I'm not the only one....

I'm not the only conservative who has both endorsed Obama and spent the last couple months wondering "What the hell happened to John McCain?"

Here is Christopher Buckley's take on the matter:

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

Like me, Buckley has long been a McCain booster and is deeply disappointed to see what the McCain campaign has become.

I've been even more heartbroken as I've worked my way through Bing West's "The Strongest Tribe," in which West frequently cites Senator McCain's work in bringing the Bush administration about with regard to troop levels and tactics in Iraq.

Here is what Buckley says about Obama:

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

Buckley's sentiments are echoed by Christopher Hitchens:

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

Like me, Hitchens does not suppose Obama will be a panacea:

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

In other news, Obama appears poised for a blowout. I'd say 100+ electoral points is realistic at this point.

The Man Who Fell to Earth - The Musical!

The above video are clips of the classic 1976 film staring David Bowie juxtaposed with a song from the upcoming Broadway stage version of the story. Bowie is apparently involved in writing the music. They should get Adam Pascal for the lead.

Thoughts on the debate.....

John McCain does not understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.

Barack Obama does.

Just something to think about.

My Endorsment for 2008: Barack Obama

With about five weeks to go, John McCain has suspended his campaign.

He says its to allow him to focus on the financial crises.

I guess we can just assume he'll be suspending his presidency each time his Google stock takes a tumble.

Let me be very clear: America can never fully repay the debt we owe to men like John McCain. There is not a person alive today that has any right to question John McCain's courage or devotion to his country. It is only fitting that I take this time to thank Senator McCain for his decades of service in defense of this nation.

But elections are about the future, not the past.

Over the last few weeks I've increasingly come to question McCain's judgment; between his choice of running mates, his confusion over the prime minister of Spain, his threat to fire the head of the SEC, seemingly without cause save the aforementioned drop in stock prices (I know there is a "meltdown" afoot, but McCain hardly articulated exactly how SEC chief could have prevented it). The "suspension" of his campaign and his attempt to postpone Friday's debate is just the latest in a what is becoming a pattern of erratic behavior and I'm beginning to seriously worry about John McCain condition. This could well portend either dementia or the early stages of Alzheimers. And I think I've made my disdain for a certain hockey mom waiting in the wings clear.

As for Obama, I think Tom Barnett said it best earlier today when he wrote:

McCain will be a presidency built around crisis. It's what he loves.

Obama's presidency will be conducted at room temperature: calm, cautious, careful, calculating.

Exactly.

Let me be very clear about something: I am now, and will remain for the foreseeable future, a Republican. If I ever switch parties it will be to Libertarian. I am not now, nor will I ever be a welfare/social liberal. My economic beliefs lie somewhere between Milton Friedman and Gordon Gecko. I think the world where Saddam Hussein is dead is preferable to the world where Saddam was alive and knowing what I know now I still think it was Saddam's time to go in '03. And I don't just pay lip service to the 2nd Amendment; if you see me out and about I am probably packin' (we fought a hard battle for concealed carry in this state).

But it is because I am a conservative; because I believe that government power must be applied judiciously; because I believe that a tax cut is not a tax cut if its cost are simply foisted upon future generations; because I know that the rule of law strengthens the legitimacy of government even while containing its power; because I realize that simply making big government less effective is not an acceptable substitute for the conservative goal of having a small but efficient government; it is for all these reasons that I am endorsing Illinois Senator Barack Obama for President.

I am not swept up in the cult of Obama. I realize he is not a perfect candidate, and once he is elected I have every intent to play the role of the loyal opposition if he tries to follow through on some of his goofier campaign promises. But the events of the last few weeks demonstrate that Barack Obama is serious about governing. His choice of running mate is nowhere near as "sexy" as John McCain's, but Joe Biden is a competent public servant whose decades of senate experience will help President Obama navigate the ends and outs of dealing with the legislative branch. And during this latest crisis, while John McCain has flailed about desperately switching messages by the hour Barack Obama has remained reasoned and rational, offering that he will have to reevaluate his new spending plans in light of the financial crisis, as McCain threatened to fire the head of the SEC, Obama offered Congress both guidance and wide latitude for compromise by outlining his criteria for a bailout.

While I do endorse Barack Obama for President I continue to endorse Republicans in every other race. Like Clinton, President Obama would perform best with a divided government, which would allow the U.S. to gain all the public diplomacy benefits of an Obama presidency while constraining the lesser of angels of the Democratic Party. That being said, an Republican retaking of either house is highly unlikely this year.


In conclusion, these last few weeks have demonstrated that John McCain has a predilection for making rash, politically expedient choices while Barack Obama has demonstrated the temperament and judgment to be commander and chief.

Uninformed Voter Bias

This is an excerpt from the literature review of my undergraduate thesis. This section deals with the existence of certain anti-foreign biases among large swaths of the American Electorate.

The paper is still very much a work in progress that now stands at about 30 pages. I'm still engrossed in reading about the history of American Grand Strategy and finding examples of public pressure (presumably related to the findings in the literature that certain biases are widespread within the American electorate) hindering strategy.


Scott Althaus’s Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People picks up where Keeter and Caprini left off. While Keeter and Caprini sought to establish that there were a large number of Americans that lacked the information necessary to make an informed decision about policy, Althuas was generally concerned with examining ways in which the views of the informed and the uninformed diverged. Althaus looked deeper into Keeter and Caprini’s assertion that there was little consistency in the views of uninformed voters. Althaus’s conclusion was that, on certain issues, there was actually a great deal of consistency among the uninformed voters. Althaus concludes, “the opinions of ill informed respondents are often amplified in collective preferences because they tend to more like minded in their answers than knowledgeable respondents”(Althaus 23), to be precise, Althaus finds that at least 30 percent of the answers on the National Election Survey have a bimodal distribution with a large grouping at both the lowest and highest knowledge quartile; foreign policy is close to the average with 26 percent of the answers having a bimodal preference between the highest and lowest quartiles (Althaus 81).

When it comes to issues of foreign policy and globalization Althaus found that uninformed voters were less inclined towards intervention, less supportive of immigration and more hawkish on military matters(Althaus 129). For example, 29 percents of respondents agreed that the U.S. should stay out of problems in other parts of the world, but that number dropped to just 18 percent among the fully informed while at the same time 64 percent of all respondents favored deployment of U.S. troops in the Middle East (in 1988) while the informed opinion dropped to 57 percent(Althaus 130). A corollary to Althaus’s research may be a recent study from the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs, which looked at global opinions largely of trade and economic globalization. While the CCFA study did not test political knowledge, they did find that support for globalization in the U.S. increased from 40 percent among those who did not follow international news to 60 percent for those that did follow international news (Chicago Council of Foriegn Relations ). While not as scientific as Althaus’s findings, it seems consistent with the idea that people will be supportive of internationalism if they are better informed.

A logical question to these findings is: Could it be that people that are better informed also share other demographic factors that make them more likely to support globalization? For example, Keeter and Carpinni observe that “Much of this nations enduring political history has been defined by four critical struggles; between economically advantaged and the economically disadvantaged; between whites and blacks; between men and women; and (in a somewhat different way) between the generation in power and the generation that preceded and follows it”(Keeter and Deli Carprini 156). It is possible that wealthy people somehow benefit from globalization or certain foreign policies more than poorer people. Of course, differentiating between a person’s ‘interests’ and the effect of information can be difficult. For example, below is a chart that illustrates the difference in political knowledge between different demographics (Keeter and Deli Carprini 162).



So while on one hand it is not unreasonable to think that the poorest and wealthiest people in society may view globalization differently, it also stands to reason that, if an information effect exists independent of other factors, views may change if respondents were better informed. Indeed, Scott Althaus suggests, that by using his method of simulating informed opinion while controlling for the effects of demographics, it can be demonstrated that the information effect is indeed very real, fairly large, and would move policy preferences in any demographic group (Althaus 193).

Further evidence of this can be seen in the work of Bryan Caplan, as the chart below demonstrates(Caplan 26). The ‘average response’ is the respondent’s answers to questions about welfare reform, with lower numbers indicating a desire to cut benefits and higher numbers illustrating a desire to raise them. As the chart shows, the response of those with high income and high knowledge is closer to the response of those with low income and high knowledge than it is to those with high income and low knowledge.

Income ------Knowledge----- % Of Population------ Response
High -----------High -----------------25-------------------------- 3
High -----------Low ------------------25-------------------------- 5
Low ------------High -----------------25 --------------------------4
Low---------- --Low ------------------25-------------------------- 6


Unlike Althaus and Keeter and Caprini, who put a good deal of their focus on strictly domestic issues while occasionally looking at foreign policy questions, Caplan focuses much of his attention on issues related international trade, immigration and globalization. In his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. , Caplan explores differences between the views of economists and laymen. He begins his research by looking at the findings of a Kaiser Foundation study that surveyed economists and lay people about their opinions on economic questions. Caplan looked at several of the questions and compared the views of economists with those of both the general public and a simulated fully informed public. The answer scale ran from 0 to 2, with zero representing ‘not a reason’ for something and 2 representing a ‘major reason’. For example, when asked if a given reason responsible for slowing growth of the U.S. economy the general public supported the answer “Foreign aid spending is too high” with a ranking of of 1.5, meaning between minor reason and major reason (Caplan 58) versus economist and the enlightened public who both answered less than ‘minor reason’. Other reasons cited heavily by the general public but very little by either economists of the informed public include “There are too many immigrants”(Caplan 59), and “Companies are sending jobs overseas” (Caplan 66). Caplan puts all of these misassumptions under a meta-category he calls the anti-foreign bias(Caplan 36), which means that many people are naturally opposed to interacting with those they perceive as ‘outsiders’.

Book Review: Terror and Conesent: The Wars for the 21st Century

Terror and Consent is the new book by Philip Bobbitt that suggests ways to make our legal system more resilient to the threats posed by both terrorists and natural disasters. Bobbitt offers some specific suggests for more updating laws of war, interrogation and information gathering for the wars of the Market-State.

Synopsis:
The Nation-State is on its way out, or so Dr. Bobbitt tells us. This thesis, which he began working in his 2002 The Shield of Achilles holds that over the last 500 years the predominate constitutional order of States in the world has gone through four distinct forms: The Princely State, The Kingly State, The State-Nation and The Nation-State. Each one of these orders was ushered in by an Epochal War and eventually codified in a peace treaty that ended the war. For instance, the age of the State-Nation was ushered in by Napoleon's defeat at the hands of the Grand Alliance and codified at the Congress of Vienna. The Nation-State began it's ascent with broad-based enfranchisement in Jacksonian America and accelerated during the American Civil War when Lincoln justified the war as a struggle to create a government of, by and for the people. The Epochal War of the Nation-State was the 20th Century War (1914-1990) and was codified in the Peace of Paris (1990).

Each constitutional order brought with it a unique approach to law and strategy. For example, with the Nation-State came Total War (see: WWII) and 4GW (fighting for the hearts and minds of the People only works if the opinion of the People is given some legitimacy).

Today we stand at the doorstep of a new constitutional order, the society of Market-States. If the Nation-State derived its legitimacy from improving the welfare of its citizens, then the Market-State derives its legitimacy from improving the opportunity and providing choice for its citizens. While liberal, parliamentary Nation-States were at one time opposed by competing versions of the Nation-State (such as communism) The Market-State is opposed primarily by States of Terror, which might be territorial (i.e. North Korea), virtual (Al Qadea) or natural (i.e. post-disaster). These States of Terror threaten liberty by threatening the security promised by the State and by threatening to limit the choices and opportunities offered by the Market-State.

If the State of Terror is the primary threat to the legitimacy of the Market-State, than the Market-State must adopt a strategy of preclusion to prevent the creation of States of Terror. This involves both intervening overseas to prevent states from collapsing (or to destroy an existing State of Terror such as Iraq or Afghanistan) and to strengthen our own laws so that neither a man made nor natural disaster can cause a State of Terror to be foisted upon a State of Consent.

What I liked:
In the Shield of Achilles, Bobbitt showed that he can ask thoughtful and interesting . In T&C, Bobbitt demonstrates an ability offer answer to difficult questions that have dogged the U.S. since 9/11. Bobbitt's solution to balancing the constitutional rights of the accused with the need to possibly detain a suspected terrorists are intriguing, especially his suggestion that the U.S. should come up with a non-jail means of detaining person is suspected of being involved in an active plot to commit an act of terrorism. Bobbitt recommends that this non-jail detention (which could include a "virtual detention" involving monitoring) would be subject to the oversight of a judge and grand jury and that those who are wrongfully accused must have the power to seek monetary compensation for their pain and suffering.

Bobbitt also believes that GITMO should be shut down and that Congress should use powers already outlined in Article III of the Constitution to create "National Security Courts" that would oversee accused terrorists whether captured at home or abroad. Also, the Geneva Convention should be amended or rewritten to reflect the fact that the simple definitions of the Nation-State era of warfare are incompatible with the wars against States of Terror.

Bobbitt also favors reexamining our laws about succession and ask "What happens if somebody wipes out Congress and the Supreme Court in one fell swoop?" He prudently argues that we need succession planning for the Supreme Court and laws that outline a "rump Congress" made up of the survivors of a massive attack on Congress would govern before their respective states were able to have new elections.

Bobbitt also favors the creation of sys-admin force for peacekeeping operations.

All of these suggestions are prudent. While Bobbitt is the first person to point out that his suggestions are not perfect, the questions he raises are very important and his ideas should be discussed and debated in Washington.

What I didn't like:
Bobbitt uses the term Market-State, State of Consent, Parliamentary State and Market-State of Consent interchangeably. This leads him down a path of calling for a "League of Democracies" to deal with the world's problem. Obviously, this leaves China, which has a million man army and rapidly growing expeditionary construction industry out of the equation and replaces them with the E.U. Europe is a nice place, nobody wants to leave. China is still young enough to have citizens to export, so any strategy of precluded the creation of States of Terror through nation building is going to have to include the Chinese.

Conclusion:

Terror and Consent is a great book for anyone looking for a vision that can reconcile the dual challenges of combating terrorism while maintaining a nation of laws.

Palin on Grand Strategy (or lack thereof)

"Doctrine, boy I don't know."

Condi. Joe Liberman. Colin Powell. Mitt Romney. Rudy.

Just a few of the people that would have made a more responsible choice for VEEP.

She doesn't understand that question. Perhaps he should have asked her to define "doctrine" define "Grand Strategy".

Gibson nails it when he says he's "Lost in a blizzard of words".

"Pakistan, boy I don't know."

I wonder if she's aware that cross border raids are being conducted into Wazaristan?

I wonder if she knows where Warzistan is?

"Warzaristan, boy I don't know."