That’s how William Ayers got where he was. When he came out of hiding because the federal government was unable to prosecute him (because of government misconduct), he got a degree in education from Columbia and then moved to Chicago and got a job on the education faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. How did he get that job? Well, it can’t have hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was chairman of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) and a charter member of the Chicago establishment. As Mayor Richard M. Daley said recently, in arguing that the Ayers association should not be held against Obama, “His father was a great friend of my father.”
Archive for the 'Politics' Category Page 2 of 36
This short essay by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was published in 1999 but is just as relevant today. Bruce is a bright light, one of the leading scholars of game theory, specifically the rational choice school of political science. See this earlier post for more on the Logic of Political Survival.
Presidential election seasons inevitably lead to calls for bipartisanship in foreign policy.
Presidential election seasons inevitably lead to calls for bipartisanship in foreign policy. We saw just such pressures during the Kosovo war. Only Senator John McCain, among the leading presidential hopefuls, publicly opposed President Clinton’s strategy. Those candidates who endorse the idea that partisan politics should end at the water’s edge are portrayed as wise statesmen. Those who criticize the position of the president are accused of seeking personal advantage at the expense of the nation’s well-being. Partisanship, however, helps democracies avoid foreign policy adventurism and provides other important advantages. Politicians should not hesitate to express disagreement when they believe America’s foreign policy is mistaken.
Why is partisanship important in shaping effective foreign policies? National leaders always want to keep their jobs. Their domestic opponents want to depose them and gain control over government; to do so, they must win electoral support. Opposition politicians are ill served in their ambition for office if they go against effective policies. Voters look at incumbents records in an effort to decide whether to keep them or throw the rascals out. Historically, democratic leaders, more than autocrats, risk losing office if they are unsuccessful in foreign affairs. Their choice of foreign policies is restrained by the risk that their opponents will point out weaknesses.
Open political competition gives leaders incentives to choose policies carefully. If rival politicians are silent by a misplaced commitment to bipartisanship, then incumbents are encouraged to believe that their foreign policies will succeed. When opponents speak out, the president pauses to ponder whether his strategy is a good one or one that will lead to his party’s defeat in the next election. The concern for electoral defeat encourages careful policy decisions.
Foreign adversaries are given a sobering lesson when U.S. politicians who have previously opposed the president’s foreign policy endorse his current approach. After all, domestic opponents should only be expected to support the president when they think his policies will succeed. They do not want to resist effective policies because that will hurt their electoral prospects. Politicians in democracies are compelled by their own interests to be responsible in their decisions about national policy. So when politicians who oppose bipartisanship in foreign affairs nevertheless support the president on a given policy, foreign adversaries are more likely to back away from confrontation and opt for negotiation.
Partisanship helps contain excessive gambling by foreign and domestic leaders. Portraying such partisan opposition as base or disloyal only serves to liberate incumbents to gamble on foolish policies, not a desirable outcome. Where domestic politics are suppressed so that leaders do not gain the benefits of competition, the great danger is that they will roll the foreign policy dice. Power, whether applied in a foreign or domestic context, should always be tempered by constraint. Denigrating domestic constraints in the name of the national welfare is a path too risky to be taken.
IBD has started an analysis series on Obama economic policy.
Barack Obama has styled himself a centrist, but does his record support that claim?
In this series, we examine Senator Obama’s past, his voting record and the people who’ve served as his advisers and mentors over the years. We’ll show how the facts of Obama’s actions and associations reveal a far more left-leaning tilt to his background — and to his politics.
From the introduction:
And as president, “we’ll ensure that economic justice is served,” he asserted. “That’s what this election is about.” Obama never spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn’t have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval.
It’s the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we’re launching this special educational series.
“Economic justice” simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It’s a euphemism for socialism.
Recently I wrote
Incentives matter — politicians are incentivized to get reelected. Which they quite reasonably interpret to mean that when the media begin emphasizing a “problem” then the politician is supposed to “fix it”.
On the gas price comedy being performed in the US Congress, Harvard economist Ed Glaeser wrote
HIGH ENERGY prices can bring out the best in people and firms, but they often seem to bring out the worst in politicians. Whether or not greed is good, there is plenty to be said for a little thriftiness. High prices, painful as they may be, do more to encourage energy conservation than replaying every one of President Carter’s sweater-clad exhortations to turn down the heat.
But politicians sometimes react to high oil prices as if the Bill of Rights had bestowed on Americans the inalienable right to cheap fuel. Elected solons are now considering a Home Energy Affordability Tax Relief Act, which promises households a tax credit equal to one third of a home’s energy costs up to $500. Some congressmen have called for restricting energy markets in an attempt to curb “speculation.” Earlier in the election season, two presidential candidates came out for a temporary summer holiday for gas taxes.
RTWT.
Thanks to the Adam Smith Institute for the link to this poster. Click the thumbnail at left for the full size image.
Incentives matter — politicians are incentivized to get reelected. Which they quite reasonably interpret to mean that when the media begin emphasizing a “problem” then the politician is supposed to “fix it”. This poster artfully summarizes the unintended consequences.
Which leads to my radical proposal to improve the impact of government — that is a constitutional amendment mandating that the number of words of legislation and regulation must decrease by 10% per year. So legislators must repeal 110% of bad law to make room for new law they want to draft.
Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly…
We’re being protected. But I believe policies like this in fact make us all less safe.
I grew up in Great Britain, and over the past five years I’ve split my time between England and the United States. I’ve long found driving in the U.S. to be both annoying and boring. Annoying because of lots of unnecessary waits at stop signs and stoplights, and because of the need to obsess over speed when not waiting. Boring, scenery apart, because to avoid speeding tickets, I feel compelled to set the cruise control on long trips, driving at the same mind-numbing rate, regardless of road conditions.
Relatively recently—these things take a remarkably long time to sink in—I began to notice something else. Often when I return to the U.S. (usually to a suburban area in North Carolina’s Research Triangle), I see a fender bender or two within a few days. Yet I almost never see accidents in the U.K.
This surprised me, since the roads I drive here are generally wider, better marked, and less crowded than in the parts of England that I know best. And so I came to reflect on the mundane details of traffic-control policies in Great Britain and the United States. And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.
Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the “tragedy of the commons”… But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It’s attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.
Prof. Staddon goes on to discuss Smeed’s Law:
the number of deaths in a country per year is given by a simple formula: number of deaths equals .0003 times the two-thirds power of the number of people times the one-third power of the number of cars.
taken from Freeman Dyson’s wonderful commentary in Technology Review, 2006. And many other fascinating unintended consequences of the American obsession with traffic regulation. I think Staddon is right, just based on my own experience driving in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and most of the continent. Simpler and safer.
So what am I suggesting—abolishing signs and rules? A traffic free-for-all? Actually, I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that. A few European towns and neighborhoods—Drachten in Holland, fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, and a few others—have even gone ahead and tried it. They’ve taken the apparently drastic step of eliminating traffic control more or less completely in a few high-traffic and pedestrian-dense areas. The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate. Stop signs, stoplights, even sidewalks are mostly gone. The results, by all accounts, have been excellent: pedestrian accidents have been reduced by 40 percent or more in some places, and traffic flows no more slowly than before.
What I propose is more modest: the adoption of something like the British traffic system, which is free of many of the problems that plague American roads. One British alternative to the stop sign is just a dashed line on the pavement, right in front of the driver. It actually means “yield,” not “stop”; it tells the driver which road has the right of way. Another alternative is the roundabout. …
As these examples indicate, traffic signs in the U.K. are often on the road itself, where the driver should be looking. And most right-of-way signs are informational: there are almost no mandatory stops in the U.K. (The dominant motive in the U.S. traffic-control community seems to be distrust, and policies are usually designed to control drivers and reduce their discretion. The British system puts more responsibility on the drivers themselves.)
Speed limits in the U.K. are also simpler and better. They are set by road type, so drivers know what limits to expect on highways, rural roads, and urban roads—usually without any signs to tell them. These limits are relatively high, set assuming optimum driving conditions, in contrast to the U.S. limits, which seem to be set with something in between the best and worst conditions in mind. (Precisely where on this spectrum U.S. limits fall seems to vary from road to road, engendering mistrust of the signs in some drivers.) Nonstandard speed limits in the U.K. are rare, so you tend to take them quite seriously when they appear, and they are posted frequently—so you don’t risk missing them if you’re, say, watching the road ahead of you.
…The miseducation that U.S. drivers are receiving is not as explicit as the instructions to these students, but it extends over years and is in some ways more forceful: the legal penalties for failing to notice traffic signs are severe. I believe that U.S. traffic policies are inducing a form of inattentional blindness in American drivers. When so many drivers say, after an accident, “I didn’t see him,” they’re not all lying.
And thanks to Prof. Cowen for the link.
Evidently there is a media frenzy underway on “What Happened” — here is some useful background and perspective:
You can tell the Democratic presidential race is all but over. Cable television has returned to 24/7 coverage of whether President Bush lied us into war in Iraq. The latest peg is the Texan-bites-Bush story of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir.
By now you know the news, if that’s the word for it: Mr. McClellan dutifully supported the war as presidential spokesman from 2003-2006, but he has since “become genuinely convinced” it was wrong. He has also had a revelation that the Administration used “propaganda” to sell the war, though this means he himself was chief propaganda minister for three years during which he expressed no similar qualms. Mr. McClellan settles various personal scores, and in particular seems bitter about former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. White House aides can defend themselves, and we’ll let others speculate about Mr. McClellan’s motives for turning on his friends.
We’d merely note that the book’s publisher is PublicAffairs, an imprint founded by left-wing editor Peter Osnos and which has published six books by George Soros. PublicAffairs is owned by Perseus Books, which is owned by Perseus LLC, a merchant bank whose board includes Democrats Richard Holbrooke and Jim Johnson, who is now doing Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting. One of Perseus’s investment funds, Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical, is co-managed with Mr. Soros.
Mr. Osnos, who is “editor-at-large” at PublicAffairs, told liberal blogger Rachel Sklar that he “worked very closely” with Mr. McClellan and his editor, Lisa Kaufman. Readers can guess what advice Mr. Osnos gave them about how to make headlines and sell a book six months before a presidential election in which Iraq will be a major issue.
And make no mistake, Iraq is the reason this book is getting so much political attention. Mr. Obama has staked out a position for immediate troop withdrawal that looks increasingly untenable amid the success of the “surge” and improving security in Baghdad and Basra. John McCain was a key supporter of the surge, so Democrats now want to change the subject and claim the war was a mistake in the first place and sold under false pretenses. Mr. McClellan’s confessions fit neatly into this political narrative.
The problem is that Mr. McClellan presents no major new detail to support his conclusions about Iraq, or even about the Administration’s deliberations about how to sell the war. This may be because he was the deputy press secretary for domestic issues during the run-up to war and thus rarely attended war strategy sessions. His talking points are merely the well-trod claims that the Administration oversold the evidence about WMD and al Qaeda.
Three independent investigations have looked into these claims, and all of them concluded that political actors did not skew intelligence to sell the war. These include the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2004, the Robb-Silberman report of 2005, and Britain’s Butler report. They explain that U.S. – and all Western – intelligence was mistaken but not distorted. Saddam Hussein himself told U.S. interrogators that he kept the fact that he lacked WMD even from many of his own generals.
As for the “propaganda” claim, any U.S. President has no choice but to make his case for going to war. It is an obligation of democracy. In Iraq, the long march to the 2003 invasion included months of debate at the U.N. and in Congress. Far from rushing to war, Mr. Bush heeded Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and sought U.N. approval. That required longer debate and a heavy reliance on WMD claims because the U.N.’s Iraq resolutions were mainly concerned with WMD after the first Gulf War. That too was a mistake, but it wasn’t a lie.
RTWT.
…With Congress’s approval rating at record lows, the time is ripe for a slam campaign. Barack Obama won’t do it, since his Democratic colleagues are running the joint. But it’s a huge opportunity for Mr. McCain, who could play Congress’s failings off his promises for reform. Even as Republicans sagely warn their nominee to distance himself from the president, they’re beginning to see that his more productive option might just be to throw them – and Congressional Democrats – under the Straight Talk bus.
I tracked down a transcript of the segment of the January Obama interview that has so enraged the left. This is what he actuallly said:
“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.
“He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into — he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
“I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
“I think we are in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going, aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having and they’re not useful. And the Republican approach I think has played itself out.
“I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies that are being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we’ve done that. We’ve tried it. It’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example…so some of it’s the times.”
I’m still not sure who Obama is, or what he plans to do with his power besides wield it. But I think it is interesting that he can mention Reagan in the context of positive change; also saying that at one time the “party of ideas” were the other guys.
I think we know that Obama is intelligent, and he seems to be able to innovate in certain areas. The outstanding example of innovation is his Amazing Money Machine. At this time we don’t know whether Obama just fell into this cornucopia of wealth pouring out of Silicon Valley, or whether he somehow made it happen. I lean to the former based on what I know so far, but remain open to the possibility that he is a skilled political innovator as well as a skilled orator and machine politician.
A good piece on US judgeships bu Alex Tabarrok — this is how it really works. There are plenty of studies demonstrating the difference, within the US, or elected vs. appointed judge behavior.
…As one judge put it bluntly:
As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone’s else money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families, and their friends will reelect me.”
Richard Neely (1988), West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
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