Politics

As you know, I’m not blogging right now — I’m taking a well-deserved vacation. But if I were blogging, I would most likely be lamenting Hillary Clinton’s decision to take up the side of ignorance in the culture war against expertise.

“There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with. And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”

That would be Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communication director, speaking about the McCain/Clinton gas tax holiday proposal. The one that is so bad that a gaggle of economists have fired up a blog just to oppose it. But who cares what economists might say?

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists….

Paul Krugman gets this completely wrong. He thinks the gas tax holiday, while obviously a bad idea, is small potatoes in the big scheme of things, and all of the fuss is just an excuse to paint Hillary Clinton as evil. That’s not right. It is small potatoes, policy wise, but the fuss is being kicked up by the Clinton campaign themselves — they’re running a wide variety of ads attacking Obama for opposing the holiday, casting him as elitist and out of touch.

The gas tax holiday doesn’t help “ordinary Americans.” The supply of petroleum during the summer months is essentially fixed, and the oil companies will charge what traffic will bear. If taxes are lower, they will simply charge the same amount and pocket the difference. Clinton’s proposal includes some weird end-around in which the oil companies pay extra windfall profits taxes so that the idea is purportedly revenue-neutral; which means the whole scheme is precisely meaningless, as the same amount of tax is being paid either way.

The tragedy is that Hillary Clinton understands perfectly well that this is a stupid policy. (If you actually wanted to save people $40 over the course of the summer, you would just give them $40.) She is embracing it anyway. Her campaign is pushing it as a purely symbolic gesture, attempting to take the side of “real people” against elitist snobs with all of their “education” and “expertise” and Ivy-League degrees.

A bit later she added: “It’s really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback…Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don’t benefit” the vast majority of the American people.

It’s hard to be more clear than that — elite opinion is the enemy. She knows perfectly well that this is a lie. But it’s politics as usual. I don’t want to dislike Hillary Clinton — she is smart and capable, and would be an enormously better President than John McCain. But treating experts as the enemy is a craven strategy to achieve short-term gains at the cost of substantial long-term harm. It’s sad to see her go down that road, and I hope she reverses course soon.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but the Democratic primary contest features a woman running against an African-American, which doesn’t happen very often. A situation like this raises the possibility, just a little bit, that attitudes born of sexism or racism might come into play. And they have! Although, by any fair accounting, Hillary Clinton has gotten by far the worse of it thus far — it’s a bit easier to be blatantly misogynist in a mainstream kind of way than it is to be racist. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, all by himself, is responsible for enough sexism to warrant several Congressional investigations.

But don’t be disappointed, those of you who were looking forward to an even uglier fight. We still have the general election coming up! In which the right-wing punditocracy, having accommodated themselves to the horror of a McCain candidacy on their own side, will be able to turn their venom on the Democratic candidate full-time. And it’s increasingly likely that the candidate will be Barack Obama. (Notwithstanding the Clinton campaign’s attempts to change the rules mid-stream.) And it will be ugly. Ugly ugly ugly.

As a warm-up salvo, consider Lisa Schiffren of the National Review Online. That would be the web presence of the National Review, leading journal of the conservative movement. Ms. Schiffren has deployed her powers of logic to deduce something that the country surely deserves to know — Barack Obama is a Communist! And here would be the evidence:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

Arguments don’t get much more air-tight than that. Obama, born in Hawaii of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, is presumptively Communist because Lisa Schiffren’s mixed-race acquaintances from New York City in the 1960’s were inevitably the spawn of shifty black Communists who seduced nice Jewish girls. Logic! Admittedly, the focus wanders somewhat, as Ms. Schiffren is not quite sure which horror to dwell on, as Belle Waring notes:

The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?

You might, if you were a generous person who wanted to think the best of the National Review, hope that Ms. Schiffren doesn’t take her chain of deduction too too far. You might be disappointed.

Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it’s an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer. …

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

And it’s not just the fever dream of a single maverick columnist. “Accuracy in Media” (sic) has dropped the bombshell that — one of Obama’s father’s friends was a Communist! And from this we are empowered to hint darkly that there must be some nefarious forces behind his popularity.

Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

(One wonders why, if public concern is so obviously mounting, he’s beating McCain so badly?) But we’re not just dealing with some musty old history here. Evidence that Obama’s dark skin tone has a pinkish tinge to it is also to be found in the legislative record, AIM goes on to discover!

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

Can you believe your eyes? The man wants to fight poverty, even in non-American parts of the world! I suspect we’ll be singing L’Internationale at his inauguration, where his left hand will be resting on a copy of Das Kapital. His right hand will, of course, be on the Koran, and in his back pocket he’ll be carrying Mein Kampf, because he’s also a fascist. Mixed races, mixed ideologies.

Barack Obama, leading edge of the Communist/Muslim/Nazi revolution. Time for some investigative journalism!

It’s going to be a long campaign.

Not the arguably-good kind of chaos — unruly throngs of new voters, eager to participate in the thrills of the electoral process, overwhelm a sleepy polling station. Democracy whiskey sexy! No, this was the certainly-bad kind of chaos: incompetent bureaucracy renders voting experience difficult to impossible.

So I show up at my decidedly non-thronged voting place — five machines, three or four workers, a handful of voters, no more than one or two hundred square feet in total. But my name is not on the list of registered voters. The volunteer worker seems not at all surprised; did I register recently, he asks? Well, it was some time in December — I’ve been receiving sample ballots and all that in the mail, so I know that my registration successfully went through. Ah, he explains, your name is probably on the “supplemental voter list.” Which, apparently, they don’t currently have. But it’s coming! They’ve sent another volunteer over to fetch it (from someone’s house, apparently — I didn’t pry), shouldn’t be more than another ten minutes.

So I wandered over to Starbucks to have a coffee and peer at the internets through my iPhone, and came back about fifteen minutes later. Now it was approaching lunchtime, and something of a throng was indeed gathering — fifteen or twenty would-be voters were squeezed into the tiny space. But there wasn’t that much voting going on. More than half of the people who showed up were, for some reason or another, not on the list of registered voters. They were now encouraging people to cast “provisional ballots” — you could vote, but it wouldn’t be immediately counted. Someone would later check to see if you were really registered, and if you were, then it would be added to the total. Did I trust the finely-tuned machine I saw before me to successfully check on my registration status? No, I did not. Besides, I wanted my vote to be included on the totals to be shown later tonight on CNN. But almost everyone affected did end up casting provisional ballots, amidst much grumbling and requests for the phone number of the Board of Elections.

I inquired about the status of the mysterious supplemental list. Well, it was explained, it was not successfully fetched. But now it is being faxed right here! So I settled back to observe the voting. (About five Democrats for every one Republican, but that shouldn’t be a surprise in Downtown LA). After about ten minutes I inquired again — still being faxed! That seemed like an awfully slow fax machine. So, to clarify, I asked whether it was actually emerging from the fax machine at present. Ah, no, but there were definite plans in the works to fax it! Soon.

At that point I gave up and left, although I plan to go back tonight and give it another shot — the polling stations are open until 8 p.m. (Sorry, East Coasters — California will be reporting late tonight.)

And then, of course, I walked back to my car in time to see an officer drop a parking ticket on my windshield. I had put (just to be safe!) about 36 minutes on the meter, but the whole affair took about forty minutes total. Our Board of Elections may make the Three Stooges look like the Kirov Ballet, but Parking Enforcement is a marvel of ruthless efficiency!

What an embarrassment.

Update: So I went back, inquired about the supplemental voter list, and happily it had arrived. (Not, evidently, by fax, but I was too polite to press the issue.) Sadly, my name wasn’t on it. I toyed briefly with the notion of flying into a Hulk-like rage, upending the table piled high with paperwork and generally inflicting even more chaos on the already-disordered polling station. But I decided that wouldn’t be productive.

So I filled out a provisional ballot, and whiled away the extra time in line commiserating with the others who were in the same predicament. It seemed to be a common occurrence, and the volunteers verified this casual impression. I suspect that my poor little ballot will never see the light of day, and the state of California will find itself bereft of my opinion that it’s okay to let the Indian casinos install more slot machines. (A weighty decision, the kind that the Golden State simply won’t entrust to its legislature, preferring instead to decide via the exciting mechanism of Direct Democracy.)

The much worse problem seems to be the hidden button that independent voters must push (on an already unwieldy butterfly ballot) to indicate that yes, not only are they expressing a preference for a candidate in the Democratic primary, but they would also prefer if their vote actually counted! Being a proud Democrat myself, I didn’t have to jump through the tiny little extra hoop.

I understand that the United States is slowly and painfully making it way toward becoming a functioning modern technological society, and wish it all the best during the difficult transition.

As many commenters will be quick to tell you, this is a physics blog and we should stay away from politics, about which we are hopelessly naive. But I have the keys to the blog, so I can occasionally quote myself. March 2007:

The fact that Rudy Giuliani is currently leading in Republican polls, and that smart people occasionally opine that he could win the election or even be a good President, is a source of unlimited amazement to me…

If Rudy Giuliani wins the 2008 general election, I promise to never again make a political prediction in public for the rest of my life.

Whew, that was a close one!

Heck, I may do nothing but politics from now on. If Mark Penn and Bob Shrum can pull down millions as Democratic consultants, why not me?

Best quote from that comment thread: “Fred Thompson isn’t inspiring anyone? Once again, Sean Carroll erroneously invokes pluralis majestatis.”

An interesting post by Chris Hayes on what goes through the minds of undecided voters. One telling excerpt:

Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.

I remember back in the ’90’s talking to a woman who was between jobs at the time, and consequently without health insurance of any sort. She was worried about her situation, but took some solace in the fact that “at least Hillary’s plan never got passed.” Say what you will about the original Clinton health care proposal, I don’t think that “gives uninsured people even less insurance” would be a valid criticism.

The lesson I would draw from these stories is not to pat ourselves on the back for being well-informed while the unwashed masses are so clueless. It’s that we have built a system where people who don’t pay that much attention to politics are easy targets for disinformation. Why would anyone believe that Bush was the candidate to back if you support stem cell research? Well, because he and his supporters are happy to tell you that he supports stem cell research. It might not be “true” in any reasonable sense, but if you are generally predisposed to favor Republicans and you’re not following the details, it’s easy enough to believe. And there’s nothing especially partisan about the strategy; Democrats will obviously try to speak of themselves as being on the right side of every issue as well.

It’s an old story, but I blame the media. A few decades ago when a small number of TV/radio/newspaper outlets were the source of almost all information about politics and governance, one could make the argument that presenting some information and not passing judgment was the right thing to do. (One could also make the argument that such a strategy is simply impossible, but that’s not for right now.) In a world with thousands of such sources, the best thing that the largest news outlets could do is to not simply present all sides dispassionately, but make it clear who is right (factually speaking) and who is wrong. When someone claims that cutting taxes always increases revenue, let us know what the evidence is. In a world where information of some sort is everywhere, the important service is not to simply provide more, it’s to separate the wheat from the chaff.

With Rudy Giuliani, one is never quite sure.

It’s a real ad.