Month: August 2012

by Gwynn Guilford and Patrick Appel

Dan Drezner skewers Jen Rubin's hatchet job of Robert Zoellick, who was just appointed Romney's national security transition planning chief. Rubin reflects a larger bias that requires Israel-love and China-hate as the price of admission. Writes Josh Rogin:

The chief complaint among critics is that Zoellick, who served as deputy secretary of state under Bush before being appointed to head the World Bank, is a foreign-policy realist who has seemed too friendly toward China and, as a disciple of former Secretary of State, not friendly enough toward Israel. Romney's vows to be tougher on China and closer to the Israeli government are key pillars of his foreign-policy platform.

Greg Scoblete mocks this Republican aversion to competence:

The last person we'd want advising Romney during this period of economic malaise is someone who's spent years working on international economic and trade issues! Instead, we need more people who cultivate the proper emotional attitudes towards countries and who write op-eds about the awesome power of "will" to make the world conform to American wishes. That will right the ship.

Noah Millman sees the episode as yet another example of Romney's weakness. Gideon Rachman applauds Romney's rejection of John Bolton-esque nationalism-driven foreign policy, sighing in relief that Bolton – who, along with Rice, have been rumored to be joining the campaign – won't likely be getting a cabinet post. Larison counters:

While the backlash against Zoellick is part of an effort to make sure that Romney keeps in line on foreign policy, some of the sudden enthusiasm for Zoellick is based on little more than wishful thinking that this appointment means a lot more than it does.

(Photo:  World Bank President Robert Zoellick speaks at the Peterson Institute for International Economics June 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

by Matthew Sitman

Marjorie Ingall reviews Joshua Berkowitz's memoir of coaching the Rashi Rams, his son's Jewish day school's baseball team:

“There’s a pace to baseball that lends itself to thoughtfulness,” said Joshua Berkowitz, author of the new book Third Base for Life: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Baseball. “People who love baseball are able to sit back and observe; they’re not constantly looking for the next great action. Baseball is history and literature; football is more like a video game. There’s such beauty to the game, with the the field and the grass and the greens.”

She believes the book is especially instructive for today's control-obsessed parents:

Every parent should internalize the book’s message that risk is its own reward. If you never let your kid fail because you’re terrified of destroying his confidence, you’re going to fail in your own job of raising a self-reliant, resilient kid. Berkowitz, a doctor of internal medicine on the North Shore of Boston, told me: “I’m not a psychologist, but my everyday observation is that parents today live through and for their children more than older generations did. It’s hard for them to let kids live their lives. People are afraid to let their kids’ feelings be hurt, which leads to every kid getting a trophy and no one ever losing, and that means we’re doing more harm than good to our kids. We make it hard for them to learn the skills they need to succeed in the world, to bounce back when they’re knocked down. If you constantly shield them from falling they’ll never learn to get back up.”

Recent Dish baseball coverage here and here.

by Zoë Pollock

David Simon has penned a touching obit for DeAndre McCullough, who just died of a drug overdose. When McCullough was 15 years old, Simon profiled him for his book The Corner and later hired him to play Lamar (Brother Mouzone's assistant) in "The Wire":

He could step back from himself and mock his own stances — "hard work," he would say when I would catch him on a drug corner, "hard work being a black man in America."  And then he would catch my eye and laugh knowingly at his presumption.  His imitations of white-authority voices — social workers, police officers, juvenile masters, teachers, reporters — were never less than pinpoint, playful savagery.  The price of being a white man on Fayette Street and getting to know DeAndre McCullough was to have your from-the-other-America pontifications pulled and scalpeled apart by a manchild with an uncanny ear for hypocrisy and cant.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

by Patrick Appel

The latest on Colorado's marijuana legalization initiative:

Amendment 64, which would legalize marijuana in the state, continues to lead for passage. It's ahead 47/38 this month, up a tick from 46/42 on our last poll in June. Independents support the measure by a 58/28 spread. The support for this initiative is unsurprisingly being driven by young people. Voters under 45 support it by a 58/30 margin, while those over 45 oppose it by a 44/39 margin. On the issue of marijuana usage more generally 50% of voters support it with 42% against, numbers that closely track those on the amendment itself.

Relatedly, Kleiman laughs at the bible-thumping in the text of Oregon's legalization measure.

by Chris Bodenner

Steve Coll provides a reality check:

The entire [post-9/11] decade-long domestic death toll from terrorism (that is, where a political or ideological motive was apparent) was thirty. By comparison, the rate of annual deaths from mass shootings by non-ideological deranged killers—such as the gunman who attacked moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, last month—runs more than thirty times higher (on average, about a hundred deaths each year). In all, there are about fifteen thousand murders in America each year.

Of the three hundred domestic-terrorism cases studied, about a quarter arose from anti-government extremists, white supremacists, or terrorists animated by bias against another religion. And all of the most frightening cases—involving chemical, biological, and radiological materials—arose from right-wing extremists or anarchists. None arose from Islamist militancy.

And certainly not Sikhs. Coll also describes how the slain leader of the Oak Creek temple, Satwant Singh Kaleka, emigrated from India three decades ago with $35 in savings yet eventually bought several gas stations. In contrast, the killer was kicked out of the Army for being a drunk and then joined a neo-Nazi rock band. Which sounds more like the American Dream? In further measure of the men, the 64-year-old Kaleka tried to tackle the gunman, while the latter shot himself in the head to avoid arrest.

By the way, Justin Erik Halldór Smith reads ups on history and concludes that "actually, Nazis are pro-Sikh":

This is a very minor point to make, almost offensively minor, in the wake of Wade M. Page's senseless massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin a few days ago, but still: strictly speaking there is no basis in traditional Nazi ideology for hatred of Sikhs. Quite the contrary. Of course this doesn't mean Nazis are nice, and Sikhs should not have to care one way or the other what Nazis think of them, but it does help to put into very clear relief how Page's singular evil was abetted by his total ignorance. … Page seems not even to have understood that Sikhs are not Muslims. Of course he was no scholar, or even a pseudo-scholar like [Nazi ideologue] Savitri Devi, but if the general level of discourse about cultural difference were somewhat higher in our society, he might have had an opportunity to hear somewhere that, at least on a certain understanding, Sikhs are more 'Aryan' than the Aryan Nation.

(Top photo: Siblings Amarjit Singh Kaleka and Jaswinder Kaur pose with family photographs of their brother Satwant Singh Kaleka, president of the gurdwara (temple) who was killed when a gunman shot worshippers on August 6, 2012. By STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images. Bottom photo: A copy photograph of the mug shot handed out by the FBI of the suspect Wade Michael Page after a press conference on the shooting at the Sikh Temple. By FBI via Getty Images)

Previous videos of Barney here, here and here. “Ask Anything” video archive here.

by Patrick Appel

Hamilton Nolan advocates for a maximum income. Derek Thompson calls the proposal "crazy":

[H]ow would this idea even work? What would it do? We don't know what would happen if we applied a top marginal rate of 100% because something like this has never been tried in an advanced economy that I'm aware of. But for the super-rich, it certainly sends a clear message: Don't work so hard. And if you want to work hard, do it some place else.

Dylan Matthews piles on:

If you have a maximum income that includes income from investments, there’s very little reason for people to save money in places they think are going to get a high return. The result is that good projects that would yield a lot of dividends are underfunded, because the extra gains realized would just get grabbed by the government anyway. If good projects aren’t getting funded, the consequences for growth – not just for the rich but for everybody – are pretty grave.

by Patrick Appel

A thorough examination of Romney's favorability problem:

Along the same lines, Nate Cohn explains why Obama currently has the upper-hand:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, history suggests that undecided voters are unlikely to uniformly flock toward the challenger: Candidates almost always finish above their share of the vote in summer polling. While there are examples of challengers sweeping undecided voters, as Reagan did in 1980, the “1980 or bust” position is hardly enviable. The economy is bad enough that the 1980 scenario can’t be discounted, but the differences between 1980 and 2012 are too great to count on it—especially given Romney’s astonishingly bad numbers among undecided voters.

by Zoë Pollock

That's Ed Smith's recipe for success:

In his study of talented young musicians in Berlin, K Anders Ericsson asked what separated the outstanding soloists from those who were merely good. The difference was not – as is often misquoted – that the best players practised more. Instead, they practised intensely and then allowed themselves more time to relax and recoup. … The idea that being good at something demands harried, exhausted martyrdom is a relatively new idea. “Only in recent history,” as Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb puts it, “has ‘working hard’ signalled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.” If we really want to be good at something, we should stop wasting time exhausting ourselves.

by Gwynn Guilford

Jason Feifer unpacks Axe's marketing strategy, which has been incredibly successful:

Axe may seem frivolous, a brand defined by a decade of ads showing large-chested women lusting over the men who wear it. And yet, if this were just a case of "sex sells," Axe’s siren call would be easy to replicate. It isn’t. Axe, which is owned by Unilever, is a $2.5 billion global brand with relentless growth (retail sales rose 13.6% from 2010 to 2011). Its success is largely the result of a sophisticated, cutting-edge marketing machine that constantly monitors youth culture’s subtle shifts so as to stay hot on the hormone trail. The Unilever product came to dominate the now $5 billion U.S. men’s body-spray market in 2007, only five years after entering it. It currently owns a 72% share of the body-spray category, 58 points higher than its nearest competitor, Old Spice. Procter & Gamble tried to keep up but couldn’t; one copycat, Tag, folded in 2010.

The current strategy:

"We talked to some of the more progressive kids and they were laughing at Axe," says Emma Cookson, chairman of BBH in New York, the agency that took over Axe in 1995. "So we said, 'You have to stop saying it’s a magic potion, like a fine fragrance that just totally transforms the moment. Don’t take yourself so seriously.' "

BBH reformulated the pitch: It became (wink, wink) a magic potion that (nudge, nudge) totally transforms the moment. And that laid the groundwork for today’s metamorphosis, with ads so cartoonish that guys and girls are expected to enjoy them together. "Axe is deliberately not telling the truth, so they’re being truthful about being untruthful. And there’s an honesty there that this generation really relates to," says psychologist Kit Yarrow, who studied teen purchases for her book Gen Buy.

Feifer highlights the recent Axe ad above, which "actually gives a female protagonist a name and identity" and calls it "unprecedented."