Via the Volokh Conspiracy How Political Fans are like Sports Fans:
Voters tend to overvalue the importance of new information that supports their preexisting views or makes their preferred party look good; and they tend to discount any information that cuts the other way.
Now, if we could only hold our political leaders as accountable as we hold the coaches and players from the teams we hold dear. It’s hard to break out of the echo chamber when talking about politics because it’s so hard to keep disagreements from turning personal, just like sports!
Some people say that this financial crisis is contrived. Other people say that things are far worse than they appear and that $700 billion won’t even come close to fixing this mess. I am sure I can find every opinion in between.
Need to clear the browser tabs. First of all, an article in the Times decrying the bailout culture currently permeating the federal government. The article posits that bailing out companies may address the short term concerns but does nothing to promote a system that actually works, as evidence he points to the bailout of Chrysler.
If Chrysler had collapsed, he argues, vulture investors might have swooped in and reconstituted the company as a smaller automaker less tied to the failed strategies of Detroit’s Big Three and their unions. “If Chrysler goes belly up,” he says, “it also might have forced some deep introspection at Ford and G.M. and might have changed their attitude toward fuel efficiency and manufacturing quality.” Some of the bailout’s opponents — from free-market conservatives to Senator Gary Hart, then a rising Democrat — were making similar arguments three decades ago.
Instead, the bailout and import quotas fooled the automakers into thinking they could keep doing business as usual. In 1980, Detroit sold about 80 percent of all new vehicles in this country, according to Autodata. Today, it sells just 45 percent.
There’s a nicely detailed analysis of the financial upheavels on the Freakonomics Blog
The editor and chief of D magazine, formerly the publisher of the conservative National Review, makes an interesting case for Obama being the ‘more conservative’ candidate than McCain:
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
I think this article beautifully outlines a schism that is starting to form in the Republican party between traditional conservatives and the neoconservatives. There are those within that party who believe it will take some crushing losses to cast out what my republican friend referred to as the ‘taliban wing’ of the party.
And finally, one of the unintended consequences of David Foster Wallace’s tragic death recently, I’ve found myself distracted by reading many of his excellent articles and interviews. In 2000, DFW wrote an article for the Rolling Stone about being on the road with John McCain. This statement from an interview in 2003 rings equally true today:
The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.
Good design speaks volumes, and so this depiction of the tax plans proposed by both presidential candidates is wonderfully informative. It’s really amazing how much information you can pack into a small space with good information design. The new presentation really shows who benefits and how much if either candidate got their way with tax policy (because as we all learned in civics class, Congress are the ones who can raise or lower taxes).
While I don’t usually talk about politics, there is part of me that is obsessed with politics. Call it a character flaw. I watched the Palin speech last night, and if you haven’t watched it, you should definitely find it on YouTube.
There isn’t anything I can say about it that hasn’t been said all over the Internets. Opinions range from ‘The democrats are in trouble’ to ‘the Republicans are totally screwed’. All I know is that it took a big glass of scotch to make it through the whole speech and I was a little hung over in the morning.
I did find one great blog quote though:
“Jesus was a Community Organizer, and Pontias Pilate was a Governor.”
What I will find interesting is what people who listen to the speech will remember three days later.
I will now plug two of my favorite political sites — mostly data without too much partisan banter:
- Five Thirty Eight – Lots of statistics with great analysis. One stop shop for understanding polling data. The contributors lean slightly toward Obama, but they disclose that and the mathematical models are sound.
- FactCheck.org – Ad and speech fact checking. Non partisan, heck, Cheney gave them a plug during the last presidential debates.
This Week’s Stratfor Geopolitical Report is meaty and a must-read about Russia’s shift in foreign policy, manifested by its military action in Georgia.
To re-cap the conflict in brief: Georgia wants to align itself with the West and join NATO. Georgia is very strategically located, with access to the Caspian sea and oil pipelines emanating from it. The U.S. has been a supporter of Georgia’s right to join NATO. South Ossetia, a province of Georgia, wants to break away and be part of Russia. When Georgia acted militarily against South Ossetia, Russia sent troops into Georgia and has effectively blockaded them. Russia also has troops in South Ossetia to prevent Georgia from asserting territoriality in the future.
Recently Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s foreign minister released a statement of his country’s foreign policy that effectively states that Russia seeks to build political influence in many of the areas that used to be part of the Soviet Union. From the Stratfor article:
Thus, the Georgian conflict was not an isolated event — rather, Medvedev is saying that Russia is engaged in a general redefinition of the regional and global system. Locally, it would not be correct to say that Russia is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union or the Russian empire. It would be correct to say that Russia is creating a new structure of relations in the geography of its predecessors, with a new institutional structure with Moscow at its center. Globally, the Russians want to use this new regional power — and substantial Russian nuclear assets — to be part of a global system in which the United States loses its primacy.
These are ambitious goals, to say the least. But the Russians believe that the United States is off balance in the Islamic world and that there is an opportunity here, if they move quickly, to create a new reality before the United States is ready to respond. Europe has neither the military weight nor the will to actively resist Russia. Moreover, the Europeans are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas supplies over the coming years, and Russia can survive without selling it to them far better than the Europeans can survive without buying it. The Europeans are not a substantial factor in the equation, nor are they likely to become substantial
The U.S. has substantial interest in keeping the Russians in check and not having them assert their dominance over Eastern Europe, but we are overcommitted in Iraq, and don’t have much ability to deal with threats anywhere else. (If we did, we would be dealing with the even-more-pressing issues in Afghanistan) The article does an excellent job outlining the strategic threat to American interests if we ignore what is happening right now with Russia.
Interesting times. I’ll be interested to hear how our presidential candidates would deal with this situation.