Category: The Dish

by Reihan

While reading Jim’s post on Adam Shepard (who seems like a bit of a punk, but what a great idea for a book), I thought, “Could this have something to do with our role models?” James Heckman has argued that a big part of the poverty problem has to do with the uneven distribution noncognitive skills. The bourgeois virtues are an important part of success, and this insight is clearly at the heart of Shepard’s effort. There’s an obvious sense in which modeling the behavior of sober, responsible middle-class parents helps kids learn how to succeed. But what about kids who, for example, look up to crazy A-Rod? Consider his absolutely insane remarks about Andy Pettite.

“Andy is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met,” Rodriguez said. “I have two daughters — well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want ’em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today’s day and age anything is possible.”

I don’t want this man anywhere near children, including his own. Oy, talk about a character reference. At least he didn’t say he would conscript his toddlers into campaigning against Barack Obama. But this is almost as bad.

[Patrick Appel]

A Pro-Hillary 527’s ad running in Ohio:

by Reihan

Does Hillary Clinton have some deep, profound bond with waitress moms and other working-class demographics? Given Clinton’s background and cultural proclivities, there is no reason this should be so. And sure enough, her advantage among these groups is eroding fast. Nick Beaudrot explains why.

It’s always like this. In Democratic primaries, the anti-establishment candidate always has a political coalition that starts from the top of the income & education ladder, then works its way down. Always. Gene McCarthy in ’68, Mo Udall and Jerry Brown in ’76, Ted Kennedy in ’80, Gary Hart in ’84, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown in ’92, Bill Bradley in ’00, and Howard Dean in ’04, all tended to fare better among more affluent, more schooled voters than with downscale voters. The more an insurgent is able to expand his coalition to include voters in the bottom two quintiles of the income scale, the more successful he or she is. It’s the nature of the beast, for any number of reasons. Labor unions are less likely to rock the boat. Working-class voters have better things to do with their time than watch CNN or read three newspapers and a magazine every day. It seems that white voters are less likely to support the establishment, and this disparity manifests itself in the income/education distribution as well.

Right now, interestingly, we’re seeing the rumblings of a mild anti-Obama backlash among elite types (this is entirely anecdotal, by the way), but there’s probably not enough time for it to trickle into the mainstream. It’s all in the timing.

by Reihan

Many Democrats are worried that the ferocious primary fight between the Clinton and Obama camps will weaken the party’s chances of recapturing the White House. There is a simple solution, one that will clear the air and unite the party. Hillary Clinton must challenge Barack Obama to a duel. Andrew Jackson, in some sense the founder of the modern, populist, egalitarian Democratic Party, was a great lover of dueling, as one of our nation’s finest magazines (yes, I’m talking about Cracked) notes:

On one occasion, he challenged a man named Charles Dickinson to a duel, (the reason behind it wasn’t important, not to us and certainly not to Jackson), and Jackson was even kind enough to give Dickinson the first shot. We’re gonna go ahead and repeat that: In a duel with pistols, Jackson politely volunteers to be shot at first. Dickinson happily obliged and shot Jackson, who proceeded to shake it off like it was a bee sting. When Jackson returned the favor, Dickinson was not so lucky, and that’s why his face isn’t on the twenty. The bullet, by the by, remained in Jackson’s body for 19 years because, we assume, Jackson knew that time spent removing the bullets would just fall under the general category of “time not dueling,” Jackson’s least favorite category.

Dueling might sound senseless to you, but as Graeme argues in his review of Randall Collins’s Violence,

And, most interesting of all, he urges us to consider reviving the practice of dueling — which was, during its heyday, a way to reduce and contain violence, not a way to encourage it. One hopes to see trial runs of this practice after the next close tenure decision in Mr. Collins’s sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rather than engage in underhanded tactics and scurrilous accusations, wouldn’t it be better if the Clintons simply tried to face off against Barack Obama under the gentlemanly rules established by our forefathers?

by Reihan

Ben Dueholm channels Mark Penn:

To: Interested Parties
From: Mark Penn
Re: Obama’s 75% Ceiling

While we heartily congratulate Senator Obama’s campaign on their Wisconsin victory, the final results must be less than heartening to the Obama campaign.

1) Obama has a ceiling of 75% of Democratic primary support. Barack Obama has consistently won primaries and caucuses with only 75% or less of the vote. In addition to effectively disenfranchising the at least 25% of the Democratic electorate that is not voting for him, the Obama camp cannot be happy that their candidate hasn’t reached 90% of the vote in any contest since the U.S. Virgin Islands on February 9.

2) Obama fails to win key demographics. Once again, Obama has not broken into the key demographic of voters who have been on a casino junket in the last thirty days. He also failed to win voters who had never heard of him, Wiccans, members of more than one bowling league, mourning dove hunters, white voters with "strongly negative" views of African Americans, and Vatican II-rejecting Catholics. These groups will only become more significant as the primary campaign shifts to Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

It gets better. All I know is that I wouldn’t get on the bad side of a bunch of Wiccans. Last time I did that I woke up with hind legs and a beard like a billy goat.

[Peter Suderman]

After serving time in solitary, er, Northern Virginia (which, okay, is actually pretty nice) I’m finally moving into the District this weekend. Naturally, I’ve been following the cab-fare changes and the ensuing controversy (D.C. cab drivers are currently striking during business hours one day a week) with much interest.  Over at my old haunt, OpenMarket, Eli Lehrer, Michelle Minton, and John Berlau have been debating how free-market advocates ought to think about city taxi commissions. Lehrer says that "taxi cabs as we know them exist by virtue of government regulation," but at least in theory, I have to side with Minton on this one when she writes:

Taxicab companies are funded by private capital and owned and operated by private businessmen. It is their livelihood at stake if their business fails.

The common argument for commissions that set fare prices for all the cabs in a city is that you can’t really have a competitive market; someone hailing a cab on a street doesn’t have the same options and price information as someone picking between orange juice brands in the grocery store. But as Berlau points out, cab branding—such as in the case of New York’s yellow cabs—helps solve many of the problems of customer captivity.

All this is purely theoretical, of course, and the only place in the U.S. we’re likely to see cities without taxi commissions anytime soon is in fan-fic sequels to Snow Crash. From a purely pragmatic perspective, then, I have to say that I’m personally pretty thrilled with Fenty’s recent rate cuts, as I suspect that, in the areas I frequent, I’ll rarely have a terribly tough time finding a ride.

by Reihan

It’s a small world after all.

On Monday, as expectations ran high here that Mr. Obama would sweep Tuesday’s primaries in Wisconsin and Hawaii, Obama, population 32,000, was making plans to buttress its support. Businessmen were getting ready with “I love Obama” T-shirts, a theme song called “Obama Is a Wonderful World” and sweet bean cakes with Mr. Obama’s face on them. City Hall was going to send a daruma doll with “victory” written across its chest, a traditional good-luck charm in Japanese elections.

“We formed our group on Feb. 4,” said Seiji Fujiwara, the leader of the support group and an official at the Sekumiya Hotel here, not far from Obama Park and across the street from the Obama Shoes Center, where a 50 percent sale was under way.

“He put up a good fight on Super Tuesday and then won seven consecutive contests, so I think our support did him no harm and, in fact, carried him in the right direction,” Mr. Fujiwara said.

Meanwhile, the town of Clinton, Japan is in the slough of despond. The town elders have accused Obama’s sweet bean cakes of being secretly Muslim, and of not being tough enough to take on Republican sweet bean cakes.

[Patrick Appel]

Even the Chinese have limits:

Liquor makers in central China’s Henan province are planning a legal challenge to fight a ban on Communist Party officials and civil servants drinking alcohol at lunch during work days, state media said on Wednesday.

[Peter Suderman]

The world’s greatest movie blog, The House Next Door, has footage of a talk Jonathan Demme gave at a Valentine’s Day screening of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. I am aware that this film is well-regarded by any number of people, but I admit to being utterly baffled by the largely positive reputation it continues to enjoy.

The 70s produced an awful lot of great films — as far as I’m concerned, the era between Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver is cinema’s best — but Maude is a symbol of everything that’s awful about the free-love hippie ethos of the era. It’s unforgivably smug, crude, obvious, naive, and stylistically shallow — and I say this as a near feverish booster of Wes Anderson. I felt the same way about Ashby’s Being There (despite my generally favorable inclination toward anything with Peter Sellers), a sort of proto-Forest Gump that was equally cloying and self-satisfied.  I saw both Maude and Being There movies during film courses in college, and on both ocassions I seemed to be the only person who wasn’t smitten with Ashby’s cutesy narcissism.

In a weird way, he reminds me of Edward Zwick, another director who irritates me to no end. The problem with both directors is a complete lack of self-awareness combined with a monstrous self-obsession. Both filmmakers evince an inflated sense of self worth combined with an obliviousness to what they’re actually doing.