The Dish

[Patrick Appel]

I enjoyed this post by P.M. Carpenter on Hillary’s prospects:

There is nothing left but strained, over-the-top shenanigans in the service of pulling off a mathematically impossible fantasy.

That, or a polite, reasoned withdrawal in the interest of faits accomplis and party unity, leaving her, in eight years, still nearly four years younger than the current Republican nominee.[…]

She can now stay mired in the silliness and do the party a whole lot of damage, or she can crawl out of it and do the party and herself a whole lot of good.

She can, that is, simply withdraw now. The test of Wisconsin was whether Obama would continue taking occupation of virtually every demographic territory once so confidently held by Mrs. Clinton. He did, and he did it decisively.

I think Clinton could still come back, but it would require a massive change in fortune. Expect the next two weeks of campaigning (and the debate this week) to get ugly. Clinton will keep coming after Obama, trying to find a line of attack that works. The person who is most likely to benefit from that strategy: John McCain. McCain gets to see how going negative on Obama is likely to play with the electorate without having to invest his own money or risk tarnishing his image.

[Patrick Appel]

This survey of officers’ feelings on how to improve recruitment has some staggering data. Here’s Matt’s breakdown:

Only 22 percent of 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above support the idea of allowing openly gay or lesbian Americans to serve in the military as a means of boosting recruitment. Fifty-eight percent support lowering education standard, 78 percent supporting offering citizenship to foreigners willing to serve (this sounds like a terrible fall of the Roman Empire idea to me), 38 percent support a draft. This suggests that even if shifts in public opinion have taken some of the sting out of the gays in the military question as an issue of electoral politics, a President Obama or a President Clinton would still face significant resistance from within the armed forces to implementing a changed policy.

One of Kevin Drum’s commenters makes this counterpoint (a good one, I think):

Allowing gays and lesbians to serve has many points to recommend it, but depending on the wording of the question, increasing recruitment may not be among them. You could be all for gays and lesbians in the military and think it wouldn’t help recruitment because 1) it’s a marginal population, and 2) it may simultaneously depress recruitment elsewhere.

I’d just be leery to jumping to the conclusion that the officers are bigoted on the basis of this response.

[Jim Manzi]

Ramesh has a great series of posts at The Corner commenting on a debate at City Journal on school choice.  Sol Stern wrote an article recanting his support for markets as the key enabling reform for school improvement, and arguing that we should instead focus on making the current system work better.  He calls this the “instructionist” approach in contrast to the “incentivist” market-oriented approach.  There is an amazing series of long letters written to City Journal in response to this article, presenting viewpoints at various points on the instructionist-to-incentivist spectrum.  The article plus the letters collectively comprise an excellent introduction to the school reform debate. 

I could write a lot about this, but I’ll try to limit myself to four points that I think are most important.

1.  School choice improves the performance of participants today.  As per my earlier post on evidence of causality in social science, one can make this statement with about as much certainty as one can make any non-trivial statement about causality relevant to public policy because we have multiple replications of true random assignment trials.  Further, there are natural experiments (normally called “differences-in-differences” analysis in education research literature) indicating that school choice probably also improves performance for students who do not personally participate in it, but are in school systems where choice is introduced, presumably because competition forces improvement to their schools.  Throwing sand in the air about aggregate levels of system performance, overall trends and other rhetorical techniques can’t really get past these facts.

2.  These results have been achieved within almost comically artificial “markets”.  Conditions vary, but one fundamental issue is that in many localities schools don’t lose the funding for a student if the student leaves the school by participating in a choice program.  This would be like your local hardware store having its annual revenues set by a “hardware board” based on the number of people who live in the area that need flashlights and screwdrivers, independent of now many flashlights and screwdrivers it actually sold.  My guess is that they wouldn’t be staying open late on Saturdays.  Another issue is that when, as in many systems, some tiny fraction of the population is allowed to participate (normally by lottery, which is why we have so many replications of random assignment trials), there is insufficient demand to stimulate the creation of much alternative school capacity, achieve scale effects that would induce large enterprises to start new school chains and so forth.  In other words, these are markets with huge limitations on the demand side and the supply side.

3.  The instructionist vs. incentivist debate is kind of silly.  For one thing it confuses means and ends, and for another it represents an entirely static view of instruction.  It’s like two guys in 1980 in the Soviet Union arguing about whether they need an open consumer market for PCs in order to compete with the Western computer industry, or if it’s smarter to just get their factories to implement known improvements to chip design and fab processes.  Of course, one of the goals of creating a real market is to force the implementation of such (painful, and hence politically resisted) design and production reforms that won’t happen without the incentives created by a market.  Beyond this, markets are required to invent new reforms (or at least to discover what innovations are working) and apply them broadly, as well as to match non-uniform educational alternatives with the, to put it mildly, non-uniform needs among tens of millions of students.

4.  Advocates of school choice do need to move beyond current efforts if they are serious about materially changing American K – 12 school results.  A Republican Party that wanted to win would make this a major initiative spanning administrations.  I summarize what I think needs to be done in an article in the current National Review:

We need competition for students among public schools in which funding moves with students, and in which schools are far freer to change how they operate. As we have seen in the private economy, only markets will force the unpleasant restructuring necessary to unleash potential. Conservatives have long had this goal, but are unprepared to win the fight. Achieving it would be at least a decade-long project.

We should start at the state and local level by scaling up the numerous existing demonstration projects to district, city, and state levels. This can be used to build sufficient pressure to force national action, using the federal education budget as a lever. The model to follow is the successful campaign to reform welfare. The biggest difference in this case is the presence of the extremely powerful teachers unions. Ultimately, political leaders will have to break them as decisively as Thatcher broke the coal-miners union in Britain.

The role of the federal government could be limited, but crucial. Suppose it established a comprehensive national exam by grade level to be administered by all schools and universities that receive any federal money, and required each school to publish all results, along with other detailed data about school budgets, performance, and so forth, each year. Secondary, profit-driven information providers, analogous to credit-ratings agencies and equity analysts, would arise to inform decision-making. The federal role would be very much like that of the SEC for equity markets: to ensure that each school published accurate, timely, and detailed data.

Once success is obvious, this can act as a platform for further change. This approach will build a constituency with an entrenched interest as powerful as the one that protects Social Security, and eliminate a major prop of the statist coalition. Inevitably, parents will demand and win the right to apply these vouchers to private schools. This would also become a model for other reforms — of entitlement programs from retirement accounts to medical care.

[Patrick Appel] Clinton tries to shore up her working-class base with this new ad running in Ohio:

[Patrick Appel]

Regarding the elections, Pakistani blogger Raza Rumi is relatively optimistic:

[The elections] undo the Musharraf paradigm of ousting the two mainstream parties from the political arena; and instituting real democracy that is hostage to the bogey of Islamism and local feudal cliques through non-party local governments.

These elections are also a slap on the face of the global corporate media (and their backers, the global military machine) that had painted Pakistan as a breeding ground for Islamic extremism and dare I say terrorism.

While Sepia Mutiny is skeptical:

So what will we see play out in Pakistan? There will be celebrations for a few weeks. Everyone will denigrate Musharraf some more for good measure. Then the people will see that their new democracy, probably composed of a weak and continually warring “coalition,” isn’t all that and that their leaders are as corrupt as they were the first time around. Eventually the new general in charge of the army will be forced to take over, just like Musharraf did eight years ago.

(hat tip: Neha Viswanathan)

[Patrick Appel]

The door is closing on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Obama is doing better with lower income voters and Gallup shows him making gains with Latinos. Texas suddenly looks like much friendlier territory. A seventeen-point loss in Wisconsin isn’t something Clinton can spin.

Here is David Kurtz:

…the electorate isn’t remaining static. It’s moving, and the exit polls suggest it’s moving toward Obama. Last week, Obama made gains among white voters and women in Virginia and Maryland. Today, the exit polls show him eroding her core constituencies further: he won among women, among middle-aged voters, among lower-income voters, and among union households.

If you’re a Hillary supporter, there’s not much in the Wisconsin results to raise your spirits.

by Reihan

Fellow comics nerds might appreciate Julian Sanchez’s excellent "The Revolt of the Comic Books," a look at the strangely self-contradictory political valence of contemporary comics. Um, that sentence sounded self-parodic. Sad to say, it was entirely unintentional. But that doesn’t change the fact that the essay is excellent, so read it. You might also want to read Shooting War, a creepily convincing premonition of the future of, among other things, Iraq, Jamie Lynn Spears, Maureen Dowd, and our media-saturated culture. Can’t say I was too impressed by the portrayal of women, but I’m a bit of a bluenose.

by Reihan I recently wrote a post praising Lawrence Lessig, and it looks as though he is taking the idea of running for Congress very seriously. He took a courtly, gentlemanly, and utterly devastating shot against Jackie Speier, the leading candidate, that strongly suggests to me he’s in the race. Or, as a friend tells me, this could all be an elaborate scheme to raise money for Creative Commons, a worthy cause if there ever was one.

But anyway, while watching Lessig’s video, a couple of things leapt out at me and gave me pause. The first is Lessig’s apparent conviction that public financing of political campaigns will help ameliorate the worst aspects of what he calls "the economy of influence." So what exactly does Lessig mean by public financing? I’m not sure. I imagine his detailed policy proposals will actually be pretty sophisticated and smart. Right now, his Change Congress platform is summarized in three planks. Candidates would pledge to (1) refuse money from lobbyists and PACs; (2) ban "earmarks"; (3) and "support public financing of campaigns."

The wording suggests that Lessig favors tough limits on private contributions or at the very least a very large-scale expansion of public funds. This, in Lessig’s view, will drive change. Might it instead protect incumbents, or entrenched ideas? Mark Schmitt, who has been closely involved in efforts to regulate campaign finance for well over a decade, wrote a terrific, insightful reassessment of the campaign finance reform movement for Democracy last year. He ended the essay on a chastened yet optimistic note.

Don’t build complex systems that put government in the position of trying to equalize all resources or ban all contributions. Instead, let voters shape the process through their own preferences, through organizing to enhance their power, and by using public funds to echo and enhance the preferences of ordinary citizens. Avenues by which large contributions influence politics will remain, whether they take the form of PACs, 527 committees, other nonprofits, or blogs. The best we can do is to offset their influence by broadening the range of voices that can be heard, as opposed to enhancing their influence by closing off other channels of money.

And fortunately,

Today we have the makings of a virtuous circle– voters are more engaged, small donors have returned, and the most corrupt members of Congress have been held accountable. Reformers should ask: What are the modest, non-restrictive interventions that would help push this virtuous cycle in the right direction? If they begin to approach the question in that way, the next decade of reform might be more productive than the last.

One wonders if Lessig has spoken to Schmitt and others who’ve been in the trenches. If he hasn’t yet, I hope he does.

The two proposals that appeal to me closely related: the first is from James Carville and Paul Begala, and the second is from David Cay Johnston. Both are zany and possibly daft, particularly the Carville and Begala proposal, but both come from people who know political corruption inside and out and both ask the right questions about the sources of corruption. Then, finally, there is the second thing that gave me pause: Lessig’s firm belief that the reason we aren’t taking urgent action on climate change is the millions of dollars spent on "junk science." But what if the proposed solutions, like cap-and-trade and a carbon tax, are in fact very bad ideas? That’s a case Jim Manzi has made very persuasively at The American Scene. And by persuasively I mean, "I used to support a stiff carbon tax and now I don’t thanks to his arguments, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on the receiving end of any subtly corrupting influence." This serene confidence in the rightness of received wisdom is never a good thing. Of course, I’m pretty sure Lessig is better on this score than almost any other member of Congress, so I can forgive him. It does make me think, though: if Lessig does run, and I hope he does, how great would it be to also have Richard Epstein in Congress? And Richard Posner on the Supreme Court? And Santa Claus in the White House? Santa would straighten FEMA out, that’s for sure. There would, however, be a firestorm of controversy regarding his overreliance on non-union elf labor.

P.S.- Below you’ll find the most compelling argument against Professor Lessig’s case for a free culture. The following video, which I urge you to watch until the stunning conclusion, can be used and abused by any and all humans under a Creative Commons license.

by Reihan

Chris Bertram writes,

And, of course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. Ditto Cuba, for a much smaller chunk. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!

But the perhaps too obvious point is that there is a tight interrelationship between the criminalization of capitalism, and by extension of capitalists and their lackeys, and the crimes and repressions Bertram rightly abhors. To be as polemical and tendentious as possible, consider the fate of the Ugandan Asians, expelled from their country on grounds of being a race of lackey capitalists, not to mention all the other Mercurian minorities that have suffered mightily on the same spurious grounds. As a cosmopolitan of the left informed by the Marxist tradition (and Rousseau!), Bertram would never endorse such policies. They are barbaric, and I imagine he associates them with right-fascism rather than left-Bolshevism. The trouble for this view is the historical record, in particular in Africa and the Soviet bloc.

As far as I know, and I know very little, there are no Castroite pogroms against Cuba’s Chinese and Lebanese minorities. The persecution of homosexuals, which merits nary a word in Bertram’s brief account of the glories of the Cuban Revolution, was less about the insidious influence of markets and more about machismo and nationalism and an ignorance and hysteria surrounding the body that is the inevitable result of a closed society. It’s true that Castro’s Cuba isn’t exactly a "republic of fear." I wouldn’t be surprised if many Cubans embraced many aspects of Castro’s defiant nationalism. But is this defiant nationalism a product of "solidarity forever," a spontaneous fellow feeling fueled by democratic centralism and robust egalitarianism? Or is it the product of a sustained propaganda campaign aimed at eliminating subversion that threatens the elite that profits most from state capitalism?

And remember, the Cuban state has embraced state capitalism since the Soviet collapse: extracting wealth from a small group of privileged foreigners, carefully isolated from Cubans who are not servants or sex workers. The hard currency has to come from somewhere, after all.

I have to say, there are brief moments when I am impressed by Cuba’s achievements, like the so-called organic food revolution that replaced the calories lost after Soviet aid ended. That’s pretty neat. I too would enjoy conducting mad experiments on a nation of over 10 millions. The thing is, I couldn’t stomach all the killing it required, and I couldn’t stomach the idea of preventing people from trading and collaborating with other people, including capitalist lackeys, through force.

Hasta la victoria siempre! indeed.

This is, I’ll admit, low-hanging fruit. Bertram took a contrarian and quirky stand, which is admirable, and I suppose I shouldn’t pile on. But there is, I hope, a small lesson in this rant, namely that our own sanctions policy is also intellectually and morally bankrupt. We’re hardly innocents. Robert Kagan’s A Twilight Struggle serves as a smart and useful defense of the American role in Nicaragua and by extension the region, but I have to say, reading Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre was an eye-opener. See this excellent Corey Robin review. There is a reason "Yanqui imperialism" is despised in much of Latin America, and it’s not all xenophobia and bluster.