Month: July 2008

I’m taking a vacation next week and working on an essay for the Atlantic magazine the week after. I’m leaving this blog in the interim in the very capable hands of Patrick Appel, my aide de blogue, and two Dish alums, Jessie Roberts, my ancien aide de blogue and Chris Bodenner, former Dish intern and now Hotline wunderkind. They’ll be trawling the web and blogosphere for the familiar Dish goodies, and revealing how superfluous I am fast becoming in these parts. Next week, they’ll also be joined by Hilary Bok, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, and the week after by Daniel Larison, whose blog, Eunomia, is currently at the American Conservative.  I don’t know how to categorize either Hilary or Daniel, which is why they are particularly welcome at the Dish. But I do know they’re two of the freshest, sharpest new voices to have emerged from the blogosphere. Welcome to my parlor, said the spider, etcetera.

I’ll be back in August and balls-to-the-wall till November. Reculer pour mieux sauter. And all that.

That’s what Domenico Montanaro is calling it. McCain’s new TV ad takes on Obama over Iraq:

Ruffini says Romney shouldn’t go for veep:

Mitt Romney is already in line to be the nominee in 4 years if McCain loses under the GOP Law of Primogeniture. Why would he want to muck it up with a VP run? If McCain loses, it is all downside for Mitt. People would forget all the positive aspects of his Presidential run and remember his role on a losing ticket. (See Edwards, John.)

The conversation deepens. Steven Taylor admits:

The main positive reason I can conjure for voting for McCain is divided government. However, since the current divided government situation has not generated much in terms of addressing these keys issues about executive power, one wonders about that argument as well. At a minimum I find myself for the first time in my life in a position where I could see myself voting Democratic, Republican or Libertarian. And, I suspect that I am not alone. I was having a conversation the other day with a lifelong friend who is also a lifelong conservative. He concurred that he, too, had a similar view on the choices and his own possible voting behavior.

Bainbridge replies in the comments:

I can sympathise with your position, but I have just three words of caution: Judges, judges, judges.

Joyner counters Taylor:

I see no reason to think that Obama would be less prone to interventionism than McCain.  My strong sense is that he’d model himself after Bill Clinton and be eager to use military force for humanitarian and do-gooder reasons, whereas McCain would be more likely to use force aggressively in pursuit of security goals.

Nor do I have any reason to believe Obama would be less prone than McCain to overreach in his use of executive power to advance what he believes to be legitimate and necessary goals.  Indeed, Obama’s seeming lack of sense of humor and condemnation of any and all criticism as beyond the pale worries me greatly on that front.

James Pethokoukis tallies the cost of Gore’s call for 100% renewable energy by 2018:

By my math, using Pickens’s numbers, converting the whole economy to renewable energy in a short period of time might cost $5 trillion—and that is if you assume that government-led projects come in on budget. (Remember, the current U.S. gross domestic product is $12 trillion.) That would be like creating another Japan. Or fighting World War II all over again. The latter analogy is especially apt since the Gore Plan would effectively transform our free-market economy into a command-and-control war economy full of rationing and scarcity. Of course, there are many folks like Gore who view global warming as the moral equivalent of war. But Gore would extend the concept into the economic equivalent of war. Again, all this makes sense if you think we are doomed otherwise.

Sara Barz rounds up blogosphere reaction.

That accent? C’mon. A reader vents:

Your post on your colleague Megan lamenting the end of the American "upper class" accent was interesting.  I would venture to guess that this accent disappeared because it was an affectation more than a genuine accent.  I had a Connecticut born, Yale-educated prep school teacher (long deceased) who used to talk like that.  We, his students, all knew that if he was given enough gin he was perfectly able to speak "normally."  The Texas drawl, African-American speech, the Boston brogue, the speech patterns of the Deep South or Northeastern Maine — all of these are genuine accents rooted in culture and migratory patterns.  The "upper class" American accent, which arguably did descend from American Yankee inflections, was also known as a "mid-Atlantic" accent and it was largely a creation of the movies.

In Hollywood’s Golden Age there was a small industry devoted to training "thespians" to talk like this (there’s a wonderful scene in "Singin’ In The Rain" that satirizes this fetish).  My ex-mother-in-law, the daughter of a California rancher and a Hollywood starlet during this era, continued to use her "upper class" accent until she died a few years ago.  This way of talking metastasized nation-wide through the movies and died out as the old studio system died.  It’s been widely reported that even William F. Buckley, an arch practitioner of this way of speaking, was the only member of his family who spoke like that.  To the extend the "accent" was phony (even if unselfconsciously so on the part of those who used it), I suppose one could say "good riddance, y’all."

Another reader adds:

The expert on the historical tides underlying the decline of the "upper-class" accent that Megan McArdle mourns is William Labov, a sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. His findings are more subtle, and more interesting, than the sudden death perceived by McArdle. Labov’s work was covered nicely by The New Yorker’s John Seabrook in 2005, available on the web here.

Clive Crook is flabbergasted by Gore’s speech:

The call to produce "100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years" is off the charts. To blandly claim that this is both "achievable" and "affordable" is a typical Gore touch–as is the hyperbole about the end of life as we know it if we fail to do as he advises. Gore says, "The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis." Well, among other things, that depends what you mean by "dramatic"; so far as am I aware, nobody else is saying, "eliminate carbon from the US electricity supply by 2018 or we are doomed." […]

I agree with Gore about some things. I agree with his preference for a carbon tax over other carbon control regimes…But eliminating carbon from electricity within 10 years? Does he even mean it? "I see my role as enlarging the political space in which Senator Obama or Senator McCain can confront this issue as president next year," he says. Translation: I advocate the impossible so that the possible becomes more probable. Fair enough, one might say. But propaganda in a good cause is still propaganda, isn’t it?

A reader explains why it shouldn’t be under-estimated:

After seeing Obama’s speech on the steps of the Springfield courthouse, I gave him $50. The next month I signed up for a small recurring gift. Then somewhere in there I bought a t-shirt and a hat. A couple times the campaign invited me to match a first-time donor, and I’d give another $25. I also bought a t-shirt, and then a hat at a small $100 fundraiser (it was November and I was cold). The recurring gift stayed through the primaries, but then every so often he’d get beat and I’d want to lend a hand with another $25. In an e-mail today announcing the June fundraising figures, the Obama campaign told me what I’ve donated: $1,103.78.

I had no idea how much I’d donated! But since I spent it over the last 15 months, it just kept adding up. I make $50K a year, so this is actually a fairly sizeable chunk for me if I ever had to write it out as a single check. And it’s hard not to think about all the other things I could have done with $1,100. But at the same time, it’s hard not to feel a little proud, too. I’ve never given to a candidate before in my life. But I really do feel like I own a piece of the campaign.

I’ve never subscribed to the belief that money in politics was a bad thing. But I’m starting to feel that the $2,300 cap, combined with Obama’s pledge not to accept PAC money, is a good thing. I will keep giving those small $25 and $50 gifts when I can/when I feel like he needs it. There are so many more like me … I think that when we see the results in November, Democrats and Republicans are going to be aghast at how much Obama and his million donors has changed the political landscape.