Category: Keepers

Earlier this week, Iran suspended its activities on its nuclear program, in accordance with an agreement reached with six great powers – the US, Russia, China, Britain, Germany, and France. And you could have heard a pin drop in the American public discourse in the face of this remarkable turn of events. And that is a bizarre thing.  For the constellation that came together these past twelve months is unlikely to happen ever again. All the major world powers – including Russia and China and the US – are in agreement. The Iranian regime and – most significantly – the Iranian people want a deal that would both restrain Iran’s nuclear capacities to civilian purposes and slowly pry open its economy after brutal sanctions have close to extinguished it. A huge amount still needs to be figured out and it will be a formidable task of negotiation to move forward. It may all come to nothing. But surely, surely, it’s worth giving diplomacy a chance.

Why? For my part, it’s for the Iranian people, and global security. Neoconservatives portray their position against any agreement as one of solidarity with the Iranian people against their regime. And I’m sure that’s a genuine as well as admirable motive. But aren’t they engaging in a classic bit of ideological projection? In so far as we can tell anything about the views of the actual Iranian people – especially its younger and more educated generation – it is that they overwhelmingly want both a peaceful civilian nuclear program (in part as a matter of national pride) and re-engagement with the wider world, including the West. So the neocons are in fact either acting against the interests of the Iranian people, or accusing them of false consciousness. Neither seems to me the right response to this moment.

It’s also an ineluctable fact that Iran has acquired the intellectual and material infrastructure to become a nuclear military power if it wants to at any point in the foreseeable future. Let me repeat that: Iran’s potential as a nuclear military power is a fact. The time to prevent that would have been the Bush-Cheney years; but we tragically chose to pursue the control of imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq instead. So the proximate actual choice we have with a regime with a disgusting record of internal repression and a nuclear potential is a) negotiating an internationally-monitored civilian nuclear program with strong inspections, b) a pre-emptive war with unknowable consequences to delay (but not end) the regime’s potential for a viable nuclear weapons program, or c) resume the Cold War stand-off, increase sanctions some more, destroy their economy and contain their military power.

For a long time, I thought c) was probably the least worst, realistic option. That view was entrenched during the Green Revolution. To see such hope and positive energy crushed by merciless regime thugs was a sober reminder of the forces we are dealing with. But here’s the thing: the Iranian people did not despair. Hemmed in by rigged, approved political candidates, they nonetheless voted in 2009 for a clear shift back toward the West and then in 2012 for the most pro-Western candidates there were. The Iranian people told us that engagement – and not continued polarization – was the answer they wanted. This movement – combined with the effect of, yes, “crippling” sanctions – brought the Iranian leadership to the backrooms of diplomacy. It was a perfect constructive storm.

This is where we are. It is not an ideal situation – but after the catastrophe of the Bush-Cheney years in foreign policy, we have no ideal situations. But it is also not the worst situation.

It’s an extraordinary victory, in many ways, for pro-Western forces in the Middle East. A hugely important country – America’s natural ally in the region – is a hotbed of democratic activism and pro-American sentiment among many of its people. That country has declared that it will never use nuclear weapons and, unlike nuclear-armed Israel, is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its newly elected government, backed by the theocratic Supreme Leader, openly says it wants to entrench a nuclear-weapon-free Iran in an international agreement. In return, it’s asking for relaxation of sanctions that would allow its economy to grow. And that growth would redound to the credit of the reformers, and perhaps begin a slow thawing of the regime itself.

These moments do not come often in human history. I remain of the view that the greatest single threat to our civilization is the combination of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. If we can reliably ensure that the biggest Shiite power does not seek to build or use nuclear weapons and retain that commitment over time, we have made a huge stride toward reducing the greatest danger we face, in the wake of 9/11. The Obama administration has already – by design or accident – managed to secure and begun to dismantle another major global WMD danger in Syria. To get an inspections regime in place to do the same for Iran would be a historic gain for global security in the most volatile region on the planet.

A deal would help Iran’s moderates; it would be a real achievement in a new global partnership between the major world powers; it is our only hope to keep Iran’s actual nuclear capacities restrained to civilian use without a full-scale war; its economic benefits would accrue to the regime – but also, critically, to the moderate path the Iranian people have chosen – in the face of bullets and torture and terror – for the last several years.

Let’s re-appraise the value of this moment, and not let it pass into the ether, because of fear or paranoia or habit, or fail to grasp the full extent of the advance that is now possible. And those Senators actively backing the American sabotage of the process should take a deep breath, put AIPAC on hold, and let diplomacy take its course. This is history. It deserves more than the politics of a domestic lobby. It deserves statesmanship. And prudence. And patience. And time.

The last few years have been fascinating to watch as new media stars have both benefited from and then fallen out with big media companies. Nate Silver is the obvious example. He went from being an independent blogger – heavily linked by the Dish among other new media sites – to becoming the true star of the NYT’s 2012 election coverage. Then he and the NYT could not figure out a mutually beneficial deal, and he quit to run a new 538-style site at ESPN.com. It won’t launch for a bit (maybe March, I hear). But ESPN, as they showed with Bill Simmons’s original blog and now Grantland, is one of the very few big media outlets to find a way to a win-win proposition with Internet stars.

Or think of Glenn Greenwald. First an immediate blogging sensation; then Salon, then the Guardian and now … working on his own news-and-opinion website, with a massive global brand, funded by the founder of eBay. The WSJ’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are also now exiting the WSJ’s employ to start their own site. The Dish’s story – until last year – was also a story of trying – and failing – to get a win-win arrangement with media companies interested in allying with us.

The truly frustrating thing about all this is that it was surely in everyone’s interests to stick together – legacy media with new media stars is a win-win proposition. And yet almost every time – the one exception I can think of may be Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook – the deals have unraveled. The egos of legacy media honchos and the energy of new media stars could not quite get along. Mutual resentment, the thorny question of compensation, and the power of personal brands all played a part.

For some, the entire model of individually branded content is a dismaying idea.

Michael Wolff cannot understand it.  His best shot at a description is that we are “less interested in the publishing business per se than in a kind of channel purity and deepness.” But then, Wolff is a big believer in old-school massive media conglomerates, is one of Rupert Murdoch’s primary hagiographers, and with respect to Roger Ailes, makes Mike Allen look like a footnote in the annals of brown-nosing. Today, he’s celebrating the end of net neutrality, so that big media companies – owned by the super-rich – can begin monopolizing again. He finds it mysterious that some writers might actually be in new media not just for the money but also for the freedom to say what they want whenever they want in ways not constrained by highers-up. I’m not so mystified.

Which leads me simply to wish Ezra the best of luck. There are many models going forward, and Ezra may not be content with the Dish’s slow, organic, reader-funded evolution. But we do not exactly have a surplus of trying to find new profitable models for non-listicle, non-sponsored-content journalism. If Ezra can help with that, he can help all of us, but especially readers. Not all of them want to read the stuff that only very, very wealthy corporations think is fit to publish. They might even forgive a few niche interests and quirkiness in the process.

Update from a reader:

You wrote:

The egos of legacy media honchos and the energy of new media stars could not quite get along. Mutual resentment, the thorny question of compensation, and the power of personal brands all played a part.

I think this phenomenon is more general. I have known numerous tech companies that were acquired by behemoths, or spun off as subsidiaries rather than independent companies. I worked for one of them. In every case, the management of the parent swore on a stack of Bibles that they wouldn’t interfere with the entrepreneurial culture of the new venture (as if they knew what the word “entrepreneurial” meant). In each case they couldn’t resist meddling, with serious and sometimes fatal consequences for the spinoff.

There were many reasons, of course: financial straits, changes in corporate strategy, new competitors. But I think the common denominator is the irrevocable human tendency to prefer control over success.

Brilliantly put.

(Photo: Journalist Ezra Klein attends The New Yorker’s David Remnick Hosts White House Correspondents’ Dinner Weekend Pre-Party at W Hotel Rooftop on April 26, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The New Yorker.)

The latest poll on legalization of marijuana from ABC News shows an even split – 49 to 48 percent – by Americans on the subject – not a clear majority as some other recent polls have found (Gallup’s in particular). That’s still a record high for the ABC poll, which has the benefit of identical wording over time: “Overall, do you support or oppose legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use?” Support has doubled since the mid-1980s.

But what’s interesting to me about the poll is its internals. They’re really surprising to me. I asked ABC News for the full data and here it is:

So one of the most powerful arguments for legalization of marijuana – that Prohibition grotesquely singles out African-Americans for criminal enforcement and spares whites – carries no more weight among African-Americans than it does among whites. Of those African-Americans who feel strongly about the subject, 40 percent oppose legalization and only 32 percent support it. Overall, there’s no statistically significant difference between whites and blacks on this. I’d be fascinated to hear from readers why they think this might be so. It seems on the surface that social conservatism is outweighing civil rights. But I’m genuinely baffled.

The second most striking thing is that having kids in the home doesn’t seem to change views much.

So that’s another perhaps lazy assumption debunked in this poll – that “protecting kids” works either for or against legalization. Even what you’d imagine would be a big regional split – between the West and the South – is pretty much a damp squib. The West favors legalization 52 – 44; the South opposes it by a similar margin. The only statistically significant variation in the regional polling is between the South and the West among those strongly opposing legalization. It’s 41 percent in the South and only 29 percent in the West. That makes more intuitive sense. But the South is far closer to the rest of the country on pot than on gays.

So what factor is statistically significant? It’s age:

Americans 65 or older are half as likely to approve of legalization as are those age 18 to 64 – 27 vs. 54 percent. And 59 percent of the elderly disapprove strongly. Support peaks among 18 – to 39 – year-olds, at 59 percent , including 37 percent who strongly support the idea.

This, in other words, is an issue like marriage equality or president Obama’s base of support. It’s generational. The young cannot see the logic behind criminal prohibition of a pleasurable plant much less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. The old retain the attitudes and the fears of the past. Perhaps, over time, the young will become more like the old. But the huge shift in favor of this over the last two decades, like the huge shift in favor of marriage equality, suggests precisely otherwise. They all suggest a new, saner, more tolerant America is out there, waiting for one recalcitrant faction of one particular generation to die.

(Photo: Matthew Staver for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

It’s a surprising move, but perhaps the only possible shred of an argument they have left in the fight to deny marriage equality to gay citizens. In Utah, the state has tried to muster legal arguments as to why they have an interest in marginalizing gay unions as opposed to heterosexual ones. Their first try was to argue that heterosexual-only marriage was important for “responsible procreation.” The Judge agreed, but couldn’t understand why allowing civil marriage for gays would somehow undermine that. In fact, he made the socially conservative counter-point that by mandating that gay couples remain unmarried, “the state reinforces a norm that sexual activity may take place outside of marriage.”

So they came up with a second argument: that by asserting the importance of heterosexual-only marriage, the state was making it more likely that children would be born into stable, two-parent homes, where they would fare better. The judge was puzzled again:

Utah’s ban, he wrote, “does not make it any more likely that children will be raised by opposite-sex couples.” But it certainly demeans and humiliates the thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples in the state, he said.

So Utah tried another tack in appealing to the state Supreme Court (and no, I’m not making this up). They said that having a woman and a man in a marriage was important for … wait for it … diversity. Money quote:

“The state does not contend that the individual parents in same-sex couples are somehow ‘inferior’ as parents to the individual parents who are involved in married, mother-father parenting,” the state said.

But, drawing on Supreme Court decisions endorsing the value of diversity in deciding who may attend public universities, the state now said it was pursuing “gender diversity” in marriages. “Society has long recognized that diversity in education brings a host of benefits to students,” the brief said. “If that is true in education, why not in parenting?”

“Gender diversity” is an argument I haven’t yet heard in the two and a half decades I’ve been debating this question. I have heard that in Catholic teaching, a mother and a father are vital complements to each other because of their differing genders.

But that’s an argument from natural law, and doesn’t actually hold up in the many studies of how well children do in same-sex and opposite-sex households. The idea of diversity like a university is somewhat different. But it begs a further question. If gender diversity is important, why not religious diversity? Or racial diversity? If the state has an interest in providing “diversity” in parenting, should it not privilege inter-racial marriage or religiously mixed ones? That’s an interesting argument in social engineering, but not one, I suspect, that can hold much water in front of a court.

When I first read it, it actually made me laugh out loud it seemed so transparently desperate as an argument. And that’s the core thing about this debate. As it has gone on, the logic of equality has proven far stronger than the logic of exclusion. In the courts, often denigrated, the standard of logic applies more rigorously than in the emotional and human maelstrom of democratic votes. If the arguments just don’t stand up to reasonable inspection – and they sure haven’t – what is even a conservative court supposed to do? And if Utah‘s supreme court cannot provide a convincing case to retain this kind of public discrimination, what hope the others?

This began as a strange outlier. Maybe, as the court deliberates over the next couple of months, it will end up in a much more radical place.

(Photo: Same-sex couple Ariel Owens (R) and his spouse Joseph Barham walk arm in arm after they were married at San Francisco City Hall June 17, 2008 in San Francisco, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

No one should be that shocked that a political dynasty in a major party that has been at the highest levels for decades would keep tabs on their friends and enemies. We’ve all watched House of Cards. Of course, in the white-knuckled campaign of 2008, which the Clintons were hoping would be a coronation, they were hurt, bewildered and betrayed by so many Democrats who saw in Obama something they didn’t always see in the Clintons: a political vision not entirely eclipsed by calculation. And you can see why they might have wanted to keep score of the hurt and the betrayal.

But the comprehensiveness of the list, the care with which it was constructed (on a scale of one to seven, for some reason), and the rawness of the feelings behind it should remind people that the Clintons have not changed:

They carefully noted who had endorsed Hillary, who had backed Obama, and who had stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. “We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” a member of Hillary’s campaign team said, “and of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members. And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.”

The list’s complexity and nuance aren’t shocking. But as Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes note:

The difference is the Clintons, because of their popularity and the positions they’ve held, retain more power to reward and punish than anyone else in modern politics.

The minute they finished one campaign they were strategizing in minute detail for the next.

But that isn’t what troubles me about the story. What troubles me is the resilience of the entourage. Jake Weisberg long ago framed the Clinton circle of friends, allies, donors, ambassadors, and courtiers as a web of “Clincest” – constantly bubbling with money, networking, favors, back-scratching, threats, charm offenses and old ties. That Clincest remains. And it is a problem.

Notice, for example, the two list-makers, in Politico magazine’s excerpt from HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. One, Kris Balderston, has been with them for two decades; the other, Adrienne Elrod, is an almost text-book example of Clincest:

Elrod, a toned 31-year-old blonde with a raspy Ozark drawl, had an even longer history with the Clintons that went back to her childhood in Siloam Springs, a town of 15,000 people in northwestern Arkansas. She had known Bill Clinton since at least the age of five. Her father, John Elrod, a prominent lawyer in Fayetteville, first befriended the future president at Arkansas Boys State, an annual civics camp for high school juniors, when they were teenagers. Like Bill Clinton, Adrienne Elrod had a twinkle in her blue eyes and a broad smile that conveyed warmth instantaneously. She had first found work in the Clinton White House after a 1996 internship there, then became a Democratic Party political operative and later held senior posts on Capitol Hill. She joined the Hillary Clinton for President outfit as a communications aide and then shifted into Balderston’s delegate-courting congressional-relations office in March. Trusted because of her deep ties to the Clinton network, Elrod helped Balderston finalize the list.

My italics. Again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong or that surprising about a politician retaining loyal friends from way-back-when, a coterie of trusted advisers, truth-telling friends and shoulders to cry on, in the glare of public office. But what distinguishes the Clintons is the sheer scale of the enterprise, the meticulousness of the extended family, the way in which money is interlaced with everything, and the remarkable loyalty of the Clinton court through the huge ups and downs of their political careers.

If the Clintons get their third and fourth terms in the White House, they will bring this vast retinue with them, with all the attendant baggage. And by that I mean the paybacks for supporting Obama (man, can you imagine that long list?) and the unhealthy atmosphere of a secluded clique where an open administration should be. Those cliques can lead to insular thinking, the kind of paranoia that led Hillary Clinton into her famous gaffe of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” (which, even if true, needlessly made Matt Drudge’s and Roger Ailes’ year).

It’s what led to all the utterly unnecessary hunkering down over minor “scandals” that, in time, were shown to be largely, if not entirely, in the eye of the beholders (including mine), and could have been defused with a little more transparency and access to those outside the inner circle of flacks and hangers-on.

I should be candid here. I believe Bill Clinton was a very good president, who sabotaged himself needlessly on many occasions. I believe Hillary Clinton was a good, if not spectacular, secretary of state. I believe their public behavior after their defeat has been close to exemplary. And I sure am not going to engage in a constant stream of Clinton-baiting if she decides to run for the presidency again. At this point, she absolutely deserves a fresh look. But it would be equally wrong to forget the patterns that led to their previous acts of self-destruction or the network of friends and dubious money-makers who seem not to have gone away, but to be reassembling in very similar dynamics for the next big push. They were and can be a liability. And it seems the Clintons still don’t see it that way at all.

(Photo: Hillary Clinton, Former United States President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton during the official memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela at the FNB Stadium on December 10, 2013 in Soweto, South Africa. By Lefty Shivambu/Gallo Images/Getty Images.)