Reason’s Nick Gillespie has a bit of fun with the UPS-FedEx fight to make a larger argument about unions.
What’s particularly amusing about this is that, rather than seeking to get the favorable regulatory treatment that FedEx enjoys, UPS is fighting to put FedEx under the same onerous rules.
I’m reminded of the old joke about the Russian who gets a wish from a genie and complains that his neighbor has two cows while he only has one. The genie asks, “So, would you like a second cow? Or a third?” “No,” says the peasant. “I want you to kill one of my neighbor’s cows.”
Pollster Glen Bolger (a founding partner at my wife’s firm) looks at the data in the Virginia governor’s race and concludes that Barack Obama hurt Democrat Creigh Deeds.
At the end of tracking, we added some questions paid for by the Republican National Committee specifically to measure the Obama effect.
[...]
The dominant national issue at that time (and still) is health care. Only 44% of likely voters support the Obama plan, while 50% oppose it. Intensity is strongly against — 29% strongly favor/42% strong oppose. The question was worded:
“As you may have heard, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are preparing a plan to change the health care system. From what you have heard about this plan, do you favor or oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care proposal?”
We also asked a message question that was stunning for two reasons. One, it was stunning in its rejection of the notion of the Democratic wave of 2006-08 is any lasting move, and it was stunning for how close it was to the final election margin:
“I’m going to read you two statements, and please tell me which one comes closest to your opinion.
Some/Other people say it is more important to elect a Governor who will help President Barack Obama implement his agenda.
Other/Some people say that it is more important to elect a Governor who will serve as a check and balance to President Barack Obama.”
Voters opted for the check and balance by a 55%-35% margin. Independents (who voted for Obama by one point in 2008 in Virginia) opted for a check and balance by an overwhelming 58%-25% margin. Throughout our tracking, we regularly found open-ended comments from Independent voters saying they wanted to balance the overwhelming power that the Democrats have in Washington. Given the absolute power the Dems have in DC, that is a very strong message for GOPers running in 2010.
We tested the impact of the Obama endorsement — 24% said they were more likely to vote for Deeds, while 32% were less likely. The minus eight increment on that can not be encouraging to the White House.
Finally, we tested a simple agree/disagree: “Creigh Deeds’ policies are too close to the policies of President Barack Obama.” Fully 52% agreed and only 30% disagreed. By intensity, 30% strongly agreed and only 9% strongly disagreed. Revisionists on the left are blaming Deeds for not embracing Obama enough, but Virginia voters did not agree. Among Independents, it was 52% agree/28% disagree.
His bottom line is that Obama’s “policies have put fiscal and economic messages back into play for Republicans.”
Presumably, by 2010, it will be even harder for Democrats to run against George W. Bush or the Republican Congress of 2006. The degree to which Obama will be an asset or a liability to his party will, of course, depend on intervening events. If we’re still looking at 10 percent unemployment next November, it’ll almost certainly be the latter.
Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to resign and disband the Palestinian Authority altogether.
The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s negotiating partner, was raised as a possibility on Monday, as several aides to its president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he intended to resign and forecast that others would follow.
“I think he is realizing that he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said in an interview. “So he really doesn’t think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority. This is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts. You think anybody will stay after he leaves?”
Mr. Abbas warned last week that he would not participate in Palestinian elections he called for, to take place in January. But he has threatened several times before to resign, and many viewed this latest step as a ploy by a Hamlet-like leader upset over Israeli and American policy. Many also noted that the vote might not actually be held, given the Palestinian political fracture and the unwillingness of Hamas, which controls Gaza, to participate.
In the days since, however, his colleagues have come to believe that he is not bluffing. If that is the case, they say, the Palestinian Authority, which administers Palestinian affairs in the occupied West Bank and serves as a principal actor in peace negotiations with Israel, could be endangered.
Four top officials made the same point in separate interviews. Mr. Abbas, they say, feels at a total impasse in negotiations with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declined to commit to a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu favors negotiations without preconditions.
Just like Obama!
Seriously, though, Abbas has a point. The Palestinian Authority is in some ways the worst of both worlds, having most of the responsibilities of an independent state with none of the independence. They’re largely powerless in the negotiating process yet treated as if they had control of their borders. As such, “Palestinian Authority” is about as much of a misnomer as Pakistan’s “Federally Administered Tribal Areas.”
It’s not clear, however, what would replace the PA. Fatah, Yasir Arafat’s old political wing, is much diminished these days. And the two sides’ goals are so incompatible that it’s difficult to see how statehood ever becomes a reality.
Jodi Rell, the “Republican” governor of Connecticut, has announced that she will not seek re-election.
In a surprising announcement, Mrs. Rell, 63, did not immediately give a specific reason for her decision, saying only, “At some point, you know inside that it is time to begin a new chapter in life.”
Her announcement came during a news conference at which she first thanked people who had helped in a food drive over the weekend. “Second, I would like to share with you the news that — after much soul-searching and discussion with my family — I have decided not to seek re-election next year,” Mrs. Rell said. Her family was standing nearby during the announcement, The Hartford Courant reported.
The news left the Republicans without a candidate possessing big statewide name recognition and the Democrats with an opportunity to push for the governorship in 2010.
Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele, a Republican, has said that he might run for governor if Mrs. Rell decided not to seek re-election. Other Republicans, including the House minority leader, Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk, and the Senate minority leader, John McKinney of Fairfield, also have expressed interest.
Among the Democrats, Ned Lamont, a businessman who unsuccessfully ran for the United States Senate three years ago, has expressed an interest in being governor. “I salute the governor for her service to Connecticut, her civility, and her integrity,” Mr. Lamont said in a statement Monday evening. “Now is the time for a fresh start.”
Mrs. Rell, a former lieutenant governor, has been governor since 2004, when Gov. John G. Rowland resigned. He served 10 months in prison after pleading guilty to corruption charges. Mrs. Rell was elected in her own right in 2006.
Mrs. Rell’s job approval numbers have dipped in recent Quinnipiac University polls, mostly because of the state’s budget problems. A Sept. 16 poll showed that 59 percent approved of how she had handled her job, while 34 percent disapproved — the lowest approval rating during her tenure.
Those numbers are sustainable, however — certainly not enough in and of themselves to signal an uphill fight. So, it may well be that she just decided to move on to something else. She and her husband have also had health problems of late, although she dismissed that explanation when asked.
The state GOP will not miss Rell, even if her decision makes it harder to retain the seat. She’s not ideologically conservative, of course, but that’s pretty typical of Nutmeg State Republicans. But she’s not at all popular with insiders, having developed a reputation for putting her own interests above her party’s.
Twenty years ago today, I was leading a rocket artillery platoon in live fire exercises at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Eastern Bavaria. Some 400 kilometers to the north, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Back in my teaching days, I jokingly used this coincidence to illustrate the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
I don’t have much in the way of unique insights to offer beyond pointing to Stephen Green’s observation that, “The Berlin Wall didn’t just fall down. It was torn down. It was torn down by the very people it was built to cage.”
Nidal Malik Hasan is a Muslim who killed 14 people. Does that make him a terrorist? Some think so.
Sen. Joe Lieberman called the Fort Hood massacre an act of “Islamist extremism” – even as top Army brass warned Sunday against guessing at a motive, fearing backlash against Muslim soldiers. “There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act,” Lieberman (I-Conn) told Fox News on Sunday. “If the reports that we’re receiving of various statements he made, acts he took are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism.”
Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate, chairs the Senate Homeland Security committee.
Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people and wounding 30 more on Thursday, reportedly expressed moral concerns about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lieberman’s comments were in stark contrast to U.S. Army chief of staff George Casey, who told CNN he’s deeply worried “that the speculation could cause something that we don’t want to see happen.” “It would be a shame – as great a tragedy as this was – it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well,” Casey said.
The fact that outrage over Hasan’s villainy could spark a backlash against innocents has no bearing on this question. It’s a separate issue entirely.
Whether Hasan is a “terrorist” depends entirely on his motivation. To qualify as “terrorism,” the act has to be committed to instill fear for the purpose of achieving political goals. If he’s just an angry Muslim who went nuts and started shooting people, he’s a psychopath and a killer but not a terrorist. Even if he was trying to send an “I’ll show them” message, he’s no more a terrorist than the Columbine killers, the lunatic who shot up Virginia Tech, or one of those postal workers who go on a rampage.
Now, evidence is still pouring in. Hasan reportedly “once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats” and actually “was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda.” That, combined with various Internet postings and other rants, at very least makes him a terrorist sympathizer. And Jim Lindgren sees some matchup of Hasan with the typical psychology of a terrorist.
But even if Hasan was an al Qaeda wannabe who was trying to restore the Caliphate with his evil deeds, I’m not sure that he’s a “terrorist” in any sense that really matters. If he’s just a lone fanatic rather than part of an organized group, the difference between him and any other mass murderer is academic. Indeed, Charles Manson was politically motivated and actually had a group of followers but he’s never referred to as a “terrorist.”
UPDATE: Some commenters are apparently under the impression that, unless we call Hasan a “terrorist,” we’re somehow excusing his crimes. My argument is not that he’s merely some poor soul who needs help and deserves our compassion. Or that there’s no such thing as Islamist terrorism.
Rather clearly, Hasan willfully committed criminal acts that were at least partly motivated by radical Islamist ideology. I simply think “terrorism” is more than that.
UPDATE II: A commenter points to the case of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was almost universally judged a terrorist, a label with which I would concur. Like Hasan, McVeigh was ideologically motivated. So, what’s the difference? Aside from the fact that McVeigh formed a criminal conspiracy with a likeminded group and carefully plotted his attack for months, he was clearly trying to send a political message to his government. It’s not clear what Hasan’s intent was at this juncture.
The House passed a trillion dollar bill that will force Americans to buy health insurance, force even small businesses to provide health coverage, and require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. (The last, as I have previously argued, makes it something other than “insurance.”)
Hours after President Obama exhorted Democratic lawmakers to “answer the call of history,” the House hit an unprecedented milestone on the path to health-care reform, approving a trillion-dollar package late Saturday that seeks to overhaul private insurance practices and guarantee comprehensive and affordable coverage to almost every American.
After months of acrimonious partisanship, Democrats closed ranks on a 220-215 vote that included 39 defections, mostly from the party’s conservative ranks. But the bill attracted a surprise Republican convert: Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, who represents the Democratic-leaning district of New Orleans and had been the target of a last-minute White House lobbying campaign. GOP House leaders had predicted their members would unanimously oppose the bill.
Democrats have sought for decades to provide universal health care, but not since the 1965 passage of Medicare and Medicaid has a chamber of Congress approved such a vast expansion of coverage. Action now shifts to the Senate, which could spend the rest of the year debating its version of the health-care overhaul. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to bring a measure to the floor before Thanksgiving, but legislation may not reach Obama’s desk before the new year.
[...]
The House legislation would for the first time require every individual to obtain insurance, and would require all but the smallest employers to provide coverage to their workers. It would vastly expand Medicaid and create a new marketplace where people could obtain federal subsidies to buy insurance from private companies or from a new government-run insurance plan.
Though some people would receive no benefits — including about 6 million illegal immigrants, according to congressional estimates — the bill would virtually close the coverage gap for people who do not have access to health-care coverage through their jobs.
Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.
[...]
Democrats were forced to make major concessions on insurance coverage for abortions to attract the final votes to secure passage, a wrenching compromise for the numerous abortion-rights advocates in their ranks.
Many of them hope to make changes to the amendment during negotiations with the Senate, which will now become the main battleground in the health care fight as Democrats there ready their own bill for what is likely to be extensive floor debate.
Democrats say the House measure — paid for through new fees and taxes, along with cuts in Medicare — would extend coverage to 36 million people now without insurance while creating a government health insurance program. It would end insurance company practices like not covering pre-existing conditions or dropping people when they become ill.
[...]
Some Democrats said they voted for the legislation so they could seek improvements in it. “This bill will get better in the Senate,” said Representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat who has been outspoken in his criticism of some provisions of the bill but decided to support it. “If we kill it here, it won’t have a chance to get better.”
[...]
The House legislation, running almost 2,000 pages, would require most Americans to obtain health insurance or face penalties — an approach Republicans compared to government oppression. Most employers would have to provide coverage or pay a tax penalty of up to 8 percent of their payroll. The bill would significantly expand Medicaid and would offer subsidies to help moderate-income people buy insurance from private companies or from a government insurance plan. It would also set up a national insurance exchange where people could shop for coverage.
This measure barely passed the House, where Democrats enjoy a solid majority in which most Members are Gerrymandered into uncompetitive seats. And there are many Jim Coopers among the Yeas: People who would have voted Nay if they were not so confident the Senate would produce a much less radical bill, ensuring any measure that reaches the president’s desk will be less mild. I’m pretty sure they’re right.
Still, this is a rather staggering measure passed by the House. If this became law, the poor would be significantly poorer and small businesses would be even less competitive with the big box stores. During a very weak economy with an unemployment at ten percent, no less. Oh, and insurance rates will go up for the rest of us, too, as companies amortize the cost of absorbing people who have costly illnesses — who will by definition be a net drain on the pool from Day 1 — by passing it on to the rest of us.
Presumably, the rationale behind these moves is to wreck the current system entirely, making a government system the only alternative. Certainly, it’s not a good faith measure to improve the current system.
I get that the status quo is far from perfect. Young, healthy people often can’t afford health insurance. (I went without during my graduate school days, for example, unable to justify spending $250 a month out of a $750 stipend to cover the incredibly unlikely event of getting seriously sick.) The poor clog up our emergency rooms. People are stuck at their job because they’d lose coverage at an otherwise preferable job. Dealing with insurance companies can be a nightmare.
This bill helps address some of those problems, at least at the margins. But it exacerbates others.
Moreover, this plan does nothing to address the fundamental problem with the status quo: The unsustainable skyrocketing in health care costs. If the Senate were to somehow pass the identical bill, we’d cover more people — a good thing in and of itself — but at a higher per unit cost. That means an even greater share of GDP would go to health care from the beginning with no additional constraints on the escalation of costs.
In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg’s Justin Blum:
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, called the war on terrorism “a war against Islam,” said a doctor who was in a graduate program with him.
While studying for a masters degree in public health in 2007, Hasan used a presentation for an environmental health class to argue that Muslims were being targeted by the U.S. anti-terror campaign, said Val Finnell, a classmate. “He was very vocal about the war, very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second,” said Finnell, 41, a preventive medicine doctor in Los Angeles, in an interview yesterday. “He was always concerned that Muslims in the military were being persecuted.”
[...]
Finnell said he remembered Hasan “vividly” and said of the shooting: “I’m not surprised, based on the things he said in the past. I’m shocked that it happened, but not surprised.”
In conversations, students challenged Hasan on his statements and he would become “visibly upset, sweaty, nervous,” Finnell said. Toward the end of the program, in 2008, Hasan gave a presentation that was billed as a survey of the climate for Muslims who serve in the U.S. military, Finnell said. “It wasn’t really very objective,” Finnell said. “It was like he was trying to prove a point.”
One witness claims Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting. Another witness says, “He didn’t say a word.”
Clearly, Hasan was unstable and, at very least, not fit to serve as an Army officer, much less an Army psychiatrist treating returning veterans from a war he hated. So, why was he still serving?
The vital facts of Hasan’s life do not suggest a man determined to kill dozens of his fellows as they sat unarmed in a crowded waiting room. He was born in Arlington, Va. His parents were immigrants, but so are millions of other Americans. His heritage was Palestinian, but he didn’t even speak Arabic. He went to Virginia Tech and in 1997 joined the Army. It was through the Army that he got his medical training. He was due to be deployed to Afghanistan.
Those who look for a ready explanation for the murderous rampage at Fort Hood can choose between two broad narratives: Maybe it had to do with the travails of an Army psychiatrist, dealing with soldiers who had been traumatized, even disfigured, by their war experience; or maybe it had to do with being Muslim.
[...]
The portrait of Hasan as a Muslim radical doesn’t entirely make sense to those who knew him well. Imam Faisal Khan, whose D.C.-area mosque Hasan attended over a 10-year period, never got the idea he was ashamed of his Army service.
“He would come in his uniforms many times,” Khan said. “He would come in his uniform and pray. And then I knew he was in the Army. He liked his job. That’s what he was trained for, you know, to serve in the military.”
His psychological evaluations were apparently well within normal range, with “No signs of physical or mental problems in examinations as recently as September,” according to Army records obtained by WaPo.
And yet there were strong signs that things were not right. His alleged comments while away at a civilian* school would likely have escaped military attention. But other officers noticed troubling behavior, too.
Col Terry Lee, a retired officer who worked with him at the military base in Texas, alleged Maj Hasan had angry confrontations with other officers over his views.
[...]
“He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans,” Col Lee told Fox News. “He said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place.” He said that Maj Hasan said he was “happy” when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June. An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings.
Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square” in New York.
He claimed he was aware that the major had been subject to “name calling” during heated arguments with other officers.
Federal law enforcement officials have said Maj Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats. The officials said the postings appeared to have been made by Maj Hasan but they were still trying to confirm that he was the author.
Hasan, 39, told relatives he’d been harassed by other soldiers for his faith. Last month, soldier John Van de Walker, 30, was arrested for scratching Hasan’s Honda with a key, police said.
The manager of the Killeen, Tex., apartment complex where Hasan lived said the vandal had returned from Iraq and targeted Hasan because he of a Muslim bumper sticker. “No one should have to deal with that kind of hate. Maybe he snapped,” said Alice Thompson, 53.
One hesitates to psychoanalyze crazies but, rather clearly, Hasan harbored rage years before his car was keyed. And the Army took appropriate action in response to that incident.
In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the Army didn’t do the same with regard to the signs that Hasan was unfit. But it’s not at all inconceivable that “the Army” had no idea. The fact that several of his colleagues had heard him say highly inflammatory things doesn’t mean that these things were reported up through the chain of command. Further, it’s not entirely clear what his superiors could have done with these reports, aside from confronting and counseling him.
While highly constrained in terms of time, place, and manner, military officers are allowed to disagree with official government policy in casual conversation with one another. Plenty of officers, including those currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, have no doubt expressed bitterness at missions they don’t believe in. Lord knows, a large number of them did so about the various deployments ordered by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And, while it may not have made Hasan a popular guy on base, one doesn’t have to be a Muslim or want Americans killed to hold the view that citizens have a right to “rise up” against an invading force.
Beyond that, there’s a natural reluctance to be overly aggressive in challenging a Muslim soldier as an enemy sympathizer. Being accused of racial profiling can be damaging to one’s career. Further, it can feed natural resentments against Muslim soldiers, almost all of whom are just as loyal to the country, the uniform, and their fellow soldiers as the next guy.
I’m of course reminded of Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who went into a religious-inspired rage and murdered two 101st Airborne Division officers in 2003. But, as Spencer Ackerman reminds us, Sergeant John Russell, who killed five soldiers in a shooting spree at Camp Liberty back in May, was not a Muslim. So, outlandish claims that “the enemy is infiltrating our military” are unhelpful.
We have a natural desire to want to make sense of tragedy. Unfortunately, we seem to have lone psychopaths going on shooting sprees and committing mass mayhem every now and again. And we only see the “obvious” clues in hindsight.
*UPDATE: A more recent AP report points out that the graduate school where Hasan made the comments was run by the military and adds further fuel to the fire that his seniors should have been aware of that they had a problem.
“I told him, `There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.” Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.
“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”
[...]
Danquah said he was so disturbed by Hasan’s persistent questioning that he recommended the mosque reject Hasan’s request to become a lay Muslim leader at Fort Hood. But he never saw a need to tell anyone at the sprawling Army post about the talks, because Hasan never expressed anger toward the Army or indicated any plans for violence. “If I had an inkling that he had this type of inclination or intentions, definitely I would have brought it to their attention,” he said.
Finnell said he did just that during a year of study in which Hasan made a presentation “that justified suicide bombing” and spewed “anti-American propaganda” as he argued the war on terror was “a war against Islam.” Finnell said he and at least one other student complained about Hasan, surprised that someone with “this type of vile ideology” would be allowed to wear an officer’s uniform. But Finnell said no one filed a formal, written complaint about Hasan’s comments out of fear of appearing discriminatory. “In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”
Hasan received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. And while he was an intern at the suburban Washington hospital, Hasan had some “difficulties” that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time.
Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2008, the same year he graduated from the master’s program. Bernard Rostker, a military personnel expert at the Rand Corp., said Hasan’s advancement was all but certain absent a serious blemish on his record, such as a DUI or a drug charge. “We’re short of officers, particularly at the major and lieutenant colonel level because of the war, and we’re short of psychiatrists,” said Rostker, who served as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Clinton administration. “There would have had to be something very detrimental in his record before there would have been a banner that would have said, ‘No, we don’t want to promote him.’”
If senior military leaders knowingly kept quiet about Hasan’s incompatibility for service in order to meet personnel quotas, they’ve aided and abetted the murder of thirteen soldiers.
The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days.
Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning. My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.
The loss of a Republican seat in NY-23 under highly unusual circumstances notwithstanding, yesterday was a good day for Republicans. After crushing defeats in successive elections, they won back the Virginia governor’s office in a blowout and knocked off a billionaire incumbent governor in New Jersey despite having their vote split between two candidates.
I would, however, resist the temptation to see these contests as a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency and the Democratic Party, much less a harbinger for 2010 and beyond.
Glenn Reynolds has an op-e in the NY Post titled “The Obama Magic has Faded.”
All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday’s off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.
But these local angles weren’t enough to keep the Obama administration out of the races. President Obama barnstormed Virginia and New Jersey — and pumped money and Joe Biden into NY-23 in support of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. (One suspects Owens would have preferred more money and less Biden.)
And — until it started looking as if they might lose — the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.
Now, this is right, so far as it goes. Exit poll analyses by both ABC and CBS show Obama remains personally popular but that people are extremely worried about the economy and the direction of the country. The reality has set in that Obama’s a politician, not a messiah. While many retain high hopes, most of the irrational exuberance has faded. And, clearly, he doesn’t have coattails when he’s not on the ballot. Then again, neither did Ronald Reagan. Recall that Republicans lost 27 House seats in 1982.
A stronger case is made by Dan Balz in an “analysis” piece at WaPo titled “Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It’s not 2008 anymore.”
Neither gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president, but the changing shape of the electorates in both states and the shifts among key constituencies revealed cracks in the Obama 2008 coalition and demonstrated that, at this point, Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year’s midterm elections.
The most significant change came among independent voters, who solidly backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008 but moved decisively to the Republicans on Tuesday, according to exit polls. In Virginia, independents strongly supported Republican Robert F. McDonnell in his victory over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds, while in New Jersey, they supported Republican Chris Christie in his win over Democratic Gov. Jon S. Corzine.
For months, polls have shown that independents were increasingly disaffected with some of Obama’s domestic policies. They have expressed reservations about the president’s health-care efforts and have shown concerns about the growth in government spending and the federal deficit under his leadership.
Tuesday’s elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.
This is exactly right. Independents, by their very nature, are fickle. When thing are going well, they’ll stick with the party in power and when they’re not, they’ll vote for change.
So, if unemployment is still high and we’re still mired in a mess in Afghanistan a year from now, the Republicans will have an opening to make major gains in the House and Senate. But they’ll need candidates who won’t alienate independents.
I followed the Virginia race with some interest given that I live in the Commonwealth. It wasn’t a race about Obama or national issues at all. Deeds was the surprise winner of the Democratic primary, with the well-financed and well-known Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran killing each other off and leaving Deeds standing. He was a moderate Democrat with appeal to rural Virginians who had narrowly lost to McConnell four years earlier when the latter got 323 more votes for attorney general. But when the Washington Post went on attack against McDonnell for an old master’s thesis and some rather unprogressive statements about women and homosexuals, Deeds decided to run a nasty campaign hammering at those points. It backfired, as McConnell turned the other cheek and came across as a decent, reasonable man. (As an aside, I should note that Republicans easily won the lieutenant governor and attorney general races in landslides, too. )
In New Jersey, Corzine is personally unpopular and his state is in bad shape. I posited on last night’s OTB Radio that it was all downhill after the motorcade incident, which was the first time I realized what a jackass Corzine was, but I don’t follow Garden State politics closely enough to know for sure. At any rate, Chris Christie was perceived as a reasonable alternative even in a Democrat-leaning state. Corzine’s genius advisers decided their best course was to double down on the jerk factor, campaigning on the theme that Christie was too fat to be governor. Oddly, it didn’t do the trick.
Regardless, these races demonstrate that Republicans can win — even with all the damage to the brand suffered in recent years — given both an opening and a solid candidate.
The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern.
Dave Schuler and I will be joined by Zenpundit’s Mark Safranksi to talk about the “elections” in Afghanistan, today’s off-off-year elections in the USA, and the state of opportunity in America.
We’ll also be taking calls at (646) 716-7030. Owing to a high trolls to legit callers ratio, however, we’ll be using the BTR chat feature to screen for legit calls.
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In a much discussed post, Ezra Klein produced a series of graphs showing that Americans pay more for office visits, scans and imaging, drugs, and other aspects of health care — often, far more — than is the case in Canada or Western Europe.
There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same — the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need — but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.
In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn’t set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you’ll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You’ll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don’t have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard.
Bernard Finel, recalling a series of posts and comment threads from a while back, observes,
James Joyner has argued that in order to reduce health care expenditures we need to make a choice — we can’t have it be better, faster, and cheaper. Yes, we can. The reason we can is that the choice isn’t simply between better, faster, and cheaper, it is between better, faster, cheaper, and more profitable. If you cut profits — for medical insurance providers, for medical malpractice insurance providers, for med-mal attorneys, for doctors, for hospitals, and for drug companies — you can have better, faster, and cheaper. The problem is that our system is essential optimized for profits — our goal is not to make people healthy but to make people wealthy.
That’s true up to a point, although some of this is simply the Find The Umbrella phenomenon combined with arbitrary itemizing of costs. (Maybe the scans are $900 because they can bill that much for it while something that they’d otherwise bill more for is capped because the insurance companies won’t reimburse above a certain rate.)
Beyond that, as Dave Schuler points out, there’s no good reason to think OUR government is going to hold down costs in the same way the social democracies have.
I see no reason to believe that even if we went to a single-payer system that the federal government would be willing to lower healthcare prices so that we’re spending what France, Germany, or the Netherlands is. Despite the legislative mandate to do so that’s been around for about ten years they haven’t lowered Medicare reimbursement rates. Every year they postpone that painful choice and, indeed, they’re preparing to do so again.
And, indeed, as Kevin Drum acknowledges, nothing in the bills before Congress will do anything at all to reduce costs.
Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins have written a piece for Brookings titled “Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity.” None of it’s new to those who’ve paid much attention to these things in recent years. What’s interesting, though, is the seeming contradiction in Myths 1 and 4.
1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.
Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they’re adults.
If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.
[...]
4. If we want to increase opportunities for children, we should give their families more income.
Of course money is a factor in upward mobility, but it isn’t the only one; it may not even be the most important. Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent. (We define middle class as having an income of at least $50,000 a year for a family of three.)
Many American families need supplements to their incomes in the form of food stamps, affordable housing and welfare payments. But such aid should not be given unconditionally. First, the public is concerned that unconditional assistance will end up supporting those who are not trying to help themselves. Second, new research in economics and psychology has shown that individuals frequently behave in ways that undermine their long-term welfare and can benefit from a government nudge in the right direction.
And third, policies with strings attached have had considerable success. One example is the 1996 welfare reform law, which required most adult recipients to get jobs, and dramatically increased employment and lowered overall child poverty. In the midst of a recession, we can’t expect everyone to work. But social policies will be more successful if they encourage people to do things that bring longer-term success.
What this seems to say is that “opportunity” is not what keeps the children of the poor from economic progress. Rather, it’s the passing along of poor habits and values.
The poor, by and large, are those who have made bad decisions: Dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and been satisfied with government supported subsistence living. Their children, in turn, are trapped in the same pattern of behavior by being surrounded by a culture that sees these things as the norm and actively discourages responsible behavior.
This point is emphasized when one looks at the part I omitted from Myth 1:
The United States is exceptional, however, in the opportunity it offers to immigrants, who tend to do comparatively well here. Their wages are much higher than what they might have earned in their home countries. And even if their pay is initially low by American standards, their children advance quite rapidly.
And Myth 3:
3. Immigrant workers and the offshoring of jobs drive poverty and inequality in the United States.
Although immigration and trade are often blamed, a more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today.
Among women under age 30, more than half of all births now occur outside marriage, driving up poverty and leading to more intellectual, emotional and social problems among children.
So, again, the problem is behavioral rather than one of raw “opportunity” in any macro sense.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that those who came up poor had the same advantages as the children of the wealthy and the upper middle class. The latter were much more likely to be surrounded by role models that steered them in the right direction. Further, there are huge advantages conferred by wealth and connections, such as a much greater likelihood of getting a good primary and secondary education and not only going on to college but a much higher propensity of going to a “good” school that opens up doors much harder to walk through for those who went to Podunk State Directional University.
This is interesting, too: “we have seen a growing tendency among well-educated men and women to marry each other, exacerbating income disparities.” My strong guess is that well-educated men have always married bright, socially adept women. But those sort of women are now likely to be college educated. Further, beyond the social advantages marrying that sort of women always brought, the fact that most married women continue to work outside the home even after they have children means that there are economic incentives as well.
UPDATE: Dave Schuler amplifies my point above about culture:
Many of the poor live in nearly self-contained communities and their exposure to the breadth of possibilities in the United States is really quite limited. There are places where the only lives that the kids can imagine for themselves are pimp, prostitute, hustler, professional athlete, performer, or cop. Becoming an accountant or a hospital administrator is unimaginable.
The editors at Foreign Policy magazine used the occasion of the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s election as president to ask a “a group of experts” to grade President Obama’s foreign policy performance. I was honored to be among the graders.
My B-minus was exactly in line with the consensus: “Obama scored only an average of a B-: five As, nine Bs, four Cs, and five Ds.”
President Barack Obama inherited two unpopular wars and a global financial crisis. Despite mostly continuing President George W. Bush’s policies, he’s rebooted America’s image in the world and avoided most of the landmines. His top-level foreign policy staff — from Vice President Joe Biden to National Security Advisor Jim Jones to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to the State Department’s Anne-Marie Slaughter — is superb. While I seriously questioned his choice of Hillary Clinton to become secretary of state, she’s mostly been solid. That said, he’s made some serious missteps on the security front with Afghanistan and Iran, and his relationship with Europe is not nearly as strong as it should be, given the warmth with which his election was received.
Afghanistan: C-. Obama carried out his campaign pledge to send more troops and to put more emphasis on the war but he quickly lost confidence and now seems mired in a struggle over grand strategy. He fired a competent general to replace him with another, presumably to double-down on counterinsurgency, and turned around three months later to question his own general’s recommendations for carrying out the obvious implications of said strategy.
Europe: B. Obama came into office with a huge popularity boost and was viewed as a breath of fresh air after eight years of Bush. But he’s fumbled the “special relationship” with Britain and has raised serious doubts in Eastern Europe. See my recent article for a detailed explanation.
Iran: C+. Jim Jones’ pronouncement that we could live with a nuclear Iran was a welcome step down from the previous talk about it being “unacceptable.” Unfortunately, the situation has been largely bungled from there, with Obama having seemingly returned to his campaign trail Pollyannaish view of the power of chit-chat.
My colleague Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, also gave him a B-minus.
President Barack Obama’s momentous election heralded a change in U.S. foreign policy and raised expectations of revolutionary developments around the globe. He certainly lifted the dialogue to a new and higher moral level and promised engagement. But progress has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, because U.S. policy is rooted in national interests that do not change dramatically with a change in the occupant of the White House. This has been difficult for people around the world to understand. Regarding the Middle East and the Muslim world in general, Obama’s rhetoric has resonated more abroad than at home. He must change the discussion at home, not just to ensure Israel’s security but also guarantee implementation of Palestinian rights within a tight time frame. On Iran and India, he missed an opportunity to give Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a larger canvas to ply his skills by handing over Iran to a separate envoy and ceding to India’s pressures to exclude that country from the important dialogue on Afghanistan. Its problems can only be solved by taking a regional approach and drawing in the major neighbors: India, Iran, Pakistan, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, Russia, and China. Restricting Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan reduced his ability to move all the chess pieces in the game.
Also, in Afghanistan, there is no savvy civilian equivalent of Gen. Stanley McChrystal representing the transatlantic view and strengthening the hand of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry with his Afghan hosts. (Paging “Dr.” Ryan Crocker!) And no Afghan voice has been brought into the discussion of the Afghan strategy. There is still time to save the situation before domestic electoral agendas take over in 2010 and then again in 2011. America’s first “global president” who promised the world an impossible dream must strive to avoid settling for the politically possible. He inherited multiple chess games and is moving from crisis to crisis at home and abroad. So, how well has he done? As my high school principal in Rawalpindi, the Rev. “Paddy” Byrne, used to pronounce on most report cards: Needs Improvement. For his high aims but relatively slow results to date, one can give Obama an A for effort but only a C+ for promised actions to date. Overall score: B-. This is an interim grade. The spring semester might produce better results at home and perhaps abroad.
Feel free to provide your grades and analysis in the comments below.
Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon. Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks:
(1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day?
You, of course, wouldn’t.
But that’s not what Twitter is to most of us. Despite the query “What are you doing now?” on the posting window, most people that I follow are posting links and commentary on matters of interest to me. Here’s a screencap of my TweetDeck screen at the moment:
Now, I’m not saying that every single posting there contributes to my net wisdom. But I get more than enough interesting information to be worth 30-60 minutes of my day scanning, re-tweeting, and posting my own bits.
Lezard seems to think Twitter is mostly about what people are having for lunch and the like. And for all I know, perhaps it is. Then again, so is “blogging.” But just as I don’t read blogs that are mostly about people’s cats or the mundane daily activities of their lives, neither do I actively follow those sorts of Twitter accounts.
