Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Patrick Ruffini Tries to Take Back His Movement from the Bushies and Their Acolytes

We wish him luck. We suggest he focus more on an appealing vision of what America should become.

He writes:

Patrick Ruffini :: Introducing The Next Right: Today, we’re giving a sneak peek into something new on the right side of the blogosphere: an online community for change-minded activists and hardcore political junkies in the conservative movement.... Here’s why we’re doing this, and here’s why it’s different....

[T]he party, and in many cases, the movement, has lost its moorings. Earmarks exploded ten-fold, and it wasn’t under a Democratic Congress. In this winter’s primary, we saw the once mighty fiscal-social-national conservative coalition turned in on itself, with economic conservatives pitted against social conservatives. And too many of the “experts” in the Presidential campaigns this cycle failed to modernize... clinging to the old top-down rostrums of direct mail and fundraising-by-cocktail-party....

It’s no wonder that Joe Conservative outside the Beltway feels that none of his self appointed “leaders” are listening to him. He looks to Washington and sees a leadership class that is too often arrogant, timid, divided, and technologically behind the curve....  

What are the coalitions, strategies, and tactics the right needs to win again? How does the party need to change to attract a generation of voters who could very well be lost to us if we don’t move fast? Where do we find the candidates who will lead a resurgent right in the 2010 and 2012 elections and beyond?... If you’re looking for pure-play opinion and link bait on sundry topics from Ann Coulter to Jimmy Carter/Hamas, you won’t find it here. What you will find is in-depth (often unabashedly technical) writing about the election, the polls, the strategy, and the issues. Our analysis will track truth and stay true to the numbers. But it will self-consciously serve a greater purpose — educating YOU to be your own political strategist and start doing something.... Only a revival of civic engagement at the grassroots level will create a conservative future we want: one that is pork-free and robust in the defense of our country and its values....

In that spirit, we’re opening the doors to anyone who wants to blog on The Next Right. Users will be able to create their own blogs on the site, an ability only a handful of conservative sites offer today....

I’m pumped about this new venture. The last few months have seen a considerable amount of backchannel discussion between the thought leaders about the sorry state of online activism on the right — often with great agreement on a direction moving forward.... This is not “the Daily Kos of the right.” What we’re hoping to do is create momentum and an intellectual framework for action — because action ultimately starts with narratives and ideas. We want grassroots conservatives and libertarians to start believing that they can make a difference again — a sense all too many have lost. Only you – and not some well-funded 527 — can bring the movement into the future...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Joe Klein Edition)

A conversation in Brewed Awakening this morning:

Thrasymakhos: Why are you chewing your tie?

Glaukon: I made the mistake of reading Joe Klein this morning...

Sokrates: How can listening to what somebody has to say ever be a mistake?

Glaukon: You'll see. The structure of Klein's argument was roughly as follows: (1) Hillary Rodham Clinton has been demagoguing the gas tax holiday; (2) I know it's a bad and stupid idea; (3) but my small unevolved journalist lizard-brain was excited and enthusiastic; (4) but she lost; (5) so I will kick her when she is down; (6) and I feel somewhat guilty; (7) and I will be a more substance- and less spin-minded journalist in the future...

Sokrates: But this is a story of self-development--of someone acquiring knowledge through experience. Why should that make you chew your tie?

Thrasymakhos: No, Sokrates, you are wrong. This is a story of someone pretending to acquire knowledge through experience--it is a false repentance narrative, a la Elmer Gantry. But did you expect any better?

Glaukon: I was not finished. Then there is: (8) John McCain is an honorable man; (9) if Barack Obama "wants to maintain his reputation for honor, he'll have representatives from his campaign sit down with McCain's people to work out a sane, equitable campaign-financing mechanism for the general election — and a robust series of debates." The fact that the initial gas tax holiday demagoguer was John McCain is not mentioned--Joe Klein hides it from his readers. If he meant his pledge to do better, the fact that the gas tax holidy was McCain's idea first would have made it into the column...

Sokrates: Your logic is irrefutable, Glaukon.

Thrasymakhos: You are correct, Glaukon. If I were as ill-mannered as Duncan Black, I would award Joe Klein yet another "wanker of the day" prize.

Sokrates: I do wish you wouldn't chew on your tie, however. It sends the wrong message...

Thrasymakhos: This is Berkeley. Why are you even wearing a tie?

---

Here is Klein:

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1738330,00.html: Clinton stood on the back of a vintage pickup truck in Gastonia, N.C., and let fly in the most impressive fashion — a woman transformed from Eleanor Roosevelt into Huey Long in two short months. Spotting a big yellow placard that said GAS TAX HOLIDAY IS BLATANT PANDERING — a sign she would have ignored in her earlier, less feisty incarnations — she went after the young Obamish sign-holders: Why wasn't the Federal Reserve accused of pandering when it bailed out the Bear Stearns investment bank to the tune of $30 billion? Why shouldn't the oil companies pay the federal gasoline tax this summer instead of the people who "hold their breath" every time they pull up to the gas pump? "I know that some people don't have to worry when they go to the supermarket," she said, staring accusingly at the placard bearers, but "there are people who count their pennies as they walk down the aisle," trying to figure out what they can afford. "Don't they deserve a break every once in a while? They haven't done anything wrong ... The oil companies have had it their way for too long," she said. "I'm tired of being a patsy."

Wow.... I was of two minds. My high-minded policy brain was, of course, appalled. The gas-tax holiday was a scam.... Her sell was, well, shameless pandering.

On the other hand, my cynical low-information political brain was saying, You go, girl. This was fun to watch. "This is a serious election," Clinton said in Gastonia, "but I believe you still should have some fun." She seemed energized by her irresponsibility, sprung from her lifelong, eat-your-peas policy straitjacket.... It seemed like smart politics too... the kind of thing I have seen "work" throughout my nearly 40-year career as a journalist... you could fool most of the people most of the time....

[Yet] Clinton's paste-on populism changed absolutely nothing. The demographic blocs that had determined the shape of this remarkable campaign remained stolidly in place.... Clinton's slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans.... Rush Limbaugh... had counseled his ditto heads to bring "chaos" to the Democratic electoral process by voting for their favorite whipping girl....

Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with George Stephanopoulos. She made alpha-dog power moves.... It wasn't until I read the transcript that I realized that Clinton's bravado had masked a brazenly empty performance. Stephanopoulos nailed her time after time.... In retrospect, it was easy to see that Clinton was desperate, willing to say almost anything to get over. At the time, she just seemed strong, certainly stronger than Obama on Meet the Press ... at least she did to me and many members of my chattering tribe. And our knee-jerk reactions — our prejudice toward performance values over policy — could infect the campaign to come between Obama and John McCain, just as it has the primaries....

The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative....

In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Obama went directly after both McCain and the media. "[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election," Obama said. "Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along."

That may have been unfair to McCain, since the Senator from Arizona won the Republican nomination in much the same way Obama has triumphed — as an outsider, an occasional reformer, a pariah to blowhards like Limbaugh. But it's also true that McCain has a choice to make: in the past month, he has wobbled between the high and low roads, at one point calling Obama the Hamas candidate for President after a member of that group "endorsed" the Senator from Illinois. If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he's going to have to stop the sleaze. And if Obama wants to maintain his reputation for honor, he'll have representatives from his campaign sit down with McCain's people to work out a sane, equitable campaign-financing mechanism for the general election — and a robust series of debates. Mark McKinnon, a McCain adviser who has said he would rather recuse himself than help his candidate against Obama, has suggested that the two candidates campaign together, staging Lincoln-Douglas-style debates across the country — a proposal similar to the offer that Kennedy reportedly wanted to make if he ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain. All the evidence — and especially the selection of these two apparent nominees — suggests the public not only is taking this election very seriously but is also extremely concerned about the state of the nation and tired of politics as usual. I suspect the public is also tired of media as usual, tired of journalists who put showmanship over substance ... as I found myself doing in the days before the May 6 primaries. Obama was talking about the Republicans, but he could easily have been talking about the press when he said, "The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they will run; it's what kind of campaign we will run. It's what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn't get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it."

Politics will always be propelled by grease, hot air and showmanship, but in the astonishing prosperity of the late 20th century, we allowed our public life to drift toward too much show biz, too little substance. Yes, the low-information signals — the bowling and tamale-eating — are crucial; politicians have to show that they are in touch with the lives of average folks. But a balance needs to be struck between carnival populism and the higher demands of democracy, and as a nation, we haven't been very good lately with the serious part of the program. As a result, there is a festering sense — I've seen it everywhere I've traveled this year — that the country is in "the ditch," as Clinton said. A general-election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama doesn't need any hype. It won't be boring. The question is whether we, politicians and press alike, will grant this election — and electorate — the respect that it deserves.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain vs the Economists

Felix Salmon writes:

Clinton vs the Economists: [D]oes it matter if politicians ignore economists? Thoma and Mankiw say yes, if they're willing to ignore the experts on one of the few areas where the experts agree with each other, then you can't trust that they will ever make good use of advice. Krugman and Cowen say no, there are bigger fish to fry, and economists tend to overrate their own importance.

For me, personally, this gas-tax episode has changed my opinion of Hillary Clinton quite dramatically. Yes, I've been an Obama supporter for a while, but I've been less opposed to Clinton than most Obama supporters, until now. But the gas-tax proposal reminded me of the way that she described the proposed Dubai Ports deal as a threat to national security, and I realized that I just couldn't trust her assertions. I'm pretty sure she's smart enough to know that she's pandering - what Mankiw calls "mendacity with a dash of condescension". Which means that Clinton considers working-class votes to be more important than working-class voters. And that's not a claim I'd make about either of the other two candidates.

And Greg Mankiw writes:

Greg Mankiw's Blog: In Praise of Gas Tax Hysterics: Paul Krugman thinks all of the fuss about the gas tax holiday has become a bit hysterical. He agrees that the policy is a bad idea, but it is no big deal, so let's not focus on it. Paul is right that the issue is, quantitatively, small potatoes, but I am nonetheless pleased to see it get so much attention. This issue is like the canary in the coal mine: No one really cares about the canary, but its condition tells us about deeper problems that lie below.

Many economic issues (e.g., health care, corporate taxation, the trade deficit) are vastly complicated, with experts holding a variety of opinions. When candidates disagree, it simply means that each is siding with a different set of experts, and it is hard for laymen to figure out which set of experts is right. By contrast, the gas tax holiday is not nearly as complicated, and the experts speak with one voice.

Why, then, are candidates proposing the holiday? I can think of three hypotheses:

• Ignorance: They don't know that the consensus of experts is opposed.
• Hubris: They know the experts are opposed, but they think they know better.
• Mendacity with a dash of condescension:* They know the experts are opposed, and they secretly agree, but they think they can win some votes by pulling the wool over the eyes of an ill-informed electorate.

So which of these three hypotheses is right? I don't know, but whichever it is, it says a lot about the character of the candidates.

It is very clear on both McCain's and Rodham Clinton's part that it is not ignorance It my be to some degree hubris on McCain's part--but I doubt it. It is overwhelmingy on Rodham Clinton's part and predominantly on McCain's part the third option: mendacity with a dash of condescension.

And Greg is right: it says a lot of bad things about th character of John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton that they would do this.

Oderint dum Metuant

Paul Krugman gets it wrong, I think:

Gas tax hysterics - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog: OK, this has gone overboard. Hillary Clinton’s proposed gas tax holiday is not, in my view, a good idea. But the furor over what is, when all is said and done, a small and temporary policy proposal is entirely disproportionate. What’s going on?

Part of it, clearly, is the fact that many people in the media really, really want Obama to win and Clinton to lose — read Kurt Andersen — and have seized on the gas tax as their latest proof that she is ee-ee-vil. But there’s also something going on with economists, a phenomenon I recognize wearing my other hat: the tendency to place excessive weight on issues where professional judgment differs from lay opinion.... [E]conomists then become like the little boy with a hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail. Because protectionism is an issue on which they believe they have some special insight, they inflate its importance, and make free trade versus protectionism THE crucial issue in economic policy — which it isn’t. Trade barriers are a minor issue.... Yet economists talk much more about trade than they do about health care policy, because they think they know something about it in a way the laity don’t.

The gas tax holiday is in this category.... There’s a lot of troubling stuff in both Democrats’ proposals. Mandates aside, Obama is seriously low-balling the cost of health care reform, and promising way too much in middle-class tax cuts. Clinton’s numbers don’t quite add up either, though she’s probably closer to the mark — and both Dems are towering figures of responsibility compared with McCain. Amid all this, the gas tax holiday is a real issue, but a small one; don’t let economist’s tendency to overemphasize their areas of expertise distort your view.

Two points...

First, there's not a lot of troubling stuff in both Democrats' proposals. There's a little troubling stuff in both Democrats' proposals. All in all, they are quite good--economists these days sit around their department lounge and feel pity for John McCain's guy Doug Holtz-Eakin; they don't feel pity for Austan Goolsbee or Laura Tyson.

Second, it is important that presidential candidates fear economists even in the campaign. If they don't fear their economists, then we get campaign promises of really lousy economic policy, some of which will then make it into post-election real policy, and then we are in trouble. Republican politicians have not feared their economists since... the Eisenhower administration, I think, and so Republican economic policy is overwhelmingly lousy. Democratic politicians have in the past and still today fear the bad headlines that are generated if their own economic advisers say that they are full of it. And so their campaign rhetoric is less out-to-lunch. And their post-election policies are better.

For Paul to take steps to diminish Democratic politicians' fear of economists... Well, it's contrary to guild rules. Just saying...

Ezra Klein's Menagerie of Decent Conservatives

He names five:

Ezra Klein Archive | The American Prospect:

• Megan McArdle.... I read Megan long before she moved to DC, and in fact, long before I knew her real name, or had ever met her.... I read, and link, to her because she's the writer on the right who's engaged in the project most similar to mine: Namely, trying to seriously examine social and economic policy. But... she's also my inverse. Where my project is trying to figure out social policy from the premise that the economic system is stacked against the not-so-powerful, her premise -- and target -- seems to be that the political culture is stacked against the interests of the rich and economically dynamic.... [S]he comes to some bizarre -- and occasionally cruel -- conclusions, but she also gets in a lot of worthwhile insights, and asks a lot of questions that I find useful. So if what you're interested in is a right wing version of me -- which is to say, a social policy writer who comes to the opposite conclusions and starts from the opposite premises -- she's your girl.

• Ramesh Ponnuru: I find it exhausting to wade through The Corner, but Ponnuru is an interesting thinker with takes policy research very seriously. His article on the conservative approach to health care is about the best I've read on the subject. If I could get a feed of just his blog posts, he'd probably be atop my list.

• Ross Douthat: Great writer, deep thinker. For better or for worse, Ross is among the conservative writers most palatable to liberal readers, probably in part because he's often writing in contraposition to the Republican establishment.... [R]eading Ross will tends to give you insight into how the Republican party is experienced by its more thoughtful members....

• The American Scene: A totally unclassifiable group of political thinkers assembled by Reihan Salam, who's possibly the world's least classifiable individual, period. Includes Peter Suderman, who's one of my favorite cultural writers, and James Poulos, whose stuff I enjoy quite a bit.

• David Weigel: Weigel's one of Reason's guys... loves politics, is obsessed with the horserace, and hates both parties. It's like reading a sports blog by someone who loathes all the teams but can't tear himself away from the joy and spectacle of the competition.

Four of these are, IMHO, OK. But I really have to dissent from the recommendation of Ponnuru. I can't understand what Ezra Klein is thinking.

When I think of Ramesh Ponnuru, I think of someone who is "mystified" at being accused of offering "bad math" in his comments on Bush's Social Security plan:

Ramesh Ponnuru: My post criticized Jacob Weisberg for claiming that President Bush had been unwilling to cut Social Security benefits and had instead balanced the books on his reform plan by invoking high stock-market returns. That wasn't true. Bush proposed cuts in future benefits...

Alas, Bush never "balanced the books" on his Social Security reform plan. Never. Jason Furman--the only person ever to go public with any estimates of the budget impact of the Bush plan, such as it was (certainly no Bush appointees ever had any numbers to talk about), calculated that it closed "only 24 percent of the 75-year [estimated Social Security funding] gap..."

When I think of Ramesh Ponnuru, I think of the guy who flamed Rod Dreher for being concerned about the interaction of industrial air pollution with his kid's asthma.

And, of course, when I think of Ramesh Ponnuru I think of the guy who fled in terror from the subtitle and dust jacket of his own book:

Ramesh Ponnuru: The Corner on National Review Online: A QUIBBLE byRamesh Ponnuru: Garance Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death[: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life], which she describes as a "book on Democrats." The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it's tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn't meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don't mean by the phrase. I'm not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I've tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)

But what Ponnuru was "complaining" about did not come from Amazon but from Ponnuru's own publisher, Regnery. Here was the inside flap of his book:

Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?

If you look at their agenda they are.

IT’S NOT JUST abortion-on-demand. It’s euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide—-and a potentially deadly concern with "the quality of life" of disabled people. If you think these issues don’t concern you—guess again. The Party of Death could be roaring into the White House, as National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru shows, in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.... Ponnuru details how left-wing radicals, using abortion as their lever, took over the Democratic Party-—and how they have used their power to corrupt our law and politics, abolish our fundamental right to life, and push the envelope in ever more dangerous directions.... Ponnuru’s shocking exposé shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them. But he also shows how the tide is turning, how the Party of Death can be defeated...

There is a Ramesh Ponnuru who is a reasonable thinker. But there is also a Ramesh Ponnuru who will say anything to get in better with Republican office-holders. And there is a Ramesh Ponnuru who thinks his job is to feed the wingnuts. You cannot separate them. You shouldn't pretend that you can.

If Ramesh Ponnuru wants to pull an Andrew Sullivan--to perform a public apology and penance for his past sins against sanity--then Ezra Klein can add him to his menagerie of decent conservatives. But until then, no.

Friends Don't Let Friends Support Hillary Rodham Clinton Over Barack Obama

Fortunately for the Democratic Party--but unfortunately for the country--John McCain is worse. Outsourced to Charles Dodgson:

Through the Looking Glass: And now, my disappointments with Hillary:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supported her plan for a gas-tax suspension.

Mrs. Clinton did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on the ABC program “This Week.” A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Look. This isn't hard. The supply of gas over the summer is basically fixed; refineries are running flat out, and can't quickly add capacity. Retailers won't respond to more demand by selling more gas --- because they can't. So, what does happen? They keep raising the price of the stuff they have until they can no longer sell it all. So, for lack of any other rationing system, the free market effectively rations the stuff by willingness to pay. And, as Paul Krugman explains:

... if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. [Emphasis added.] Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount.

The plan won't save ordinary folks a dime. And some of them aren't fooled:

Stephanopoulos turned the mike over to a woman who said she supported Obama and said she makes less than $25,000 a year.

"I do feel pandered to when you talk about suspending the gas tax," the woman said, adding: "Call me crazy but I actually listen to economists because I think they know what they've studied."

So, what of Hillary herself? She's touting a plan that's nonsense the way Dubya's war plans were nonsense; the reasons it can't work are widely acknowledged facts which aren't seriously disputed by anyone with relevant knowledge.

Perhaps, after days of publicly touting this proposal, she still doesn't know she's selling snake oil. Or maybe she knows, but doesn't care. Either way, she has left the reality based community.

Expertise...

Robert Reich writes about Hillary Rodham Clinton's and John McCain's character issues:

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Listen to Economists: When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.”

I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”

That’s the problem: Politics as usual.

The gas tax holiday is small potatoes relative to everything else. But it’s so economically stupid (it would increase demand for gas and cause prices to rise, eliminating any benefit to consumers while costing the Treasury more than $9 billion, and generate more pollution) and silly (even if she won, HRC won’t be president this summer) as to be worrisome. That HRC now says she doesn’t care that what economists think is even more troubling.

In case you’ve missed it, we now have a president who doesn’t care what most economists think. George W. Bush doesn’t even care what scientists think. He rejects all experts who disagree with his politics. This has led to some extraordinarily stupid policies.

I’m not saying HRC is George Bush. And I'm not suggesting economists have all the answers. But when economists tell a president or a presidential candidate that his or her idea is dumb – and when all respectable economists around America agree that it’s a dumb idea – it’s probably wise for the president or presidential candidate to listen. When the president or candidate doesn’t, and proudly defends the policy by saying she's "not going to put my lot in with economists,” we’ve got a problem, folks.

Even though the summer gas tax holiday is pure hokum, it polls well, which is why HRC and John McCain are pushing it. That Barack Obama is not in favor of it despite its positive polling numbers speaks volumes about the kind of president he’ll be – and the kind of president we’d otherwise get from McCain and HRC.

Haven’t we had enough of politicians who reject facts in favor of short-term poll-driven politics?

I Think Paul Krugman's Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton Has Just Come to an End

Ezra Klein:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: CLINTON VS. ECON. Asked about the gas tax holiday and the universal opposition from economists, Hillary Clinton said, "Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists." Regular readers know I have my own moments of econo-skepticism, but I really wouldn't advise folks to throw in with political hacks instead....

[T]he gas tax stuff shouldn't be thought of as economists versus everyone else. It's economists, environmentalists, energy experts, budget types, and anyone who has spent a couple minutes thinking through the implications of the policy. It's simply a bad idea, albeit one that polls well, so Clinton is running with it. That's experience you can count on, or something.

The terrifying thing is that it is still overwhelmingly likely that HRC economic policy would be better than the economic policy of John McCain...

"Straight Talk" It Ain't

John McCain on video:

John McCain in the eyes of the in-the-tank press corps--in this case Steve Holland of Reuters:

McCain slowly but surely distancing self from Bush: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Slowly but surely, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is putting some distance between himself and unpopular President Bush. This week it was the ill-timed "Mission Accomplished" banner that the White House hung behind Bush five years ago when Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq. "I thought it was wrong at the time," McCain said in Cleveland Thursday, proceeding to criticize Vice President Dick Cheney's various comments over the years that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes" with "a few dead-enders" all that was left.

Last week, McCain surprised some in the White House by declaring Bush's leadership "disgraceful" during the crisis over the 2005 Katrina hurricane that walloped New Orleans. "Never again," McCain declared.

It is a strategy born of necessity for McCain, facing uphill odds as he tries to win a third straight White House term for his party, a feat that has happened only once in presidential politics in the past half century. Political experts say McCain has to put some distance between himself and Bush, whose approval rating was at 27 percent in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The same poll found that 43 percent of Americans have "major concerns" that McCain will be too closely aligned with Bush's agenda...

The McCain-Clinton Gas Tax Holiday

In my inbox right now, from a highly-respected public finance economist:

In the long and sad annals of truly bad ideas, it is unusual for one to receive bipartisan support at such high levels right in the middle of a campaign as this one has...

Why oh why can't we have less dishonest presidential candidates?

Paul Krugman Likes McCain Fiscal Policy Even Less than I Do

Paul writes:

Bush Made Permanent: [T]he perception, eagerly propagated by Mr. McCain’s many admirers in the news media, [is] that he’s very different from Mr. Bush — a responsible guy, a straight talker. But is this perception at all true? During the 2000 campaign people said much the same thing about Mr. Bush; those of us who looked hard at his policy proposals, especially on taxes, saw the shape of things to come. And a look at what Mr. McCain says about taxes shows the same combination of irresponsibility and double-talk that, back in 2000, foreshadowed the character of the Bush administration.

The McCain tax plan contains three main elements.

First, Mr. McCain proposes making almost all of the Bush tax cuts, which are currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, permanent.... Second, he wants to eliminate the alternative minimum tax.... Third, he wants to sharply reduce tax rates on corporate profits.... [T]he overall effect of the McCain tax plan would be to reduce federal revenue by more than $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s a lot of revenue loss — enough to pose big problems for the government’s solvency....

[L]et’s look at what I found truly revealing: the McCain campaign’s response to the Tax Policy Center’s assessment... written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, criticizes the center for adopting “unrealistic Congressional budgeting conventions.” What’s that about? Well, Congress... [compares] the McCain plan with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expired on schedule. Mr. Holtz-Eakin wants the McCain plan compared, instead, with “current policy” — which he says means maintaining tax rates at today’s levels. But here’s the thing: the reason the Bush tax cuts are set to expire is that the Bush administration engaged in a game of deception. It put an expiration date on the tax cuts, which it never intended to honor, as a way to hide those tax cuts’ true cost. The McCain campaign wants us to accept the success of that deception as a fact of life. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is saying, in effect, “We’re not engaged in any new irresponsibility — we’re just perpetuating the Bush administration’s irresponsibility. That doesn’t count.”

It’s the sort of fiscal double-talk that has been a Bush administration hallmark.... Mr. McCain’s budget talk simply doesn’t make sense. So what are Mr. McCain’s real intentions?... [T]he McCain tax plan... [is] a giant exercise in pandering — an attempt to mollify the G.O.P.’s right wing, and never mind if it makes any sense.

The impression that Mr. McCain’s tax talk is all about pandering is reinforced by his proposal for a summer gas tax holiday — a measure that would, in fact, do little to help consumers, although it would boost oil industry profits.

More and more, Mr. McCain sounds like a man who will say anything to become president.

Short-Term Costs of Long-Run Fiscal Stupidity

I'm glad I'm not a Republican. Just saying.

---

J. Bradford DeLong: Project Syndicate: Back in 1981, America’s Republican Party gave up all belief that the government’s budget ought to be balanced. The idea took hold that tax cuts should be undertaken all the time, at every opportunity, because reducing taxes supposedly raised revenue.

Irving Kristol, sometime editor of the magazine The Public Interest and one of the intellectual midwives of this idea, later wrote that he was interested not in whether it was true, but in whether it was useful. Years later, he spoke of his “own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task...was to create a new...conservative... Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government...” Now it has become clear that John McCain – who once criticised George W Bush’s tax cuts as imprudent and refused to vote for them – has succumbed to this potion. He appears to be proposing further tax cuts that promise to cost the US Treasury some $300bn a year, to “offset” them with cuts in earmarked spending accounted for at $3bn a year, and somehow to balance the budget.

We know the consequences: McCain’s fiscal policy is likely to be standard Republican fiscal policy – and since 1981, standard Republican fiscal policy has increased the ratio of gross federal debt to GDP by nearly 2% per year. By contrast, a typical post-WWII Democratic administration has reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio by more than 1% per year. This is one of the issues at stake in this year’s presidential election.

Policies that ignore the level of government debt lead to the currency’s collapse, depression (due to the resulting disruption of the sectoral division of labour), and high inflation – perhaps hyperinflation. Often, the guilty blame the economic catastrophe on the sinister manipulations of foreigners like the “gnomes of Zurich” or the IMF. The US is far from that point. But even in the shorter run – over the next two presidential terms, say – the costs of a high deficit and rapid debt growth would be substantial.

A growing debt-to-GDP ratio would, in the first instance, crowd out investment, as resources that would otherwise go to fund productive investment instead support private or public consumption. Since 1981, the US has been lucky in that inflows of capital from abroad financed the growth of government debt. At some point, this will stop, and increases in deficits will trigger capital flight from the US. Suppose that over the next eight years larger deficits trigger neither extra capital inflows nor capital outflows, and suppose that a lower-investment America is a poorer America, with a gross social return on investment of 15% per year. By 2016, America’s productive potential would be smaller by an amount that would reduce real GDP by 3.6% – $500bn real dollars, or roughly $3,000 per worker. In a poorer America, fewer businesses would find it worthwhile to entice secondary workers from families into the labor force, and perhaps 500,000 net jobs would disappear.

In getting from here to there over the next eight years, a higher-debt America would see productivity growth slow by perhaps a third of a percentage point per year. Average unemployment would then have to rise in order to keep workers’ demands for real wage increases at a level warranted by productivity growth. The gross correlations between productivity growth and average unemployment found in the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and 2000’s would increase the economy’s natural rate of unemployment by about one-fifth of a percentage point, costing an additional 500,000 jobs.

And a higher-debt America is one in which savers and lenders would have a justified greater fear that the government would resort to inflation in order to repudiate part of its outstanding debt. The Federal Reserve would then have to fight inflation – putting upward pressure on unemployment – in order to reassure savers and lenders of its willingness to guard price stability. There are not even crude gross correlation-based estimates of the size of this effect, but economists believe that it is very real. Would it cost a negligible number of jobs? A quarter-million? A million?

Add it all up, and you can reckon on an America that in 2016 that will be much poorer if McCain rather than Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president. Other countries that are counting on exporting to America would be affected by slower growth and lower employment in the US.

However, under McCain, the wedge between public spending and taxes would be larger, Americans would feel richer, and they would spend more at the expense of “posterity” eight years down the road. Ronald Reagan might have approved. After all, as he put it: “Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?” Or was that Groucho Marx?

Party of the Damned

Dan Froomkin shows us what the print Washington Post could be, if anybody working for it had any ovaries:

Party of the Damned: As the Bush presidency staggers to an end, it's hard to say who has less to brag about: the president or the journalists who cover him. So it's fitting that the last White House Correspondents' Association dinner of the Bush era -- the ultimate celebration of chumminess between the most powerful people in the world and those who are supposed to hold them accountable -- was a dispiriting, mostly humorless affair.

President Bush phoned in his appearance, uttering a few topical one-liners but leaning primarily on greatest-hits footage from previous performances -- and wrapping up with a cartoonish but crowd-pleasing "conducting" of the Marine band. Comedian Craig Ferguson essentially apologized in advance for his understated headlining performance -- a far cry from the withering diatribe delivered by Stephen Colbert two years ago.... [T]he only time he really showed teeth was to attack the no-show New York Times. "The New York Times unfortunately did not buy a table," he said. "They felt that this event 'undercuts the credibility of the press.' It's funny, you see, I thought that Jayson Blair and Judy Miller took care of that. What? . . . Did I go too far? Now let me try this: Shut the hell up, New York Times, you sanctimonious whining jerks!"...

Key members of the White House's torture-management team-- Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state Colin Powell -- along with leading torture apologists -- Attorney General Michael Mukasey, CIA Director Michael Hayden, former White House spokesman Tony Snow and current spokeswoman Dana Perino -- were fawned over as honored guests....

Watch it yourself if you dare. Here is video of the red carpet arrivals and the entire dinner. Here is the Bush performance and the Ferguson performance. Here is footage of the swampy hell that was the Bloomberg after-party.

Michael Scherer writes for Time that Bush "rose to offer C-SPAN viewers another reason to doubt political journalists' ability to be anything but cowardly suck-ups to presidential pomp. In recent years, this event has been known mainly for the fantastic performance in 2006 of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host, who addressed the crowd with a withering critique of both the failures of President Bush and the media. . . . Neither the press nor the president had a rebuttal to Colbert, then or now, so he was simply not invited back and officially forgotten. Ever since, the dinner had been a far less newsworthy affair. As is tradition, the president stood to do a short stand up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor....

[W]hat did British actor Rupert Everett thinks about the dinner? "'Hideous,' he said flatly. 'One of the most hideous events I've ever been to.'"...

Meanwhile. . . . Mark Mazzetti writes in the New York Times: "The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

"While the Geneva Conventions prohibit 'outrages upon personal dignity,' a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments. 'The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,' said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public. . . . Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal.

"'What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense,' said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University....

Legal blogger Sandy Levinson writes that there is "a certain logical paradox here: The very fact that the some US interrogator would suggest that some particular conduct is 'reasonable' in some situation would, by definition, mean that there is not 'universal' condemnation of the practice. This is especially true if one accepts the DOJ argument that 'The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.' Once one allows what might be termed 'purity of utilitarian motive' to dominate the analysis, the game is over, for there will always be those who will argue that it is worth doing practically anything to forestall any 'terrorist attack.'"

Phillip Carter blogs for washingtonpost.com: "Among the more Kafkaesque arguments proffered by the Bush administration for its coercive interrogation (or torture) regime is this: Cruel, inhuman or degrading acts are not torture if they're done with good intentions."

Gitmo Watch

Jess Bravin writes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "When military prosecutors enter Guantanamo's heavily guarded courtroom Monday, they can expect to face a spectacle: their former boss, in uniform, testifying against them. Col. Morris Davis, for two years the chief Guantanamo prosecutor, is expected to testify that the operation he once led has been infected with political agendas and corrupted by the Achilles' heel of military justice -- unlawful command influence. The Bush administration's military commissions plan has careered through internal disarray, administrative setbacks and legal debacles since the president announced it in November 2001, and still has yet to conduct a single trial. But Col. Davis's appearance may be the strangest twist yet. 'It's not that I'm sympathetic to the detainees or say they should get a free pass,' says Col. Davis, now director of the Air Force Judiciary. 'But I do think they are entitled to a fair trial.'"

Time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to Quit the Race

This is really embarrassing. Barack Obama needs to be the Democratic nominee.

Steve Benen writes:

Clinton, on the attack, takes to the airwaves on ‘gas-tax holiday’ - The Carpetbagger Report: It’s one thing for a good presidential candidate to embrace a bad idea. It’s worse when the candidate knows it’s a bad idea. It’s worse still when the candidate attacks her rival for failing to embrace a bad idea. And it’s the worst when the candidate feels so strongly about the bad idea that she starts running television commercials about it.

And that, unfortunately, is exactly what we have in the case of Hillary Clinton and the “gas-tax holiday.” Her campaign unveiled a new TV ad yesterday in North Carolina and Indiana attacking Obama for not supporting a temporary suspension of the 18.4-cent federal gas tax....

I don’t doubt that Clinton’s focus groups found all of this quite compelling.... But Clinton’s proposal has no merit, and would probably do nothing but boost the profits of oil companies. Clinton... no doubt knows this.... It’s rather transparent demagoguery. Worse, it’s crude and cheap demagoguery.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw noted yesterday, “I don’t know any prominent economist who favors this McCain-Clinton proposal. More common is the reaction of a friend of mine (a veteran of the Clinton administration) who calls the idea ‘ludicrous.’”

Paul Krugman, usually a rather enthusiastic Clinton supporter, explains:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing....

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

Alex Koppelman reminds me that “political campaigns are rarely about the actual merits of policy proposals.” That’s painfully true. Demagoguery works. Playing on voters’ fears and ignorance works. Confusing the public with bad ideas that sound good works. But I really don’t think Clinton wants to win this way. She’s smarter and better than cheap pandering.

Worse, all of this reinforces Obama’s argument that he’s more honest, principled, and willing to tell people the truth, even when they don’t want to hear it. Obama wants to present himself as a “different kind of politician,” and Clinton’s gas-tax attacks are making it easier for him to do so.

I’m absolutely certain that McCain and Clinton know full well this gimmick wouldn’t do anything to help consumers, and may actually make matters worse by encouraging consumption, pushing prices higher.

They know this, but are pushing the idea anyway, hoping, cynically, that it will pay political dividends anyway. What a shame.

Greg Anrig on Education Reform

Greg Anrig writes:

An Idea Whose Time Has Gone: The conservative infatuation with vouchers did contribute to one genuine accomplishment. The past thirty years have been a period of enormous innovation in American education.... In addition to charter schools, all kinds of strategies have taken root: public school choice, new approaches to standards and accountability, magnet schools, and open enrollment plans that allow low-income city kids to attend suburban public schools and participate in various curriculum-based experiments. To the extent that the threat of vouchers represented a "nuclear option" that educators would do anything to avoid, the voucher movement helped to prompt broader but less drastic reforms that offer parents and students greater educational choices.

Along the way, some success stories have emerged... strategies that combine school choice initiatives like magnet and charter schools with policies to integrate poor and middle-class students. Wake County, North Carolina, for instance, introduced a policy in 2000 mandating that no school could have more than 40 percent of its students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Because this program makes use of choice and incentives like magnet schools to integrate poor and middle-class kids, it avoids the political hazards of compulsory busing. So far, the results have been impressive. In 2006, 60.5 percent of low-income students in Wake County passed the high school End of Course exams, compared to 43 percent of low-income students in a nearby county of a comparable size.

Of course, the inherent limit to this idea is that many urban school districts are so uniformly poor that there are few, if any, middle-class communities with schools that low-income kids can attend. One way to get around this problem would be to amend the No Child Left Behind Act to give students in failing schools the ability to attend a school outside their own district.... [V]oucher proponents... motivated by a desire to help disadvantaged kids, and not merely an ideological urge to weaken public institutions... [should put] their prodigious energies and money behind choice programs like these that actually work.

Andrew Samwick on Spend-and-Borrow

He writes:

Taxing Our Way Out of a Problem: Greg Mankiw directs us to David Leonhardt's article on John McCain's chief economic advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin.  I've known Doug for a number of years and admired his scholarship and his policy work.  It's got to be frustrating to be pushing the McCain economic agenda.  From the article, here's the crux of the problem:

In all, federal taxes now equal about 19 percent of the nation’s economic output, which is in line with the historical average. But the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, on their current path, would require that number to rise to an unmanageable 30 percent, and beyond, in coming decades.

“We as a nation cannot tax our way out of this problem,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin says. “It’s just not an option.” It is true that we cannot tax our way out of all of this problem.  But we could untax ourselves today into a bigger problem tomorrow.  As I've said before in the context of entitlement reform, all dollars matter:

If concern over tax burdens on future generations is what motivates you, then it is completely inconsistent with that motivation to pass a Medicare prescription drug bill that generates a projected unfunded obligation that is bigger than the projected unfunded obligation in Social Security. It is also completely inconsistent with that motivation to run General Fund deficits that are not balanced by later surpluses, raising the debt burden on future generations. This sort of inconsistency will doom any chance at prudent reform of any of the programs.

If I were a Republican, McCain's flunking the fiscal responsibility test is one of the many things that would make me a Democrat.

Felix Salmon Goes to the Milken Conference

He sees signs of increasing non-stupidity in the public discussion of economic policy:

Political Hacks: The Backlash: Macroeconomic discussions at the Milken Conference tend to feature a great deal of party-political Republican talking points... Steve Forbes... Paul Gigot... political speechifying and pandering to the assembled plutocrats tends to obscure any substantive points....

But when Tom Donohue, President and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, said this morning that "Nancy Pelosi is an agent for Chávez", he actually got booed.... The CBO's Peter Orszag, on the same panel, said that many of the free-trade types on the right were increasingly out of touch when it comes to the deep-felt anti-trade sentiments in most of the country; Donohue simply responded by saying that pro-trade proponents should work on their vocabulary.

Orszag touched on something real, not only in the nation but even at the conference. the mood... is one of pervasive worry and uncertainty. People are losing equity in their homes, they're scared of inflation, they fear the implications of a deep recession, they're more interested in not losing money than they are in making it.... [T]he kind of rah-rah rhetoric which went down well last year is increasingly sounding rather hollow. That's a good thing: it means that always-cut-taxes wing of the Republican Party is going to either moderate itself a bit or else become irrelevant. After the panel, one delegate came up to me and complained, apropos of nothing, that the panelists were "ideologues, when we're looking for objective analysis from an independent think tank"...

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch Watch: Tax Policy John-McCain-Wusses-Out 110% Edition

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

I have an email in my inbox from that practitioner of worthless "he said, she said" journalism, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post. Jonathan writes:

From: weismanj@washpost.com
Subject: Hello Prof. DeLong
Date: April 29, 2008 6:56:56 AM PDT To: delong@econ.Berkeley.EDU

Haven't spoken to you in awhile, but I was compelled to write, seeing that you read an entire front page story on John McCain's curiously changed positions on tax policy, and out of all that, you fixated on a single word.

I find that remarkable, but I did want to thank you for reading so attentively.

Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post congressional writer
weismanj@washpost.com
(202)334-7745
(202)689-9134 (cell)

What's Weisman talking about? Weisman had written:

McCain Offers Tax Policies He Once Opposed: To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands.... Said J.D. Foster, a former Bush White House and Treasury tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience"...

Upon which I had snickered, commenting:

Jonathan Weisman Strikes Again!: Ah. Page A1 of the [Washington] Post. The [Washington Post's] death spiral continues.... First time I have ever seen anybody describe J.D. Foster as a tax policy "expert." Lobbyist, yes. Apparatchik, yes. Ideologue, yes. But expert? Never seen that before...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

I note that Jonathan Weisman does not say a word defending his claim that the statement J.D. Foster is in any sense the view of tax policy "experts" who support McCain.

The natural questions for Weisman--that he has never tried to answer--are two:

• If Weisman isn't willing to defend what he writes, why write it in the first place?
• Why not go do something useful?

The natural questions for the Post management are three:

• Why does it retain and promote a reporter who doesn't even try to tell it straight?
• Who does it think will be reading it in five years if it doesn't try a lot harder than it is to regain its lost credibility as a news source?
• How stupid does it think its readers are?

If Weisman felt himself allowed to say what he really believes, and said it on the record, he would presumably say something like the following about how he and his fellow reporters at the Washington Post view their jobs:

Look, I know that the overwhelming opinion of McCain-supporting tax-policy experts--people like Greg Mankiw, Andrew Samwick, and Doug Holtz-Eakin--is that tax cuts don't raise revenue, that unfunded tax cuts are bad public policy, that McCain has caved to the ideological tax-cut lobby for the duration of the campaign, and that the tax-policy experts hope to recoup the ground they have given up and restore fiscal-policy sanity to the McCain operation after the election. I know that very well. I know that McCain has wussed out 110%. But I can't report it. I can't find McCain tax-policy expert supporters willing to say it on the record. And Len Downie won't allow me to print the story without a quote high up in the article making McCain look good.

Calling J.D. Foster a tax-policy "expert," and implying that the view that McCain has seen the light is a respectable view among the broader community of tax-policy experts is misleading, but only in a very minor way. I got a lot of good stuff out in that article, and I couldn't have gotten the article printed on page A1 without calling J.D. Foster a tax-policy expert. It was a very small price to pay.

But Weisman won't say anything like that on the record. The closest thing about the culture of reporting at the Washington Post was said by Weisman's colleague Mike Allen, who once traveled to Virginia Beach to say, as Matthew Yglesias reported:

Matthew Yglesias: He Said / She Said: I went down to Norfolk to be on a panel discussion with The Washington Post's Mike Allen.... Mike had something to say on the topic of "he said, she said" journalism that provided me with some valuable perspective.... Somebody from the audience asked a question which seemed to take as its premise that there was a strict dichotomy between "factual" writing, which is what you see on news pages, and "opinion" writing, which is what you see on editorial pages.... I took some issue with that characterization. News pages, I said, aren't so much giving a "just the facts, ma'am" approach to reporting. Rather, they're trying to act as neutral arbiters between contending parties. Oftentimes this means there will be political controversy about a basically factual subject ("what's the effect of X on the deficit?") that goes unresolved by a news writer. Instead of giving us the facts, the news writer gives us a set of meta-facts -- "Joe says 'X' but Same says 'Y.'"...

People... become partisans in large part because they think the facts are partisan. When I say that the Bush Social Security plan involves a huge quantity of transition debt that risks provoking a fiscal crisis, I'm trying to state some facts, as I see them. Others who disagree are likewise trying to argue facts. We're not offering "opinions" as such....

Allen took issue with that characterization of what news writers are doing. He said that news writers are trying to present both sides' points-of-view, hence the "he said, she said" quality to it, but that they're trying to present these points-of-view in such a way so that a discerning reader can tell who's right based on reading the story.

I tried then to revise my statement of the situation. A good news reporter, on my revised view, tries to "lead a horse to water."... He seemed happier with that restatement...

On my view, misleading "he said, she said"-lead-a-horse-to-water journalism--where what is really going on is apparent only to discerning readers willing to pay a lot of time and attention and who already know a lot about the issue--is not something that any reporter should be craven enough to practice or any reader willing to pay for. Jonathan Weisman and his bosses think differently.

What I don't understand is why Jonathan Weisman thinks that what he does has some right to my approval. I don't understand that at all.

Methinks Fareed Zakaria Will Vote for Barack Obama

He writes:

Mccain Vs. Mccain | Print Article | Newsweek.com: On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy... the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed... McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8.... McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil--but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous--that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order... would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

I write this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage.... McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic.... His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic. The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies.... What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia...?

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives--which would make American safe and the world more secure—--need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy....

McCain appears to think that he can magically unite the two main strands in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. But he can't.... We have watched an American president unable to choose between his ideologically driven vice president and his pragmatic secretary of State--and the result was the catastrophe of George W. Bush's first term...

Jonathan Weisman Strikes Again!

Ah. Page A1 of the Post. The death spiral continues:

McCain Offers Tax Policies He Once Opposed: Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush's tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked....

To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands the power that business tax relief has to spur economic growth and innovation. Said J.D. Foster, a former Bush White House and Treasury tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience."

To critics, it is political pandering. "It's just part of the new John McCain that's taking on the conventional wisdom that in tight races, you have to energize the base and win by 50.000001 percent," Chafee said. "I was frankly surprised that he's kept it up after securing the nomination. I thought he'd move to the center, and I haven't seen it"...

First time I have ever seen anybody describe J.D. Foster as a tax policy "expert." Lobbyist, yes. Apparatchik, yes. Ideologue, yes. But expert? Never seen that before...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Virginia Postrel: Politics and Global Warming

Virginia Postrel waxes wroth:

Dynamist Blog: There's No Such Thing as a Free Carbon Cap: It's infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline. The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications.... The last thing you'd want to do is reduce gas taxes during the summer, as John McCain has proposed. That would just encourage people to burn more gas on extra vacation trips--as any straight talker would admit.

The connection between higher prices for energy and reduced carbon dioxide emissions may not have hit the national consciousness yet, but the LAT's Margo Roosevelt reports that California utilities--and eventually their customers--are beginning to realize this isn't just a symbolic issue.... The [Los Angeles] DWP, to whom I pay my electric bills, wants out of the carbon dioxide caps. It apparently thinks the law shouldn't apply to socialist enterprises.

A Pox on All the Candidates' Houses, But the Largest Pox on McCain's

John Berry is--rightfully--unhappy: >April 21 (Bloomberg) -- The three major presidential candidates, ignoring the tenuous outlook for federal finances, are making foolish, untenable promises not to raise taxes... are pretending the next president isn't going to have to make some politically painful choices about cutting popular programs, raising taxes or, most likely, both.... "Under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path -- that is, federal debt will grow much faster than the economy over the long run," CBO said in December in its most-recent assessment of the long-term budget outlook. That's the elephant in the room the candidates are ignoring, just as President George W. Bush has done year after year. >McCain's pledges are the more egregious because he wants major tax reductions in addition to extension of all the expiring cuts enacted during Bush's two terms. McCain is offering one really good idea: elimination of the alternative minimum tax, or AMT, though without saying how he would offset the revenue loss. He also wants to double the personal exemption from $3,500 to $7,000, cut the corporate income-tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent and allow immediate expensing of business investment in new equipment.... McCain's proposals, which would lead to a big increase in debt service due to larger budget deficits, make that [fiscal] future worse by many trillions of dollars. His ideas for offsetting spending cuts are trivial in comparison, though he nevertheless also promises to balance the budget.... >[B]udget experts say his numbers don't add up, and they are right.... >The Democratic candidates, Clinton and Obama, didn't go that far in their April 16 debate in Philadelphia. Rather, they promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. That group was absurdly defined by Clinton as households with incomes of less than $250,000. Obama put the upper limit at between $200,000 and $250,000.... [T]here were 4.1 million income tax returns filed in 2006 with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more. That was just over 3 percent.... Increasing tax rates for upper-bracket taxpayers won't raise a lot of revenue. The 2006 IRS tax data attributed about half of that year's total $1.07 trillion income-tax liability to taxpayers with $200,000 or more in adjusted gross income. The increase in payments from reimposing the higher tax rates probably would yield initially only an additional $60 billion or $70 billion annually. Clinton and Obama also have proposed new tax cuts that would reduce revenue by more than that each year.... >At the same time the two Democrats are promising no tax increases for all but a handful of Americans, they also want to establish some type of universal health insurance that would add significantly to federal spending.... >Of course, maybe being honest about the future is no way to get elected, and that's really sad. One quibble: eliminating the AMT with a plan to offset the revenue loss is a good idea. Eliminating the AMT with no such plan is an act of utter stupidity. John McCain's AMT plan falls into the second, not the first category.

Mark Kleiman on McCain's Lack of Character (Economic Policy)

Mark Kleiman writes:

Voodoo economics 3.0: Bloomberg does a job on McCain's Voodoo Economics 3.0. Again, it's couched in "objectivese":

Some economists and analysts say his numbers don't add up.

But they've got the numbers, and they catch McCain's economic guru, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, with his analytical pants down, making him look like both a fool and a liar:

Two Washington research groups said McCain's plan would cost more. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated his tax cuts would cost $5 trillion over a two-term presidency. The Tax Policy Center, run jointly by the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, said they would cost $5.7 trillion.

McCain senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin dismissed such estimates as "fantasy-land budgeting." McCain's proposals, Holtz-Eakin said, would balance tax and spending cuts to meet his balanced-budget goals.

In an interview yesterday on Bloomberg Television's Political Capital With Al Hunt, McCain said budget slashing is essential because "we Republicans presided over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great Society," referring to a series of government entitlements, including Medicare, enacted in the 1960s.

To help pay for the tax cuts, Holtz-Eakin said, McCain would save $30 billion a year by eliminating so-called rifle shot provisions. Those include items such as tax breaks for small insurance companies.

But a Treasury Department report Holtz-Eakin cited as the source of his estimate states that $27 billion could be raised by eliminating narrowly used tax preferences spread over a decade, not a single year.

When asked about the discrepancy, Holtz-Eakin said that McCain would start with those provisions and target others like them to recover $30 billion annually.

The voters got fooled by this stuff when Reagan was pushing it, and again when Bush the Second was pushing it. Let's hope that the third time is the charm. And let's not forget that attacking McCain's ideas is only half the battle. The key is to attack his character: it's not just that the plan is bad, it's that no competent and straight-talking person would even think of offering it. Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition shows how it's done:

Once, McCain was a deficit hawk, Bixby said, but "strange things happen when people run for president."

To say that $3 billion a year of savings will pay for $600 billion a year of tax cuts is indeed a strange thing.

McCain Doesn't Seem to Have the Character to Be a Good President

Dean Baker on John McCain's economic policies:

The Meltdown Lowdown | The American Prospect: 1. Confusing Tax Day and April Fools' Day 1: McCain's Tax Breaks: Some politicians have trouble distinguishing between tax day and April Fools' Day. After all, they both come in April -- it's so confusing. This year, Senator McCain pulled the best prank -- he proposed a huge tax break for Exxon and the other big oil companies. With a straight face he announced that he wanted to eliminate the gas tax during the summer driving season to save drivers money....

[P]rice is determined by demand, because supply is constrained by the refinery capacity of Exxon and the other big oil companies.... [With] fixed... supply, so the price will go as high as is necessary to eliminate any shortages. If the price of gas is determined by demand, then what happens to the price when we eliminate the gas tax? That's right, absolutely nothing. The price will stay exactly the same, drivers will pay as much for gas during the summer driving season as they would have paid if the tax was left in place. The difference is that instead of 18.4 cents a gallon going to the government to pay for maintaining roads and bridges, this money will go to Exxon to keep CEO pay high, and make Exxon shareholders happier.

Senator McCain had more too. In addition to extending President Bush's tax cuts, he wants to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, eliminate the alternative minimum tax, [and] double the dependent exemption from $3,500 to $7,000.... These tax cuts will cost in the range of $400 billion to $500 billion a year (13 percent to 16 percent of the budget), and Senator McCain has no way to pay for them, other than a one-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending. That can maybe get you $10 to $15 billion, but where is the rest of the money?...

I am going to have to revise my (preliminary previous) judgment that economic policy in the McCain camp was under control and not-insane. I was clearly wrong.

John McCain: An Absence of Character

John McCain--while much better than the other Republican candidates--does not have the character to be a good president.

Here are Michael Cooper and Larry Rohter. They should be ashamed of themselves for their "he said, she said" journalism, but the story gets through if you read their article recognizing that everything said by "the Bush administration" or "Kenneth Pollack" is a lie:

McCain, Iraq War and the Threat of "Al Qaeda": As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand "Al Qaeda" to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there.... Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name "Al Qaeda" since the Sept. 11 attacks.

There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11 attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq. "The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University.... The entity Mr. McCain was referring to... Al Qaeda in Iraq... did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003....

[S]ome students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. "The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it's been fighting Iraqis," said Juan Cole.... the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army's unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.

The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as "a multifactional civil war"... Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of %u201CIslam, Politics and Social Movements%u201D and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley... wrote in an e-mail message....

In recent months, Mr. McCain has also been talking more about the threat posed by Iranian influence in Iraq, bringing him in line with American military officials, who in the wake of the Basra fighting seem increasingly convinced that Iranian support for Shiite groups now constitutes the primary security threat in Iraq.... talking about both threats, Mr. McCain tripped up last month on a visit to the Middle East, when he mistakenly said several times that the Iranians were training Qaeda operatives in Iran and sending them back to Iraq.... And Mr. McCain went beyond what he usually says and what his foreign policy advisers believe during a back-and-forth with Mr. Obama at the end of February.... Mr. McCain... said at a town-hall-style meeting in Tyler, Tex. "Al Qaeda is in Iraq.... My friends, if we left, they wouldn't be establishing a base. They'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen."

Mr. Obama's views track with those of many independent analysts. In a speech last August, he criticized President Bush by saying: "The president would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of Al Qaeda's war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates Al Qaeda in Iraq -- which didn't exist before our invasion -- and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan."...

Few, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, to take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal.... Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's senior foreign policy adviser, said during a recent conference call with reporters that in the event of an American pullout, "you might not necessarily see a single entity taking charge." But such a withdrawal could empower Shiite militias in the south and Kurds in the north, leaving Al Qaeda "free to try to impose its will" and lead to increased sectarian violence that "would be very likely to draw neighbors into the conflict," he said...