This Is Not News

Had a letter to the editor printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. The paper cut out a line I had blasting Phil Gramm’s nation of whiners comment, but them’s the breaks. Since I allowed the paper to publish my e-mail address, I’ve gotten about a dozen responses, most of which are criticisms. I’m debating whether to reply or post more on the blog or what. But I do think it was a nice bit of placement that the letter showed up n the same editorial section as this unsigned editorial and an op-ed (which I can’t yet see online) that discusses Gramm’s role in 90s-era deregulation.

I have been trying to wrap my head around John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee today, and I’ll be honest, I’m having no luck. I don’t know if it will help or hurt McCain, or what exactly it says about the state of our politics. I know that as a partisan Democrat I don’t want her to be Vice President, but I’d’ve thought that about anyone that McCain picked.

But what I’m really starting to wonder about is whether this will bring more coverage to Alaska and its unique economy and politics. As I understand it, the state distributes a dividend from oil revenue to everyone in the state – a shared participation in the state’s resources that provides some foundation for every citizen. That’s a fascinating idea to me, and I wonder if we’ll have the chance to discuss why Alaska does it this way – and why the rest of the country doesn’t.

The major thoughts rattling through my head after the John Edwards news last week seem to be as follows:

1. Good thing the Democrats didn’t nominate this guy.
2. Man, I feel awful for the Edwards supporters who feel let down or worse.
3. If Obama ever does something this dumb, you’re gonna need to keep me away from windows and sharp objects for at least a month.

There is one other thread, though. I’ve noticed a number of people on the blogosphere saying that this isn’t such a huge deal, and that their support of Edwards was because of the positions Edwards took, not who Edwards was himself. And while I see where they’re coming from, I have to say that I think it’s a terribly incorrect way of viewing the role we voters play in the American government at this point in time. Outside of the occasional initiative ore referendum, we pull the lever for a name, not a policy position. And that’s not an accident.

For starters, even if a candidate completely agrees with you on all of your policy issues, getting those policies enacted is a personal skill. You have to decide if the candidate can do that. Part of that skill in enacting policies depends on the popularity of the official doing the enacting. And part of a public official’s popularity depends on how the public reacts to that official – on how we feel about him or her as a person.

Beyond that, there are any number of ways that a particular policy can be implemented or approached. Those decisions are going to be in the hands of the public official, and they can determine whether or not your goals are achieved in the way that you want them to be. So you have to decide whether this particular candidate’s approach to implementation and problems solving is one that you can get on board with.

And all of that says nothing about the fact that any leader is going to have make hundreds of unglamorous decisions about issues that you might not have given any prior thought to, so you better hope you feel good about a candidate’s judgment, level-headedness, and ability to deal with challenges.

All of this is why, on some level, most voters have to feel like they can trust something about the person they’re voting for. And we have to make these judgments about these candidates based on fairly distant signals – which is exactly why personal scandals can wind up with the legs that they do.

This NY Times article on rising shipping costs is worth a read, if only for the examples of head-scratching activity that somehow makes sense given our current energy and economic policy. When I think of the effort that is required to ship something from China to the US, it boggles my mind that it is somehow cheaper to send raw materials to Asia, manufacture a product, and then ship[ that product back to the US. What that suggests to me is that as high as energy and fuel costs have gotten lately, they may still not be high enough to accurately reflect the scarcity of fuel, the global demand for products, the environmental damage currently done by transportation, and the further diminishing of available resources that results from damage.

I have a feeling a lot of people are going to have to make a lot of lifestyle changes in the coming decades. And I have a hunch part of my job as a teacher is going to be to try to help my students understand why that’s necessary – or at least to clearly understand the problems so that they can find the solution that is far, far beyond my grasp.

In the hub-bub over Iraqi government leaders backing Barack Obama’s general proposal for a 16-month timeline to withdraw American combat troops, John McCain has been making the argument that even if, after all “translation”-related confusion has been cleared up, the Iraqis do agree with Obama, Obama deserves no credit for this because he opposed the surge plan a year ago. Whether you agree with this or not, it does raise the point that the justifications for the timeline seem to be shifting a little bit in the media coverage. When Obama began proposing a 16-month withdrawal, he argued that it was necessary to give the various Iraqi factions time to get their act together – that Iraq would never completely stand on its own until it had to. Now the argument seems to be coming across more as “things have calmed down, they don’t need us, let’s go.” I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t take just about any justification for getting out of Iraq right now, but I have a gut feeling that the original justification is going to turn out to be a lot more valid than the new one. There are still a lot of competing power centers in Iraq, and I am certainly not an expert on how well the government is currently getting along with the Sadrist militias or what kind of autonomy the Kurds will demand or so on. But I can’t help feeling that we’re in a calm-before-the-storm period, that the calm has something to do with a belief that American forces will leave relatively soon, and that it won’t stick around indefinitely if that belief is lost.

I’ve been thinking about this reaction piece Josh Marshall wrote at Talking Points Memo over the weekend, focused on the New York Times editorial calling for Alberto Gonzales’s impeachment. Marshall is struck by how unusual the impeachment of a cabinet official is – the only time Marshall knows it’s been done, the official in question had already resigned. And the reason Marshall figures that it’s so rare is that almost every time a cabinet official runs into as many problems as Gonzales has – with senators saying he’s not credible and the department discombobulated – then said official either resigns to stop the feeding frenzy or gets fired by a boss who wants to look like he’s listening to the people or caring what Congress thinks or what have you. But this time, whatever the reason, Gonzales isn’t quitting and Bush isn’t firing him, and people just seem flummoxed by this. Many people want Gonzales to go, but the only actual procedure by which anyone in Congress can make that happen is impeachment. And impeachment is so seldom used that people are reluctant to use it.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this so much is that it seems to point to something I’ve always been struck by – how much we rely on unwritten rules and understood conventions. There’s so much that we don’t expect or prepare for ahead of time, and for the most we continue to function by giving ourselves some slack to deal with this. But it does leave loopholes in the system for someone who really doesn’t care about keeping up with the conventions – if you’re not willing to play that give-and-take, you can actually get your way quite a bit even if you’re not very well liked at the moment. So it’ll be interesting to watch this play out some more, and see whether any of Gonzales’s opponents decide that they’re gonna have use wht procedural tools they have, clunky though they may be.

A follow-up on filibusters: McClatchy has a nice article and chart detailing the growth of filibusters as a tactic over the last couple of years.

In many ways this is a shoe-on-the-other-foot situation, but what I find interesting is that it seems to me that Republican senators considered to be moderate have been more willing to stick with the party line than Democratic senators considered to be conservative were during the 2002-2006 period. That could be a superficial impression based on my ideological perspective, and I’m not making a value judgment about whether or not party discipline is inherently good or not. But I do wonder if the cultures of the two parties means that sometimes they choose to play by different rules. And I wonder how voters will feel about that next year.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo seems annoyed that several news outlets are not calling the all-night session being held in the Senate a filibuster. This isn’t necessarily isolated to TPM – folks at other blogs had been calling on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to force Senate Republicans to “actually filibuster” various amendments and measures designed to force a change in Iraq policy. And I gotta say, I don’t get it. What’s happening tonight may well be a significant event and means of moving legislation forward – but it ain’t a filibuster in the modern or the traditional sense. In a traditional filibuster, the kind we associate with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and anti-civil rights senators, opponents of a measure get the floor and keep on talking to prevent a bill from moving to a vote. If the bill’s supporters can get the floor, they can presumably move things forward. In a modern filibuster, a bill’s opponents just vote against a motion to stop debate – no one has to give any speeches or do any talking.

Now, what’s happening tonight is that Reid has called for an all-night session of debate. Senators from both sides are taking turns speaking. If the Republicans wanted to, they could yield their time and just let the Democrats keep yakking. At some point, there’s still going to have to be a motion to end the debate in order to get to an actual vote. And whenever that motion occurs, it will almost certainly fail because enough Republicans (plus Joe Lieberman) will vote against ending debate.

I’m not saying I’m against the stunt. I just don’t think it’s an actual filibuster.

There is a related point that Marshall makes – somehow, the media is not using the word filibuster to describe the Republicans voting against cloture. And that’s definitely a mistake.

Wow, the Inquirer must have known I was in a mood to write about voting, because they have an article about a state representative who wants to hold hearings on instituting a vote-by-mail system.

I’ve written before about why I think the current one-day-of-voting plan doesn’t work so well. But I will note that in the Inquirer article, a task force claimed that there was a communal value in having in-person voting on a particular day.

You gotta be kidding me. If you’re lucky, you walk up to a polling place, fend off a bunch of people trying to give you endorsement ballots, vote, and get out. If you’re unlucky, you have to wait in line because there aren’t enough machines, the machines are broken, the ballot’s too confusing, there are too many questions, etc. etc. Some people enjoy this communal value so much that they don’t vote at all! What fun!

There’s a lot of anger in antiwar circles about the supplemental spending bill that came out of the House-Senate conference committee, which appears to strip all timelines and mandated consequences from the bill. It’s being portrayed as a blank check for the president’s war policy

The major thing I’ve been grappling with in this discussion is that it seems like even many of the anti-war voices in Congress seem opposed to any action that would cut off funds. Whether that’s because of political fears, reliving Vietnam, beliefs about the separation of powers, or something else entirely, I’m not completely sure. But it seems pretty real and not something that’s going away any time soon. And given that fact, it seems like President Bush knows that he doesn’t have to compromise – even if by not compromising he’s doing himself and his party political harm. That seems like something that’s so hard for anyone else in Washington to comprehend that they really can’t come up with a strategy for it. I suppose it’s why I never really expected anything different to come from all of this – but I still wouldn’t mind if people proved me wrong.