Stupid Books

In a certain episode of The Simpsons, Lisa pits Bart against a hamster in an intelligence test. One of the rounds involves getting Bart to try to eat a cupcake, which Lisa places on a bookshelf for him to discover. Bart notices the cupcake as he walks by glaring at the bookshelf and muttering "Stupid books." One often gets the feeling that our august president reacts similarly in the face of humankind's accumulated knowledge, especially since some of his most notable mistakes were made by much smarter people well before he ever got to office - everyone thought the lessons of engaging in precarious voluntary wars halfway across the world had been discredited until Bush showed up.

But Bush's apparent contempt for the Enlightenment (see below) is insufficient to stop him from seeking his own presidential library. The presidential library is kind of a funny tradition, because why should every president have his own library? Why not a regular museum? Or a generic archive? I guess it's just one of those things: lions have prides, whales have pods, presidents have libraries. As for the Enlightenment, think back to some of the central aims of that project and ask yourself how Bush is doing: integrating religion and state, replacing trained bureaucrats with private warlords, defining science and truth as dependent upon who is in power instead of universal principles, etc.

I would be remiss in my account of the relationship between Bush and books if I didn't mention that Bush was reportedly in a heated reading contest this summer with staff brainiac Karl Rove. Never mind that most of us grew out of reading contests before we had grown out of braces, it still seems a little far fetched to imagine a moron like Bush picking up Camus, as he is alleged to have done. Despite a lack of hard evidence (something which has never stopped Bush before), I am going to go ahead and aver that he is lying in almost every detail of the reading contest. With that declaration safely behind me, Bush's lies about his reading fit right in with his general pattern of lying about everything, thus embodying his disrespect for the orderly transmission of knowledge.

It gets better, though - the library is apparently intended to be attached to a new think tank at SMU, to be modeled after Stanford's Hoover Institute. Ignoring for the moment that it would more rightly be called a thoughtless tank, it's pretty scary to think of serious scholars deliberately trying to emulate this president. Alas, this is the nefarious evil of the conservative movement: establishing the intellectual infrastructure to dominate the debate. It's basically one more way for the people with money to make sure everybody thinks how they want them to. For a political ideology that values intellect so little (see also: candidacy of George W. Bush), it makes more than a little sense that one prong of the attack on truth should be bullying legitimate intellectuals from within the academy. Fortunately, I think it's going to take more than a library/tank to rescue Bush's horrendous legacy.

Who likes money?

Money
So they say
Is the root of all evil today

These words are as true today as they were thoses time my roommates got high and blasted Pink Floyd through the house. Or are they? Not many serious people are against money as a concept these days, but a couple of new books highlight one extreme of the influence that the economy can have on democracy.

Jacob Hacker addresses economic security in his The Great Risk Shift. This work appears to combine the twin notions that the middle class is getting screwed by things like the horrendous health care situation and the downward pressure globalization is putting on jobs with the way conservative think tanks and echo chambers have made it difficult to talk about fixing the problems. This doesn't sound like an earth-shattering insight, but the more awareness there is of these problems the better. Plus, I have every reason to think Hacker, whose last book was excellent, is likely to give these problems a trenchant treatment.

Gerry Spence seems to be onto something in his Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power; The Rise and Risk of the New Conservative Hate Culture, which appears to explore the connection between economic violence and actual violence. Says Spence, "It’s easy to hate gays if one can’t find a job that pays more than the minimum starvation wage. It’s easy to jump on the patriotic band wagon to blow the hell out of half the innocent people in Iraq if one has, in effect, been blown to some sort of economic hell and is equally innocent. When people feel hurt they hurt back." This phenomenon may be our contemporary equivalent of Marx' economic alienation, and it reflects the old sociology chestnut that people compensate for uncertainty in their own lives by seeking certainty in the moral order. So once again we find ourselves grappling with the question of what role the economy should play in society.

Anthony Downs gives a classic interpretation of the role economic analysis can play in understanding society in his canonical Economic Theory of Democracy, but this isn't exactly what I'm driving at. What I'm going for can be traced back to accounts of the rise of capitalism in 18th century England and its subsequent spread around various parts of the globe, in which many observers have noted that a middle class seems to be a prerequisite for successful democracy. It's hard to prove any law of causation with certainty in the social sciences, but anecdotal evidence suggests that prosperity does encourage democracy. When Japan first opened up to the West in the mid-1800's, it had a sizable bureaucracy class known as Samurai; soon thereafter, Japan began to prosper and to govern effectively via a democratic Diet. In the United States, the 1890's saw a harsh economic bust cycle, and the period is now remembered for xenophobia and the restriction of rights, among other things. Contrast that to the period following World War II, when America's economic dominance over the world was unquestioned, and when available democratic rights, especially for blacks and women, multiplied.

People aren't in as bad a position today as they were in the 1890's, due to some accumulated wisdom in economic management and some of the social safety net first installed during the New Deal. But things aren't good, either. It has become a truism today that income disparity is a serious and rapidly expanding problem. It's a problem that is going to demand bold solutions to overcome, such as a reworking of the tax code.

But ultimately it may not matter what our tax code is if we continue to ignore our impending environmental collapse. Nothing would be worse for the economy or democracy than an uninhabitable world. A responsive democratic government that evaluates and acts upon relevant scientific evidence would be a good first step to acknowledging and addressing our dire environmental predicament. While we moved towards that goal by dethroning maniacs like Inhofe earlier this month, a strengthened middle class would surely help sustain progress towards a better democracy. If restrictions on democratic rights and polarization of income are problems that build on each other in hurting the environment, then so expansions of the middle class and democratic rights should build upon each other in helping the environment. This is the true division between the Democratic vision and the Republican vision - under their vision, when one person does well, he hoards it to himself, but under our vision, when one succeeds, so do all others.

Thanksgiving Homework

If University of Chicago readers are anything like me, your programs are too easy and you're just itching for some more homework to do over the Thanksgiving break. As luck would have it, here is an assignment for you. Many of you will be spending time around lots of family, and, tragically, not every member of every family is as enlightened as we would like. Many of them may be conservative and/or Republican, and others will just want to hear what the smarty-pants college student at the dinner table thinks about the mid-term election results. So your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to think up something clever to say about why you're a Democrat and why it's good that Democrats are soon to be in power. And, as an internet personality, it's my job to help you.

I'm not actually the one who determines how you vote (maybe I will be some day, but for now it's up to you), so here is a quick range of options that might describe your situation. Maybe you're like Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia - someone who doesn't feel that he is particularly liberal but who is sick of the Republican BS. Webb worked in the Reagan administration, and he has been a lifelong military man; other turn-ons for Webb include walks on the beach, kittens when they yawn, and the Scots-Irish. This is the description of someone who thinks of himself as reasonable and realizes that there is no place for reason in the Republican party of today. More and more people who may not be bleeding hearts are finding that the Democratic party is the only one available for people who aren't complete psychopaths.

Or maybe you're more like me, and you identify yourself with liberal values. Fortunately, the list of desirable values that can now be considered liberal has grown dramatically in proportion to the growth of the aforementioned insanity in the Republican party. It used to be that the values liberals could claim exclusivity over were limited to things like taking care of each other, social justice, and compassion. Today, we can add reasonable and ernest political debate, intellectual integrity, the constitution, and more.

But, as I have pointed out before, probably the single most important thing you can do is make sure that whatever your rationale is, it can be summed up in one or two sentences. We lose the debate before it even gets started when Republicans can say "less taxes, less government" (even if it's not exactly true) and we come up with a fifteen point plan for why Democrats would do everything Republicans do but just a little better. If you're fortunate enough to think of yourself as having liberal values, Michael Tomasky has already done your work for you. In this piece he spells out the case for Democrats to embrace goal of "the common good." This is in contrast to the Republican platform of "personal this, private that" - a platform that puts everyone out on their own. So that's my plan. If anyone asks me to tell them why I'm a Democrat, it's because Democrats are the ones who believe we all need each other. What's yours?

Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

Milton Friedman, the economist that leftists love to hate, died on Thursday at age 94.


Friedman was widely regarded as a charming and pleasant person, so it's too bad that his legacy is so harmful to the world. Last month my grandmother passed away in a town just down the coast from where Friedman died, and it's safe to say that she did the world more good with her work on the library board and geneological society than Friedman did with his economics. Just like Sam Cooke, there are several subjects about which I don't know much, and one of them is economics, but I'll do my best to show where this animosity comes from.

Of foremost concern to people around Hyde Park should be that Friedman is probably the single name most associated with the University of Chicago. He is credited with founding the so-called Chicago school of economics, which in turn is credited with conferring a great deal of intellectual legitimacy on the conservative movement. Friedman was an ends-justify-the-means type of guy. One of his most famous works, The Methodology of Positive Economics, propounded the idea that it doesn't matter what your model's assumptions are as long as its predictions are accurate.

Which is handy if you plan to make the kind of friends Friedman made. Perhaps his most notorious ally in the government world was Augusto Pinochet, the reviled and ruinous Chilean dictator and human rights violator. Pinochet brought in scholars from the Chicago school to introduce Friedman's monetarist, free market ideas into Chile's economic policies. So if human rights violations are the assumptions of your model, that shouldn't matter as long as the economic prosperity predictions prove true, right? Obviously that's a fairly dubious claim, and it doesn't help that without regulation, the economic welfare of the poor and middle class in Chile deteriorated precipitously over the course of Pinochet's rule. But Friedman, apparently, didn't care about distributive justice in economics. Most economists today find it pretty hard to argue in favor of screwing the poor in your economic policy.

It's hard to prove a connection between Friedman and the development of the right-wing think tank infrastructure, but it walks and quacks like a duck, as they say. At the beginning of his day, Friedman was often the only economist opposing the Keynesian orthodoxy, which would later get Chile back on the right track after Pinochet. I would contend that his example of the potential power of having some scholarship to back up your wing-nut conservatism inspired other conservatives to build up the right wing think tank infrastructure, including places like the Stanford's Hoover Institution, with which Friedman himself was affiliated following his time in Chicago. It is this think tank infrastructure which does the intellectual leg work for today's conservative movement, testing and developing ideas like school vouchers.

So Friedman's gifts to the world were economic policies that are disasterous for almost everyone (i.e., those who aren't already rich) and a shining ray of hope for conservatives looking for scholarship to justify their ideology. Those who harm the world seldom think of their actions that way, but it seems that it didn't particularly matter to Friedman. Pleasant conversationalist or not, I don't mourn him.

I've Been Waiting/For a Girl Like You/To Come Into My Life

When the Democratic House caucus convenes tomorrow to hold leadership elections, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) is expected to become the highest ranking elected woman in American history. This is actually a pretty big deal, because, as Dana Goldstein and Sarah Wildman point out in American Prospect, just the presence of such a powerful woman could help recruit more women into other areas where they have not been well represented, such as political journalism and especially punditry, and help turn out the female vote. Closer to home for me, women are a powerful force in blogs, but their muslces have yet to be flexed in political blogs.

What is even more interesting than Pelosi's coup for her gender is how short-lived it may turn out to be. Hillary Clinton is in clear position as the early frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, at least so say the experts. Here's one problem, though: people already know Hillary Clinton, and 45% say there is no chance they would vote her. A bigger problem may be her stance on the occupation of Iraq. She was profiled in this month's Atlantic, and towards the end (sorry - I think it's available to subscribers only) is a devastating description of the author's interview with her on the subject. The core problem, as demonstrated there and elsewhere, is that she lacks America's most prized commodity - authenticity. In the interview, she describes the big long list of evidence to support her contention that she was misled by Bush & Co. into supporting the war, and she describes her recently developed interest in accountability and winning. Maybe she could get away with that style of argument as a lawyer, but her evidence is dumb. Everyone can tell that Democrats like her sold out to W, who was pretty obviously out to grind the neo-con Iraq ax, because they were afraid to stand up to the Republican intimidation machine.

But getting back to Pelosi, who voted against the war, we might wonder how she will do as speaker. The netroots have clearly gained a lot of confidence in her abilities, judging by a methodologically dubious DailyKos poll in which she has increased her approval rating a modest 50 points since July. Since the election, however, she has done at least two notable things: one was heading off an intra-caucus squabble by brokering a deal to get Rahm Emanuel, who for some reason has gained respect from some people, into the leadership without fighting with Rep. Clyburn, an African American from South Carolina. So score one for some much-needed unity and minority caucus love.

The other thing she has done is endorse Jack Murtha for Majority Leader in his race against Steny Hoyer. This move seemed like a good idea to me at first, because Murtha got Democrats rolling on the pull-out-of-Iraq message last year, and I feel like he's more or less with the program; Hoyer seems like he's always been out for himself and not with the program. However, shortly thereafter the news cycle's narrative became "Murtha is too corrupt". Since what evidence there is on Murtha being corrupt dates back well over 20 years, one has to wonder why the press only jumped on this story once the Pelosi endorsement came out. For example, could a certain outgoing Minority Whip with a penchant for undermining the party be spreading rumors? We don't know.

I think Pelosi is an astute leader, and my opinion is backed up by the fact that anyone of any gender would have to be pretty sharp to get where she has gotten. Hopefully she will inspire more women to get involved, and hopefully none of them will be Hillary Clinton.

The Perfect Storm

In the eponymous movie (and book), a group of fisherman goes out in some big storm and some of them die or something. Apparently the original definition of the term must have been a hurricane that causes the maximum amount of damage possible, and extrapolating from that has given us the same practical meaning as the stock phrase "a whole that is more than the sum of its parts." And it really grinds my gears how overused this phrase has become.

The situation has been especially dire with news coverage of the recent midterm elections. Some writers have tossed the term around indiscriminately, and some at least have had the grace to put quotation marks around it. Sometimes reporters are just reporting that some idiot used it, while sometimes they have apparently picked it from amongst many competing nautical metaphors. However, overuse during the midterms has been an extension of the usual journalistic corner-cutting, as there have also been recent mentions in articles on topics as varied as the music business, privacy regulation, and heavy industry.

This example, from my hometown fishwrap, has an outstanding example for analysis. The author desribes the situation thusly:

What we have is a perfect storm which combines the GOP's desperation to tarnish their opponents, the Democrats['] obsessive defensiveness over being branded as soft on defense, and the media's fixation with conflict.

Oh. My. God. More than one thing happened at once? Something was caused by more than one thing? This is so weird it needs a special term. How about perfect storm?

This is precisely the type of nonsense George Orwell decried in 1946 in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, a classic about the lazy degradation of said language for political purposes.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

Step #4 is what is clearly being ignored by the guilty reporters, but to a certain extent this example of misattribution of causation is simply emblematic of some more or less common shortcomings in the human capacity for reason.

When determining cause, people often make the so-called fundamental attribution error, which consists of giving too much weight to an actor's personal characteristics at the expense of his situation. A simple example is seeing someone slip and concluding that he is clumsy instead of taking into account that there was a spot of ice on that part of the sidewalk. Research has also shown that people are frequently content to find one explanation for a phenomenon they observe, no matter how many causes actually contributed; people also expect a cause to look like its outcome and will often discount potential causes that don't look like the observed outcome.

David Hume had even more trouble pinning down causation than research subjects, although he at least gave it some more thought.

One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life.

Other philosophers have given it a go, and they have come up with some incredibly detailed explanations of causation. Non-Western philosophy has taken a crack, although we ought to be able to come up with something that doesn't rely on metaphysics. Perhaps the answer is that life imitates art, as those in the important philosophical tradition of intellectual powerhouse Tipper Gore have suggested.

But getting back to the point, if it's beyond the capacity of David Hume to solve causation, I don't know why I should expect anything more from newspaper reporters, let alone newspaper readers. None the less, I'm siding with Orwell here: I'm tired of hearing how two things happening at once constitutes a perfect storm, and I hope that the fad of describing things as such will soon pass.

It's a Dead Man's Party

Back when legendary supergroup and noted Rodney Dangerfield enthusiasts Oingo Boingo released Dead Man's Party, they probably weren't thinking about the Republicans in 2006, but I sure am.
And I don't mean to connote the party of Abraham Lincoln, one of America's most famously dead people for approximately the last 140 years. Since Lincoln joined The Great Majority, his party has moved through a variety of stages, lately arriving at the point known as "off the deep end". Republicans are currently facing an uphill battle to keep the party alive.

Let's start with Bush. The neoconservatives had their moment in the sun on his watch. Now that Donald Rumsfeld is gone, following the earlier departures of people like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney is the only prominent neocon left in the administration. The new defense secretary, Gates, is a product of the Brent Scowcroft/Bush #41/James Baker school of being evil while at least acknowledging the existence of the real world. As Maureen Dowd puts it in the New York Times,

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.

Gates has two principle strikes against him. Strike One: he played a central role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Said affair was one of America's all-time sleaziest moments, an illegal and immoral international embarrassment under Reagan and #41. Strike Two: at the CIA he was responsible for establishing the precedent that you should manipulate the intelligence you have to make it look like the intelligence you want. In his days, that meant everything was a sign of Communists, but many of the managers he trained at the CIA were still there at the beginning of this decade. And they are the ones who produced the infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showing the "indisputable proof" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But back to Bush. He made a rare acknowledgment of the existence of the real world in his press conference yesterday. Unfortunately, for a moment of honesty it was strikingly dishonest.

Q. "Just a few days before this election, in Texas, you said that Democrats, no matter how they put it, their approach to Iraq comes down to terrorists win, America loses. What has changed today?"

Bush: "What's changed today is the election is over, and the Democrats won."

So, in other words, he lied because of the election, and he expects that excuse to vindicate him. Huh. At least all the cries of "filthy liar" he inspires are confirmed, as if there were ever any doubt. The crowd surrounding #41 mostly confined their lying to big things. You know, things like illegally selling weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages and money and funneling the profits to anti-democratic terrorists in Central America. W just lies about everything, all the time, no matter what the situation or consequences, for any reason. Big deal if he accuses the earnest opposition to the policies he privately realizes are failing of treason if it might help him grab more power, right? Why would anyone think that was wrong?

And this attitude of doing whatever it takes to get some power is all over the party. By way of example, one of the various scummy tactics Republicans used on election day was pretending that Michael Steele, the would-be Republican Senator from Maryland, was a Democrat. Forces friendly to Steele (he obviously knew nothing about it) bused in homeless people from Philadelphia to tell black voters in Baltimore to vote for him as a Democrat. One of the homeless people has spoken up, and his story is heart-wrenching for anyone with a comitment to democracy or social justice:

"People started screaming, at us, 'Do you think we're that stupid? What are you trying to pull?' " said El-Bedawi. "I said, 'I didn't know it was a lie! I'm from Philly!' And they said, 'Then go back to Philly!'

[and]

"I am so angry and upset, I don't know what to do," said El-Bedawi, who's particularly shattered that he and at least 200 other Philadelphians didn't get home from Maryland in time to vote here.

"These people think we're too stupid to understand the magnitude of what we did."

[and]

"I might not have a home," El-Bedawi told me yesterday, "but that doesn't mean I don't care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way."

This is becoming the problem for Republicans: people are starting to realize how much they care about right and wrong. It is becoming more and more obvious to people across the country that no matter where Republicans say they stand on a given issue, they just can't be allowed to rule.

Once upon a time, Karl Rove had a dream of building an unstoppable Republican super-coalition. He would maintain all the current Republican support and add black evangelicals and Latino social conservatives, yielding a permanent majority. Not only did this election shatter that dream in the short run, but it looks like Rove may be building a permanent majority for Democrats. The youth vote apparently fell to Democrats by a margin over 20% this cycle; other polls show that the younger people are, the more support they have for things like gay rights. And Latinos and blacks, shall we say, did not exactly fall in line. This year, Latinos gave 69% of their vote to Democrats while blacks voted 89% for Democrats.

Democrats will probably pick up some more seats next election, especially in the Senate, while the GOP fights its civil war between the maniacs and the evil reasoners. Eventually Republicans will bounce back to some degree. But there aren't many trends looking good for them right now, and it looks like they're dead in the water for the time being. I'm sure more than a few wish their party could be more like that one dead man's party.

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

This summer, Time ran the cover article displayed at left about George Bush running up against the limits of going it alone. Well yesterday he ran up against an even more important limit - the amount of BS the public was willing to tolerate. So now that the Bush cowboys have been vanquished (note that real cowboys like John Tester are flourishing), certain questions are emerging to define our moment. These questions are based on the 'who' of the situation, and they boil down to these two: who is responsible for getting the Democrats here now? And who are the Democrats that are now here?

As for who got us here, there are three possible answers I'm looking at, including conservative, moderate, DLC-type Democrats; progressive, blog-friendly, liberal Democrats; and Republicans. As for who they are, duh, out of that selection the first two are the only possibilities.

Basic election coverage in both the New York Times and the Washington Post includes statements to the effect that the earthquake we've just seen was brought to us by conservative Democrats. The reasoning appears to go that only a more moderate or conservative Democrat could wrest a Republican seat away from said Republican, plus newly elected Democrats like Heath Shuler (NC-11) and Bob Casey (PA-Sen) are not supporters of abortion rights. Others in the MSM are eager to credit Rahm Emanuel with hatching a brilliant strategy that paid off big time.

Fortunately, these two arguments are easy to dismiss. Voters pretty clearly repudiated conservatism in favor of liberalism (judging by the exit polls), and a lot of the newbies just aren't that conservative anyway. While Shuler and Casey might be more conservative than Sherrod Brown (OH-Sen), they share one particularly notable quality - economic populism. In addition to Brown, Democrats added some bona fide progressives in Jerry McNerney (CA-11), John Yarmuth (KY-03), and Tim Walz (MN-01). So that takes care of the illusion that somehow going centrist was a national recipe for Democratic success.

As for Rahm Emanuel, the worst thing since un-sliced bread, I guess I'll start with the positives: he raised a huge amount of money, and he recruited several candidates. Good. Now let's jump right into the bad stuff. There is absolutely no doubt that we won the House despite Rahm Emanuel, not because of him. Per the article in the preceding link, here's his rap sheet:

• Constantly recruited candidatest for primaries against more progressive Democrats that were otherwise unopposed, including McNerney and Yarmuth. Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) was another Rahm recruit, from out of district, who won her primary but lost the general election despite the $3 million Rahm dumped into her race; her primary opponent, Cegelis, got really close to Henry Hyde last cycle with very little help. Michael Arcuri (NY-24) is another example of a Rahm primary recruit, but he won his general election.
• Stiffed in the general election any candidate who ran against one of his primary choices. There was no money forthcoming from the DCCC for candidates like Yarmouth and McNerney, and candidates like Larry Kissell (NC-08) who did receive some support are now locked in statistical dead heats that probably could have been broken with some of the $3 million Rahm poured into losing IL-06 (although of course we were all pulling for Tammy).
• Warned of gloom and doom if Democrats ever made the mistake of talking about the Iraq war, and we all know how much voters supported the Republican position on that.

Republicans obviously don't make up the new crop of Democratic winners (except in Kansas, where there were multiple defections from R to D), so let's think about whether they gave the election away. They raised a ton of money, they ran some really nasty ads, and they did everything in their vicious power to paint Democrats as whatever they liked. For their part, Democrats ran their 50-state strategy, expaned the field of contested seats, and hit hard on Iraq. So while we couldn't have done it without the Republicans, I think we earned it.

If many of the new Democrats entering Congress will be reasonably progressive, who will the rest of the Democrats be? Well, some of the most important ones, committee chairs, will be liberals - Conyers (MI), Waxman (CA), Rangell (NY) are some of the names now giving Republicans nightmares. You see, although Republicans abolished the practice of giving chairmanships based on seniority, Democrats didn't, and the Democrats with the longest service are (no surprise) the ones in the most liberal districts. So the composition of our august legislature, brought to you by the left wing of the party, will also be largely leftist.

The new Democratic majority is also the first since 1920 to come to power without a majority of seats in the South. Liberals like Tom Schaller have been arguing for some time that this is precisely the party makeup Democrats should be embracing anyway. And, indeed, it does seem that it will alow a less compromising brand of liberalism to guide the new party. Additional stability should come from the fact that PVI ratings (Partisan Voter Index - a measure of a district's underlying partisanship, independent of its elected representative, based on its presidential voting) for many new Democratic districts in the Northeast and Midwest lean Democratic. Since so much has changed in the last couple of years, I would guess that the next time PVI ratings come out, they will be more favorable to Democrats in some of the other new seats in the Mountain West and Midwest that currently look more Republican. These data put the nail in the coffin of the argument that it must take a conservative Democrat to capture one of these seats.

Another way people are asking the question "Who are the Democrats that are now here?" is in terms of what they will do and who they will invesitgate. For his part, Bush has made an overture for bipartisanship with Democrats. However, it should be remembered that Bush is an awful, malicious human being who probably doesn't mean it.

On a rhetorical level, it's a neck-snapping reversal from the savage smearing of Democrats as troop-hating terrorist-appeasing cowards that continued right up until last night, when the will of the voters became undeniable even by White House standards.

Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled off a bipartisanship-style reinvention of his image this year en route to easy reelection as governor of California after pushing a right-wing agenda last year, but suggesting that George Bush might be capable of coopting a Democratic platform to the same extent stretches the limits of believability. There's no way any voter wants the Democrats to jump right into retribution for the cockamamy investigations Republicans launched against Clinton, so Democrats have sensibly promised bipartisanship in holding the administration accountable. But it is essential going forward that they not resort to what some have started calling "date rape bipartisanship": giving in to the Republican agenda in the name of compromise. If Republicans want to be bipartisan in actually holding the administration accountable, actually fixing Medicare, or actually promoting alternative energy, I say give em a seat at the table. But our new, hard earned progressive influence in Congress shouldn't be wasted on the Lieberman-style "bipartisanship" of supporting Bush on Iraq and the privatization of Social Security.

What Now?

Well, that was fun. There was some election theft, but we pulled it out for the good guys. The Democrats took the House decisively, and the MSM is using some well advised caution in calling the Senate. However, the DSCC is taking the right approach in calling VA and MT for Democrats while still encouraging every voice to be heard through a recount; assuming they're right, and assuming Lieberman doesn't further betray us, we will have the Senate. So what now? The first question on the lips of any thoughtfully engaged civic participant is, of course, which Led Zeppelin song title best characterizes the story of this election?

• Communication Breakdown: Republicans are finally revealed to have nothing more to offer than their brilliant communications strategy, which finally breaks down.
  
• Gallows Pole: Republicans have been judged for all their crimes and will now face the brutal frontier justice of Congressional committee investigations.
  
• Good Times, Bad Times: Good times were had by some when the treason rhetoric and tax cuts were flowing freely from Republicans, who are now in for some mighty bad times.
  
• Heartbreaker: Republicans had their hopes up really high this time, but their hearts were broken when the results came in? This one doesn't seem too plausible.
  
• Ramble On: Bush's rambling, incoherent speeches will continue unfettered as Democrats continue to give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants. I'm not buying this one, either.
  
• Ten Years Gone: It has been ten years (give or take) since Democrats controlled the House, and now that those ten years are gone, we're back in action, baby.
  
• The Song Remains the Same: Democrats are the same as Republicans, all politicians lie and steal and cheat equally, nothing will change. I'm giving a big thumbs down to this one, too.
  
• When the Levee Breaks: When it rains, it pours. Voters' resistance to Republicans broke in a bunch of little spots, and it led to a landslide for Democrats. When conservative ideology threw poor black people overboard during Hurricane Katrina, the levees broke and there was no going back for Republicans. This is probably the most compelling.
  
• Your Time is Gonna Come: Well, the Republicans' time just came, actually. But directed at Bush, whose time to be investigated is going to come when Democrats finally get on top of those committees, this might be pretty apt.

In a somewhat more serious examination of metaphors, noted U. of C. alumnus David Broder remarks for the WaPo that the appropriate metaphor to use here is not tidal wave, but earthquake. An earthquake causes a lot of commotion when fundamental, underlying elements undergo dramatic shifts, whereas a tidal wave makes a big splash that doesn't leave much lasting impact when the water recedes and everything goes back more or less to what it was. But that's a topic for another post, which I will hopefully get to tonight.

For now, the most comprehensive way to describe this election may (somehow, if this is even possible) not involve Led Zeppelin at all. Perhaps the best way to describe this election is through Neil Young: "Hey hey, my my."

The Inevitable Tightening

For most of this campaign cycle, Democrats have had a significant advantage in the so-called "generic ballot." This ballot is a poll question that asks voters which party they would prefer to see in power (usually in the House) without mentioning candidate names. However, two recent polls that asked about the generic ballot found the Democrats' lead diminished dramatically from where it had been earlier in October. But how much does it matter?

For starters, the last time there was a hegemonic shift in Congress, 1994, the Democrats lost a whopping 52 seats, and the last generic ballot showed them up by 5%. This guy takes a statistical validitation approach to declaring his opposition to the use of generic ballots. On the other hand, this guy just thinks there is no such thing as a generic Democrat or Republican. It is part of the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans always underperform in the generic ballot because they turn out at higher rates than Democrats. Of course it doesn't help that Republicans do a pretty good job of suppressing Democratic turnout through shady and/or illegal means (see here, here, here, and here, for example; see here for what to do).

But these are the real reasons why I'm feeling pretty good about the Democrats' chances tomorrow despite the tightening of the generic ballot:

• Race by race, we are projected to win a majority (218 or greater) even before toss-up races are factored in.
• Voter enthusiasm has been higher among Democrats, which should mean more Democrats are motivated to get out to the polls. Supposedly Kerry's latest slip is going to reenergize Republicans, but I think it may be counteracted by the Haggard gay sex 'n' meth scandal.
• People always come home at the end. One of the classical debates in political science has been whether voters make their decisions rationally or emotionally. The most likely answer is that there's a little bit of both involved, but the upshot is that by the time of the election, some of those people who were thinking this might be the year they crossed party lines will come home and vote with their own party after all. This can be seen in New Jersey, a solid Democratic state, where once-endangered Senator Bob Menendez has been pulling away.
• The two polls showing diminished leads have proven to be outliers, since other polls have since come out showing the same comfortable leads we were used to.
  

As you're well aware, it all depends on how many people turn out, so make sure you do your part. GET OUT THE VOTE! GO DEMOCRATS!

Pins and Needles

Start holding your breath....now!

Digging Themselves Into a Fox Hole

The Evil Fox Network has just announced some terrible ratings news that should make everyone who prizes independent thought cheer in unison - their ratings are down almost a full quarter over the last year. This, frankly, is incredible. Considering the kind of numbers Fox is used to putting up, we're talking about an enormous amount of people. And it's all the more incredible for how unstoppable they seemed as recently as, well, a year ago. Along with the decline of Ann Coulter, it might be the most interesting trend this fall. The thing about the unstoppable right-wing juggernaut of the last decade or so is that it all depended on momentum, like a pyramid scheme.

Fox blames its bad ratings news on the fact that this is a slower news year than 2005, which can't possibly be true. Any year when there is a major, tightly contested election is automatically a big news year. More appropriately, 2006 has been a bad news year for people who watch Fox, in that their entire movement has been collapsing under the weight of its own lies and antipathy. Since, as I've explained, the liberal system is based on being right while the right-wing system is based on maintaining power, the right-wing system has always necessarily functioned as more than the sum of its parts. Things only worked when they worked in synch. Fox was a very influential part of this system, and it is therefore a great case study in how this is going to be a vicious downward spiral for the Repugnicans.

The excellent book Off Center explored an interesting aspect of this system. Right-wingers were able to convince moderate Republicans to go along with their extremist agenda because they could offer moderates something called backlash insurance. Because the right wing was able to control the debate, control what bills came to the floor, control the news cycle, and control what went on behind the scenes in conference committees between the House and Senate, Republicans were able to effectively shield these moderates from being held accountable by voters for going along with the very most conservative parts of the right-wing agenda.

The military was also a key piece of this puzzle. It is an old truism in the military that you can't keep the ranks disciplined if they don't think the leaders can shoot straight. Well, as it turns out, the ranks currently don't think the leaders can shoot straight. The Army Times, the newspaper of record for folks in the Army, has joined with sister newspapers for the other services in calling on Rumsfeld to resign. Again, this is huge. The American military is obviously a proud bunch, and one of the most fundamental things they are proud of is their two centuries of subordination to civilian control. When the lies were only partially obvious, and when the consequences were only partially destructive, the military could be counted on to take its orders. But, like most people, there's only so far it wants to be pushed.

So the house of cards is about to come crashing down on the Republicans. Congressional candidates can't get far enough away from Bush, and Democrats are about to get subpoena power. What will happen to Bush? Everyone knows he lies a lot. And so far he has found it difficult (by his own admission), which is pretty credible since one doubts he has the brain power to pull it off too much longer. Bush was apparently fairly articulate when he was governor of Texas, but lying is stressful, and it may be that the stress of lying all the time is taking its toll. With Republicans in Congress acting as the proverbial rubber stamp, the system has worked together to protect this practice. With the system broken, how will Bush do? How far will the Republicans fall?

I Hear the Secrets That You Keep/When You're Talking in Your Sleep

This fall, Republicans have seemed like they were talking in their sleep. And why not? What do they have to talk about? They have been in total control of government for about six years now, and what do they have to show for it?

1. Tax cuts for the absurdly wealthy, which are now hurting us badly.
2. Faith-based social services, which turn out to have been a political ploy this whole time.
3. "Missile defense" that preoccupied Bush when "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US" couldn't get his attention.
4. A made-to-order, Think Tank brand quagmire in the Middle East.
5. Flushing the environment down the toilet.
6. A screw-everyone-not-named-Pfizer (or Wyeth, or Merck, etc.) drug plan.
7. An attempt to take money away from little old ladies.
8. Disingenuous and ineffective education policy.
9. An eviscerated Constitution.
10. I could go on.

So Republicans have basically shown that they're out to ruin the country, which means there's no agenda left for them to talk about. Instead, they've gone on auto-pilot. They're doing what they do best: scare tactics. Negative advertising has been a big one this cycle for both teams, but especially on the Republican side. They've had some good ones in Tennessee, and some others nationally.

Better yet is the flap this week over John Kerry's statement on education and Iraq. This is what Kerry said on Monday:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

To me, this is more of a joke on how the Bush administration has heightened income inequality and provided a way to get yourself killed if you're poor. It probably wouldn't be my first example if you asked me to cite some jokes that were in good taste, but whatever. Republicans, on the other hand, are the party that brought you the politics of stains and Christmas cards. They absolutely couldn't wait to pounce on their whipping boy Kerry, who they mercilessly antogonized for his alleged lack of patriotism in 2004. Except this time, a full two years too late, Kerry actually fought back with some really good points. Such as the fact that he's actually a decorated veteran, while none of the people attacking him have any significant service. Kerry doesn't need to apologize for this, and it would actually be better if he didn't.

So Republicans, faced with nothing else to run on, are running on a platform of attacking the people who are trying to fix their humongous mess. Fortunately for them, this is what comes naturally. They can talk like this in their sleep. But when they do, it's no secret what they're not talking about.