Joshua Malbin

I’m hardly the only person to say this today, but Scott Brown would be foolish not to run for president. A state senator who lept to the U.S. Senate. Brown’s opponent did him plenty of favors, but Obama’s opponent was so laughable as to raise reasonable questions about Obama’s ability to survive an actual competitive election. Brown is telegenic, looks good naked, has a national base but can probably (by virtue of living in Massachusetts alone) mitigate fears that he aligns perfectly with that base’s beliefs. The career paths of John Kennedy, Bob Dole, John Kerry, Barack Obama and John McCain all deprecate the value of “experience”, suggesting that candidates quickly grow stale in the Senate. At some level, voters prefer governors with executive records; legislative records pile up for consumption by op researchers; magic and local identity wear off.

Given a wide-open field and two and a half years to the convention, I’ll put up $125 right now that Brown takes the GOP nomination if you’ll give me 4:1 on it. Who wants a piece of that action? Honest Harry holds.

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This Washington Post article caused a minor blogospheric stir yesterday:

During his first nine months in office, Obama has won confirmation in the Democratic-controlled Senate for just three of his 23 nominations for federal judgeships, largely because Republicans have used anonymous holds and filibuster threats to slow the proceedings to a crawl.
…
Some Republicans contend that the White House has hurt itself by its slow pace in sending over nominations for Senate consideration. President George W. Bush sent 95 names to the Senate in the same period that Obama has forwarded 23.

You can’t control what you can’t control. Senate Republicans are gonna do what they’re gonna do. But there’s really no earthly reason for Obama to have sent over only 23 nominations when, as we learn a few paragraphs later, there are currently 90 vacancies in the federal courts.

If it were only the courts I’d be inclined not to worry about it. But this inexplicable delay in nominations affects every part of the Obama administration. For example:

Obama has filled just 15 of the 93 U.S. Attorney posts, with another 12 recommendations awaiting review by the Senate Judiciary Committee and three awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

So a total of 30 nominations for 93 jobs. As far as I know, Obama still hasn’t nominated a USAID administrator since the Senate Foreign Relations Committee complained about the vacancy three or four weeks ago. There’s been no nomination of an Inspector General for EPA.

Yes, Senate Republicans are putting an unprecedented number of holds on every subcabinet post under the sun for obvious ideological reasons. But the hold is a courtesy. If Senate Democrats believe that courtesy is being abused, they have more than enough power to do something about it, they needn’t just whine.

More importantly, it’s still no excuse for not nominating after this much time. The regulatory decisions of federal agencies can make huge differences in people’s lives much faster than new laws. Obama’s already sacrificed nearly a year’s worth of such policymaking for no good reason.

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The monks of Burma

Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

Father John Dear

Hu Jia

Piedad Cordoba

Others?

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Yeah, yeah, all of you who know me are thinking. Here comes the predictable rant about Park Slope parents blah blah.

This time that’s not what I have in mind.

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
…
The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

And that assumes several things I don’t believe will happen, for example, that the U.S. Senate will pass the global warming legislation currently on the table without weakening it even more.

In fact what’s happening is that because the Senate almost certainly won’t pass ACES by December, the U.S. won’t be able to participate realistically in negotiations for the successor treaty to Kyoto. And without meaningful U.S. participation, the Copenhagen negotiations probably won’t go anywhere, at least for a while.

Obama said earlier this year that he would like to show up in Copenhagen with a climate bill passed by the Senate in his hands. However, with the debate on health care raging and the fragile economy just getting off life support, some have expressed doubt that lawmakers have the political will to pass a bill.

Without a commitment from the U.S. to significantly reduce its industrial emissions, the best that environmental advocates can hope in Copenhagen is an extension of negotiations.

Here are three small reasons I’m pessimistic today.

1) Rich nations are already failing to live up to their promises about helping poor nations adjust to global warming, even though rich nations are causing the problem and the global poor are the ones who will suffer.

2) I saw this post from the liberal AmericaBlog: Enviros want your quilted toilet paper. Yes we do. Because only old-growth trees have the long fibers needed to make puffy paper, and we’d really rather you use recycled paper to wipe your ass. If we can’t even make that small step (and judging by the comments, even liberals aren’t willing to) can we really make bigger steps like reducing our meat consumption?

3) Oh, speaking of meat consumption: “For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table.”

Those of us in our thirties now will probably die before the worst of the climate catastrophe, though our lives won’t be as nice as our parents’.  Children born now won’t be so lucky. Think twice before you inflict the coming world on them.

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During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court’s majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law, Jess Bravin in the Wall Street Journal, 9/17/2009

It would be easy to make too much of this. So why not do the easy thing? Disappointment is clearly going to be the fighting liberal’s default mode for the duration of the Obamallenium, but you can’t have real disappointment without hope. You can’t have low results without high expectations. Under the beach, the paving stones!

In 1996, Ralph Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket. The relationship, and Ralph in general, would curdle, but speaking in Yale’s Battell Chapel a few days before Clinton’s reelection, Ralph made a very strong case that the only means by which democracy could be meaningfully restored was by curbing the corporation’s outsize role in American civic life. It was a clarifying and totalizing critique that made the sand-the-edges interventions of Clintonism comprehensible and wan. A week later, in Ward One, Nader outpolled Bob Dole by four votes. (As I remember it, Clinton had around 700 votes and Ralph and Bob were each in the high 300’s.)

The problem of corporate personhood was one that Nader had been flogging for a decade; “Corporations Are Not Persons” ran in the New York Times in 1988. As Nader’s stature as a left critic has been dwarfed by his ego-outburst electioneering, critiques of corporate power that address this originary judicial interpellation have become harder to find.

Meanwhile, the trend in liberal jurisprudence is to accommodate the corporation. Last year, Jeffrey Rosen’s New York Times Magazine piece “Supreme Court, Inc.” demonstrated at length the comfort level that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has with the supposedly liberal wing of the Supreme Court:

In opinions last term, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter each went out of his or her way to question the use of lawsuits to challenge corporate wrongdoing — a strategy championed by progressive groups like Public Citizen but routinely denounced by conservatives as “regulation by litigation.” Conrad [from the USCOC] reeled off some of her favorite moments: “Justice Ginsburg talked about how ‘private-securities fraud actions, if not adequately contained, can be employed abusively.’ Justice Breyer had a wonderful quote about how Congress was trying to ‘weed out unmeritorious securities lawsuits.’ Justice Souter talked about how the threat of litigation ‘will push cost-conscious defendants to settle.’ ”

Sotomayor’s question above came in questioning for Citizens United v. FEC, the outcome of which depends on whether campaign finance law steps on the First Amendment rights of corporations. The Roberts court is quickly getting a reputation for narrow-bore decisions that don’t upset the apple cart too much, and liberals are strategizing around the best ways to lose there.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration has gotten off to a slow start with judicial appointments; in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin suggests that it will be long time before the Republican judiciary faces any challenge in numbers, let alone in ideology. But if pragmatic, non-ideological judges like Sotomayor can smuggle in a healthy skepticism for corporate personhood, I’ll suspend my disappointment for a little while longer.

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By now everyone has heard about Rep. Joe Wilson’s cri de coeur during Obama’s health care speech last week. He was furious that Obama would dare to deny that his health care plan might cover illegal immigrants. (The next day Sens. Conrad and Baucus announced plans to strengthen bans against illegal immigrant participation, thereby retroactively validating Wilson.)

That anger seems a pretty clear example of the loyalty phenomena studied by Enzo Luttmer (PDF):

I show that self-reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self-interest but also by interpersonal preferences. These interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect—individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises—and racial group loyalty—individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises. These findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states.

In other words, if you see benefits going to members of your own race, you support welfare more than average. If you see benefits going to members of another race, you support it less than average.

Illegal immigrants are only the current racial bugbear of much of the right. If it wasn’t them, you can be sure we’d be hearing fear about benefits being sucked up by some other unworthy group. My taxes going to pay for those people. Never mind that in fact it’d be more likely the other way around—immigrant taxes would pay for old white people:

According to a July article in the American Journal of Public Health, immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. With the ratio of seniors to workers projected to increase by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030, it stands to reason that including the relatively healthy, relatively employable and largely uninsured illegal population in some sort of universal health-care system would be a boon rather than a burden.

Reactions like these are why I think I have to part with Josh K-sky on the desirability of ingroup loyalty as a moral principle, at least when it comes to those invoked in politics. A feeling of belonging may be important for mobilization, but the moral appeals of liberal politics rarely depend on it. I’d say it’s the difference between what you feel (solidarity) and the morals you invoke in your rhetoric. There’s plenty of “we are as good as you” or “we deserve the same justice as you.” Not so much “stick with your own.” Not constructively, anyway.

I suppose there might be some. But I don’t think it’s wrong to be reflexively suspicious of anybody who comes making those sorts of appeals. Highly suspicious.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:

Part of the problem I think I may be having with Haidt’s framework is that he seems to be conflating “moral judgments” with “things people care about.” Take, for example, this bit on bumper stickers Josh K-sky linked to in a comment:

The soft-spoken psychologist is acutely annoyed by certain smug slogans that adorn the cars of fellow liberals: “Support our troops: Bring them home” and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

“No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, ‘Hmm — so liberals are patriotic!’” he says, in a sarcastic tone of voice that jarringly contrasts with his usual subdued sincerity. “We liberals are universalists and humanists; it’s not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic — or that we’re supporting the troops, when in fact we’re opposing the war — is disingenuous.

“It just pisses people off.”

The University of Virginia scholar views such slogans as clumsy attempts to insist we all share the same values. In his view, these catch phrases are not only insincere — they’re also fundamentally wrong.

But “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” isn’t an attempt to insist we all share the same moral values. It’s an attempt to recapture the concept of patriotism in a liberal, nonmoralistic context. To put it another way, just because I don’t believe love of country is a moral imperative doesn’t mean I don’t love my country. When Haidt insists that I’d be insincere to say so, it pisses me off.

This is how liberals conceive of identity and solidarity in a diverse society, too: I value my group, or my heritage, without appealing to it as a font of rectitude.

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That rhetorical tic of his where he says “Now let me be perfectly clear” and then says something vague.

I’m sure it’ll be there.

Fortunately, I don’t plan to watch.

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(Be warned: this post rambles and offers no hopeful conclusions or prescriptions.)

It is no special insight to claim that Barack Obama’s candidacy was largely about his brand. Maybe not as much in the general election, when many voters chose Obama simply because they were disgusted with Republicans after the Bush years. But in the primary, people chose him not just because of his personal charisma but because his campaign managed to associate vague, desirable qualities with him. (Hope. Change.)

Of course brands are always a lie, which is why, I think, so many Democrats are disillusioned with Obama now, even though he is more or less exactly the president he promised to be. He has broken some specific promises, sure. But overall, throughout his campaign he promised to govern as a cautious, technocratic centrist, and so far he has. Yet his brand promised inspiration, and cautious technocratic centrism turns out to be totally uninspiring.

Drinking a ton of Captain Morgan does not, in fact, get you laid. It just gets you a really unpleasant hangover.

Even in their disappointment, though, many Democrats are still reacting fundamentally as consumers of politics. That’s it, they say, I’m not donating any more to the Democratic Party. I’m not buying any more of that.

This is no surprise. It’s how we of a certain class and political bent are encouraged to conduct all of our political activism these days. We buy recycled paper towels and wind-powered electricity. We buy Fair Trade-certified coffee. I buy all these things myself. When we get mad at the owner of Whole Foods, we hold personal boycotts.

So who can blame us for trying to buy a president and then getting buyer’s remorse?

I think that in the end, it will never work for us to approach politics this way. That’s because the consumer mindset depends on the highly attractive idea that my individual choices matter. They do when I am consuming consumer goods. In politics, though, collective action is all that counts.

Unfortunately, because this is how we are most comfortable interacting with the world—as consumers who believe, each of us, that our individual choices are of paramount importance—I also think it will be very difficult if not impossible for us to adopt a different paradigm for political action. Small groups may find new ways to exert political pressure, but I’m guessing that the vast majority of Americans will remain political consumers.

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In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki argues that one of the obstacles to public acceptance of health-care reform is a bias in favor of the status quo:

But the public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it.

And then later:

Compounding the endowment effect is what economists dub the “status quo bias.” Myriad studies have shown that, even if you set ownership aside, most people are inclined to keep things as they are: when it comes to things like 401(k)s, for instance, people tend to adopt whatever their company’s default option is, and with things like asset allocation or insurance plans people tend to stick with whatever they start with. Just designating an option as the status quo makes people rate it more highly. Some of this may be the result of simple inertia, but our hesitancy to change is also driven by our aversion to loss.

I believe it. But I think Surowiecki overlooks several critical elements of what’s going on right now.

First, people aren’t being asked to give up what they have now in favor of a defined Public Health Reform Policy X. They’re being asked to contemplate giving up what they have now in favor of a pig in a poke. There are four versions of health reform already in Congress with a fifth yet to be written, and while the four in existence are broadly similar, who the hell knows what will come out of the Senate Finance Committee or what the final bill will look like? It could be anything from a strong public-option plan to one that offers mandates without price protections.

Of course Democrats knew that this was a risk, which was why most of them wanted to have draft bills on the table before they left for August vacation. But even if they’d accomplished that much, they’d still have faced a second unacknowledged problem: nearly all the versions of health reform currently under serious consideration go farther than the plan Obama campaigned on.

It was Clinton and Edwards, not Obama, who offered plans with universal coverage mandates like the ones in all the bills that have been written. Obama only proposed to mandate coverage for all children and attacked the Clinton/Edwards universal mandate idea, a line of attack Paul Krugman warned against in this now eerily-prescient column. It was Clinton and Edwards, not Obama, who offered a strong public insurance option. Obama’s plan included something called an “exchange” (from the Roll Call link above):

Obama’s system, called the National Health Insurance Exchange, would point consumers to a plan that best suits them. It would “act as a watchdog and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more affordable and accessible,” according to Obama’s campaign Web site.

Personally, I never understood how that was supposed to work.

Finally, the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic agenda during the campaign was never health care at all. It was a tax cut. He already enacted that cut as part of the stimulus bill, though no one seems to be aware of it so he’s getting no credit for it.

So, to review: on top of status quo bias we have an undefined alternative, the fact that that alternative will nearly certainly not be what people voted for, and the fact that most people don’t know that the main domestic policy priority they thought they were voting for has already been accomplished.

I’m glad things have moved in the direction they have. When it came down to Clinton and Obama I voted for Obama, but nearly entirely because of Iraq. I recognized that Clinton’s health care proposals were better, and I think it’s great that Congress is moving much closer to her ideas. I also don’t have any amazing insights about how things should have been done better or could be done better in the months to come.

I guess I’m just getting a little bit tired of the howls of betrayal coming from certain quarters. There is no question that President Obama has so far failed to deliver on some of his campaign promises (notably, to undo Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and to do something meaningful about our history of torture). But on health care Democrats have the chance to enact a better policy than we actually voted for.

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