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Monthly Archives: June 2009

Losing Our Climate Hymen

“I like the sand idea.” – Randy Marsh

Note: I doubt I’m the first person to make this analogy, but I can’t think of where else, if anywhere, I’ve seen it..

Crowded out by the death of Michael Jackson and the ensuing debate about his greatness and his weirdness was the House’s razor thin passage of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill on Friday.  The vote in the House, where the Democrats are supposed to be firmly in charge, was a mere 219-212, with eight Republicans voting “Yes” and forty-four Democrats voting “No”.  Reading about the great lengths (via) the House Democrats needed just to pass this thing in the lower chamber (they pulled a Kennedy out of rehab!) one wonders what will come of it in the Senate.  Doubts abound, apparently, as this morning’s New York Times contained an article relating the climate change bill to a similar (and spectacularly failed) effort in 1993.  For the sake of historical optimism though, a better analogy might be 1957.

In 1957 Congress passed, and then President Eisenhower signed, the first post-Reconstruction attempt to ensure blacks the right to vote.  In order to get the bill through the Senate, where the South had routinely been able to kill previous attempts, almost all of its provisions were stripped away.  The only thing left was a guarantee of the right to vote, and even that proved so toothless and unenforceable that by 1960 black voter registration in the South had either been static or had actually gone down.  The 1957 Civil Rights Act was, to say the least, rather ineffective.  But it passed; and in doing so it irrevocably moved the conversation about an issue which, to that time, Congress had studiously ignored.

During and after the 1957 bill’s passage civil rights advocates were split on whether or not to endorse it.  It was a transparently weak piece of legislation and the fear, echoed today by environmental groups about Waxman-Markey, was that this token was all they would get.  But 1957 wasn’t the last time a Civil Rights bill was passed.  Indeed, as the culture of repression in the South rolled right along and the voting rolls remained lily-white the need for further federal intervention became self evident.

The problem itself was not seriously addressed by the 1957 bill, but its passage meant that the great stumbling block of outright denial had been removed from the path of later efforts.  After 1957 it was no longer a question of whether or not Congress would do anything, but instead a question of what Congress would do.  Lyndon Johnson shepherded the bill through the Senate and, never one to miss a sex analogy, promoted it to skeptical supporters by saying, “Once you break the virginity it’ll be easier next time.”

Now, no historical parallel is perfect.  Climate change, for example, has a largely theoretical constituency whereas civil rights was about millions of minority Americans.  And the negative effects of legalized repression (civil unrest and murderers going free) were far more tangible than higher global temperatures.  But there are a number of striking similarities, the sharpest of which is the nearly identical conservative position of, “Problem?  What problem?”

Then as now there was no real conservative alternative position.  They simply wanted to ignore the problem and more or less hope that it would go away on its own.  It wasn’t a realistic position in 1957 and it isn’t one in 2009, but that didn’t stop a great many people from holding fast to it.

By was of illustration, watch this video from TPM of Republican id Michele Bachmann:

She’s citing rather lofty concepts like “tyranny” and “liberty”.  During his famous one man, 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill Strom Thurmond read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and George Washington’s Farewell Address.  Thurmond saw civil rights legislation the same way that Bachmann sees energy legislation: as a liberal government power grab.  We are quite literally killing ourselves with our current energy policies (or lack thereof) the same way that organized and institutionalized racism was quite literally killing black Americans.  But the denialist mindset doesn’t see a problem that desperately needs to be addressed, it just sees another item to be crammed into its existing intellectual framework, hence, the “tyranny” talk.

That denialist position is still remarkably potent; witness the forty-four Democrats who voted against the bill.  But the passage of a climate bill – any bill – will do serious damage to head-in-the-sand climate thinking.  So while the Waxman-Markley bill isn’t going to stave off climate change all by itself, and may not even be strong enough to significantly reduce our CO2 emission rate, it’s still incredibly important because it will permanently take the shine off of the only argument conservatives have so far made: denial.  Bachmann and her allies aren’t warning that the bill won’t halt global warming, they’re arguing that global warming doesn’t exist and that this bill is just a waste of money that will hurt the economy.  But when the economic horror show doesn’t happen they’ll have lost the only argument that they’ve made.

If anything climate related gets to the President’s desk this year it will probably be even weaker than what passed the House on Friday.  In 1957 as now it is the Senate where legislation, good and bad, is often altered.  It may even prove utterly toothless.  But it will do tremendous damage to anyone hiding behind denial and it will establish Congress as an active player in the climate debate.  It may not be a pleasing or pretty first step, but it is a step in a direction Congress has never gone before, and that counts as very real progress.

End Note – Memo to Harry Reid – While flipping through Robert Caro’s hyper detailed “Master of the Senate” desperately trying to remember where the original “virginity” line was I came across this priceless quote from LBJ himself as recounted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:

“Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” Johnson said.  They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case.  Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s?  I [Schlesinger] said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ whereupon he opened his drawer and pulled out a comparison of his voting record . . . on fifteen issues.  On each one he had voted for the liberal side and Case for the conservative side.  ‘And yet they look on me as some kind of ignorant southern bigot.’  He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism.  ‘But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic Party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.’”

Death from Above

“People, this is an issue that we as a town are strong enough to ignore.” – Mayor Quimby

Buried on page A6 of my New York Times this morning was the latest account of mass death from American drone aircraft in Pakistan.  The toll currently stands at 60, at least some of which are certainly civilians.  On Monday a story about our tough new policy on airstrike restrictions made the front page.  That story, part of the ‘President Obama is bringing change to Afghanistan’ genre, has gotten a lot more play recently and the relative placement of these two stories is just the latest small example.  (While there are editorial deadline issues at play here, the details of the current attack are still murky, this isn’t an isolated incident.)  The Afghan War in general, and our airstrikes in particular, have been a consistently under- or unreported.  As of this writing the word “Pakistan” does not appear on the home page of CNN or MSNBC.  Fox News has a link to an AP story at the bottom of its homepage (it’s the very last story in the World section).  The airstrike story isn’t anywhere near the front page of the websites of The Washington Post or The New York Times.

None of the above is exactly news; American journalism in general has shown shockingly little interest in the Afghan War the last seven years.  But it melds rather disturbingly with another long term trend in these matters.  The initial reporting about yesterday’s strike often mentions that several top Taliban commanders were killed, but not Baitullah Mehsud, the main guy we’re gunning for.  It has shades of that idiotic “find the evil mastermind” policy that permeated the action movie obsessed Bush Administration.  How many times did Bush the Younger announce that we’d captured or killed al-Qaeda’s #2 man?  Remember how all the violence in Iraq was attributable to al-Zarqawi?  He was killed three years ago.  This Baitullah Mehsud guy is probably a nasty asshole, but he’s not John Connor.  Killing him won’t end the Taliban and killing innocent people while trying to get to him sure seems counterproductive.

This is about the part where I’m obligated to point out that yes, indeed, it is vastly better to have Obama and his crowd than the zealous crusaders of Bush the Younger or whatever cigar chompers John McCain would’ve installed.  It’s very much preferable to have people who are not certifiably insane running the show.  But if the show itself is insane . . . well, then there’s only so much they can do, isn’t there?

That has been the basis of much of the criticism Obama has taken from the left over his decision to escalate the Afghan War.  Better leadership of a doomed project doesn’t change the fact that it’s a doomed project.  As Tom Engelhardt pointed out last week the odds are very good that this war will still be going in two years when it will be a full decade long.  Think about that, a decade of war; of a war that barely rates mentioning because its continuation has become a given in our political discourse.

In the short term (i.e. the next 2-3 years) there isn’t much that can be done.  Obama’s plan, such as he has one, appears to be to get us the fuck out of Iraq and hope that an undistracted and focused US military can bring something akin to order to Afghanistan (and by extension the government-less parts of Pakistan).  It’s an open question as to whether or not it will work.  And in the meantime we’ll continue ignoring it, because that’s what we do.

We’re All Gonna Die!

“Please don’t tell the supervisor I have the flu.” – Subtitled Juicer Factory Employee #1
“I’ve been working with a shattered pelvis for three weeks.” – Subtitled Juicer Factory Employee #2

“Flu” is not a very scary word.  It’s something most people have gotten – and gotten over – many times.  “Influenza” is a very scary word.  It means pandemics and quarantines and deaths.  In reality the two words describe the same virus.  We just expand it by three syllables when we’re taking it seriously.  Five years ago John M. Barry wrote a book that takes it very seriously, “The Great Influenza”.  The bombastically grim subtitle is “The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History”.

(I meant to read the book when it came out but I never got around to it.  I was reminded of it when Barry penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times back in April at the height of the media obsession with what we’re calling “swine flu”.  It’s now officially reached “pandemic” status which basically means that not only is it transmissible from one person to another, but it’s also reached all the way around the globe.  Fortunately, this variant of the H1N1 influenza virus has so far proved relatively mild, which means that, as of earlier this week, it had killed only 163 people despite infecting almost 36,000.  In the op-ed Barry pointed out that the 1918 virus, which was also of the H1N1 variety, had a similarly mild first trip around the globe in the spring of 1918 before coming back in the fall and killing in unprecedented numbers.  Happily, Novartis announced last week that it had developed a vaccine.)

“The Great Influenza” is a marvelous book which tells the tale of the horrible 1918 pandemic, and tells it well.  It is thoroughly researched and manages the always tricky feat of explaining scientific concepts to non-scientists without causing boredom or confusion.  For example, it explains what the H and the N stand for.  The H is hemagglutinin and little spikes of it allow the virus to attach itself to, and then penetrate, the cells in your respiratory tract.  Once inside the virus begins replicating itself until the cell dies and between 100,000 and 1 million new viruses come bursting out.  The N is neuraminidase, a different kind of little spike, that prevents newly formed virus from sticking to the cell from whence it came so they can instead go infect other cells.  Creepy, huh?

Beyond the microscopic nitty gritty is the story of how medicine came to be a science based discipline and of how in 1918 it wasn’t quite ready to cope with influenza.  It is a tale both chilling and thrilling, even when you know how it ends.  Hospitals overwhelmed, men dropping like flies in overcrowded army camps, and scientists maddeningly behind the curve of the disease.

Something Barry only touches on in the book, but which is clearly repeating itself today, is the simple human denial of disease.  World War I, to which the pandemic is inextricably linked, killed far fewer people and yet it looms much larger in out memories.  Trench warfare, poison gas and the guns of August still ring a bell with us.  Whereas there are almost no works of fiction concerned with influenza.  There are no cenotaphs or cemeteries, no famous poems and no Mel Gibson movies.

It isn’t hard to understand this willful amnesia.  Death by disease in these numbers lacks the drama necessary for tragedy.  It doesn’t feel like a contest and so there is no suspense.  Indeed, it wasn’t a contest, it was a culling.  There’s no glory in the virus because there wasn’t any victory.  Influenza came and went of its own accord.  And this forgetting isn’t limited to fiction.  Anyone who’s taken high school level American history has studied World War I at least a little, but if the pandemic is mentioned at all it’s in passing, or as a deathly side effect and nevermind the relative body counts.

But of course influenza didn’t just come and go leaving no mark on the world.  Barry makes a convincing case that in fact it had a profound outcome on the peace treaty that led to the next war.  In 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris negotiating with the French and the British he was struck ill.  Weakened, he lost his spirit for fighting with his European counterparts and gave in to their demands for a harsh peace.  Post-war Germany was crippled and humiliated by that deal and it set the stage for the later rise of the Nazis.  Wilson’s illness is usually explained as a minor stroke, he would later suffer a massive one, but Barry finds a far more credible and likely culprit in influenza.  The symptoms match and there was, to say the least, a lot of it going around.  Hell of a bug.

I Will Not Put a “Brick” Pun In This Title

“Oh really?  What if I gave you a whole mess of that neon toilet paper you Frenches call money?” – Duke Phillips

It’s getting completely subsumed by the much more dramatic and, I’ll freely admit, much more interesting story going on in Iran, but the rather odiously named “BRIC” summit that happened in Russia this week deserves a brief comment.  (If you must relate it to the Iran story, Ahmadinejad flew off to the same place for a security summit earlier in the week.)  BRIC is an acronym that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China.  It was coined in 2001 by a guy at Goldman Sachs to refer to big countries that had very promising economies and were likely to become major economic players in their own right someday.  It’s a formulation that’s just clever enough that it became a fashionable buzzword for internationally minded people (think readers of publications like The Economist) and now the countries themselves have adopted it as a mark of pride.

While the “group” itself exists in only the loosest and most informal of ways, that doesn’t make it completely meaningless.  The usual criticism of it is that the countries that make it up don’t have all that much in common, hence the idea of a summit is kinda silly.  But they’re highlighting an important trend that otherwise gets very little attention.  Namely that the economic institutions of the world have been very slow to adapt to an increasingly flat global economic playing field.  Their main concern, one that the summit addressed only obliquely, is that it’s simply unfair for the dollar to be the world’s currency reserve.

It’s a fair complaint.  Having the dollar as the world’s favorite currency shields America (to some extent) from its own economic stupidities by imposing some of the negative effects on other countries.  (Imagine what professional lunatics like, oh, Michelle Bachman, would say if the reverse were true.)  The problem that the BRIC countries, and others, face is that there isn’t a good alternative, nor can one be manufactured.

It’s not as though the current system was devised with the overarching goal of American advantage.  It was setup the way it was setup because everyone trusts the US government to pay its debts.  Even after eight years of catastrophic mismanagement and scandalous squander US Treasuries remain the safest investment on the planet and the dollar remains supreme.  Why is that?  Because the alternatives are worse.

The Euro is hamstrung by the fact that no one really knows that the EU is, or is going to be in five, ten or twenty years.  As for the BRIC countries, Russia defaulted on its debt a little more than a decade ago.  China is an authoritarian state answerable to no one.  Brazil emerged from military dictatorship just a quarter of a century ago and has been a roller coaster ever since.  India has a relatively stable government, but its economy and its society are anything but.

It’s always dangerous to speak in grand generalizations like these.  Innumerable issues get swept up and obscured and so gross inaccuracies are very possible.  However, the main point here stands pretty firm.  The financial system upon which the world economy depends is largely a Western, and specifically an American, creation.  That cannot go on indefinitely.

This isn’t an immediately pressing issue which is why for once I’m not complaining about something important getting lost in the shuffle.  But it does serve to highlight an issue which will probably need to be reconciled sometime in the next couple of decades.  This is only the most tentative of beginnings of that reconciliation, but it cannot be postponed forever.

It’s Always the Dessert That Gets You

“You see Starvin’ Marvin, these are what we call appetizers.” – Eric Cartman
“App-e-tizr.” – Starvin’ Marvin
“This is what you eat before you eat, to make you more hungry.” – Eric Cartman

David Kessler’s new book is titled “The End of Overeating”.  It is a bit of a misleading title; “An Explanation for Overeating” would’ve been more accurate (though probably also less marketable).  The misdirection continues on the table of contents, where we find a whopping forty-eight chapters divided amongst six main parts.  There’s nothing wrong with the chapter breaks, but the book really only has two parts.  The first, and vastly better one, is an explanation of why some people eat far more food than they need.  It focuses on brain chemistry and neuroscience instead of psychology and willpower, and it’s a very interesting read.  The second part, which takes up less than a fifth of the book and feels almost like an afterthought, is a rather banal instruction on how to eat less.  It succumbs to the worst kinds of diet book cliches and should in no way be held against the rest of the manuscript.

Let’s start with the good parts, which are very good indeed.  Using efficient prose that does not require a biology degree to understand, Kessler explains some of the physiological mechanisms of eating.  He then goes on to explain how modern food science and industry have learned to exploit these mechanisms for fun and profit.  He’s a doctor, so he can’t help but tsk-tsk a little at food companies and chain restaurants, but he also recognizes that industrial food production is a necessity and is here to stay.

Kessler’s main point is that human beings as a species have evolved to chase salt, fat and sugar.  Not only do we find foods that contain these items tasty, but our brains reward us for locating them.  It is when these reward mechanisms are thrown out of whack by the unlimited availability of these treats that problems begin to arise.  A significant minority of people have reward response systems so skewed that, regardless of whether or not they are hungry, they will either eat anything that’s placed in front of them or be seriously distracted by the effort of not eating.  Speaking with a dizzying array of scientists, in and out of academia, Kessler clearly describes the mechanisms behind this and experiments that demonstrate it.

In just the last thirty years or so the science behind food (and the presentation of food) has become so exquisitely refined that it’s changing the way our brains process eating.  In one memorable example, modern preschoolers are less able to compensate for overeating than their predecessors of just fifteen years ago.  In this case “compensate” is a technical term, it means that if you give a normal four year old a high-calorie juice drink, he will naturally reduce his caloric intake the rest of the day to compensate.  His body is a self regulating system that, without any conscious action from him, keeps his food intake within limits.  There have always been fat kids who lack this kind of self regulation, the difference is that now there are more of them.

This type of “dysregulation” continues up the age ladder, for both populations and individuals.  So not only are fat kids more likely to become fat adults, but as children age even the skinny ones become more accustomed to what Kessler causes “hyperpalatable” foods.  Over time those foods, scientifically calibrated to be fun to eat, tasty as hell and easy to swallow, will knock more of them off their regulatory balance.  Once that happens the brain’s reward system has essentially been hijacked.  People begin eating for the pleasure rush it produces.  Satiety no longer suppresses craving and overeating becomes a conditioned response to food advertising, vending machines and other unavoidable stimulus.

Kessler described this vicious and self reinforcing circle convincingly, at least for this layman.  But Kessler is a doctor, and having isolated and identified this ailment he feels compelled to offer a remedy.  It is here that the book falls to pieces.  At the beginning Kessler scrupulously notes that this kind of condition only affects some people.  Towards the end Kessler switches into self help mode and begins copiously using the universal word “you”:

The elements of the Food Rehab program outlined here have been used and tested in other contexts and still need to be rigorously evaluated for the treatment of conditioned hypereating.  Nonetheless, I believe they can offer you some help.

He then walks, rather blithely, right into the trap of stigmatizing eating in general:

We can lead long and healthy lives without consuming alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs of abuse, so treatments for those addictions can be built around the principal of abstinence.  But since we can’t survive without eating, we need other strategies for changing our perception of foods that are superstimulants and for keeping them at bay.

That is a pretty good distillation of the odious “gospel of naught” so thoroughly debunked by Barry Glassner in “The Gospel of Food”.  Shortly after the above passage, he even succumbs to that most one-size-fits-all of diet tropes: the calorie restriction (1200-1500 a day for “just-right” eating).

Kessler has identified a very real problem, unfortunately the only solutions to it he can come up with are bland and prosaic suggestions about how to mentally coach yourself to avoid self destructive eating behaviors.  He is an extraordinarily accomplished doctor who has served as the dean of two different medical schools and as an FDA commissioner.  Surely he has some thoughts on how foods like these can in some way be regulated or bettered?  Nobody’s going to vote to ban Oreos or gargantuan appetizers at Chili’s, but the reasoned voice of public policy certainly deserves a say in something that negatively affects the health of millions of Americans.  Yet Kessler remains curiously quiet on the subject, save a presentation he gave to some food executives about the real world effects of their products.  It is a wasted opportunity.

Nevertheless, the first 80% of the book is an excellent and easy read.  It explains the real world consequences of having a food industry (armed with modern science and rich budgets) pursue the single minded goal of greater consumption.  Skip the dessert.

A Telling Little Anecdote

“Shut up!  Shut up!  If I don’t hear you it’s not illegal!” – Homer Simpson

This can probably be filed away as just another sign that the times they are a changing, but it’s still a very remarkable lead for a newspaper story:

President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.

“He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’ ”

The magazine article in question was Atul Gawande’s fascinating look at Medicare costs in the June 1st issue of The New Yorker.  (The fact that the word “fascinating” can be legitimately used to describe anything to do with Medicare speaks to the high quality of the article.)  In it, Gawande spends a lot of time in south Texas trying to figure out why cities which are geographically, demographically and economically similar have wildly different Medicare costs.  The two primary examples he cites are El Paso, where costs are about the national average, and McAllen where costs are double those in El Paso.  As recently as 1992 costs in each city were roughly equal, so it isn’t a case of El Paso doing something radically different to control costs along the border, it’s a case of something fundamental changing in McAllen.

The article’s conclusions are both encouraging and disheartening when it comes to health care reform, and they can’t really be summarized here.  (In other words: it’s worth reading in full.)  What’s interesting about this incident isn’t that The New Yorker had a long and thoughtful article that gleaned new information about a prominent topic of public interest.  That happens all the time.  Rather, what’s interesting here is that the President of the United States acquired information he found to be useful not from some government report or think tank white paper.  He got it from a mass market magazine.  This is the very definition of “outside the bubble”.

The contrast with the Bush Administration is obviously very stark.  (Would it surprise anyone if URLs like www.newyorker.com were blocked with filtering software during their tenure?)  Amongst its many problems, that Administration was notorious for ignoring information it did not want to hear.  The apotheosis of this is probably the White House staff’s decision to make a DVD of gut wrenching news footage to get Bush the Younger to realize disaster was unfolding in New Orleans.  The Gawande article isn’t all doom and gloom, but it’s no walk in the park either.  It presents some very grim realities and some very sobering facts for anyone intent on changing health care policy.

There’s no knowing how Obama became aware of the article, perhaps he’s a regular New Yorker reader, perhaps someone with his secret e-mail address recommended it to him.  It doesn’t matter.  In the grand scheme of things this particular instance isn’t likely to matter much either.  What does matter is that even though he sits in the middle of the bubble, Obama found a piece of outside information he found useful.  It speaks well of the way the new President has organized his very complicated work life.

Thinking Long

“You’ve changed, man.  It used to be about the music.” – Milhouse van Houten

Matt Taibbi had an interesting post up this week.  He was puzzling over just why Barack Obama (freshly inaugurated, insanely popular, Savior of the People Barack Obama) has so publicly embraced these goofy tribunals and odious concepts like indefinite detention.  Taibbi is a sharp and cynical political observer, but this has him confused to the point of throwing his hands up:

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t get what Obama is doing here. He could have closed Gitmo, created some sort of tribunal system for the current inmates, and then stood up on a pedestal and announced that the United States is no longer a country that detains people without due process. And as soon as he finished that speech he could have gone on doing what presidents have done for decades before Bush, finding the soft spots in international criminal/military law to basically arrest and detain anyone whom they considered a genuinely dangerous suspect. But what he’s done instead of that, seemingly, is specifically endorse preventive detention. He apparently is anxious for people to know that that is in fact what he stands for.

Which to me is just… weird. I don’t get it. What does he gain from making this move? I know what we lose, but what does he gain? Votes in Alabama three years from now? Is that really what this is all about?

This is essentially the same reaction I had to Obama’s FISA problem last July.  He’s very publicly embracing ideas that are antithetical to longstanding Constitutional principles in exchange for a short term political benefit that’s so tiny it may not even exist.  As Taibbi points out, this isn’t like the financial mess.  In that case it makes sense that a new president, dealing with a complex subject on which he is not an expert, could be pressured by advisors into being overly generous with ghoulish bankers.  But the Guantanamo mess and everything that goes with it are issues of Constitutional law, a subject that Obama knows back to front.

The chances that Obama has multiple personalities and one part of him simply doesn’t know what the other part is doing are vanishingly small, so his decisions on prisoners and tribunals have to make sense to him in some larger context.  In an effort to figure out what that context is, to try and see this from Obama’s perspective, I conducted a thought experiment: what is the most craven and cynical thing I can plausibly devise for Obama’s true motives?  (The keyword there is “plausibly”, no matter what you may read on the dark corners of the internet Obama is not a fascist, a communist, or a space alien.)  The short answer I came to is “health care”.  The long answer is below.  Here goes:

The most undernoted aspect of Obama is his political skill.  Oh sure every once and a while someone will refer to him as coming from the “Chicago machine” or some such, but it’s usually some right wing crank who’s seen The Untouchables too many times and thinks fedoras are still in style.  But Obama really did come from a brutal political culture, as Ryan Lizza detailed in The New Yorker last summer.  This experience included direct participation in nakedly gerrymandering Illinois after the 2000 census.  This gives us a first postulate from which to work: Obama cares deeply about Democrats winning elections and fucking over the Republican Party.  Blue success at the polls isn’t a paramount goal for Obama as much as it is an omnipresent concern, something which must at least be considered in every other decision.

The second thing we can say for sure is that Obama, and his closest advisors, understand the political lay of the land in this country better than anyone right now.  He spent two years barnstorming the country and when he wasn’t giving speeches or talking with voters he was studying issues and looking at enough poll numbers to make an ordinary person’s eyeballs melt and pour back into his skull.  That doesn’t mean they can’t misjudge an issue here or there, but it does mean that their overall take on things should be treated with a lot of respect.

Third, for all his high minded rhetoric and genial nature Obama knows that the bungling of Bush the Younger has given him a tremendous opportunity, the kind that doesn’t come along too often.  The last time the Reds were this discredited and in this much disarray was the mid-1960s.  Before that it was the 1930s.  Introspective as he his, Obama has probably allowed himself some pretty grandiose thoughts.  Johnson pushed through Civil Rights and Medicare, arguably the two greatest achievements of the post-war federal government.  Roosevelt brought the federal government into the modern age and erected an idea of government as a positive force which has withstood nearly eight decades of conservative assault.  Those men changed this country for the better and even after all these years majorities of Americans look on their works as good things.  They are giants and Obama has a chance to take his place amongst them.  He and his brain trust are thinking in those kinds of terms and on those kinds of time scales.

That brings us to health care reform; it is the key to Obama’s agenda.  Successful health care reform, defined as the twin goals of covering everyone while not disrupting the lives of people who already have coverage, paves the way to everything else.  Not only does it look good from policy and historical perspectives, but it also has tangible and immediate political benefits.  Think of the millions of voters out there who don’t have health insurance.  What’s more important to them, addressing climate change (which will take decades) or being able to go to a doctor next time they or someone they love gets sick?  It seems almost laughable to say, but there’s a very good chance that by this time next year every single American will have some kind of medical coverage.

And so we come to the next important item on Obama’s agenda: November 2010, a mere seventeen months from now.  Successful health care reform would make the election vastly easier on the Blues.  Anyone with a D next to their name is going to proclaim, often and loud, that their team got the health care system fixed.  That means more Blue Senators and Representatives, which will be nice for Obama, but it also means big things below the federal level.

Obama is very cognizant of the power of redistricting, he’s been in the secret room in Springfield and he’s helped draw the maps.  Winning elections in years that end in zero can tilt the playing field in your favor for the rest of the decade.  It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it means a few more House seats and friendlier state legislatures and makes everything a little bit easier.  Remember, Obama is thinking big and the easier things are on the Democrats the more he can get done while in office.  He’s not just trying to win an election, he’s trying to create a self reinforcing system.

That doesn’t mean he’s trying to create a one party state, but it doesn’t mean he’s trying to shift the country to the left in a permanent way on some issues.  Opposing him is what’s left of the Republican Party and it’s true that the Reds have a lot of problems right now.  These range from unfortunate demographic trends (proportionally less white people) to simple matters of political organization (plummeting party ID numbers) to the fact that it is currently being led by catty buffoons (Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh) and disgraced has beens (Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney).  Despite all that, they aren’t dead yet.

In fact, there is still one area where the Reds hold an advantage over the Blues and it falls under the heading of “national security”.  Any doubt of that was erased by all the mileage conservative wackaloons have gotten out of the ludicrous idea that Obama wants to drop off Gitmo guys in Kansas City with panel vans, Kalashnikovs and your child’s after school schedule.  Those attacks have been so successful that only half of Americans even want that fucking place closed.  Terrorism and national security remain weak spots for the Blues and a major catastrophe in that area could unmake all of the progress of the last two and a half years.

The alternative is almost too ghastly to contemplate.  If Obama goes down like Carter, as a nice liberal who couldn’t handle the big chair, it would mean a return to the bad old days of Bush the Younger and worse.  It would mean the hard core of the Republican Party gaining control over the federal government again, only this time with an enormous sense of vindication and the world even closer to an environmental apocalypse.  It would mean an America that’s a militant supply side nightmare, with walled cities protected by private guards and draconian punishments for anyone who steps out of line.

That is what’s riding on Obama’s shoulders and it is a fearsome burden.  With that much responsibility they’re loathe to take any chances.  Indefinite detention of suspicious men so stateless that their own governments don’t even want them back is a very small political risk to take.  These men, villains all in the public imagination, have no constituency.  And then, of course, there are the many spies and generals Obama has, at least some of whom are no doubt warning him in emphatic terms that abandoning this or that tactic (or releasing this man or that) is downright irresponsible.

From that perspective publicly embracing indefinite detention makes a lot more sense.  It’s black belt level politics on a national scale, divide and conquer.  Destroy the Republicans by cleaving off their moderates and letting the rest of the party shatter against its own stupidity and ignorance.  Assure party loyalty on your side by balancing between the moderates and the liberals, tough-on-terrorists in exchange for public-option-health-care, more-troops-in-Afghanistan for talks-with-Castro/Assad/Khamenei.

So when Taibbi asks if it really is all about votes then the answer is yes, it is.  But it’s not just about votes three years from now, it’s about votes one year from now, and five years from now and deep into the next decade.  Health care reform can cement the Democratic majority, it must not be risked.  The Republicans are wounded but they’re not dead, they must be treated with the utmost caution.  Civil liberties?  Due process for terrorists?  Legacy burnishing policy changes like that are what second terms are for.

Netanyahu Government Deathwatch: Day 65

“I was watching; I saw the whole thing.  First it started falling over, then it fell over.” – Milhouse van Houten

Two months ago I predicted doom for Benjamin Netanyahu’s second stint as Israel’s Prime Minister.  My conclusion was based on two irreconcilable facts.  First, that Netanyahu needs to push hawkish, right wing policies to appease his shaky right wing Knesset partners.  Second, President Obama, who is considerably more secure and more powerful than Netanyahu, is opposed to those policies.  The last week or so has seen those differences break right out into the open.

First there was Secretary of State Clinton’s unequivocal remarks:

“With respect to settlements, the president was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here, he wants to see a stop to settlements.  Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.  We think it is in the best interest of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease.  That is our position, that is what we have communicated very clearly, not only to the Israelis, but to the Palestinians and others and we intend to press that point.”

That is, shall we say, a bit of a departure from what Israel is used to hearing from Washington.  Netanyahu, caught between his fickle fundamentalist allies and a liberal and determined American president, seems flustered (via):

Referring to Clinton’s call for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu groused, “What the hell do they want from me?”

Those are not the words of a man preparing his supporters to make compromises; those are the words of a man that, though only in office for two months, is already between a rock and a hard place.

That post, by Laura Rozen at ForeignPolicy.com is worth reading in full, but I’m going to quote one other part here that strikes me as a particularly ill tiding for Netanyahu’s job prospects.  Quoth Hussein Ibish, “senior fellow at the American Task Force for Palestine”:

There has been a growing sense of members of Congress who are well-informed on foreign policy … that peace is essential to the American national interest and the Israeli national interest. And there’s been a growing sense that the possibility of a two-state agreement is time-limited and that things like the settlements are incompatible with the goal of creating two states.

That’s the crippling problem Netanyahu faces.  The creation and expansion of West Bank settlements, tacitly (if not openly) supported by the US Government for eight years, is now seen as detrimental to American interests.  So while Netanyahu is free to torment the Palestinians he can’t count on the US remaining silent while he does so.

Events look set to take the next step starting next week when US Middle East envoy George Mitchell visits Israel.  He’s there to, “hear official responses to U.S. demands for a halt to West Bank settlement building.”  That ought to be a fun conversation.  Though it will be interesting to see what Netanyahu and his government come up with.  America is far and away Israel’s most important foreign relationship and its government can’t be seen as openly thumbing its nose at Washington.  This is especially true given the enormous international clout and prestige of the new American President.

Netanyahu remains stuck between Obama and his Knesset allies.  Enacting a genuine freeze on settlement activity (and as Juan Cole points out Obama seems unlikely to be satisfied by half measures and evasions) could cause Netanyahu’s government to collapse as his right wing allies shriek “Betrayal!”  Ignoring Obama and continuing the settlement project could cause a serious breach in the Israeli-American relationship, and no Israeli government can long survive the cold shoulder from Washington.  Keeping both placated will require an extremely delicate balancing act; indeed it may be completely impossible.

It’s also worth remembering that in January Tzipi Livni, who would presumably be the favorite to replace Netanyahu if his government fell, told this to 60 Minutes:

60 Minutes: Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?

Livni:  It’s not going to be easy, but this is the only solution.

60 Minutes:  But you know that there are settlers who say, “We will fight, we will not leave, we will fight”.

Livni:  So this is the responsibility of the government, of the police to stop them.  As simple as that.  Israel is a state of law and order.

Obama and his people are certainly aware of that position so in the end, Obama’s answer to Netanyahu’s question (“What the hell do they want from me?”), may simply be “To go away”.

End Note:  For a nice idea of just how short sighted Netanyahu is capable of being, read “Mishal’s Luck” in the 14 May issue of the London Review of Books.  The article details Israel’s enormously botched 1997 assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal, one of the founding members of Hamas.  Long story short, it ended with Netanyahu flying to Jordan to personally apologize to the king.  Mishal is still alive and is now, in no small part thanks to Netanyahu’s bungling, the leader of Hamas.  Good decision making is not one of the Israeli Prime Minister’s hallmarks.

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