Month: March 2010

by Alex Massie

More on the "exciting" debates between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg (the leader of the Liberal Democrats who, though in no position to become Prime Minister has to be included) that are, inevitably, going to become the most "important" moments in this year's election campaign. As I suggested earlier, these are problematic for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that they won't be debates at all – at least not in the sense that anyone who's ever taken part in any real debating would understand the term.

Mr Eugenides puts it well:

What's ironic about this is that in the debating I know, it's usually the quality of a team's arguments that wins the day, not their style. Beyond a certain level of competence, everyone in the final of the Oxford Union intervarsity (say) is assumed to be confident, quick on their feet, at ease in front of an audience.

Sure, delivery matters, but when it comes to deciding who has won, the main focus of judges' discussions is the debaters' content. What did he say? Did he give any evidence for that claim? Did he explain that clearly, and was I convinced? These are the things that "real" debating hinges on, more often than not. So it's somewhat depressing to note that in these three "debates", the criteria for success will be almost exactly the opposite. Sod what the guy says; was that sweat I saw on his upper lip?

The second big issue in these debates is the media narrative, and this is where the expectations game kicks into play. Candidates will routinely build up their opponent as the love child of Winston Churchill and Cicero, possessed of oratorical gifts that would make Martin Luther King weep with envy. Anything short of a physical assault on the other candidates will be hailed as a "draw", at the very least and, given expectations, any kind of draw hailed as a "win".

Labour spinners will try to make a virtue of their man's misanthropic, malevolent awkwardness, suggesting that Cameron is nothing more than a suit and a haircut. They will massage expectations down so low that any sort of coherent performance will be trumpeted as an extraordinary coup, as if Brown was an orangutan that had been shipped by crate from Borneo and taught to speak English only last Tuesday.

But this is all the fault of the format. There will be no cheering from the cheap seats, no back and forth, no direct interrogation of the other candidates, nothing but the dreary recitation of policy positions so tired and familiar and hackneyed that we're all more than sick of them already. No wonder they're likely (one could be wrong about this) to prove a massive, crushing disappointment.

Outwardly and publicly all the candidates and certainly the TV companies will promise an exciting in-depth discussion of the "issues" but since Gordon and Dave and wee Nicky are pretty familiar with answering the questions they're likely to receive in the debates it's hardly likely that there will be any substantive revelations, nor any interesting insight into how they actually think or approach problems or see the world. No wonder the contest becomes a kind of beauty pageant in which the only marks that count are those awarded for style.

Within the limitations of the genre there's not really any satisfactory way of avoiding this. So change the rules and, rather than having the debates be little more than a souped up version of Radio 4's Today programme, why not make them actual, you know, debates?

There's a real appetite for this sort of thing. Pick a good motion and attract some competent speakers and you can fill a large hall in London pretty quicky. Debating is actually back in style and not simply a jolly undergraduate wheeze.

Since we're flying with pigs here, let's imagine a situation (and this would be equally applicable in the US too) in which the rival candiates – Brown and Cameron in this instance – were given 15 minutes notice of the motion for debate. Each would iuse that time to think of their arguments before in turn delivering a ten minute speech followed by five minute rebuttal speeches and a final two minute summation of the main points. The whole thing would be done in not much more than 40 minutes.

The key, obviously, would be to pick interesting motions that allowed one to see how they actually manage under pressure. A mix of conceptual and factual topics might be best.

It would have been good sport seeing John McCain propose the motion That this House Thinks Brutus Was an Honourable Man or Gordon Brown defending the idea that This House Would Rather Be Keynes than Hayek. Imagine George W Bush proposing that This House Believes the World Has Learnt Nothing from 9/11 or This House Believes in Guns, not God or any politicians arguing a nice, open-ended motion such as This House Believes in the Right to Choose that could be defined in any number of ways.

You get the idea. It's hard to see how this could be worse than the way debates are currently organised.

Granted there are difficulties here too, not the least of which being that it's not obvious that the qualities that make for a good debater* are necessarily those that make for a good Prime Minister or President. Then again, the ability to learn and recite talking points – the chief skill involved in the game as its currently played – doesn't seem obviously useful or illuminating either. 

*Indeed, long experience of the type suggests that the opposite may well be true…

How would you improve these press conferences masquerading as debates? Let me know at alexmassieATgmail.com

by Patrick Appel

Brian Mockenhaup, who served twice in Iraq, didn't enjoy the film:

I expected a movie that would give viewers a real sense of what a minority of Americans have been doing on their behalf these nine years. Instead, I left the theater frustrated and disappointed. To its credit, The Hurt Locker, unlike many of the War on Terror films so far, doesn't spoon-feed political messages. But Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have tried so hard to make a great and important film that they transformed their story into caricature.

David Sessions counters. Freddie DeBoer's thoughts:

I think, like the large majority of war movies I've ever seen, it is hampered by a tremendous amount of cliches, and is sort of hokey on the level of character. (The soldier who can only make sense of the world when he's at war is a pretty well played out trope at this point, right?)

by Chris Bodenner

She is shopping a docudrama with "uber-reality show producer Mark Burnett." Plus, another book:

Her new work will "include selections from classic and contemporary readings that have inspired her, as well as portraits of some of the extraordinary men and women she admires and who embody her love of country, faith, and family," [HarperCollins'] statement reads.

Brace yourself, Quote Garden.

by Chris Bodenner

Impressed by Palin's appearance on Leno, Richard Lawson proposes a win-win:

Despite her dumb politics, Palin has a certain TV-ready verve to her that could be well-harnessed by the soft touch, stiff chair confines of a daytime talk show. There she could spout forth about a whole wide variety of non-political topics — things like Weight and Sadness and Celebrity and America. Everything she said would still be annoying and, for the most part, categorically wrong, but it wouldn't really matter, because she'd just be a silly talk show host. Not some great governmental hope.

The Dish would certainly sleep better at night.

by Jonathan Bernstein

The important thing to remember about all budget gimmicks is that they there are really only two ways to change the federal deficit: raise more revenues, or cut spending.  The presidents and Congresses that have really wanted to cut deficits (most notably George H.W. Bush in 1990 and Bill Clinton in 1993, along with Democratic Congresses in both cases) have done so by actually supporting proposals that would change government revenues and/or outlays. 

Any time you hear someone propose a budget gimmick instead of proposing to raise revenues or cut spending, you can be fairly certain that it's just hot air.  The only exception I'd make would be for a pol who does both.  Barack Obama, for example, is putting together a commission which is purely a public relations gimmick, but he's also supporting a health care plan that will, if implemented, probably cut the long-term deficit quite a bit. 

(Commissions can work if everyone involved wants to do something but doesn't want to leave fingerprints; that's not the case with Obama's commission). 

In general, I'd probably be willing to speculate that the more distant the gimmick, the less serious the authors are about it.  So the one gimmick that actually might matter is the Democrats' PAYGO rules…although even there, the only real way it's going to matter is if Congress and the president abide by those rules, which means that the rules themselves are close to, although not quite completely, irrelevant.

Long wind-up to: the very least serious thing you can possibly do about the federal budget deficit would be to sponsor a Constitutional amendment on the subject.  Bruce Bartlett takes part two recent examples, the Blue Dog balanced budget amendment and the Pence-Hensarling spending amendment.  Bartlett nails it:

I’m starting to think that Samuel Johnson was wrong; patriotism isn’t the last refuge of the scoundrel, it’s a constitutional amendment. The only purpose of such amendments is to allow members of Congress to shirk their responsibility to propose and support meaningful deficit reduction measures now. Unless they are cosponsors of Paul Ryan’s detailed deficit reduction proposal, or have put forward one equally as stringent and detailed, they can’t be considered serious about the budget and should simply be ignored when saying anything about the need for constitutional changes to make them do what they should already be doing.

I'm not a deficit hawk…on deficits, I belong to the Brad DeLong school.  But for those of you who actually care about deficits — if you see a pol coming brandishing a Constitutional amendment, I strongly urge you to either run away quickly or laugh in his or her face.  At any rate, there are no procedural impediments that would make lowering deficits hard, so there's no reason to look for a procedural solution.

by Patrick Appel

Douthat defends his dream presidential contender against George Packer:

[T]he O.M.B.’s $60 billion estimate [for the Iraq war] anticipated “a conflict, a period of stabilization in Iraq, and the phased withdrawal of a large number of American forces within that six-month window,” which turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong. But the question is whether it was the Office of Management and Budget’s job to figure out in advance how wrong Donald Rumsfeld’s plan for Iraq would turn out to be. Daniels wasn’t the Secretary of Defense, and he certainly didn’t set the administration’s strategy; he took their strategic vision and tried to cost it out. He could have publicly questioned that vision, and issued sweeping 10-year cost estimates for what might happen if Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” plan sent Iraq spinning into chaos — but that isn’t what O.M.B. directors generally do.

by Graeme Wood

Moringa oleifera, a tree in northwest India, will feed you and clean your water, and it won't die in a drought.  A scientist at a Canadian NGO is urging the wretched of the earth to plant it and solve several problems at once.

I wonder, idly, what other plants have properties that will allegedly save the world.  (I realize this is an exaggeration of the powers claimed for the moringa.) Readers of this blog will no doubt know about the magical properties of hemp.  To these I might add the American sycamore and water hyacinth, which all-purpose genius Freeman Dyson suggested as plants that we might use to remove carbon from the atmosphere rapidly and arrest climate change. 

(Via Greenbang. Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, from Wikipedia, whose full gallery can be found here.)

by Patrick Appel

Yesterday Jonathan Bernsteined reflected excessive voting. Joyner concurs. As does Yglesias:

Larry Bartels did a great paper once (PDF) about how in US political culture, the answer to every government reform problem is always that things need to be “more democratic” and this often proceeds without any real effort to think about what you’re trying to achieve. There’s obviously a sense in which subjecting more and more officials to popular election is “more democratic” but if you think that what’s good about democracy is that it creates accountability you’ll see that asking people to vote for Commissioner of the General Land Office is undermining accountability.

Ryan Sager adds his voice to the chorus:

Corruption is endemic to government. At a low level, it’s a cost of doing business. But if you want to reduce it even further, you’re going to need to go back to a system where fewer elected officials do a lot more appointing. That way, one man or woman is accountable when things go wrong. When everyone’s elected, no one’s accountable.

by Patrick Appel

Howard Gleckman moderated a panel that ran through several ideas.

by Patrick Appel

Lieberman has introduced it. The Advocate snags an interview:

“I think a guess right now — and this is really a guess — if this bill came to a vote tomorrow, we’d have over 50 votes and that’s saying a lot,” [Lieberman] said. “Do we have 60? Not clear yet, but possible.” But Lieberman also said he had spoken with Chairman Levin “preliminarily” about including the legislation in this year’s defense authorization bill before it’s passed out of committee.