The Dish

by Reihan The following post closely resembles outright hackery. Rest assured, it is very sincere and heartfelt hackery.

The special election to replace the late Tom Lantos is only a few weeks away, and it looks as though former State Senator Jackie Speier has the race sewn up. But a group of free culture enthusiasts, led by Harvard’s John Palfrey, are working to persuade Lawrence Lessig to run for the seat. Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, the leading light of the free culture movement, and now a scholar focused on corruption and the fate of democracy, has a highly unusual pedigree. As a kid, he was a teenage Reaganite and hardcore libertarian. Though he later drifted to the left, Lessig’s leftism (leftishm?) reflects a Millian sensibility that informs his thinking about the uses and abuses of government and corporate power. More encouraging still, he clerked for Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia. His worldview derives from a serious and lasting engagement with conservative ideas. This accounts in part for his decidedly unconventional tack in Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which he made an originalist case against the scandalous Copyright Term Extension Act  of 1998. After losing the case, Lessig offered an insightful mea culpa that’s well worth your time.

The image that will always stick in my head comes from an editorial that ran in The New York Times. While the reaction to the Sonny Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to the court’s decision was mixed. The press coverage that attacked the decision did so because it left standing a silly and harmful law. That "grand experiment" that we call "the public domain" is over, the paper said. When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I shrunk the Constitution." But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see differently.

Call him a crazed egomanic, but there’s something really remarkable about the way Lessig takes a manifest failure of our constitutional system personally. He’s not in public life because he was charming and popular in high school, or to find some lobbying sinecure or because he is convinced the other side constitutes an American Taliban that must be shamed and then destroyed. Rather, Lessig is most concerned with preserving the immune system, the organic intellectual defenses, of a free and open society, something conservatives and liberals alike ought to care about very much.

Of course there are many avenues through which to effect political change, perhaps the most important of which is raising awareness of the issues at stake. Lessig has brilliantly pursued that course. In leaving behind questions surrounding copyright, though, he’s recognized that there are deeper problems with the body politic, and deeper questions concerning the vitality and indeed the viability of representative democracy in a society like our own. The time may now have come for Lessig to bring his considerable rhetorical skills and intellectual prowess to the legislative branch.

I’m not a liberal and I’m not a Democrat. I’ll bet I disagree with Lessig on Iraq and S-CHIP and possibly even net neutrality. Yet I think Lessig, who is very firmly a liberal and very firmly a Democrat, can, in some small but significant way, deliver some of that "change" we’ve been hearing so much about.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the Cult of Obama, which Patrick Ruffini brilliantly dissected through the lens of corporate marketing in this post, but if the rising tide of interest and enthusiasm can lead one or two Lessigs into public life, perhaps it will end up being more than a mass delusion. I think of Lessig as an almost paradigmatic Obamacrat, a smart and accomplished professional interested in reforming and revitalizing government for the betterment of all Americans through the embrace of disruptive technologies and, um, cherished American principles. If this is the animating impulse behind the new liberalism, the new conservatism that will rise to challenge it will be sharper and more forward-looking still.

There’s more to say about the nature and importance of free culture, about Lessig’s virtues, and about why conservatives and liberals alike have reason to back him. But I guess I’ll leave you with Glenn Reynolds’s characteristically brief take.

LARRY LESSIG FOR CONGRESS?  We could do worse — and probably will!

We’re in a rare and weird moment in which we actually can do better. The voters of California’s 12th Congressional District, and all Californians and all Americans, deserve better. Si se puede! Oh heck, I’ve gone off the deep end. I’ll just add that I never get excited about candidates ever. It’s just not in my DNA. So I’m not used this whole enthusiasm jag. It doesn’t suit me, I’m afraid.

by hilzoy

I have been idly following the fight between the McCain and Obama campaigns on the subject of accepting public financing for the general election, and thinking that at some point I’d probably have to write about it. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this: the laws are arcane and complicated, and going back and figuring out who had said what, exactly, about accepting public financing in the general election isn’t really my idea of fun. I mean, I may be wonky, but even I have limits. So I’ve been hoping that Mark Schmitt, who actually knows a lot about this topic, would write about it, and luckily for me, he has. And he brings up a very interesting point: that John McCain might have inadvertently opted into the system of public financing by accepting a loan that did not exclude any public money he got as collateral.

The reason accepting loans matters is that the campaign finance laws try to force a choice on candidates: either you take the public money and abide by the limitations that go with it, or you don’t. If you don’t actually accept the money from the government, but use the fact that you are eligible to receive that money to secure a loan from someone else, then you can essentially spend the money you’d get through public financing without accepting the limitations that go with it. The consensus seems to be that this would violate the letter of campaign finance laws; it seems to me indisputable that it would violate their spirit.

Today, Schmitt has found the actual loan agreement, and it’s pretty astonishing. On the one hand, it goes out of its way to redefine “collateral” as not including any public money. On the other hand, it contains the following startling passage (p. 22, Schmitt’s transcript and his emphases):

“Additional Requirement. Borrower and lender agree that if Borrower [McCain’s campaign commitee] withdraws from the public matching funds program, but John McCain then does not win the next primary or caucus in which he is active (which can be any primary or caucus held the same day) or does not place at least within 10 percentage points of the winner of that primary or caucus, Borrower will cause John McCain to remain an active political candidate and Borrower will, within thirty (3) days of said primary or caucus (i) reapply for public matching funds, (ii) grant to Lender, as additional collateral for the Loan, a first priority perfected security interest in and to all Borrower’s right, title and interest in and to the public matching funds program, and (iii) execute and deliver to Lender such documents, instruments and agreements as Lender may require with respect to the foregoing.”

You read that right: in exchange for a loan, John McCain gave away his right to decide for himself whether or not to stay in the race for the Presidency. And he did so in order to use his eligibility for future matching funds, rather than the funds themselves, as collateral. Again, I agree with Schmitt:

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan.”

Just remember: he probably suffered while he did this, and according to Nicholas Kristof, that makes it all OK.

Oh, and about Obama’s “pledge”?

“Obama’s precise statement was, and has always been, “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” That’s an artful statement, and it’s not artful in a “meaning of ‘is'” sense — it’s exactly the right answer. A commitment to “preserve a publicly financed election” would have to mean much more than whether both participate in the system. It would require some significant agreement about how to handle outside money, 527s, “Swift Boat”-type attack groups, party money, etc., and other factors that have undermined the last two publicly financed elections, from both sides. It is hardly an evasion to describe this as an agreement to be negotiated, rather than a simple pledge.

The side story here is why many of the the “traditional” campaign finance reform advocates and the Times and Post editorial boards still seem so hypnotized by McCain-as-reformer, a pose he adopted for a period that ended years ago, that they cannot call him on his evasion of public funds in the primary, and are happy to be used to echo his first partisan attack in the general election, against someone who, unlike McCain, really has been a remarkably consistent and hard-working supporter of public financing, at both the state and national level.”

A new ORC/CNN  Texas poll has Clinton and Obama in a statistical dead heat. Considering the primary is more than two weeks away, it is little more than a straw in the wind, but this continues Obama’s upward trend in the Texas polls.

by Reihan

Razib Khan, my favorite science blogger, is a rare bird: a Bangladeshi-born neo-paleocon who is deeply knowledgeable about subjects ranging from genomics to anthropology to computer science. He also firmly believes that assortative mating and shrinking families are a good thing. But why? Well, it seems that Razib finds a lot of his relatives deadly dull. And by deadly dull I mean "mind-asphyxiating." For those of you who’ve been trapped in endless gossip with your “aunties,” this post will have special resonance.

Values, norms and ideas float on a social surface. If one’s local network is saturated with family members, family values will be preeminent. Eccentric interests are not likely to be shared across the family network unless one is totally inbred. So there is a strong selection for banal conversation topics which everyone can participate in, or signalers that everyone can appreciate. There’s a local fitness peak of mediocrity around which a family gathers in terms of topic and creative expression; everyone knows uncle-so-and-so or the terrible thing that happened to that particular cousin. Remove the close relations and the landscape is no longer so regular and coalescence around a local fitness peak no longer as inevitable. As an isolated individual, you move to a new location and float in and out of social circles based on common affinity. In other words, the non-family world is one of a shifting balance of ideas and an exploration of a more rugged topography. The sample space of possibilities is larger, the risks greater, the comfort zone less incestuous. Depending on your values, that might be a good thing….

That’s a fairly strong case for the supposed anomie of modern urban life. Down with the family! Except I suppose I see at least some of these banalities in a more positive light, which accounts in part for my family valuesism. Razib continues:

Even shared affinity groups can become too incestuous, to the point where all creativity is removed.

This reminds me of the much-derided (unfairly, in my view) Pauline Kael remark,

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend and I had a heated yet mostly playful exchange (about privacy norms and social graph gluttony) that mortified all of our other friends. After I had said my peace, one of my best friends said to my interlocutor, “I can’t believe you let him say that!,” almost as though I had knifed someone in the chest. It occurred to me that my core social group is diverse enough that what strikes some of us as bantery disputatiousness strikes others as monstrously rude. Which is interesting. I do try to keep my combativeness in check.

[Patrick Appel] Above is a picture Abisko Ark Hotel in Sweden. Visitiors stay in fishing huts specially modified so that they can watch the Northern Lights. I blogged about Sweden’s ice hotel yesterday. I’m not sure why Swedish hotels have become a running theme this week. More photos here. Photo by Doug McKinlay/The Observer.

by Reihan Is George W. Bush a good dad? I honestly have no idea. I wouldn’t say I’m indifferent, exactly. The United States would be better off if the president weren’t spending his off-hours loudly demanding that his children not use wire hangars. But really, questions of child-rearing should be left to the president and his wife and possibly Uncle Cheney, better known as "Bad Cop."

Which is why I found this op-ed in The Badger Herald so strange.

Growing up, Hillary was like a second mom to all of Chelsea’s friends (we are sure you know the type of mom we are talking about from your own adolescence). She was a constant presence at school events, sleepover parties and family gatherings. She was the hit of the annual Mother’s Day Skit in high school, imitating Chelsea in tights and ballet slippers with her nose buried in a book. She was a shoulder to cry on after a particularly bad high school break-up and taught us that sometimes, after a terrible day, a giant chocolate brownie is truly the best medicine. She encouraged us to work hard in school, converting the White House kitchen into our exam study room. She taught us how to make sweet potato soufflé when we decided to attempt our first Thanksgiving. She was a source of solace and love when we lost a parent.

There’s more. It seems that Senator Clinton also inspired Chelsea’s friends to believe that they too could achieve great things. Now, I don’t know these young people, and perhaps many of them did grow up under hardscrabble circumstances and not in the manicured precincts of Upper Northwest Washington, a neck of the woods a friend of mine once affectionately called "Upper Caucasia." But my guess is that attending a wonderful, nurturing school, highly selective school probably went a long way towards opening their eyes to the bountiful opportunities available to bright young people in America, and that being close to the First Family was icing on the cake.

I have to say, I’m perhaps a little sensitive on this subject because my parents weren’t a constant presence at school events. That’s because they both worked six if not seven days a week, thus making it impossible for them to take part in any extracurricular activities. My sisters attended parent-teacher conferences on their behalf, and I’m grateful to them. One of the best weekends of my life happened when my mother made it up to my college campus to see me perform in a play. I was amazingly proud and pleased, but I was always amazingly proud and pleased because I had really wonderful, cool parents. Granted, they weren’t always "down to hang" with my cronies, and they didn’t inspire my friends to believe that they too could achieve. My friends were mostly inspired by the hard work of their own parents and by teachers and by kids who were a few years older.

Clearly this testament to the singular excellence of Hillary Clinton as a mother and role model isn’t meant to denigrate my immigrant parents. But that’s the trouble with our pharaonic presidency: we shouldn’t expect our president to be a moral exemplar in every respect. Character does count, but it counts in certain contexts: prudence, humility, judgment, resilience, an ability to lead. That all matters, as demonstrated by the many failings of the often-petulant, allegedly incurious President Bush. But parenting skills? There are many different ways to be a good parent, and I’m powerfully vexed by the idea that a particular bobo parenting stye constitutes a noteworthy qualification for office.

While we’re on the subject of parenting, I have to wonder: given the reflexive hostility of many in our political class against the titans of finance capital, doesn’t it seem odd that Senator Clinton’s daughter and proxy-in-chief works for a hedge fund focused on distressed securities? I see nothing wrong with this because I think that this work is vitally important, not just not morally suspect. But given the privileged circumstances of the younger Clinton’s upbringing, the lens of personal politics leads us to ask questions like, "Does this really reflect your most deeply held values, Senator Clinton?" And of course the fact that some privileged people do choose less remunerative work has implications for the inequality picture, but I digress.

Once we praise Hillary Clinton for being a truly terrific mother, do we then ask about John McCain’s alleged infidelities, or Bill Clinton’s? There is plenty to say on both subjects. This is a trap. It never stops.

If I were to choose a candidate based on her purely personal qualities, I think it would have to be John Edwards. Some time ago I listened to Elizabeth Edwards answer a radio interviewer’s question about privacy, and Edwards said, refreshingly, that she never cared much for privacy: the neighborhood kids would stroll right into her bedroom and say, "What’s cookin’?" She wasn’t trying to be "relatable" (I make sweet potato soufflé!"), but rather she was saying, "I’m an incredibly social weirdo who loves talking to strangers." That’s my kind of woman. By winning her over, John Edwards demonstrates his mettle and keen intelligence. Then, of course, there is the fact that he has embraced the Soviet interpretation of American life, which I find problematic. You get my point.

[Patrick Appel] Matt makes a good point about the Andrew Ferguson article I mentioned earlier:

Under the right circumstances, having advisors from competing schools of thought would probably be an asset…The best policies can often secure support from a variety of different perspectives, and certainly complicated undertakings tend to be improved by accepting some critical input. The trouble is that to make something like this work you need the person in charge to actually be capable of assessing different kinds of advice and ironing them into something resembling a coherent policy and there’s little in McCain’s background to suggest that he has any idea of how to season a policy with a touch of Kemp and a dollop of Peterson.

I have no problem with McCain, or any candidate, having a variety of advisors, but I have yet to see evidence of McCain’s ability to synthesize disperate viewpoints into a sound economic platform.  If he wants to weather the inevitiable  Democratic attacks against his admitted weakness in economics, he is going to have to do a hell of a lot more than name his advisors.

[Peter Suderman]

Jeffrey Overstreet points us to the trailer for the new David Mamet film, Redbelt.

Mamet’s a love-him or hate-him kind of filmmaker, and I tend to fall on the love-him side: the tense, terse Pinteresque dialog and brooding machismo is suggestive of a primordial Michael Mann. In his movies, everyone’s a con artist, and most people are conning themselves too. Everything’s turned inward, backed up on itself to the point where it’s impossible to truly see the end of the duplicity and manipulation; they’re crime films as Escher paintings.

[Patrick Appel] I am not one to cry foul over negative attacks; I think they can point out important differences between candidates. What confuses me about some of the recent attacks against Obama is Clinton isn’t highlighting differences. Critiquing Obama on public financing doesn’t make a lot of sense when you haven’t agreed to public financing yourself. Attacking Obama for using the words of other politicians would be a stronger charge if Clinton hadn’t already appropriated much of Obama’s rhetoric. David Kurtz puts it this way:

Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren’t even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.

The attacks are intended to bring down Obama’s positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it’s hard to see how they raise Hillary’s. Her argument, boiled down, is: "He’s no better than me." (Or perhaps, less charitably, "He’s just as bad as me.")

[Patrick Appel] Ethan Zuckerman explains the relationship between the Kenyan middle class and the Kenyan bloggers covering the disputed elections:

There’s a strong overlap between the emerging middle class in the developing world and the world of citizen media. Bloggers in Africa are highly educated, and generally are wealthier than the average African. (It’s not cheap, in African terms, to afford the amount of internet access you need to maintain a blog.) Kenya’s got a large middle class, and it’s got one of the largest blogger populations on the continent, behind South Africa, Egypt and very few others.

This group of bloggers and their peers are documenting the election crisis in a way that’s unprecedented in Africa. Traditionally, we’ve heard about African crises either long after they took place (Rwanda) or through the eyes of international media (Darfur, northern Uganda, eastern DRC). In Kenya, we’re hearing raw, emotional accounts from people directly affected by this violence. These accounts are complicating mainstream media narratives. Immediately after the election, many newspapers offered a narrative of the Kenyan violence in terms of “long-simmering ethnic tensions” – bloggers reminded us that these tensions had been consciously stoked by political parties, and that the nation had been largely free of serious ethnic tension for most of its history. As the violence has taken on a clear ethnic cast, bloggers have reminded us how unexpected and how shocking the violence is against the backdrop of Kenyan history.