Month: August 2008

Marc Lynch on Maliki making himself clear about troops pulling out:

…here’s why I’m less excited by this than some of my colleagues.  As with everything in Iraqi politics, there’s likely to be a substantial gap between a political agreement and its implementation.  I assume that even if an agreement actually passes the Iraqi Parliament (which the speaker just said was unlikely), it will contain plenty of ‘conditions-based’ loopholes.  And I assume that both a Maliki government (and any likely successor) and a McCain administration would have every intention of exploiting those loopholes.   In other words, the upshot could well be to take McCain’s 100 years off the table in American politics and enhance Maliki’s still-shaky political position while legalizing precisely the long-term U.S. military presence it supposedly rules out.  That’s why it’s important to scrutinize the details of the agreement, and to get the right leadership in place to get the implementation right.

Part of Dan Conley’s convention week agenda:

The Dems made a huge mistake in 2004 by not bloodying up Zell Miller in Boston before he could attack them in New York.  This time, Lieberman must be annihilated.  I’d use Jim Webb or Wesley Clark to twist the knife into him.

Yet again:

LENO: Welcome back, Sen. McCain, for one million dollars, how many houses do you have?

MCCAIN: You know, could I just mention to you, Jay, and a moment of seriousness. I spent five and a half years in a prison cell, without—I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a kitchen table, I didn’t have a table, I didn’t have a chair. And I spent those five and a half years, because—not because I wanted to get a house when I got out.

Virginia Postrel tells the story of how she gained a sister-in-law. It doesn’t sound like an attack on family values to me:

As of July 27, this happy woman went from my sister-not-exactly-in-law, her status for the past two decades, to my actual legal sister-in-law. And the woman she’s hugging became her legal mother-in-law, instead of the unofficial relative who comes to visit for a month every year, whose medical care she frets over, and whose new living arrangements she researched. (Did I mention that Mindy, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, is now a stay-at-home mom? How traditional can you get? Steve and I are the radical ones.)

But the Republican party now believes that this act of family bonding is such a threat to society that the Constitution must be amended to forbid it – and to force this married couple into de facto divorce.

A reader writes:

It seems to me that several months ago (maybe years now), you hypothesized that Michelle would be significant force for the Obama campaign. Things haven’t quite turned out that way thus far with the pundits and those of us that follow the race day by day. This morning I saw this…

A CSPAN caller, who was torn between McCain and Obama, just called in to say that as a result of Michelle Obama’s speech, she will be voting for Obama.

Juan Williams, seeing what matters:

A reader writes:

I agree with everything your reader said on Romney but … Biden would CHEW Pawlenty up, vomit him, make mincemeat of him and rechew him up. Which is why people are right when they say McCain is boxed in with his VP pick.

For whatever flaws Obama’s choices had, none of the choices of McCain make sense. Lieberman’s downsides are obvious. Meg Whitman would be smart politics but completely deprive him of the whole "inexperience" thing that is clearly at the core of his "official message" against Obama. Romney is a catastrophe. Pawlenty is a pathetic lightweight. Interestingly, Huckabee does seem like someone who makes sense (in a way that kind of crazy makes sense for a Republican) and sure enough, Ambinder says he is the one Obama people fears. But we know he is – like a certain lady – saving himself for 2012 and is not being vetted – or is he?

McCain-Huckabee? Is Pawlenty that reminiscent of Quayle?

It’s half bitterness at the Lamont episode and a lazy conflation of the netroots with Obama. But let’s not kid ourselves:

The real reason he’s backing McCain, Lieberman says, is because he believes in the kind of foreign policy that the Democrats don’t provide anymore: unflinching on Iraq, Iran, and Russia, and unfailingly loyal to Israel (he invokes Nixon’s line about “loading every plane” with weapons for Israel to explain what kind of president McCain will be).

David Leonhardt’s monster article on Obama’s economic thinking has been buzzing around the web. One snippet:

As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets. What tends to distinguish Democratic economists is that they set out to uncover imperfections of the market and then come up with incremental, market-based solutions to these imperfections. This helps explain the Obama campaign’s interest in behavioral economics, a relatively new field that has pointed out many ways in which people make irrational, short-term decisions. To deal with one example of such myopia, Obama would require companies to automatically set aside a portion of their workers’ salary in a 401(k) plan. Any worker could override the decision — and save nothing at all or save even more — but the default would be to save.

It may be the most readable summary of Obama’s economic positions yet.

Dave Barry:

Sen. Clinton is scheduled to address the convention Tuesday night, when she will either call on her supporters to unite behind Obama, or attempt to snatch the nomination and escape with it by helicopter to a secret mountain fortress. ”We are fully confident that Sen. Clinton will do the right thing,” stated a Democratic party official, adding, "but we have a net.”

(Hat tip: Smith)